London-based artificial intelligence firm looks to expand after raising £13m in a Series A funding round June 11, 2018 Research-driven artificial intelligence (AI) company Eigen Technologies aims to expand after raising £13m in its first significant round of venture capital financing. The London-based tech firm, which has obtained the money in a Series A round co-led by Goldman Sachs and Temasek, takes unstructured qualitative data and turns it into information which companies can then [...]
Will humanity be phased out of the workforce by robots? June 10, 2018 As automated employees begin to fulfill not just physical roles but also cognitive ones, workers can be safe in knowing that history has proven humanity’s staying power. Researchers have concluded unanimously that automation will make improve our ability to do our jobs, boost wages and make the world a better place, according to a report [...]
The UK tech industry pulled in more than three times as much investment as any other European country post-Brexit June 8, 2018 Since the EU referendum, UK tech companies received over £5bn in venture capital funding, with London taking in 80 per cent of that number. Over the last two years, the UK earned more than the next three top-earning European countries combined, including France (£1.55bn), Germany (£2.15bn) and Sweden (£644m). London also topped the charts for [...]
Google chief executive Sundar Pichai sets out AI principles and won’t use it on weapons or surveillance June 8, 2018 It has its critics – including a certain Elon Musk – but artificial intelligence is being explored by many of the world’s biggest tech giants as a key focus for the future. Including Google. Now, the company’s boss, Sundar Pichai, has shared Google’s principles on AI, saying the tech behemoth felt “a deep responsibility to [...]
Artificial intelligence will dominate every aspect of our lives, but it won’t replace us June 6, 2018 Guess which of the 964 jobs listed in the widely used Occupational Information Network online database is the least susceptible to replacement by artificial intelligence (AI). The unsurprising answer is that of “massage therapist”. This is one of the findings of a paper in the latest issue of the American Economic Review by Erik Brynjolfsson [...]
A future society driven by tech must have freedom at its heart June 4, 2018 Spotify knows your own taste in music better than you do. It’s the promise made by predictive technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) – and it was the claim made to a recent gathering of Europe’s leading investors in technology. Taste in music is not something I’ve ever shouted about, and to say my playlists are [...]
Google backtracks over controversial military drone project Maven, as thousands of employees protest its involvement June 3, 2018 Google will not be renewing the contract for Project Maven, a controversial drone artificial intelligence imaging program in partnership with the Pentagon, after it expires in March 2019. Google Cloud CEO Diane Green said during a weekly meeting with employees on Friday that the company would be backing away from its involvement with the US [...]
Yandex amps up its premium offering with new smart speaker launch and subscription service May 29, 2018 Yandex, also colloquially known as Russia’s answer to Amazon and Google, has today launched a smart speaker and a corresponding premium subscription service, alongside a range of expansions to its artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem and intelligent assistant Alice. Known as Yandex.Station, the 9,990 roubles (£120) smart speaker is both Yandex’s first hardware product and the [...]
Could the office be staffed by chatbots? May 29, 2018 Whether checking insurance quotes, ordering concert tickets, or seeing if your favourite trainers are back in stock, almost all of us will have encountered a chatbot in our daily lives. Capable of providing fast access to information and offering pre- programmed responses to minimise misunderstanding in communication, businesses have found that chatbots have cut customer [...]
Rocket Internet moves into fintech and AI with £2.3bn cash investment up for grabs May 29, 2018 Prolific German e-commerce investor Rocket Internet will begin channelling money towards startups in fintech, vertical marketplaces and artificial intelligence, confirmed CEO Oliver Samwer after revealing its first quarter results today. Rocket currently owns majority stakes in meal kit delivery service HelloFresh and fashion house Global Fashion Group (GFG), though it recently sold eight per cent [...]