Most of us could infer that large scale autonomous vehicle programs were capital intensive. With that being said, the recent news of Uber’s $20 million a month burn rate for its autonomous vehicle program must have caught a lot of us by surprise. With that amount of money they might as well pursue 1 or 2 acquisitions to help accelerate progress. Other weekly news can be found below.
Big news this week is centered around the AI chip industry. Out in China, Horizon Robotics has raised a massive $600mm series B led by SK China. They’re already backed by Intel and will use the proceeds to continue expanding their capabilities in what’s known to be a very competitive space.
Meanwhile in the U.S., Google Ventures has invested in Lightmatter, an AI chip startup out of Boston. More weekly news can be found below.
Lots of news out of China this week. Biggest story was Victor Gevers, a security researcher for the GDI Foundation, finding a database belonging to SenseNets. The Shenzen based company provides facial recognition and other monitoring systems to the Chinese police. Everyone knows that China is utilizing AI to enhance the government’s surveillance capabilities, but this was the first insight we’ve gained into the scope of the government’s operations in the Xianjiang province. It’s looking quite Orwellian there. It’s also notable that SenseTime divested their stake in SenseNets right after finding out about the security breach.
This week the autonomous trucking world added another Unicorn. TuSimple raised a $95mm Series D round to expand its autonomous truck fleet to over 50 vehicles by June. Definitely a player to look out for in this area. Other weekly news can be found below. Company developments: Waymo’s autonomous vehicles leave Apple in the dust… Read More »
Lots of M&A this week in the AI world with Termset (NLP), Textkernel (recruiting), and Crunchbot (chatbots) all being acquired. Many enterprises are finding out that sometimes it’s easier to acquire AI talent than develop it in-house, especially if it’s outside of a particular domain of expertise for the acquirer.
Other news this week includes a few developments in the autonomous vehicle world. Waymo is set to test driverless cars out in Michigan, while Apple cut 200 jobs in its autonomous vehicle division (Project Titan). Not sure what’s going on with Apple, but it’s definitely not the best sign as competitors ramp up research, investment, and personnel additions.
We’ve finished up our first week in 2019 with numerous AI developments to kick things off. In the autonomous vehicle arena we witnessed perhaps the most bizarre developments as Waymo’s vehicles continue to face attacks from pedestrians. It’s quite a situation and just another reminder of how weird humans can be (let’s hope the AI doesn’t fully resemble us!). It seems like although these are random incidents, they pose a threat to public perception of the safety of autonomous vehicles.
Last weekly update for 2018. Thanks to all the readers and visitors here. Let’s all hope for continued positive progress in the AI world in the new year.
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.