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 »
Two big M&A announcements this week in the AI space. The first one is Salesforce, who acquired Bonobo AI out of Israel for an undisclosed price. Bonobo AI specializes in analyzing customer interactions for sales teams. Acquisition clearly makes sense for Salesforce.
The other big acquisition this week is Square acquiring Eloquent Labs, who provides a conversational AI assistant named “Ellie”. This acquisition should help bolster Square’s NLP capabilities. Other weekly news can be found below.
Lots of news this week on privacy in the world of AI. China is drafting up a bill to regulate the collection of biometric data, while in the U.S. citizens of Oakland and Brooklyn are fighting the use of facial recognition technology. The precedent set by these ongoing legal matters will have a big impact on how other cities/countries approach privacy regulations going forward. More weekly news can be found below.
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.
Big news this week for Apple, who poached one of Google’s top AI minds. Dr. Ian Goodfellow decided to leave his role as “Senior Staff Research Scientist” with Google to join Apple as a “Director of Machine Learning” in the company’s Special Projects Group. Dr. Goodfellow is best known as being the “father” of GANs. Given Apple’s AR focus this hire makes a lot of sense. As for Google, in addition to losing Dr. Goodfellow, they decided to shut down their AI ethics committee after only a week. That was quick… Other weekly news can be found below.
Big news this week for AI M&A with McDonald’s acquiring an Israeli AI startup for $300mm and Daimler Trucks acquiring an autonomous truck startup for an undisclosed amount. For those interested in reading more about the autonomous truck industry, take a look at one of my earlier posts on the industry. I expect to see a lot more M&A activity going forward.
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.
Another week with many developments in the autonomous vehicle world. In particular, Uber will not be held criminally liable for the pedestrian killed from one of its autonomous vehicles, Waymo is selling its Lidar sensors, and a recent report on the risks associated with a hacked autonomous vehicle in New York. More weekly news can be found below.