AI Technology & Industry Review
The 5th World Internet Conference kicked off in Wuzhen, Zhejiang, China today, with state-run Xinhua News Agency and leading search service provider Sogou jointly unveiling the world’s first “AI Synthetic Anchor,” a highly realistic AI-generated newscaster.
In the 1950s the philosophy informing the futuristic vision of autonomous vehicles was to “make the road guide the car” via electronics and mechanical devices embedded in high tech roadways.
Tencent AI Lab unveiled its new intelligent microscope for pathological analysis yesterday at the Tencent Global Partner Conference in Nanjing. The device represents a huge step in the company’s ongoing commitment to ramp up its R&D in AI + medicine.
Baidu CEO Robin Li today gave the world a peek at China’s first Level 4 autonomous driving passenger cars, co-developed by Baidu and carmaker FAW Hongqi. Li introduced the vehicles at the 2018 Baidu World Conference in Beijing. The cars will enter mass production by the end of 2019, and their road debuts will be in Beijing and FAW Hongqi’s hometown of Changchun.
If you’ve ever wondered whether Dota 2 or League of Legends is the most popular multiplayer online battle arena game, or how long you’d need to spend on a treadmill to burn off that party size bag of chips you just ate, you know that you can probably find the answer by accessing a couple of relevant information sources and then applying what seems like a natural and straightforward reasoning process.
Baidu today announced plans for a comprehensive self-driving taxi and bus service in Changsha, the capital of southern Hunan province and birthplace of Mao Zedong. Baidu has signed a partnership agreement with the Changsha Municipal People’s Government and Hunan Xiangjiang New Area Development Group that aims to reinvent the local commute.
Tencent AI Lab has announced an open-source NLP dataset comprising vector representations for eight million Chinese words and phrases. The dataset aims to provide large-scale and high-quality support for deep learning-based Chinese language NLP research in both academic and industrial applications.
Adding Baidu’s voice will broaden PAI’s understanding of global AI technologies and their ethical implications. Chinese companies are pushing forward with a wide adoption of AI technologies across industries from healthcare to transportation and beyond.
Beijing-based self-driving startup Momenta has closed its latest funding round to boost its total funding to over US$200 million. The company bills itself as China’s most valuable autonomous driving startup, with an estimated worth of US$1 billion.
Xilinx believes one solution is its recently-released, cutting-edge 7nm programmable chip Versal. The chip is based on Xilinx Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform (ACAP) technology and built with 7nm FinFET manufacturing process technology, integrating the Arm Cortex-A72 and Cortex-R5, an AI engine and DSP engine.
The company made a series of AI-related announcements today at the Huawei Connect 2018 Conference in Shanghai, introducing two AI chips and a machine learning framework. Huawei’s AI push is expected to intensify its battle with domestic rivals Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu in the AI market.
A typical JD motorcycle deliveryman in Shanghai delivers 100 packages per day, racing along the city’s waterfront, navigating tiny alleyways and darting between the city’s skyscrapers. That may seem impressive but JD is still striving to improve motorcycle delivery efficiency with new tech — much of it AI-powered.
Yi Wang will never forget Thursday, September 27, 2018. That’s the day that Liulishuo, the AI-driven English tutoring startup he founded in 2012, went public on the Nasdaq (NYSE:LAIX), raising US$72 million under an estimated market cap of US$600 million.
The Beijing Traffic Management Bureau yesterday issued new licenses for self-driving vehicle testing in the Chinese capital, with tech giant Tencent receiving authorization to operate an autonomous vehicle on designated roads for the first time.
As Chinese Internet giant Baidu has expanded from search to mobile apps, cloud services, and emerging business sectors like autonomous driving and voice assistants, it has correspondingly beefed up its research efforts, particularly in AI, to keep pace with growing security threats.
Beijing-based computer vision unicorn Megvii Technology runs the world’s largest face-recognition technology platform, Face++. The company provides innovative solutions for object detection and image recognition using AI-powered techniques.
Synced has discovered that Alphabet self-driving subsidiary Waymo has set up an office in China.
On August 23, Synced found an entry in the National Enterprise Information Publicity System indicating that the limited liability company (solely foreign invested – 外国法人独资) Huimo Business Consulting (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. had been incorporated in Shanghai.
Three months after Chinese Internet giant Baidu announced that COO Qi Lu will step down in July due to “personal and family reasons”, Lu today unveiled his new adventure: Chief Executive Officer of Y Combinator China.
Guangzhou-based Xiaopeng Motors (Xpeng) announced today that it had scored CN¥4 billion (US$585 million) in its Series B+ funding round. This is the largest 2018 single-round funding total among Chinese Electric Vehicle startups (NIO, Byton, WM Motor, etc.), and pushes Xpeng’s valuation to CN¥25 billion (US$3.66 billion).
On the same day Baidu was announcing another quarter of strong earnings, the Chinese search engine giant’s stock prices suddenly tumbled on a report American rival Google is planning to launch a new search engine for the Chinese market.
Scientists at the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin in China have unveiled their prototype of a next-generation exascale supercomputer. The centre says the Tianhe-3 (天河3号) can perform at one exaFLOPS, or a billion billion calculations per second— the threshold for coveted “exascale” status.
Over the past year Chinese startups and tech giants alike have developed their own voice technology ecosystems comprising product manufacturers, tech solution providers, content makers, and platforms designed to help hardware or skill applications “speak and be smarter.” In this article, we look at the current state of open voice platforms in China.
Chinese IoT startup Tuya Smart has completed its Series C funding with nearly US$200 million, led by Future Fund, NEA, China Broadband Capital, Quadrille Capital and C.M.Capital. The company will apply the funds to its AI+IoT, Smart City, Smart Business and Smart Home technologies.
Xilinx, the world’s leading designer and supplier of programmable logic devices, today announced its acquisition of DeePhi Tech — a Beijing-based chip startup with a focus on machine learning, specializing in deep compression, pruning, and system-level optimization for neural networks.
Chinese autonomous driving solution provider Pony.ai has reported an additional US$102 million in Series A1 funding — just six months after scoring US$112 million — to bring its Series A total to US$214 million.
China now has some 4,040 AI companies, according to a whitepaper released by the Beijing Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology at this weekend’s 22nd China International Software EXPO in Beijing.
The opportunities for studying AI at Chinese higher learning institutes have never been better or more varied. More than 70 Chinese universities and colleges have introduced AI-related majors, and 283 universities are licensed to offer data science programs.
From 2015 – 2017 over 450 Chinese AI startups received funding totaling CN¥30 billion (US$4.8 billion). Although the number of funding rounds declined in 2017, the year’s total funding was more than double the total for 2015 and 2016 combined.
Eager to kickstart its AI industry, the nation of 52 million yesterday released an ambitious national plan to invest ₩2.2 trillion (US$2 billion) by 2020 to strengthen its AI R&D capability.
Chinese AI and humanoid robotic company UBTECH Robotics today announced a staggering US$820 million in Series C funding. With its new estimated value of US$5 billion, Shenzhen City-based UBTECH becomes the world’s most valuable AI startup.
Tencent today officially launched its first-ever smart speaker, Tencent Tingting (腾讯听听), which can send or receive voice messages via WeChat.
Founded by two Chinese AI experts in 2012, the company is particularly competent in recognizing human faces and vehicles. Such capability appeals to China’s public security departments.
Chinese State media People’s Daily recently reported the country is facing a shortage of five million AI talents.
A separate LinkedIn survey revealed that while there are some 1.9 million AI engineers worldwide, about one million reside in the US while China is home to just 50,000.
New Chinese regulations will permit self-driving vehicle testing on public roads across the country.
The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Ministry of Public Security, and Ministry of Transport yesterday jointly issued the Intelligent Connected Vehicle Road Test Management Standards…
China’s Ministry of Education last week issued its AI Innovation Action Plan for Colleges and Universities to the education departments at all levels and institutions of higher education.
China’s computer vision company SenseTime today announced it had raised a staggering US$600 million in Series C funding, setting a world record for an AI company and bringing its value to an estimated US$4.5 billion to make it the world’s most valued AI startup.
Hikvision AI Cloud is a distributed structure incorporating cloud computing and edge computing. Launched last year, it can extend an AI algorithm from the cloud centre to an edge network of on-premises video recorders and servers, and further to edge devices, such as security cameras.
Synced surveyed the international regulations, and here are our picks of major regions and countries that are accommodating the testing and deployment of autonomous driving technologies on their public roads.
Chinese Premier Keqiang Li delivered this year’s official government work report, identifying “reinforcing the new generation of artificial intelligence research and development” among the state’s innovation focuses for 2018.
Capillary Technologies is a cloud-based SaaS company serving over 300 large enterprises and 500 small or medium businesses in over 30 countries. It improves retailers’ engagement with customers through analytics.