Thanks to Uber’s S-1 filing we have new insight on their investment activities surrounding autonomous vehicles. Last year they spent over $450mm on autonomous vehicles, and ~$1bn in total over the past three years. Quite a big bet they’re making and it will be interesting to see how they stack up against Lyft in the future. Other weekly news can be found below.
Company developments:
Disney’s AI generates storyboard animations from scripts – Apr. 12, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- “Automatically generating animation from natural language text finds application in a number of areas, [like] movie script writing, instructional videos, and public safety … [These systems] can be particularly valuable for screenwriting by enabling faster iteration, prototyping and proof of concept for content creators.” the researchers wrote. “In this paper, we develop a text-to-animation system which is capable of handling complex sentences … The purpose of the system is not to replace writers and artists, but to make their work more efficient and less tedious.”
Uber Has Spent More Than $1 Billion on Driverless Cars – Apr. 11, 2019 (Bloomberg)
- The ride-hailing company reported $457 million in research and development expenses for its self-driving unit on Thursday in its filing for an initial public offering. That was up from $384 million in 2017 and $230 million in 2016. Those numbers also include other tech projects, such as a flying car initiative. Uber also warned prospective investors that its adjusted losses would rise in the near term thanks, in part, to those costs
- Uber has invested heavily in self-driving cars, a futuristic technology that could upend its core ride-hailing service. But the company was outspent by at least one rival in the field: Cruise Automation, the General Motors self-driving arm. Last year, Cruise reported spending $728 million and said the amount would top $1 billion in 2019. Alphabet’s Waymo, the veteran in self-driving, does not disclose spending
Google launches AI Platform, a collaborative model-making tool for data scientists – Apr. 10, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- “The AI Platform is the place where if you’re taking this terrifying journey from a germ of an idea of how you can use AI in your enterprise all the way through launch of a safe, reliable deployment, the AI Platform helps you move between each of those stages in a safe way,” Google Cloud chief AI scientist Andrew Moore told reporters ahead of the news
- “So you can start with exploratory data analysis, start to build models using a data scientist, decide you want to use a specific model, and then essentially with one click be able to deploy it in our Google Cloud or in other clouds, or on-premises running on top of Kubernetes.”
Facebook is using AI to map population density around the world – Apr. 9, 2019 (The Verge)
- As Facebook explains, creating maps like this is a challenging job for humans. Although we have high-resolution satellite imagery that covers pretty much every corner of the globe, turning this into useful information is a time-consuming process
- To automate this process, Facebook’s engineers used data from open-source mapping project Open Street Map to train a computer vision system that can recognize buildings in satellite imagery. They then used this to remove the vast majority of the satellite data that showed unoccupied land
M&A:
Amazon acquires autonomous warehouse robotics startup Canvas Technology – Apr. 10, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Amazon has acquired Boulder, Colo.-based warehouse robotics startup Canvas Technology, TechCrunch has learned. The deal makes a lot of sense from the outside, adding another important piece to Amazon Robotics’ growing portfolio of fulfillment center machines
- Founded in 2015, Canvas has already showcased some impressive technologies, including a fully autonomous cart system that positions the startup as a direct competitor with the likes of Bay Area-based Fetch. The startup raised a $15 million Series A led by Playground Global
Fundraising / investment:
Chinese game publisher Kunlun invests $50 million in Pony.ai for 3% stake – Apr. 12, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Guangzhou, China-based self-driving startup Pony.ai is in line for a capital infusion from Chinese game publisher Kunlun. As spotted by TechCrunch this morning, Beijing Kunlun Wanwei, which has also backed Musical.ly, live-streaming company Inke, dating app Grindr, and microlender Qudian, revealed this week in a filing with the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) that it plans to invest $50 million in the driverless car company for a 3% stake
- Pony.ai confirmed to VentureBeat in an email that the capital contributes to its pre-B financing round. The company previously raked in $102 million last July from lead investors ClearVue Partners and Eight Roads (Fidelity International Limited’s investment arm), bringing its total raised to $214 million and bringing its valuation to over $1 billion
Rasa raises $13 million for open source conversational AI tools – Apr. 11, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Rasa, a Berlin, Germany-based startup developing a standard infrastructure layer for conversational AI, today announced that it’s raised $13 million in series A funding led by Accel, with participation from Basis Set Ventures, OpenAI cofounder and chairman Greg Brockman, UiPath CEO Daniel Dines, and Hashicorp founder Mitchell Hashimoto
- It brings its total raised to roughly $14 million, following a $1.1 million seed round last summer. CEO Alex Weidauer says it’ll use the money to move Rasa’s headquarters to San Francisco, expand the team, and fuel further growth and development
Google’s Gradient Ventures invests in AI insurance underwriting startup Flyreel – Apr. 11, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Flyreel, a Denver, Colorado-based startup that claims to have “the most advanced” AI product for property insurance underwriters, has today announced it has raised $3.85 million in a round of funding led by Google’s Gradient Ventures, with participation from State Auto Insurance Companies’ VC arm State Auto Labs and Donan Forensic Engineering
- Founded in 2016, Flyreel offers a smart digital assistant that guides policyholders through property inspections using the camera on their smartphone. The “policyholder” in this instance could be the owner or tenant of a residential or commercial property, or it may be a designated third party such as an agent who is acting on behalf of the policyholder
Trint, the AI-powered transcription service, closes $4.5M Series A – Apr. 11, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Trint, the London-based transcription startup founded by Emmy-winning journalist Jeff Kofman, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding. The round includes follow-on investment from Horizons Lab, the Hong Kong-based seed fund operated by the managers of Horizons Ventures, with participation from TechNexus, and The Associated Press
Voice-Enabled CRM AI Platform Snares $40 Million Funding – Apr. 10, 2019 (ToolBox)
- The Series B funding was led by Battery Ventures, with Battery General Partner Dharmesh Thakker joining Gong’s board of directors. Existing investors in Gong also participated in the round, including Northwest Venture Partners, Shlomo Kramer, Wing Venture Capital, NextWorld Capital and Cisco Investments
- “We believe Gong’s technology is the most significant development for sales since the invention of CRM in the previous century,” explains Amit Bendov, CEO at Gong. “Before Gong, companies were blind to customer realities and were managing with no real data.”
Partnerships:
Dubai’s Dewa to build AI-fitted virtual power plant with Enbala – Apr. 11, 2019 (Construction Weekly)
- Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (Dewa) has teamed up with Canada’s Enbala to build the region’s first virtual power plant (VPP), powered by artificial intelligence (AI), to expand the emirate’s renewable energy integration capabilities
- The VPP’s smart network will be made up of solar energy, battery storage, and flexible energy loads. It will aggregate these energy sources to create a single conventional power plant that supplies energy to the emirate’s grid
Akon Enlists AI In His Green Energy Vision – Apr. 11, 2019 (Business Ghana)
- Akon — “I’m a true believer in the ability of combined forces and partnering with advanced technologies to help us combat climate change and make positive impacts in people’s lives. Integrating technologies such as artificial intelligence to our new sustainable energy solutions is a must” said Akon. “By partnering with Group A MondoBrain, we are committing to turn the promise of providing efficient sustainable energy solutions by using AI technologies into living reality for people in America and Africa
- Group A MondoBrain is a leading provider of AI-augmented solutions with experience across the financial, engineering, and agricultural sectors with deep roots in Africa. The organization’s main offering is the award-winning MondoBrain platform, used by governments and private organizations across the world to optimize performance decisions and manage KPI’s
This Tysons company has signed on to help BMW develop driverless cars – Apr. 8, 2019 (WTOP)
- BMW has signed up Tysons-based DXC Technology Co. (NYSE: DXC) to support the development of the German auto manufacturer’s autonomous vehicles
- DXC, which was created in 2016 out of the spin-off of a Hewlett Packard Enterprise segment and its merger with Computer Sciences Corp. and Electronic Data Systems, is supplying BMW with technology to collect, store and manage vehicle sensor data from its global test fleet of autonomous vehicles
Research / studies:
New IBM technique cuts AI speech recognition training time from a week to 11 hours – Apr. 10, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- To ease the computational burden, IBM in a newly published paper (“Distributed Deep Learning Strategies for Automatic Speech Recognition“) proposes a distributed processing architecture that can achieve a 15-fold training speedup with no loss in accuracy on a popular open source benchmark (Switchboard). Deployed on a system containing multiple graphics cards, the paper’s authors say, it can reduce the total amount of training time from weeks to days
- As contributing researchers Wei Zhang, Xiaodong Cui, and Brian Kingsbury explain in a forthcoming blog post, training an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system like those in Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa requires sophisticated encoding systems to convert voices to features understood by deep learning systems and decoding systems that convert the output to human-readable text. The models tend to be on the larger side, too, which makes training at scale more difficult
Government / policy:
California to allow testing of light-duty self-driving trucks – Apr. 12, 2019 (The Verge)
- California would allow for the testing of light-duty autonomous trucks on public roads under a proposed rule announced Friday. The state’s Department of Motor Vehicles announced the proposal today, which outlines a permitting process for companies wishing to test or deploy driverless trucks for testing
- The rule would only apply to autonomous vehicles weighing less than 10,001 pounds. That means only Class 1 and 2 trucks — which include minivans, pickup trucks, utility vans, and step vans — could receive permits for testing under the proposed rule. All vehicles in Class 3 through 8 — which include walk-in delivery trucks, semi trucks, buses, and heavy-duty construction vehicles — would not be allowed under this permitting system
Microsoft’s work with Chinese military university raises eyebrows – Apr. 12, 2019 (Phys.Org)
- Over the past year, researchers at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing have co-authored at least three papers with scholars affiliated with China’s National University of Defence Technology (NUDT), which is overseen by the Central Military Commission
- “The new methods and technologies described in their joint papers could very well be contributing to China’s crackdown on minorities in Xinjiang, for which they are using facial recognition technology,” said Helena Legarda, a research associate at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, who focuses on China’s foreign and security policies
European Commission announces pilot program for AI ethics guidelines – Apr. 8, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- “The ethical dimension of AI is not a luxury feature or an add-on,” said Vice-President for the Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip in a statement. “It is only with trust that our society can fully benefit from technologies. Ethical AI is a win-win proposition that can become a competitive advantage for Europe: being a leader of human-centric AI that people can trust.”
- Last summer, the commission appointed a group of independent experts to help develop a set of ethical guidelines. That group created seven general guidelines that were presented today officially and will be reviewed at a forum scheduled for tomorrow
Facial recognition flunks ID test at New York City’s RFK Bridge, report says – Apr. 8, 2019 (USA Today)
- The MTA email was sent to the office of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. According to the email, the “initial period for the proof of concept testing at the (Robert F. Kennedy Bridge connecting Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens) for facial recognition has been completed and failed with no faces (0%) being detected within acceptable parameters.”
- The MTA is reportedly working with Idemia, a French identity company, which besides its efforts in the MTA project, tests mobile digital driver’s licenses
Events:
OpenAI Five defeats professional Dota 2 team, twice – Apr. 13, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- OpenAI preferred to defend its towers in today’s matches, although it occasionally brought over a hero to strike proactively. It made a few misplays, like directing one of its player characters — Death Prophet — to use its ultimate skill against an enemy hero, Riki, after which the latter went invisible and retreated. But it demonstrated a knack for “juggling” — that is, killing creatures away from the main action (despite the fact that it strayed away from resource gathering, attacking towers, and getting objectives)
Andrew Ng hosts symposium on AI and climate change, invites students to bootcamp – Apr. 9, 2019 (Stanford Daily)
- Two months after the birth of Ng’s daughter — who he said will age in a world shaped by the decisions of today — the professor is leading an AI for Climate Change (AICC) bootcamp to mitigate the impacts of “what may be the biggest problem facing humanity.” The bootcamp gives students an opportunity to work with Ng, Ph.D. students and other professors to develop AI-based solutions to specific climate issues