Interesting week in the AI world. In the U.S., top executives at Google met with top U.S. military generals to discuss Google’s work with China on AI research. Can’t help but notice that Google might be singled out here given Project Maven (Microsoft, Amazon and other U.S. tech giants also have AI operations in China).
Meanwhile, on the IPO front Megvii is looking to IPO later this year at an ~US$800mm valuation. As one of the top facial recognition startups in the world in the biggest facial recognition market (China), I’d flag this as one of the top IPOs in 2019 to watch.
Company developments:
Tesla sues Zoox over manufacturing and logistics secrets – Mar. 24, 2019 (Ars Technica)
- On Wednesday night, Tesla sued four former employees and the self-driving startup Zoox for misappropriation of trade secrets. No, you’re not having driverless-car lawsuit déjà vu—you’re just remembering the time last year when Waymo and Uber settled their own trade secrets case after four days of trial
- Tesla’s suit, filed in the Northern California federal district court, alleges that four of its former employees took proprietary information related to “warehousing, logistics, and inventory control operations” when they left the electric automaker, and later, while working for Zoox, used that proprietary information to improve its technology and operations
Drone analytics startup Aria Insights suddenly shutters – Mar. 22, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Earlier this year, Helen Greiner-founded drone startup CyPhy Works announced a major change. The company was rebooting and renaming itself Aria Insights, a move that arrived with a newfound AI/data-driven focus. Now, just over two months later, the company is no more
- The move appears to be an abrupt one, with little to no information offered to external parties. It brings to mind last year’s sudden closure of Rethink Robotics, another company launched by a former iRobot co-founder
Nvidia AI Turns Doodles Into Realistic Landscapes – Mar. 20, 2019 (ExtremeTech)
- Nvidia calls its AI-powered landscape generator “GauGAN,” which is a mashup of GAN (generative adversarial network) and Gau (post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin). The software is dead-simple, but that’s very much the point. It has just three tools: a paint bucket, a pen, and a paintbrush
- Nvidia designed GauGAN to work on a Tensor computing platform powered by an RDX Titan GPU. That card has the necessary power to render the output in real time, but GauGAN should technically work on any platform, even a basic CPU. Although, it would take several seconds to generate images
Ford will build its first driverless cars in Michigan in 2021 – Mar. 20, 2019 (Washington Post)
- Ford’s first wave of autonomous vehicles will be produced at a new center in southeast Michigan, the company announced Wednesday, as part of a $900 million investment to reshape its manufacturing operations in the state
- “As we ramp up AV production, this plan allows us to adjust our investment spending to accommodate the pace of growth of this exciting new technology,” Joe Hinrichs, Ford’s president of global operations, said in a news release. “This new plan combines our core strength in mass manufacturing with the agility and leanness we’ve shown with our modification centers for specialty manufacturing.”
Optimus Ride will roll out geofenced driverless taxis in New York City and California later this year – Mar. 20, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Earlier this year, Optimus Ride, an autonomous technology startup based in Boston, partnered with Brookfield Properties to deploy three driverless cars in the Reston, Virginia mixed-use development of Halley Rise. Now, Optimus is setting its sights on Northern California and Brooklyn
- Optimus today announced that it’ll deploy a small fleet of self-driving cars on private roads in Brooklyn Navy Yard, a 300-acre modern industrial park housing over 400 manufacturing businesses, and within Paradise Valley Estates , a private 80-acre assisted living community located in Fairfield, California
Waymo is gearing up to put a lot more self-driving cars on the road – Mar. 19, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Waymo is opening another technical service center in the Phoenix area, an expansion that will allow the autonomous-vehicle technology startup to double its capacity in the area as it prepares to grow its commercial fleet
- The new 85,000-square-foot center will be located in Mesa and is expected to open sometime in the second half of the year. The company’s existing 60,000-square-foot facility in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler will remain
Fundraising / investment:
Skymind raises $11.5M to bring deep learning to more enterprises – Mar. 20, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Skymind, a Y Combinator-incubated AI platform that aims to make deep learning more accessible to enterprises, today announced that it has raised an $11.5 million Series A round led by TransLink Capital, with participation from ServiceNow, Sumitomo’s Presidio Ventures, UpHonest Capital and GovTech Fund
- Early investors Y Combinator, Tencent, Mandra Capital, Hemi Ventures, and GMO Ventures, also joined the round/ With this, the company has now raised a total of $17.9 million in funding
Chinese AI start-up Megvii said to plan IPO in either Hong Kong or New York to raise up to US$800 million – Mar. 20, 2019 (South China Morning Post)
- Megvii, the developer of facial recognition software Face++ used widely across China, is mulling an initial public offering that could raise up to US$800 million, people familiar with the matter said
- The company, backed by Alibaba Group Holding and Foxconn Technology among other investors, is looking to raise between US$500 million and US$800 million in the offering. The preliminary offering date is set for July, according to one person familiar with the matter
Founders Fund invests in Tibber, a Norwegian AI to smartly manage energy – Mar. 19, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Hailing originally from Stockholm, Tibber offers customers the ability to lower their energy bills in exactly the above manner, with the user using a simple app, and the purchasing of power is automatically done by its bots. That means Tibber is always looking for the lowest electricity prices as well as alerting customers to consume energy during the cheapest hours of the day
- The funding round was led by SF-based Founders Fund, known for their early investments in Spotify, Facebook, SpaceX, Palantir, Airbnb and Stripe. Tibber is the third investment ever in Europe for Founders Fund, which is quite something. The rest of the round came from existing investors, including Wellstreet, BKK, Petter Stordalen and RFF Vest
Alcatraz AI raises $4 million to open doors with your face – Mar. 19, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Alcatraz AI today announced the close of a $4 million funding round. Created by former Apple engineer Vince Gaydarzhiev, who helped create Face ID on iPhone 10, Alcatraz uses machine learning and computer vision to control physical access to government buildings and corporate campuses not with a badge, but with your face
- Alcatraz combines software with a hardware device equipped with sensors, mounted next to a locked door, to recognize a person as they approach the device and open the door in less than one second
Partnerships:
Google and Harvard test a machine learning approach to food safety – Mar. 19, 2019 (TechRepublic)
- The team built a machine-learning model called FINDER that is designed to predict foodborne illness in real time. The team from Google and the Harvard used anonymous aggregated web search and location data to figure out which restaurants have food safety violations that may be making people sick
Yandex teams up with Hyundai Mobis for driverless cars – Mar. 19, 2019 (Reuters)
- Russia’s Yandex and Hyundai Mobis Co Ltd, an auto parts affiliate of Hyundai Motor Co, agreed to jointly develop control systems for driverless vehicles, Yandex said on Tuesday
- In the future, the cooperation aims at building a new autonomous driving control system for car manufacturers, car sharing services and taxi fleets
AWS adopts Nvidia’s Tesla T4 chip for AI inference – Mar. 18, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Amazon’s AWS today announced new EC2 instances with Tesla T4 GPUs, which it says will be available via G4 instances to customers in the coming weeks. T4 will also be available through the Amazon Elastic Container service for Kubernetes
- “It will be featuring Nvidia T4 processors and really designed for machine learning and to help our customers shrink the time that it takes to do inference at the edge — where that response time really matters — but also reduce the cost,” AWS VP of compute Matt Garman said onstage today during the keynote address at San Jose State University
U.S. Department of Energy and Intel to Build First Exascale Supercomputer – Mar. 18, 2019 (Energy.gov)
- Intel Corporation and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will build the first supercomputer with a performance of one exaFLOP in the United States
- The system being developed at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, named “Aurora”, will be used to dramatically advance scientific research and discovery. The contract is valued at over $500 million and will be delivered to Argonne National Laboratory by Intel and sub-contractor Cray Computing in 2021
Research / studies:
Intel and Keemotion detail the ways Yale’s basketball team uses AI – Mar. 20, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Intel is helping bring AI to the basketball court — Yale’s court, to be exact. Just in time for March Madness, the San Jose chipmaker today detailed the system that the college’s men’s basketball team — the Bulldogs — uses to capture and analyze live game footage. It’s supplied by five-year-old startup Keemotion, with a backbone built partly on Intel’s Xeon Scalable hardware
- “As a coaching staff, we want to put our players in a position to succeed,” James Jones, Yale head basketball coach, said. “The ability to analyze game and practice footage in real time with Keemotion’s solution allows me to teach in the moment, and is a real competitive advantage.”
Chinese university uses AI to check class attendance rates and find the reasons behind absenteeism – Mar. 18, 2019 (South China Morning Post)
- A Chinese university in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province, has rolled out a class attendance system that enables students to sign in with verification codes via their mobile phones and issue auto-reminders to those who fail to show up on time, along with a warning about the risks of skipping class
Government / policy:
Top U.S. General Plans to Meet With Google Execs to Scold Them for Doing Business in China – Mar. 22, 2019 (Gizmodo)
- Google executives will meet next week with U.S. General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the nation’s top general, to discuss Google’s artificial intelligence business in China and the company’s troubled relationship with the Pentagon, Dunford revealed on Thursday during a live interview at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C.
- Google isn’t the only American tech giant working on AI in China. Both Microsoft and Amazon have AI centers in China. The difference, it seems, is that both Microsoft and Amazon have never had a high-profile split from the Pentagon and have no pledge comparable to Google’s. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, for example, defended the company’s Pentagon business in the face of employee protests
Commercial Facial Recognition Privacy Act introduced – Mar. 21, 2019 (Daily Journal)
- U.S. Senators Roy Blunt (Mo.) and Brian Schatz (Hawaii), members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation, have introduced the Commercial Facial Recognition Privacy Act of 2019
- The bipartisan legislation would strengthen consumer protections by prohibiting commercial users of facial recognition technology (FR) from collecting and re-sharing data for identifying or tracking consumers without their consent
The White House launches ai.gov – Mar. 19, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- The White House today launched an ai.gov website to share AI initiatives from the Trump administration and federal U.S. agencies. Featured initiatives include a National Institutes of Health (NIH) biomedical research project using AI and a recent Department of Transportation report on autonomous vehicles