A key figure at Baidu Inc.’s research group appears to have left.

Adam Coates, who joined the company in 2014 to lead its Silicon Valley artificial intelligence lab, was spotted to have removed the reference to the position from his LinkedIn profile. An unnamed insider at the Chinese search giant confirmed the departure to TechCrunch. The exit comes as a blow to Baidu in a time when hiring AI talent is becoming increasingly important for tech companies.

The holder of a computer science Ph.D. from Stanford University, Coates wrote or contributed to several dozen papers about AI. A good number of them were co-authored with Andrew Ng, the former head of Baidu’s Artificial Intelligence Group.

Ng left the company earlier this year to pursue other projects. He has since published a series of deep learning courses on Coursera, the online learning platform he co-founded in 2012, and started engaging investors about establishing a venture fund. Regulatory filings indicate that the fundraising target is $150 million.

The departure of Ng and Coates less than six months apart may set back Baidu’s ambitious research roadmap. The company is particularly active in the field of text-to-speech conversion and the self-driving car market, an area where it recently teamed up with Nvidia Corp. They’re looking to put fully autonomous vehicles on the road by 2020.

Baidu is stepping up hiring efforts to support these projects. In March, the company announced plans to open a second AI lab in Silicon Valley that will prioritize autonomous driving.

Recruiting the necessary talent may be more difficult for Baidu now that it has two fewer leading AI experts to lure potential hires. This is especially true given that other tech companies are working just as hard to attract machine learning and deep learning researchers. Google Inc.’s DeepMind division, for instance, recently established a lab in Edmonton to draw on Canada’s large pool of AI talent.

Image: Simone Brunozzi