Andrew Ng is hunched over his smartphone, in a pantomime of key-pecking, squinting, typo-ridden discomfort. “This is how we do it today,” he says.

“And this is how we should be doing it,” says the chief scientist for Baidu, China’s largest search engine. He sits back in his chair, speaking to no one in particular with his phone placed on the table. The one-finger typing agony of millions of smartphone users should one day become a thing of the past, he says. All it would take is the creation of a reasonably accurate, pocket-sized electronic version of a human brain.

Mr Ng is an expert in deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence that focus on teaching computers how to talk, listen, read, and think like us. The area is fast becoming a priority for the world’s biggest technology companies, including Baidu as it tackles the era of the mobile internet.