On the April 11th, the first graduates from the Tencent AI accelerator have reported to deliver their accomplishments in the pass one year. Last year, Chinese internet giant Tencent officially began its artificial intelligence accelerator at its headquarters in the city of Shenzhen in southern Guangdong province. 25 local and 4 overseas startups were chosen into this program.
After 9 months of the guidance, the total valuation of these portfolio has reached to more than ￥20 billion, with the triple growth compared with the former valuation（￥7 billion）.
The projects support AI entrepreneurs and promote the industrialization of AI technologies，covering a range of fields including finance, health care, education, corporate services and intelligent hardware
25 projects were selected after a second interview stage last year, covering a range of fields including finance, health care, education, corporate services and intelligent hardware. Nearly 1,000 businesses originally applied for the program with 42 companies taking part in the second interview stage.
The Tencent AI route map is hoping to aid more partners.
Tencent is aggressively exploring the potential of AI by expanding its application scenarios with the aid of partners. It rolled out a plan to incubate 100 startups that can use its AI cloud and other technological and commercial resources.
Tencent opened a research lab in Seattle in April 2017, in addition to its AI lab (Tencent Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) launched in April 2016. The Tencent AI lab is missioned to “Make AI everywhere”, with four areas of focus – computer vision, voice recognition, natural language process and ML.
The AI competitions in the tech giant in China
1.Baidu takes the actions in AI in a quirkiest speed.
Baidu is focusing on the commercialization of AI technology across its AI-enabled new business initiatives – cloud, financial services, autonomous driving and DuerOS, all of which have the potential to become Baidu’s core businesses.
Apollo is an open, complete and reliable software platform for unmanned driving and the auto industry, expecting to be the “Android” of the auto industry. Baidu expects sharing resources to accelerate industry innovation, empower business partners, and hence achieve mutual benefits.
2.Alibaba：A world-leading use case for AI
The gigantic ecommerce business size requires a stable and reliable processing capacity and system. Alibaba has applied AI technology to enhance the efficiency of this program. Data Intelligence has been the most important strategy for AliCloud.
