Current Events #2: "Alibaba aims to Master the Laws of AI"

This article published last Thursday by Yiting Sun highlight the resent announcement that Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce giant, is going to invest $15 billion on researching artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Most, if not all the money will be spent on the establishment and maintenance of the Alibaba DAMO Academy. The purpose of the academy is to research cutting-edge technology as artificial intelligence. Alibaba plans to open laboratories in China, Russia, Israel, Singapore, and America. A quote from Jeff Zhang, Alibaba's chief technology officer, when asked what the vision is for DAMO Academy is, "We hope to attract the top talent in many fields. Alibaba is a vast platform, so anyone who joins can try things out anytime. In universities, it’s very hard to do research related to big data and AI due to limited access to data and computing power. Some countries we’ll be recruiting in are the U.S., Singapore, Russia, and Israel." The reason behind Alibaba's curiosity on AI is because the company would like to develop a "set of solid theories of deep learning" and grasp principles of neural networks. However, what stand in Alibaba's goal is to maintain efficiency with there large scale company. It will be quite interesting to observe how Alibaba develops over the next few years.

Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609099/alibaba-aims-to-master-the-laws-of-ai-and-put-virtual-helpers-everywhere/


Jeff Zhang

Alibaba HQ in Hangzhou, China

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