Artificial intelligence could transform China. Beijing has ambitious plans to lead the world in artificial intelligence.

The computer press is just full of it. Each week, AI can do something more. Google says that, in the future, it won't be a search engine company. It will be an AI company. China is aiming to lead the world in AI and it investing billions into it.

Google has announced it's acquiring a $1.1bn chunk of HTC's smartphone business, and with it providing the once leading Taiwanese phone brand a much needed lifeline. But what does Google want with part of a smartphone business? Google gains half of HTC's research and development team – about 2,000 people – and a non-exclusive license for HTC's intellectual property, allowing it to take advantage of some of HTC's advances in smartphone technology. HTC gets a cash injection, which will help it survive in some very competitive markets, and Google gets to continue its "big bet on hardware" according to Rick Osterloh, the company's senior vice president for hardware. It's "a business decision to have access to one of the best R&D teams", said Neil Shah, research director at Counterpoint Technology Market Research.

Oracle today launched its six-month Oracle Startup Cloud accelerator in Bristol, which will see it work with five startups basing their services on the tech giant's cloud. Marina Traversari, programme manager for the accelerator, told Cloud Pro that the reason why Oracle has launched the programme is rooted in its own entrepreneurial beginnings. "Oracle believes in supporting innovation and entrepreneurialism," she added. "We're fostering co-development and co-innovation with the aim to create new technologies and services across Oracle and our customer base," she continued. The five startups were chosen out of 120 applicants, which were judged against a five-tiered system, whittling down the hopeful startups to 40. These then had a Skype interview, with the numbers then cut down to 25, who were invited in for a face-to-face interview.

Chinese search engine Baidu (bidu) announced a 10 billion yuan ($1.52 billion) autonomous driving fund on Thursday as part of a wider plan to speed up its technical development and compete with U.S. rivals. The "Apollo Fund" will invest in 100 autonomous driving projects over the next three years, Baidu said in a statement. The fund's launch coincides with the release of Apollo 1.5, the second generation of the company's open-source autonomous vehicle software. After years of internal development, Baidu in April decided to open its autonomous driving technology to third parties, a move it hopes will accelerate development and help it compete with U.S. firms Tesla (tsla) and Google (googl) project Waymo. In the latest update to its platform, Baidu says partners can access new obstacle perception technology and high-definition maps, among other features.

Chinese search engine Baidu announced a 10bn yuan ($1.1bn) self-driving car fund on Thursday as part of a wider plan to speed up its technical development and compete with US rivals. The "Apollo Fund" will invest in 100 autonomous driving projects over the next three years, Baidu said in a statement. The fund's launch coincides with the release of Apollo 1.5, the second generation of the company's open-source autonomous vehicle software. After years of internal development, Baidu in April decided to open its autonomous driving technology to third parties; a move it hopes will accelerate development and help it compete with US firms Tesla and Google project Waymo. In the latest update to its platform, Baidu says partners can access new obstacle perception technology and high-definition maps, among other features. It comes amid a wider reshuffle of Baidu's corporate strategy as it looks for new profit streams outside its core search business, which lost a large chunk of ad revenue in 2016 following strict new government regulations on medical advertising.

Horizons Ventures has backed 3 unique companies on the map: Viv Labs, Sentient Technologies, and Affectiva. Increased investor interest in AI startups – from around 10 deals in Q1'11 to over 120 in Q2'16 – can be attributed to recent advances in machine learning algorithms, particularly "deep learning" technology, a souped up version of AI. Just this week, Google integrated deep learning into its Google Translate tool; Baidu announced the launch of DeepBench, an "open source benchmarking tool for evaluating deep learning performance across different hardware platforms"; and NVIDIA introduced Xavier, a deep learning-based supercomputer for driverless cars. In the private market, Google put deep learning in the spotlight back in 2014 when it acquired 4 startups focused on this AI tech in quick succession: DeepMind, Vision Factory, Dark Blue Labs, and DNNresearch. Apple, which joined the race in 2015, most recently acquired Turi, which has developed a deep learning toolkit, among other AI-based solutions.

Google will announce a number of new products on October 4, reportedly including two new phones, a smaller version of the Google Home, and a high-end laptop. And on Wednesday, the company announced an agreement with struggling manufacturer HTC that will import a team of engineers over to Google, to help close the gap between Mountain View's hardware ambitions and its present reality. The tie-up's not quite the acquisition that had been rumored, but rather a "cooperation agreement." Google is hiring a team of HTC employees--about 2,000 people in all, members of HTC's "Powered by HTC" division--most of whom have already been working on Google's Pixel phones. Those employees will stay in Taipei, Taiwan, where HTC is headquartered, but they'll become full-on Googlers. Both sides hope to close the deal by early 2018.

Boston's notoriously unfriendly drivers and chaotic roads may be the perfect testing ground for a fundamentally different kind of self-driving car. An MIT spin-off called iSee is developing and testing the autonomous driving system using a novel approach to artificial intelligence. Instead of relying on simple rules or machine-learning algorithms to train cars to drive, the startup is taking inspiration from cognitive science to give machines a kind of common sense and the ability to quickly deal with new situations. It is developing algorithms that try to match the way humans understand and learn about the physical world, including interacting with other people. The approach could lead to self-driving vehicles that are much better equipped to deal with unfamiliar scenes and complex interactions on the road.

The digital transformation that is building speed with brands and agencies alike will increasingly be powered by more nimble use of data derived from IOT connections, then filtered through AI's machine learning by executives that have the merged mindset of a CMO and a CIO. And while that mouthful of reality hasn't been fully digested by the brand maketing ecosystem, Jordan Bitterman, CMO of IBM's The Weather Company, sees it close at hand thanks to the connected appliances and products around us. "AI can't be anything without data. So often we think of IOT as being Fitbits and Apple Watches and while that's true, there is a whole host of data that most of us in the advertising space haven't considered" including from elevators, airplanes dishwashers and cars, Bitterman explained during an interview with Adweek at Dmexco 2017 in Cologne, Germany. "All that data can play a role in an AI solution so they're totally linked," he added.