Turing Weekly: Select the big events of the AI industry of the week, select the most valuable information from the uneven industry information, with professional reviews, which is worth your perusal and taste.
01 Microsoft acquires AI voice company Nuance for $16 billion
On April 12, local time, Microsoft and Nuance Communications, an artificial intelligence and voice technology company, jointly issued an announcement announcing that the two sides have reached a final agreement that Microsoft will acquire Nuance with a total cash price of $56 per share, including Nuance's net debt and a total price of $19.7 billion. That price represents a around 23% premium to Nuance's closing price on April 9.
Comments: In Microsoft's huge acquisition map, the field of voice intelligence is a part that cannot be ignored. In recent years, Microsoft has released a number of AI translation and voice products, seeing AI technology as the main driving force in the cloud service business. The process has not been smooth. Microsoft officially revealed that its voice assistant application Cortana (Cortana) has officially stopped service on March 31, 2021, and will focus on Microsoft 365's voice assistant in the future. After the high-priced acquisition of Nuance, Microsoft has improved its strength in the field of AI+ medical care through the integration of its related businesses with Nuance's speech recognition technology. However, in addition to Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon and other giants have also built their own teams in the field of artificial intelligence technology and medical cloud services, increasing related investment efforts, and Microsoft will still face fierce industry competition.
02 Tucson, the world's first driverless stock, will be listed in the United States in the future
On the evening of April 15, 2021, Beijing time, Tucson Future (TSP. US) was officially listed on the NASDAQ segment of the US stock market, issuing a total of 33.78 million shares, priced at $40 per share, and raising $8.4 billion. At this point, the truck autonomous driving "unicorn" company rooted in Shanghai's Lingang New Area has become the first share in the global unmanned driving field.
Comments: As a leading self-driving truck unicorn enterprise in China, Tucson will achieve multiple industry milestones early in the future and become a well-deserved market leader. In 2018, it completed the world's first unmanned fleet collaborative operation and obtained China's first unmanned truck public road test license. In 2020, launch the world's first driverless freight network. It is also the first company in the world to implement L4-level truck autonomous driving technology on highways and surface streets, and the first company to realize commercial freight with driverless technology, announcing that the commercial model of driverless freight has been verified. However, on this track, Tucson will face many opponents in the future, such as Zhijia Technology and Wincher Technology.
03 Sino-US research team creates the first "human-monkey embryo"
In a recent paper published in the journal Cell, Professor Belmonte of the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences and a team of professors from the Primate Translational Medicine Institute of Kunming University of Science and Technology successfully injected human stem cells into the embryos of primate macaques.
Comments: Some people see it as a significant advance in scientific research and praise it for its potential to improve the health of all human beings; some people think that this has a huge ethical risk, which is tantamount to pushing human beings to the edge of the cliff of "making monsters".
04 China has ranked first in the world in the number of artificial intelligence patent applications in the past decade
the annual meeting of Chinese intelligent industry was held in Suzhou on April 11. According to the "Chinese Intelligent Development Report 2020" released at the meeting, the number of patent applications for Chinese intelligent technology ranked first in the world in the past decade, and artificial intelligence will focus on the development of reinforcement learning, knowledge graph, intelligent robots and other directions in the next decade.
Comments: China's scientific research output in more than 10 AI sub-fields such as natural language processing, chip technology, and machine learning ranks among the top in the world; in the fields of human-computer interaction, knowledge engineering, robotics, computer graphics, and computational theory, it still needs to strive to catch up.
05 NVIDIA launches its first CPU
On April 13, the NVIDIA GTC Conference was held online as scheduled, and (NVIDIA) NVIDIA founder Jen-Hsun Huang released NVIDIA's first Arm-based CPU chip in front of the camera in his own kitchen.
Comments: For a long time, the CPU chip market has been monopolized by the two giants Intel and AMD, and NVIDIA is well known as a global GPU giant. The release of the first data CPU also announces the addition of new key elements to NVIDIA's heterogeneous computing layout, and the data center product line integrates the "three pillars of future computing" of CPU, GPU and DPU. NVIDIA is pushing hard to advance the ecological development of combining GPUs with Arm-based CPUs, and this is obviously just the beginning.