Number of Artificial Intelligence startups acquired since 2010. As the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) opens today in Shanghai, this infographic highlights the extent to which tech's Big Five have been trying to conquer the high-potential market over the last decade. Google has been slowly injecting AI into many of its products and services but as this chart shows, it's Apple that are leading the way in terms of acquisitions. According to numbers compiled by CB Insights, Apple has acquired 20 artificial intelligence startups since 2010, more than any other company. Considering that all tech industry heavyweights are working on artificial intelligence solutions, we can expect our phones and computers to become a lot smarter in the years to come.

As the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) opens today in Shanghai, this infographic highlights the extent to which tech's Big Five have been trying to conquer the high-potential market over the last decade. Google has been slowly injecting AI into many of its products and services but as this chart shows, it's Apple that are leading the way in terms of acquisitions. According to numbers compiled by CB Insights, Apple has acquired 20 artificial intelligence startups since 2010, more than any other company. Considering that all tech industry heavyweights are working on artificial intelligence solutions, we can expect our phones and computers to become a lot smarter in the years to come.

A new analysis shows that the number of Chinese AI researchers has increased tenfold over the last decade, but the majority of them live outside the country. Superpower dreams: China has put forth a concerted effort to grow into a leading AI powerhouse over the last few years. Beijing deemed the discipline in need of special attention as early as 2012, and in 2017 it released a detailed national strategy for advancing and harnessing the technology. Home-grown army: In a new analysis, Joy Dantong Ma, the associate director of MacroPolo, a Chicago-based think tank focused on China's economic growth, showed how this top-down push has affected AI talent. The report analyzed the authorship of papers accepted to NeurIPS, one of the most prestigious international AI conferences, and found a nearly tenfold increase in the number of authors who did their undergraduate studies in China over the last decade.

The new stage of the race for AI domination I. Let use your imagination (an ability only humans have). Imagine you are in the Library of Congress and need to find a book that contains one specific sentence. You may get lucky, but most probably you die before you find it. But you can hire thousands of interns, and they will be flipping through pages in books and comparing the sentence on a piece of paper you gave them with sentences in a book, and one will find the book rather soon. This is exactly what AI does these days, and will do for many years to come; AI is just an intern with thousand hands and eyes, and a brain strong just enough to learn some patterns, although for AI learning takes much more time than for a human intern.

Google I/O, the company's annual developer conference, is the company's biggest event of the year. One of the main talking points at this year's conference will likely be artificial intelligence. Google has been slowly injecting AI into many of its products and services and the company's CEO Sundar Pichai has sounded very bullish on the prospects of artificial intelligence in recent public appearances. As our chart illustrates, Google's recent M&A activity also speaks its ambitions in the AI field. According to numbers compiled by CB Insights, the company acquired 11 artificial intelligence startups since 2012, more than any other company.

What if artificial intelligence actually made a difference in our everyday lives? If you think about it, technology for processing information like humans do is still at an early stage. It shows up in chatbots and on speakers like the Amazon Echo. Yet, many of the services we use each day are still not AI-enabled, which is unfortunate. It's one thing to make a car we can't afford or to make a speaker smarter, but what about common products and services?

What if artificial intelligence actually made a difference in our everyday lives? If you think about it, the technology for processing information more like a human is still in an early stage. It shows up in chatbots and on speakers like the Amazon Echo. Yet, many of the services we use each day are still not AI-enabled, which is unfortunate. It's one thing to make a car we can't afford or a speaker smarter, but how about these common products and services?

AI is all set to go mainstream as every major tech company in the world is racing to build AI capabilities into its products as well as change the very way in which companies function. It is only this week that Google announces Fei-Fei Li would be joining their company and be heading the'Cloud Machine Learning Group'. There is a reason that Google was very vocal and public about this announcement. Fei-Fei Li is one of the most well-known names in AI research. She heads the Stanford department of Artificial Intelligence and Vision and was responsible for driving the work behind ImageNet, a project that taught AI to'see' and recognize different images.

Intel has pulled open the curtain on a secretly developed mega-chip called Knights Mill, a key component in its artificial-intelligence strategy. The chip--which belongs to the family of high-performance Xeon Phi processors--gives Intel a legitimate opportunity to tackle machine learning. It is targeted at servers and workstations, and will be available in 2017. Intel was caught off-guard with the emergence of artificial intelligence as a way to analyze and present data. Knights Mill, introduced on Wednesday at the ongoing Intel Developer Forum, will fill a big hole in company's chip lineup.