That doesn't sound like a fundamental difference between Baidu and Google so much as it sounds like he has a lot more authority within Baidu. A lack of red tape is not inherently a good thing- if we read some other story about some other Baidu employee who asked for and received 1000 GPUs within 24 hours for a project that ended up being completely pointless, that story would be about wastefulness and lack of oversight at Baidu, not about how refreshingly free of bureaucracy it is.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with any of the points here- there are just many different ways of looking at these data points.
Good point. Though, my impression of Andrew Ng's tenure at Google was that he was running a high visibility deep learning project[1] that was attracting some big names, and one would think he'd have had some authority to get hardware provisioned sooner rather than later. Certainly his level of authority is much greater within Baidu now than it was at Google.
Google has a LOT of highly famous AI/ML/DL researchers like Hinton, Kurzweil and Norvig to name some off the top of my head. Ng is certainly very highly regarded but he was one of many there. It seems like at Baidu he's top dog.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with any of the points here- there are just many different ways of looking at these data points.