Company developments: Aptiv’s self-driving cars hit 50,000 ride milestone in Las Vegas – Jun. 14, 2019 (NBC) Their fleet currently offers ride-sharing options through Lyft, as users have the option to request the self-driving cars if they’d like to Facebook to open third London office with 100 new AI roles – Jun. 12, 2019 (VentureBeat)… Read More »
What do you do when you have a talented team but no chance to compete against better scaled competitors? You sell and move on. Looks like this is the situation Drive.ai finds itself in as it’s rumored to be in talks with Apple to be acquired.
I’m personally a huge fan of Drive.ai. They were one of two startups I pitched in my AI VC thesis a few years ago (the other one being Netra). My thesis on them held true, as I said they were a strong candidate to be acquired by a self-driving player who felt “behind the game”, which Apple very much is. With that being said the return early stage investors are getting likely isn’t great as this will be an acqui-hire and Drive.ai was looking for a buyer for 6 months (not the best sign). Regardless, I wish the team the best of luck in their next adventure. More weekly news below.
Company developments: David Cameron takes job with US artificial intelligence firm – May. 31, 2019 (The Guardian) Cameron said on Friday: “The government I led took a wide range of steps to ensure the UK was successful in the new tech industries … As part of this work, I was excited to see the rapid… Read More »
China’s focus on facial recognition continues to expand to various use cases. The latest? Pandas. Our favorite bear is now the subject of a new app developed by China’s Research and Conservation Centre. Given there’s less than 2,000 wild pandas left, the government is focusing on ways to conserve the population. More weekly news below.… Read More »
Two big M&A announcements this week in the AI space. The first one is Salesforce, who acquired Bonobo AI out of Israel for an undisclosed price. Bonobo AI specializes in analyzing customer interactions for sales teams. Acquisition clearly makes sense for Salesforce.
The other big acquisition this week is Square acquiring Eloquent Labs, who provides a conversational AI assistant named “Ellie”. This acquisition should help bolster Square’s NLP capabilities. Other weekly news can be found below.
Lots of news this week on privacy in the world of AI. China is drafting up a bill to regulate the collection of biometric data, while in the U.S. citizens of Oakland and Brooklyn are fighting the use of facial recognition technology. The precedent set by these ongoing legal matters will have a big impact on how other cities/countries approach privacy regulations going forward. More weekly news can be found below.
We’ve seen two sides of Microsoft over the past two weeks. Last week, we learned that Microsoft was working with a Chinese military university on AI. This week, we learned they declined to sell their facial recognition technology to California law enforcement. While encouraging to hear given the current privacy and civil rights violations associated with many facial recognition technologies, the fact that they’re operating in China on this topic should still leave us all concerned. More weekly news can be found below.
Big news this week for Apple, who poached one of Google’s top AI minds. Dr. Ian Goodfellow decided to leave his role as “Senior Staff Research Scientist” with Google to join Apple as a “Director of Machine Learning” in the company’s Special Projects Group. Dr. Goodfellow is best known as being the “father” of GANs. Given Apple’s AR focus this hire makes a lot of sense. As for Google, in addition to losing Dr. Goodfellow, they decided to shut down their AI ethics committee after only a week. That was quick… Other weekly news can be found below.