AI Technology & Industry Review
AI highlights.
The BAAI Conference 2022 kicked off on May 31 in Beijing and ran through June 2. AI experts, industry leaders, young talents and international delegates joined the virtual gathering and live stream for three busy days of high-level keynotes, tech talks, parallel forums and networking.
On December 6, EU antitrust regulators have temporarily paused the investigation into NVIDIA’s multibillion-dollar acquisition of UK chip design company ARM.
On November 23, Samsung Electronics announced the company is investing $17 billion to build a new semiconductor manufacturing facility in Taylor, Texas.
On November 22, the NVIDIA blog introduced the interactive demo website app to generate photorealistic landscape images in real-time via text description.
Google recently has launched an adorable new feature for its Arts and Culture app named Pet Portraits that can compare your pet photo to artworks from museums worldwide and find their art doubles.
On November 10, Meta (formerly known as Facebook) announced a partnership with another tech giant Microsoft to integrate its work app Workplace with Microsoft’s work-focused social network and collaboration software Teams.
On November 11, self-driving truck startup Kodiak announced that it had raised $125 million in an oversubscribed Series B round for a total of $165 million raised to date.
On November 3, facial recognition company Clearview AI was ordered to destroy all existing images and templates the company collected from Australia and to cease collecting facial images and biometric templates from individuals in Australia.
On October 30, Chinese President Xi Jinping said China will apply to join the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement (DEPA) as part of his video address a day earlier to the Group of 20 leaders’ summit in Rome, Italy.
On October 13, ICCV 2021 announced its Best Paper Awards, honourable mentions, and Best Student Paper.
On October 11, Microsoft introduced the largest and “the most powerful monolithic transformer language model” trained to date, a 530 billion parameter GPT-3-style generative language model.
According to Reuters, the Pentagon’s former software chief Nicolas Chaillan told the Financial Times on Sunday that “We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years. Right now, it’s already a done deal; it is already over, in my opinion.”
On October 6, Sony Group announced that the company will launch its edge AI platform service Aitrios AI sensing platform in Japan, the U.S. and Europe starting late this year.
The London-based AI research firm DeepMind has introduced AlphaFold-Multimer, a model that can predict the structure of multi-chain protein complexes with increased accuracy.
ording to estimation by Loup Ventures, by 2032, full self-driving (FSD) purchases and subscriptions is expected to bring electric vehicles giant Tesla USD 102 billion in profits.
On July 20, Quanergy Systems announced its 3D LiDAR solution has been selected to support the development of an Information, Communication, and Technology (ICT) system in Busan, South Korea. The ICT system is a key component of the South Korean government’s strategy to build data driven IoT smart cities. Busan is one of the pilot cities for the initiative.
On July 19, SenseTime, China’s leading AI company, announced the launch of the SenseTime International AI Innovation Hub.
On July 21, the chip giant Intel announced its second-quarter financial report. The report shows that Intel’s revenue in the second quarter was USD 19.631 billion, and its net profit was USD 5.061 billion, a decrease of 0.9 percent compared to the same period last year.
On July 22, Argo AI, Ford Motors and Lyft joined hands to launch L4-level autonomous driving services in Miami by the end of this year.
On July 23, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez stated that Apple will increase artificial intelligence in Spain, after meeting with company’s CEO Tim Cook during a four day trip to the US west coast.
On July 7, the University of Texas at Austin announced that it has teamed up with major wireless companies to set up a new 6G research center, the 6G@UT. Founding affiliates Samsung, AT&T, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and InterDigital will each fund at least two projects for three years at the center.
On July 17, Baidu rolled out its Apollo Robotaxi in the streets of China’s southern city Guangzhou. Users can access the self-driving taxi service via the Baidu Map and Apollo GO apps, and board the vehicles from 9:30 to 23:00, at 237 stops across the city.
On July 13, Alibaba announced the establishment of the Alibaba Artificial Intelligence Governance Laboratory (AAIG, https://s.alibaba.com/cn/aaig). The laboratory will promote sustainable, reliable, credible, and usable AI.
On July 8, e-commerce giant Amazon announced its plan to set up a R&D centre in Helsinki, Finland, to develop technologies for its Scout unmanned delivery robot.
Intel plans to invest 20 billion U.S. dollars to build chip factories in a number of EU countries, and is actively lobbying governments, including France and Italy.
At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) held in Shanghai on July 9, Daosheng Tang, the senior vice exectuvie of Tencent and president of the Tencent cloud and smart industry group, said that the company’s Yangtze River AI Supercomputing Center with RMB 45 billion (approx. USD 7 billion) investment will soon commence operation.
On July 4, according to notice mandated by China’s Cyberspace Administration (CAC), ride-hailing giant “Didi Chuxing” app has serious violations of laws and regulations with its collecting and use of users’ personal information.
On June 28, Shenzhen promulgated the draft of Regulations on the Promotion of Artificial Intelligence Industry of Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, which seeks to establish an overarching framework for AI, such as the approval framework for market entrance of AI products and services.
According to media reports on June 28, South Korea is investing KRW 1.1 trillion (USD 1 billion) on L4-level self-driving, involving the government’s science, transport and police units. The government task force also announced 53 projects for commercializing L4 and high levels of autonomous driving by 2027.
According to a securities report released on June 24, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda is personally investing USD 45.3 million into Woven Planet Holdings, the smart city unit of his company spearheading autonomous driving research.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger expect the global chip shortage to continue worsen, and the world will have wait for “a healthy supply-demand situation until 2023″.
On June 23, India’s antitrust regulator, the Competition Commission of India (CCI), released the investigation results of tech giant Google’s alleged abuse of the country’s smart TV market via the Android operating system.
On June 26, China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) announced that Tesla Motors (Beijing & Shanghai) are to recall approximately 286,000 vehicles over faulty active cruise control system.
On June 16, Tencent Quantum Lab and the Department of Physics of Tsinghua University signed an MoU regarding cooperation on functional material databases, machine learning-assisted material computation methods, and material virtual screening cloud platforms.
On June 21, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) issued a document stating that it had appointments with major state-owned banks and mobile payment provider Alipay for providing cryptocurrency transaction services.
On June 22, LG Electronics announced the launch of a new “digital x-ray detector” (DXD). The new product is equipped with assisted AI diagnostic functions, which are designed by healthcare AI solutions company VUNO. The product will detect chest X-ray images for abnormal findings and enhance lesion areas with coloring and outline, to help medical professionals accurately identify lung diseases including tuberculosis, pneumonia, and cancer.
On June 18, China completes the building of the self-driving expressway in Jiangsu province, which will be open to traffic at the end of this month.
On June 16, LVMH and Google Cloud announced a strategic partnership to accelerate innovation and develop new cloud-based artificial intelligence solutions.
On June 16, General Motors Co. announced it will increase its electric vehicles (EV) and autonomous vehicles (AV) investments from 2020 through 2025 to USD 35 billion, representing a 75 percent increase from its initial commitment announced prior to the pandemic
On June 11, China’s rise-hailing giant Didi Chuxing formally submitted its IPO prospectus to the SEC. In the 12 months ending March 31, 2021, Didi had 493 million global annual active users and 15 million global annual active drivers.