AI does grunt work on China's pig farms

Artificial intelligence technology has been developed to help piglets survive their first months - and then to decide which sows to kill. The scheme is being rolled out in China, the world's biggest producer and consumer of pork. It marks the latest deployment of tech giant Alibaba's ET Brain cloud computing service. China's pig industry is notoriously inefficient, but one expert said the tech could also prove useful elsewhere. For now, the trial is limited to the country's Sichuan province. Alibaba teamed up with local feed provider Sichuan Tequ and the farming group Dekon to develop the solution.