Anthony Levandowski is back in the news again. This time it’s for his new autonomous trucking startup Pronto.ai, where he completed a 3,099 mile cross-country trip in one of his trucks. If verified it would be the longest known journey for an autonomous truck. Levandowski just keeps finding ways to stay relevant.
Big news out of China this week on yet another ambitious AI project. This time they’re looking to create an underwater AI colony in the South China sea. The base will be for scientific research and defense purposes, so will be interesting to see how much investment is put into this.
There were a few interesting developments this week in various areas of AI. On the autonomous vehicle front, GM’s Cruise is now expanding to Seattle. Ultimately they’re aiming to hire up to 200 engineers for the office there. Seems like GM is really making a big push this year to expand across the U.S. with their autonomous vehicle program.
Meanwhile, one of the most high profile AI events will be moving to Africa in 2020 due to visa issues for many of the attendees. Yoshua Bengio (founder of Element AI) made the call this past Saturday for the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). He noted that many researchers from the Black in AI group where particularly facing visa difficulties. This is a real positive step for fostering an inclusive and diverse environment for AI research.
This week we saw some interesting M&A activity. Microsoft made yet another acquisition in the field of AI. This time they acquired Lobe, who’s developed an AI drag and drop tool. In addition we saw U.K. based Medopad acquire Sherbit to continue to enhance their AI driven disease detection solutions. KPMG has previously said Medopad… Read More »
Busy week leading into Labor Day weekend. Highlights are centered around the autonomous vehicle world with one of Apple’s self-driving cars getting rear-ended, and Toyota investing $500mm into Uber. Very interesting move by Toyota given their own autonomous vehicle program and Uber’s have struggled compared to peers. Maybe this partnership provides synergies that aren’t immediately… Read More »
This past week has been quite a busy one. Highlights include Apple’s increased investment in its autonomous vehicle program, Softbank’s push to invest in Sensetime, Microsoft’s AI/cloud partnership with Walmart, Zoox’s $630mm potential investment round, and much more. Company developments: Get down with Google’s new pose-matching machine learning experiment – July 20, 2018 (Android Authority)… Read More »
Another exciting week in AI. In particular, lots of news on the autonomous vehicle front. Pony.ai just raised another massive fundraising round, numerous U.S. states are driving forward autonomous vehicle investment and research, SpotHero is prepping Chi-town for the revolution with customized parking spots designed for autonomous vehicles, a former Apple employee was charged attempting… Read More »
Another busy week in AI. In particular, I’ve noticed more news on AI’s impact on the continent of Africa. Highlights there include Google’s new AI research center in Ghana, Zimbabwe looking to expand their AI capabilities with the help of China, and a great profile of Azuri Technologies’ initiatives to bring solar energy to east… Read More »