Bits & Bytes
Google scraps controversial AI ethics council days after it was announced.
- Google has shuttered its new artificial intelligence ethics council, a little more than a week after announcing it, in large part due to employee reactions to the appointment of a conservative think tank leader to the group.
WIPO launches AI-based image search tool for brands.
- The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has launched a new AI-powered image search technology that uses deep learning to identify combinations of concepts within an image, thus making it faster and easier to establish a trademark’s distinctiveness.
Tim Apple poaches Ian GANfellow.
- Apple has poached another of Google’s top AI researchers. This time it’s Ian Goodfellow, best known as the creator of GANs, or generative adversarial networks, who has joined Apple in a director role.
FDA Proposes Regulatory Framework for AI- and Machine Learning-Driven SaMD.
- US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requested feedback on a new discussion paper that proposes applying a “focused review” approach to premarket assessments of software as a medical device (SaMD) technologies that are powered by AI and ML. [Paper]
Qualcomm Reveals “Cloud AI 100” AI Inference Accelerator.
- Qualcomm announced their first discrete dedicated AI processors, the Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 family. The chip, which it expects to begin producing in 2020, is designed for use in datacenters to meet increasing demand for AI inference processing.
Google launches an end-to-end AI platform.
- At Google Next ’19, Google announced the beta version of its end-to-end AI platform, which aims to offer developers and data scientists a one-stop shop for building, testing and deploying models. At Next, the company made several additional announcements as well, including updates to its suite of Cloud AI Solutions, AutoML, BigQuery ML, its pre-trained ML APIs, and more.
Petuum Unveils Industrial AI Product for Complex Manufacturing Operations.
- Petuum announced the Petuum Industrial AI Autopilot product, which enables optimization of complex manufacturing operations with modules that continuously learn and adapt.
Dollars & Sense
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Intel Capital announced investments in five AI companies at its annual Global Summit.
IntelCapital led a $13M round in AI chip startup Untether AI and a $150M round in AI systems company SambaNova Systems. In addition, the company invested undisclosed amounts in Andrew Ng’s Landing AI and China-based CloudPick and Zhuhai Eeasy Technology.
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Run.AI, a startup building a new virtualization and acceleration platform for deep learning, announced that it has raised $13M
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Enlitic, a San Francisco, CA-based company leveraging AI for medical imaging raised $15M in Series B financing
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Boston Dynamics announced that it is acquiring California-based startup Kinema Systems, which makes computer-vision and ML systems for warehouse robots
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Evolve IP, announced that it has acquired Jog.ai, a speech analytics and natural language technology firm based in Austin, Texas
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Rasa, San Francisco-based an open source company that enables developers to build contextual AI assistants, has secured $13M in Series A funding
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Labelbox, a collaborative training data platform for machine learning applications, has raised a $10M Series A funding
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Observe.AI has secured $8M in a Series A funding
