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 »
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.
Extremely busy week in the AI world, particularly because of the 2019 annual CES conference. Lots of companies announced new product developments, partnerships, and investment in their AI strategy.
One of the biggest CES developments came from Xiaomi, who announced a $1.5bn investment in AI and smart devices. The recently IPO’d tech company is looking to expand aggressively, likely driven in part from the Chinese stock market’s recent sell off. Other weekly news can be found below.
The creep factor from China was pretty high this week. To start, ~30 of the brightest young minds in China have been recruited to develop AI weapons for the government. These kids aren’t even in college yet, and are already doing this kind of work. Meanwhile surveillance in the country has reached a new level as the government is now able to identify people based on the way they walk. Looks like hiding your face won’t work anymore. Finally, China revealed an AI news anchor for its state run media. It’s pretty weird and I don’t really know how to interpret this. Other than the awkward lip movements the AI is pretty solid. I see potential for this to become a common fixture for pushing propaganda 24/7 (since AI doesn’t need a break like us obviously), but hopefully I’m proven wrong.
Highlights this week are dominated by new developments in the autonomous vehicle world. Baidu continues to add new partners with the separate additions of Ford and Volvo this week. Waymo also had a big win this week becoming the first company to receive a permit from the California DMV that allows for fully autonomous vehicle testing without a safety driver.
Quite a few interesting trends this week in AI. On the fundraising side, we saw three different AI startups focused on infrastructure raise capital. I can see this trend continuing as there is no shortage of energy, transportation, and other infrastructure-related assets that could benefit from improvements in maintenance efficiencies through the use of AI.… Read More »
Quite an interesting week in AI. To start, Anthony Levandowski is rumored to be back in the game through Kache.ai, an autonomous trucking startup. This comes after the infamous legal headaches he created for Waymo and Uber’s autonomous vehicle programs. In China, Baidu had a very busy week adding Daimler trucks to Project Apollo, which… Read More »
Recapping the week of May 21st-27th. This week’s post to follow soon. Big highlights from last week include Sensetime’s partnership to invest in AI startups in Hong Kong, Microsoft developing a tool to “detect biased algorithms” and congress diving into recent use cases of facial recognition. Company developments: Mobvoi Releases 4 New AI-Powered Wearable &… Read More »