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.
Extremely busy week in the AI world, particularly because of the 2019 annual CES conference. Lots of companies announced new product developments, partnerships, and investment in their AI strategy.
One of the biggest CES developments came from Xiaomi, who announced a $1.5bn investment in AI and smart devices. The recently IPO’d tech company is looking to expand aggressively, likely driven in part from the Chinese stock market’s recent sell off. Other weekly news can be found below.
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.
Heavy week on the fundraising side. In particular, lots of Chinese AI startups raised money this week including Moviebook, Suiyuan, and Tianrang. In addition to startup fundraising, nonprofits were big winners this week as well. AI4All, a nonprofit working to increase diversity and inclusion in artificial intelligence, received a $1mm grant from Google. It’s great to… Read More »
Big week for fundraising and autonomous vehicle related partnerships. Highlights include Kroger’s partnership with Nuro for driverless grocery deliveries, Ford’s partnership with Baidu, Nvidia/Bosch/Volkswagen partnership, and Audi’s partnership with Cognata. It’s becoming obvious that these partnerships are vital to stay competitive in the space. Meanwhile, both Microsoft and IBM have made progress with eliminating bias… Read More »
Special shout out this week to David Vandegrift and Ablorde Ashigbi of 4Degrees, who officially announced their $1mm pre-seed funding round. Very proud of the team they’ve assembled and overall progress of the company. In general, there was a ton of fundraising news in AI this week. Highlights include Sensetime’s $620mm follow on round, Softbank’s… Read More »
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 many positive news stories. Most notable was the use of new facial recognition software by police in India to find thousands of missing children. Always great to see the use of AI to help make the world a safer and better place. Company developments: IAI developing autonomous vehicles – Apr. 29, 2018… Read More »