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Tencent, Asia’s second highest valued tech firm, has bought a five percent share in Tesla. According to a filing, the Chinese firm scooped up 8,167,for around $1.7 billion to become one of Tesla’s largest shareholders.

The news itself sent Tesla’s share price up three percent in pre-market trading. The purchase was arranged on March 17, and those now-Tencent-owned shares are worth around $2.2 billion at current market value.

Tencent is a prolific investor. It holds equity in Snap, this year’s hot tech IPO, among others following an early investment. While that interest in messaging makes sense since Tencent’s operates China’s dominant chat app — WeChat — it isn’t immediately clear whether the Tesla investment has strategic undertones. An alliance with Tencent could significantly boost Tesla’s efforts in China, which is already impressive. Chinese sales accounted for 15 percent of Tesla’s $7 billion revenue last year.

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For a mind to be capable of tackling anything, it has to have a memory.

Humans are exceptionally good at transferring old skills to new problems. Machines, despite all their recent wins against humans, aren’t. This is partly due to how they’re trained: artificial neural networks like Google’s DeepMind learn to master a singular task and call it quits. To learn a new task, it has to reset, wiping out previous memories and starting again from scratch.

This phenomenon, quite aptly dubbed “catastrophic forgetting,” condemns our AIs to be one-trick ponies.

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We will be able to embed storytelling directly into business strategy development, tell meaningful and memorable stories that truly connect with employees and customers, craft moments that are personalized and frictionless, and as a bonus, have the ability to harness Watson to optimize distribution across channel, demo and geography.

This is particularly resonant as I believe that just as the last twenty years mandated that every organization strive to be a technology company, the next twenty will command every winning corporation to be a content or media brand. In my view, Watson and AI will be the ingredient brand catalyzing tomorrow’s innovation at leading corporations in many ways; but media for certain will be top of the list, as AI assists them in becoming the top content studios of the future. Smaller businesses can scale these ideas using Watson as well as compelling content creation becomes an increasingly important driver of business strategy.

Tomorrow’s business success stories will be fueled by AI that extends beyond the CTO and areas of pure technology and infrastructure, to the CMO and areas ranging from culture to communication to creativity. The winning formula of the future as articulated by IBM will be creativity + technology = meaningful engagement, and the ability to activate purposeful change.

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ES Emerging Technology are delighted to invite you to the second event in our Exponential Series!

Nathan Waters is a futurist, decentralist and entrepreneur. He is the founder of the monthly Ethereum blockchain meetup (SydEthereum) and Australia’s largest independent hackathon (Hackagong).

In this discussion Nathan will be presenting a new project for a blockchain-based economic protocol intended to transition humanity to a post-Capitalist future. We’ll be covering topics such as: runaway automation, technological unemployment, future of work and education, wage slavery, wealth inequality, rising precariat, universal basic income, peer production, platform co-operatives, post-scarcity and decentralised autonomous organisations.

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