Chinese retailer and cloud infrastructure provider Alibaba is the latest company to think up its own design for processors that can run artificial intelligence software. It joins a crowded roster of companies already working on similar custom designs, including Alphabet, Facebook and Apple.

The Q Fund will seek to work exclusively with startups developing software and services that tackle AI's biggest challenges.

Synopsys has announced it has been enhancing its design tools with AI technology to address the complexities of leading-edge design. AI-enhanced tools augment the Synopsys Design Platform and work with recently announced Fusion Technology to accelerate time-to-results (TTR) and set new standards for quality-of-results (QoR) in digital and custom design.

Qualcomm Technologies has announced the formation of Qualcomm AI Research, a cross-functional, cooperative effort that encompasses all of the cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) research taking place across the company.

The departure of Baidu's most senior operational executive threatens to derail the Chinese search giant's ambition of placing artificial intelligence at the heart of its business.

Apple and IBM revealed an enhancement to their existing collaboration at the Think 2018 conference with Watson Services for Core ML and the newly designed IBM Cloud Developer Console for Apple. The offering marries Apple's Core ML tools for developers with IBM's Watson to make it easier for companies to add artificial intelligence into mobile applications.

According to the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), patents related to AI semiconductors, which was 32 in 2013, soared to 391 in 2017 in South Korea, a ten-fold increase over the four years.

Qualcomm has introduced the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 700 Mobile Platform Series, designed to exceed what is expected from today's high-tier mobile experiences, with features and performance previously only available in the premium Snapdragon 800 Mobile Platform Series. Advances to be expected in the 700 Series include on-device AI supported by the Qualcomm Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engine, and improvements to camera, device performance and power.

Samsung Electronics has decided to cooperate with the Chinese government to develop next-generation technologies including artificial intelligence (AI). With China having been putting pressure on Samsung Electronics due to a rise in the price of memory chips supplied to Chinese smartphone makers, some market watchers say that the partnership can settle a series of conflicts between the two.

Google's Android phone has only one lens, but a technology called RAISR uses machine learning to help you zoom in better.

Micron has announced with Rambus, Northwest Logic and Avery Design, their efforts to deliver a comprehensive solution for GDDR6, the world's fastest discrete memory. This first-of-its-kind solution would enable GDDR6 use in advanced applications such as high-performance networking, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and 5G infrastructure.

After Imagination Technologies bought MIPS Technologies in 2013, they invested in the architecture and attempted to build a business around it as a potential ARM competitor. These plans largely failed, and Imagination Technologies arranged the sale of MIPS - and itself - to different venture capital firms in the fall of 2017. Now, the company has been brought back to Silicon Valley, where it hopes to build a new line of competitive processors for AI workloads.

The industry this year may see a microprocessor ship from startup Graphcore that uses no DRAM and one from rival Cerebras Systems that pioneers wafer-level integration. The hefty 2.5-D Nervana chip acquired by Intel is already sampling, and a dozen other processors are in the works. Meanwhile, chip companies from ARM to Western Digital are working on cores to accelerate the inference part of deep neural nets.

A month after announcing plans to open its first AI lab in China, Google is expanding again through a move into Shenzhen. The U.S. tech giant has opened an office in the Chinese city, which borders Hong Kong and known for being a global hardware hub, according to an internal email obtained by TechCrunch. This isn't a fully-blown Google campus, instead the company has taken up space within a serviced office starting this week.

At CES 2018 Nvidia has unveiled details of its functional safety architecture for Nvidia Drive, its AI autonomous vehicle platform, which uses redundant and diverse functions to enable vehicles to operate safely, even in the event of faults related to the operator, environment or systems. The Nvidia Drive architecture enables automakers to build and deploy self-driving cars and trucks that are functionally safe and can be certified to international safety standards, such as ISO 26262.

Nvidia's big push into the world of autonomous vehicles has attracted a vast amount of customers for what is still early stage technology - over 320, by the company's count. This week at CES the company announced that it's finally making Xavier, an AI chip made for self-driving vehicles that Nvidia announced in 2016, available to customers. And the company's also adding a few marquee names to its list of self-driving technology customers, including Uber and VW.

Google is deepening its push into artificial intelligence (AI) by opening a research center in Beijing, China, even though its search services remain blocked in the country. Google said the facility would be the first its kind in Asia and would aim to employ local talent.

Nvidia has gathered predictions from the world's leading researchers and industry thought leaders concerning the development of AI.

A special-purpose chip for artificial intelligence and other tasks in Google's new Pixel smartphones draws on Intel technology.

The nature of work is changing on a global level at a rapid pace. Sure, it's not the first time work has been dramatically impacted by technology, but the growth of automation, robotics, AI and the like have the potential to displace jobs at an unprecedented rate. And Google will almost certainly be one of the driving forces behind that transformation.

For the second time in recent months, Amazon and Microsoft are teaming up in artificial intelligence, with Google on the sidelines for now. On Thursday the two companies rolled out new tools that will make it easier for developers to use open-source AI software.

Samsung's Montreal office will tackle self-driving cars and image recognition.

Imagination made a name for itself as the designer of the graphics accelerators in Apple's smartphones and tablets. Now it's designed a new range of processing cores that chip makers can use to accelerate artificial intelligence algorithms in their own hardware.

Tesla is getting closer to having its own chip for handling autonomous driving tasks in its cars.

Qualcomm Technologies is announcing the acquisition of Scyfer, a company affiliated with University of Amsterdam and focused on cutting-edge machine learning techniques, to add a talented team to its roster.

Facebook already tailors its feed of news, sports scores and viral videos to show you what you want. Now Google is going to do it too. In a classic case of Silicon Valley "Anything you can do I can do better," the search giant on Wednesday updated its free Google app for iPhones and Android phones with a feed that uses artificial intelligence to show you things like news stories or movie trailers.

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), the birthplace of the Robot World Cup in 1996, now presents a new technology matchup, the AI World Cup this November. The event is being organized by the Machine Intelligence and Robotics Multi-Sponsored Research and Education Platform (MIR-MSREP) of KAIST. The online, simulated AI soccer game, based on rolling updates, will be a draw for avid online gamers and tech-savvy university students from around the nation.

Apple is working on a processor devoted specifically to AI-related tasks, according to a person familiar with the matter. The chip, known internally as the Apple Neural Engine, would improve the way the company's devices handle tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence -- such as facial recognition and speech recognition, said the person, who requested anonymity discussing a product that hasn't been made public.

Intel aims to gain the upper hand in the budding field of artificial intelligence with a new lineup of chip products in 2017, a senior executive said.

Tesla Motors has announced that all Tesla vehicles - Model S, Model X, and the upcoming Model 3 - will now be equipped with an on-board "supercomputer" that can provide full self-driving capability. This in-vehicle supercomputer is powered by the Nvidia DRIVE PX 2 AI computing platform.

Intel has announced plans to pay an undisclosed amount for Nervana Systems, a 48-employee company working on semiconductors, software and services to exploit a popular AI technique called deep learning.

Artificial intelligence is the next big frontier in technology.