08.27.17 Recap

Uber Picks Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi as chief executive officer

Fiat Chrysler joins BMW-Intel self-driving car alliance

Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

Winner-takes all effects in autonomous cars

The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial
Such good commentary from Venkat.

The Boring Company is building a hyperloop

Tesla developing self-driving tech for semi-truck

The New Copycats: How Facebook Squashes Competition From Startups

Amazon launches Macie - a new platform powered by machine learning

Handheld spectral analyzer turns smartphone into diagnostic tool
Love to see great work come out of the Big10!

Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice: On-device Deep Mixture Density Networks for Hybrid Unit Selection Synthesis

Amazon will put 1,600 Echo Dots in Arizona State University’s engineering student dorms
Interesting move by Amazon and great experience for students to get some practical experience with emerging technologies. Would be cool to see more companies follow suit in a similar fashion.

The Coinbase Seed Round Pitch Deck
Always enjoy taking a look back to the beginning. Offers some perspective into how far things have come and all the hard work that goes into making great companies great. Also, did I catch a word cloud in there? 😉  Keep up the good work Coinbase!

Similarly, Garrett Camp offers a look into The Beginning of Uber after sharing one of their original pitch decks

a16z YouTube channel

Google launches Chrome Enterprise subscription service for Chrome OS
Google Cloud pushes further into the enterprise.

Walmart, Kroger & Nestle Team with IBM Blockchain to Fight Food Poisoning

And a lot happening in mobility:

Uber Weighed Changes to Autonomous Vehicle Unit

Uber in talks with NSW government to fill Sydney's public transport gaps

Ford, China's Zotye Auto plan JV to build electric vehicles

Infiniti unveils all-electric concept with next-gen Nissan Leaf technology

Cloud driver profiles mean any Tesla could automatically become your Tesla

Volkswagen is finally putting an electric Microbus into production

Waymo patents flexible vehicle that loses rigidity in accident event

GM's Maven assembling building blocks for ride, delivery services

08.06.17 Recap

TL;DR Review of KPCB’s 2017 Internet & Tech Trends
Full 2017 report posted here by Mary Meeker

Marc Andreessen answers questions from Stripe Atlas founders
Also wrt Stripe, a nice feature of the company/founders -  How Two Brothers Turned Seven Lines of Code Into a $9.2 Billion Startup

The End of Typing: The Next Billion Mobile Users Will Rely on Video and Voice

How to Start a Cultural Revolution | Ben Horowitz
Sage advice from Ben with his classic Toussaint case study - always enjoy hearing him tell this story.

Apple launches a machine learning journal (blog? 🤔) 
In any event, nice to see technical details and transparency around some of the work they're doing.

Q&A with YC Partners at the Female Founders Conference

Jeff Dean’s Lecture for YC AI

Beijing Wants A.I. to Be Made in China by 2030

Cardiologist-Level Arrhythmia Detection with Convolutional Neural Networks

This DNA-mimicking protein can make gene editing more precise and safe

Cracks in the ridesharing market—and how to fill them

Google’s AI Guru Says That Great Artificial Intelligence Must Build on Neuroscience

Lyft launches a new self-driving division and will develop its own autonomous ride-hailing technology

Combining design with data to reimagine ridesharing

BMW says self-driving car to be level 5 capable by 2021

The business of AI:  What it can — and cannot — do for your organization

Bringing neural networks to cellphones

Google.org is launching a $50 million effort to prepare job seekers for the ‘future of work’

The future of deep learning

Britain to Ban New Diesel and Gas Cars by 2040

A Brighter Future for Electric Cars and the Planet

Electric car startup Lucid Motors is short of cash and weighing its options

Hedge Fund Uses Algae to Reap 21% Return

Cheat Sheets for AI, Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Deep Learning & Big Data
Interesting overview of the space from a technical perspective

07.16.17 Recap

How Nature Solves Problems Through Computation

DARPA Wants Brain Implants That Record From 1 Million Neurons

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, Tokens, ICOs: Why should anyone care?

TinyDesk:  Chance the Rapper - including bc it's 🔥 🔥 🔥 

Tesla’s First Mass-Market Car, the Model 3, Hits Production This Week

All New Volvo Models Will Be Electric Or Hybrid Starting In 2019
Also, Volvo admits its self-driving cars are confused by kangaroos

Daimler, BAIC to invest $735 million in electric vehicles in China

Open source isn’t just altruistic - it’s smart business. TensorFlow has been a win-win for Google and AI overall

Capitalism the Apple Way vs. Capitalism the Google Way

Ask the AI experts: What are the applications of AI?

Technical Debt in Machine Learning 
ICYMI - mentioned in the post, but worth highlighting Gooe great paper from NIPS '15 on the topic from Google. Also

The Brain as Computer: Bad at Math, Good at Everything Else

I can grade you, or I can teach you, but I can’t do both

Microsoft Workplace Analytics

Microsoft creates an AI research lab to challenge Google and DeepMind

Alphabet’s AI arm DeepMind opens research lab in Canada, first outside the U.K.

Emergence of Locomotion Behaviours in Rich Environments -- aka DeepMind’s AI is teaching itself parkour, and the results are adorable

NVIDIA, Baidu Announce Partnership to Accelerate AI

Sam Altman on UBI with Fortune

Andrew Ng announces Deeplearning.ai, his new venture after leaving Baidu

No surprises: The key to the founder/VC relationship and avoiding the “Oh shit” board meeting

07.02.17 Recap

Elon Musk thinks he can make getting to Mars cheaper than going to college

And the Boring Company is in talks with LA

...annnd has apparently started to bore

Lots happening in 🚗  the past few weeks...

Texas explicitly allows driverless car tests

Alphabet Inks Deal for Avis to Manage Self-Driving Car Fleet

Apple Is Working With Hertz to Manage Its Self-Driving Car Fleet

Tesla hires deep learning expert Andrej Karpathy to lead Autopilot vision

Tesla’s New AI Guru Could Help Its Cars Teach Themselves

Ford’s on-demand bus service Chariot expands to Seattle

Waymo’s self-driving van hits the desert to see if it can stand the heat

And plenty of other happenings + thoughts...

Hard Questions: How We Counter Terrorism from Facebook

The Human Rights of Women Entrepreneurs

The Internet Doesn’t Have to Be Bad for Democracy

Mark Zuckerberg explains why he just changed Facebook's mission

MIT CSAIL research offers a fully automated way to peer inside neural nets

Ex Machina’s Scientific Advisor – Murray Shanahan

Bezos's Grocery 'Waterloo' Is Now His Biggest Opportunity

In a few years, no investors are going to be looking for AI startups

Forget AlphaGo—DeepMind Has a More Interesting Step Toward General AI

Google advances AI with ‘one model to learn them all

Accenture, Microsoft team up on blockchain-based digital ID network

The Man Who Helped Turn Toronto Into a High-Tech Hotbed

A leading Silicon Valley engineer explains why every tech worker needs a humanities education

You can now sign up for early access to Google’s wacky Area 120 app experiments

How HBO’s Silicon Valley built “Not Hotdog” with mobile TensorFlow, Keras & React Native 🌭

Why Are Corporations So Bad At Working With Startups?

Your Apple Pay purchases can help preserve national parks
Awesome to see Apple step up and help preserve our national treasures 💪

06.18.17 Recap

Happy Fathers Day to all the dads! 👨🏻

How Will EV Charging Impact the Power System?

Crypto Tokens: A Breakthrough in Open Network Design

Google Says It Will Do More to Suppress Terrorist Propaganda

After London attack, Facebook says aims to be 'hostile environment' for terrorists

Plant trees you'll never see

Cognata receives $5M to speed up autonomous testing

From post-it note to prototype: The journey of our Firefly

Lyft discloses $25 million investment from Jaguar

Proterra Raises $55 Million as Electric-Bus Maker Preps for IPO

Scaling Product at Airbnb with Joe Gebbia and Reid Hoffman

Amazon to buy Whole Foods Market in deal valued at $13.7 billion

DeepMind Shows AI Has Trouble Seeing Homer Simpson's Actions

Latent Attention Networks

Do More! What Amazon Teaches Us About AI and the “Jobless Future”

What Intelligent Machines Need to Learn From the Neocortex

A Strategist’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence

We Could Build an Artificial Brain Right Now

AlphaGo, in Context

Buyer Beware - Fred Wilson shares some thoughts on ICOs

DeepMind open sources some datasets

Apple issues $1 billion green bond after Trump's Paris climate exit

06.04.17 Recap

It Could Be 10 Times Cheaper To Take Electric Robo-Taxis Than To Own A Car By 2030

“Is this going to destroy the company? If not, let them test it.”
Love that ethos.  💯   [Also, Reid's @MastersOfScale is pretty great]

Delphi joins self-driving alliance with BMW, Intel

Mossberg: The Disappearing Computer

OpenAI Baselines: DQN

As Profit Dwindles, Ford Is Said to Replace Its C.E.O. with its director of autonomous vehicle research

Self-driving car technology: When will the robots hit the road?

Toyota pushes into blockchain tech to enable the next generation of cars

Zuckerberg Asks Harvard Grads to Fight Isolationism, Nationalism

The Unbundling Of Excel
☝️  I've been hot on this trend for awhile now

This is Jupiter? Giant planet surprises scientists in Juno’s first flyby

China's GSR Nears $1 Billion Deal for Nissan Battery Unit

AlphaGo retires from competitive Go after defeating world number one 3-0

Zillow announces $1M prize for anyone who can improve the algorithm for its Zestimate
Always like to see these open innovation challenges 🙌

When the Patient Is a Gold Mine: The Trouble With Rare-Disease Drugs

Faraday Future Said to Plan $1 Billion Raising as Main Backer Struggles

Facebook to launch ParlAI, a testing ground for AI and bots

Why Google’s CEO Is Excited About Automating Artificial Intelligence

Apple Is Working on a Dedicated Chip to Power AI on Devices

How AI Startups Must Compete with Google

Is China Outsmarting America in A.I.?

I trained a Word2Vec model on FoxNews broadcasts:  This is what it thinks about the world.

05.21.17 Recap

An Introduction to LIDAR: The Key Self-Driving Car Sensor

A novel approach to neural machine translatio with FAIR

Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs Eyes Toronto for Its Digital City

Smarter cars powered by Android

a16z Podcast: Quantum Computing, Now and Nex

Using Brainwaves to Guess Passwords

Uber app to display real-time public transit data so you can easily combine modes of transport

Learning to Fly by Crashing

Scientists use gene editing to eliminate HIV DNA in live mice

Innovation, Change and the Rest of Your Life

Microsoft's call for a Digital Geneva Convention

Automated ethics

Facebook hires former Jeff Sessions staffer as it expands it's policy team

Here’s our first look at Uber Freight, Uber’s long-haul trucking venture

An interesting a16z curation of essays on Open V Closed

Real or Fake? AI Is Making It Very Hard to Know

Lyft and Waymo to team up on self-driving cars amid Uber controversy

Your tl;dr by an ai: a deep reinforced model for abstractive summarizatio

The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data

Pushy AI Bots Nudge Humans to Change Behavior

San Francisco train service plans to run solely on clean energy

05.07.17 Recap

Updating Google Maps with Deep Learning and Street View

Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future

Amazon Strategy Teardown: Building New Business Pillars In AI, Next-Gen Logistics, And Enterprise Cloud Apps

Fooled by Experts

Waymo testing self-driving car ride service in Arizona

Apple, Tesla want changes to California's self-driving car tests

Slack’s updated search helps find the right team member to answer your question

The Navy built rechargeable batteries that won't explode on you

Revisiting PathNet:  DeepMind's approach to Transfer Learning

Bitcoin soars above $1,400 to all-time high

YC's How to Build a Product:  Part I (Michael Siebel, Emmett Shear and Steve Huffman) and Part II (Aaron Levie)

a16z AI Playbook

Several Google engineers have left one of its most secretive AI projects to form a stealth start-up

Apple documents offer first look at the tech giant's self-driving-car technology

NASA Issues a Challenge to Speed Up Its Supercomputer Code

04.23.17 Recap

Tesla Semi truck unveil set for September

VW to build a ‘nationwide 150 kW+ fast charging network’ for electric vehicles as part of Dieselgate settlement

Apple Said to Near Road Tests of Self-Driving Car Software

Copy that -- Apple just received a permit to test self-driving cars in California

Bezos on the Future of Amazon the company's annual report (hint:  lots of AI)

And now, a brief feature on Facebook who's receiving a lot of love this time around...

Facebook outlines how it is going to fight misinformation and fake news, amongst other things in it's Information Operations at Facebook report

Facebook's Building8 working on brain-computer interface technology
I mentioned this tech a few weeks back when Neuralink formally popped up. Very fascinating tech. Oh, and they got the former head of DARPA to oversee things.

Facebook owns four out of the five most downloaded apps worldwide (wow, that's strong 💪)

So is this - Facebook Gives Staff Green Light to Join May 1 Political Protests

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to boost sharing of global scientific research in collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (aka bioRxiv)
[Side note:  really awesome to see Mark's commitment to the Chan Zuckerberg initiative]

And back to our regularly schedule programming...

Princeton’s Ad-Blocking Superweapon May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race
☝️ What's cool about this is the information literacy component -- that is, highlighting ads not just censoring. You know, teach a (wo)man to fish and what not. Similar approaches could be expanded to other use cases.

Tesla unveils its new ‘sleek and low-profile’ exclusive solar panel made by Panasonic

This Week In Statups: Stripe Patrick Collison on online payment pwrhouse, Atlas, public/private mkts, & GDP of net (again, huge fan of the Atlas)

Speaking of Stripe - Susan Fowler to lead Stripe’s new engineering tips publication

The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI

Facebook’s Perfect, Impossible Chatbot

CommAI: Evaluating the First Steps Towards a Useful General AI

Live Office Hours with Yuri Sagalov and Sam Altman

Toyota unveils plans to build a fleet of heavy-duty, hydrogen-powered trucks

04.09.2017 Recap

Uber’s self-driving cars are back on the road after Arizona accident

Introducing Station F, Paris' newly constructed startup hub

And Neuralink
Elon looks to develop brain-computer interface. Incredibly fascinating work with many implications. 

Here's more - The case for neural lace:  Elon Musk enters the world of brain-computer interfaces

Adapting ideas from neuroscience for AI

Stripe opens Atlas business creation toolkit to U.S. entrepreneurs
Big ups to Stripe for this project -- happy to see it expand stateside. 👍

Cars and second order consequences

Tech community "dumbfounded" by Mnuchin's dismissal of AI impact on jobs

Meanwhile, Six jobs are eliminated for every robot introduced into the workforce, a new study says

How Aristotle Created the Computer

Volkswagen doubles down on China with $180M investment in smart technology for cars

Dyson Is the Apple of Appliances (and Just as Secretive)

DARPA Hierarchical Identify Verify Exploit (HIVE) Program (next-gen processor)

IEEE Global Initiative Aims to Advance Ethical Design of AI and Autonomous Systems

Hacking DNA: The Story of CRISPR, Ken Thompson, and the Gene Drive

Toyota is using AI to hunt for new battery materials

Facebook plans a free version of its Slack competitor

Google's former self-driving car guru raises cash for his own startup

London trials driverless shuttle service

Mercedes-Benz speeds up the launch timeline for 10 new electric vehicles

03.26.17 Recap

This week in mobility...

Bosch Announces AI Self-Driving Computer with NVIDIA

Also, Chipmaker Nvidia says working with Paccar on driverless trucks

Meanwhile, BMW says self-driving car to be level 5 capable by 2021

And Uber’s autonomous cars drove 20,354 miles and had to be taken over at every mile, according to documents by Johana Bhuiyan

But Alphabet nabbed a new VP as it gears up for government battles over self-driving car regulation by Tony Romm
(spoiler:  Waymo poached a government affairs guru form eBay)

Autonomous car startup NIO unveiled its self-driving concept vehicle

In other news...

Culture and Revolution by Ben Horowtiz

It begins:  bots are leaning to chat in their own language by Cade Metz

The US Navy wants gamers to stop the rise of the machines by Tom Regan

Taking feedback impersonally by Julie Zhuo

Facebook’s new ‘Town Hall’ feature helps you find and contact your government reps by Sarah Perez

Lessons in Tenacity from the Co-Founder of Foursquare by FirstRound and Denis Crowley

NASA signs up four research teams to study the Solar System by Mariella Moon

California's new car emission standards defy the White House by Jon Fingas

03.19.17 Recap

Toward Machines that Improve with Experience by DARPA

How Drive.ai Is Mastering Autonomous Driving With Deep Learning by Evan Ackerman

Alibaba leads $18 million round into augmented reality car nav startup WayRay by John Koetsier

AI's PR Problem by Jerry Kaplan

DeepMind Finds Way to Overcome AI’s Forgetfulness Problem by Jeremy Kahn

a16z Podcast: Startups, Pivots, Culture, and Timing (Oh Shit!) with Ben Horowitz, Jason Rosenthal, and Sonal Chokshi

Google Brain’s new super fast and highly accurate AI: the Mixture of Experts Layer by Theo Symkowiak

Why today's tech themes are poor predictors of tomorrow's hot startups by Founder's Collective

YC AI by Daniel Gross

Microsoft Teams launches out of preview in 181 countries and 19 languages by Emil Protalinski

Complexity and strategy by Terry Crowley

Embedding watermarks into deep neural networks by Yusuke Uchida, et al

Voice and the uncanny valley of AI by Benedict Evans

Away

Signing off again through the holidays for some reflection, travel, and lots of work.

VOTE

Get out and VOTE!! 🇺🇸  👍