🗞 News
How to block drones (a16z investment). Link
Apparently, Intel has closed its wearables team. Painful, but, as for Cisco, none of Intel's consumer projects have worked, and it's hard to see why they would. The PC market may be in structural decline, but that doesn't mean Intel can pick and choose alternatives. Link
Beijing wants to be the world AI leader 'by 2030'. This kind of industrial policy has historically worked out extremely bad for software and intellectual property (Japan tried the same thing once). Link
Microsoft is concentrating its research efforts into a dedicated AI lab. Link
Microsoft will have... some sort of dedicated chip in the next version of the Hololens. Link
Apple has launched a machine learning blog. This of itself would be trivial at any other company, but Apple has no other blogs and its focus on secrecy (partly, a just focus on controlling the message) has been cited as a problem in recruiting machine learning talent, out of which comes for academia and sees publishing as an essential building block of a career. So, this is art of Apple's moves to position itself as offering AI researchers some interesting problems. First post: using synthetic images to train recognition models - which of course is something you do it you want to preserve privacy, another Apple trope. Link
Amazon launched Spark, an interest-based product suggestion feed that's part of its mobile app. Oddly, this doesn't seem to use purchase history at all - you have to tell it what you want to see. Recommendation and discovery remains the big gap in ecommerce in general and Amazon in particular. Link
The latest blow-up in China - an ML-based news aggregator. Link
Tencent co-founder Zeng Liqing called LeEco a Ponzi scheme. Link
Jio, the disruptive (alt: suicidally cheap) new mobile entrant in India, is now doing 'free' 4G phones. Link
Roomba plans to sell your floor plans. (Yes, that's what it says). Link
🔮 Blog posts
Uber, Lyft and autonomy. Link
Graphcore ML chips. GPUs are much better than CPUs for ML, but dedicated chips ( see Google's TPU) are even better. Link
China's sharing economy: 600m people. Link
The limitations of deep learning. Link
Some advice for journalists writing about artificial intelligence. Link
"The only intelligent thing about Watson is the PR department". Link
BBC research on consumer attitudes to VR. Link
😮 Cool thing of the week
Satellite video of a rocket launch. Link
Panorama photos. Link
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