Alibaba crafts AI chips, Facebook uses Bayesian magic to tweak code performance, and more

Roundup Good morning – here's some machine-learning bits and bytes to kick start your week. If this sort of tech is right up your street, then perhaps check out our AI conference, M3, in London, England. Alibaba to make its own AI chips: Jack Ma, CEO and chairman of Alibaba, the giant Chinese e-commerce conglomerate, announced it will set up a new company to build a neural network accelerator chip. The hardware will be perform inference, the decision-making stage in which a trained network acts on incoming data and spits out, say, the type of objects in a photo or the age of someone from their picture. Ma said it was a "core technology" that China needed to develop itself if were to stop relying on US imports. Both countries are locked in a tit-for-tat trade tariff war, with the US slapping extra levies on billions of Chinese-built components coming into America – from aerospace parts to networking equipment.