Company developments: David Cameron takes job with US artificial intelligence firm – May. 31, 2019 (The Guardian) Cameron said on Friday: “The government I led took a wide range of steps to ensure the UK was successful in the new tech industries … As part of this work, I was excited to see the rapid… 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.
Big week highlight this week is Baidu’s development of simultaneous language translation through one of their AI programs. It’s considered a major step forward in the natural language processing realm.
Elsewhere on the M&A side Lyft made an acquisition of Blue Vision to further enhance their autonomous vehicle program.
Recapping the week of May 21st-27th. This week’s post to follow soon. Big highlights from last week include Sensetime’s partnership to invest in AI startups in Hong Kong, Microsoft developing a tool to “detect biased algorithms” and congress diving into recent use cases of facial recognition. Company developments: Mobvoi Releases 4 New AI-Powered Wearable &… Read More »
This week featured a number of AI developments from Facebook, who had their annual F8 developer conference on May 1st and 2nd.
Meanwhile, across the pond in South Wales (U.K), the local police force is having issues with their facial recognition software. At an 8% accuracy rate for its recent use during the UEFA Champions League matches, “having issues” might be an understatement.
Breakthroughs / studies: Artificial intelligence can make power firms more efficient: consultancy – Mar. 12, 2018 (Reuters) Utilities can increase their efficiency by using more artificial intelligence (AI) technology, such as software to predict demand swings in the power grid or to control home appliances, consultancy Roland Berger said European utilities could achieve efficiency gains… Read More »
This past week has featured a lot of developments in autonomous vehicles. Also noteworthy to highlight Congressman John K. Delaney’s open letter to congress to start working on AI policy. Fundraising / investment Self-driving car startup Pony.ai raises over $100 million – (01/17/18) Pony.ai, a year-old California-based self-driving car startup, announced it recently completed a… Read More »