Asia AI News Archives — Carrington Malin

August 4, 2019
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PayPal co-founder and tech billionaire Peter Thiel published an opinion piece in the New York Times at the end of the week — ‘Good for Google, Bad for America’ — in a follow-up to his Washington DC speech a couple of weeks ago, during which he called for a probe into Google’s ‘seemingly treasonous acts’.

In the current atmosphere of ‘China fever’ and President Trump’s new trade tariffs, this has naturally gone down rather well in some circles and I’m sure Mr Thiel will be delighted with the publicity.

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July 16, 2019
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A Bengaluru-based start-up is developing India’s first attack swarm drone prototype in conjunction with state-owned contractors Hindustan Aeronautics

report from NDTV last week confirmed that India’s military is developing weaponised autonomous swarm drones. It has been much publicised that these are being developed by China, Russia and the U.S., but not so India — until this year.

There’s been talk about India’s military need for swarm drones for a couple of years now and the possibility of leveraging home grown UAV startups, but not much buzz about the development of weaponised swarm drones.

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July 9, 2019
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Yesterday’s Bloomberg story quoting new figures from UK market research firm Preqin, tells a similar story to those we’ve been reading during the past week. The stats show the same downward trend for venture capital activity in China, with the value of venture deals during the second quarter of 2019 falling far short of Q2 2018.

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July 8, 2019
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The first Modi 2.0 budget has been called cautious, incremental and lacking a blueprint; Will India be able to implement the right programmes at the speed required to remain competitive?

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Modi government’s budget for 2019/2020 to India’s parliament on Friday, in a statement full of vision for the future, drawing heavily on the themes from the national Economic Survey 2018–19 released last week. In a speech that aimed to garner popular appeal, Sitharaman prioritised infrastructure, digital economy and job creation. You can review the government’s online presentation here.

As expected, the new budget has received both praise and criticism, while inspiring some tough questions, depending on the economic and political leaning of the commentators.

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July 8, 2019
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Chinese AI venture investment deals fell 63 percent in value during the first half of 2019, but AI leaders remain upbeat.

As mentioned in Wednesday’s post, investment in Chinese tech ventures has continued to slow down throughout the first half of 2019. As we leave H1 behind, more and more data is coming out to support this.

Yesterday, the South China Morning Post published figures from Beijing-based information source ITJUZI.com, reporting that ‘new economy’ investments in China continued their slide into the second quarter, dropping 62 per cent year -on-year to RMB 154.3 billion ($22.4 billion). The only bit of good news was that the overall rate of decline in investment may have slowed from Q1 to Q2.

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July 5, 2019
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According to a recent report by Canalys, South Korea’s smart speaker growth rate is second only to China with Canalys predicting 132% growth during 2019. It’s now well publicised that China’s own smart speaker manufacturers are driving China’s 166% market growth. So, what’s the catalyst for South Korea’s growth? It could well be home-grown innovation.

SK Telecom, South Korea’s largest wireless operator, introduced NUGU in 2016 — the first AI-virtual assistant for the Korean language (so, two years after the U.S. Amazon Alexa launch).

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July 4, 2019
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The growth in China’s investment in artificial intelligence ventures over the past few years has been nothing less than explosive. China is now home to more ‘AI unicorns’ than anywhere else in the world (statistics differ greatly, but CB Insights counts six out of the top 11 unicorns in its top AI startups list, while some others put the count much higher).

According to ZDNet, China’s funding of AI startups grew from about $1 billion in 2016 to more than $8 billion in 2018, accounting for 44 percent of all global AI startup funding (with the U.S.’s accounting for 41%). However, investment in China AI ventures has slowed greatly compared to last year.

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July 2, 2019
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The G20 Summit in Osaka ended on a high note for some, with the meeting between the presidents of the two largest economies in the world stealing a lot of the headlines. U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed after the meeting that his government will continue to allow sales of American technology products to Huawei, likely pleasing the likes of Intel and Micron.

If the biggest success of G20 was a reset for China-US trade negotiations, one of the biggest failures was arguably the Osaka Track digital economy declaration to formulate rules on digital governance under the concept of “Data Free Flow with Trust”, but without the support of India (a country that expects to make $350 billion from IT and BPM by 2025).

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June 28, 2019
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The G20 Summit kicks off today in Osaka and — with the much publicised US government attack on China’s trade policies, threats of new tariffs and measures already taken against Huawei — technology interests have already been thrust squarely front and centre.

AI, big data, IoT and robotics have quickly risen in the public and political consciousness over the past couple of years and there’s already been much talk from attendees about cooperation, conflict, regulation and policy-making. Innovation is one of the top themes for this G20 meeting.

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June 28, 2019
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According to the news media, there is enormous focus on AI development in the defence space and, in fact, global military spending on AI is projected to reach nearly $19 billion per annum by 2025.

Virtually anyone with a social media account must have now seen the Boston Dynamics videos of Atlas and his robot pals. Military aircraft, vehicle and systems manufacturers are heavily invested in AI and other new technologies. However, a great deal of a nation’s AI development for defence purposes has nothing to do with robots or even weapons and every government, one could easily assume, is doing it. Or are they?

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