The billionaire Arkady Volozh, known as the architect of "Russia's Google," valued at 30 billion at its peak, has long had an apolitical public persona. "I don't have friction with the state," Volozh told WIRED in 2017. "Just like I don't have friction with the weather. What happens if it's raining? I need to build a service to avoid the rain."

Beijing's crackdown on its tech giants is fueling a noticeable phenomenon: it's opened the spending floodgates. China's largest internet corporations are digging deep into their pockets to open up new avenues of growth as Beijing curtails their most lucrative businesses from fintech to e-commerce. Tencent Holdings Ltd., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Meituan have all warned investors in recent weeks they're prepared to open their coffers to expand in areas such as cloud computing, autonomous driving and artificial intelligence. The coming deluge promises to transform the internet landscape by funneling capital into fundamental technology and infrastructure -- not coincidentally priority areas for the Communist Party. Of the three, Beijing-based Meituan was the earliest to throw caution to the wind and also the one most accustomed to sacrificing profits.

Despite the rapid advances it has made it over the past decade, deep learning presents many industrial users with problems when they try to implement the technology, issues that the Internet giants have worked around through brute force. "The challenge that today's systems face is the amount of data they need for training," says Tim Ensor, head of artificial intelligence (AI) at U.K.-based technology company Cambridge Consultants. "On top of that, it needs to be structured data." Most of the commercial applications and algorithm benchmarks used to test deep neural networks (DNNs) consume copious quantities of labeled data; for example, images or pieces of text that have already been tagged in some way by a human to indicate what the sample represents. The Internet giants, who have collected the most data for use in training deep learning systems, have often resorted to crowdsourcing measures such as asking people to prove they are human during logins by identifying objects in a collection of images, or simply buying manual labor through services such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Amazon's AI assistant will soon be able to speak more than just English in the U.S. The internet giant has launched a new program that will allow U.S. developers to build skills for Spanish-speaking users. In doing so, it will allow Amazon to build a more robust experience for Alexa users when it launches full Spanish-language support later this year. Amazon's AI assistant will soon be able to speak more than just English. 'We're excited to announce that now developers can start building skills for Spanish-speaking customers in the US using the Alexa Skills Kit with the new Spanish for US voice model,' the company wrote in a blog post on Monday. 'Skills that developers create now and are certified for publication will be available for participants in the Alexa Preview program, and to all customers when Alexa launches in the US with Spanish language support later this year.'

Recently, the China-based medical big data and artificial intelligence company LinkDoc Technology completed a RMB 1 billion Series D financing in the first half of 2018 and quickly became the focus of the industry. LinkDoc Technology is the first big data and AI startup for medical applications to receive the highest score in this area in a single round of financing. Founded less than four years ago, LinkDoc has been dedicated to medical big data and artificial intelligence, and has continuously updated industry records in this new medical-ecological field. On June 24, 2018, Tencent and LinkDoc signed a strategic agreement for a medical AI business to achieve a strong alliance. They will strengthen their cooperation on hospital access and AI products based on Tencent's open innovation platform AIMIS and LinkDoc's oncology experience. Thanks to Tencent's "link" capabilities and the LinkDoc's proven track record in medical big data and medical AI, industry collaboration has given rise to new thinking.

Amazon is rolling out self-driving delivery robots. The internet giant announced Wednesday that six'Scout' robots will deliver packages to customers in a neighborhood in Snohomish County, Washington. Each Scout robot is a squat, bright blue device that gets around on six wheels. The battery-powered devices about the size of a small cooler and can deliver packages autonomously. And city or suburban dwellers don't have to worry about Scout running them over on the street, as Amazon says the robots'roll along sidewalks at a walking pace.'

So, let's look back and see what the giants have made in 2018 and what are their plans for 2019. Let's look at their major advances in 2018- Waymo One robotaxi service is now open to those customers who were a part of the early rider program in Phoenix. The Alphabet subsidiary will be putting test drivers behind the wheel for now in case something goes wrong with the tech. There's a lot to like about how Waymo is approaching this launch. Waymo's goal building the world's most experienced driver. The project was started in 2009, By experience it doesn't mean the age rather the amount of data that is tested upon using ML and AI.

A senior Google research scientist has quit the company in protest over its plan to launch a censored version of its search engine in China. Jack Poulson worked for Google's research and machine intelligence department, where he was focused on improving the accuracy of the company's search systems. In early August, Poulson raised concerns with his managers at Google after The Intercept revealed that the internet giant was secretly developing a Chinese search app for Android devices. The search system, code-named Dragonfly, was designed to remove content that China's authoritarian government views as sensitive, such as information about political dissidents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest. After entering into discussions with his bosses, Poulson decided in mid-August that he could no longer work for Google.

Google is developing a version of its search engine that will conform to China's censorship laws, reports say. The company shut down the engine in 2010, complaining that free speech was being limited. But online news site The Intercept says Google has being working on a project code-named Dragonfly that will block terms like human rights and religion, a move sure to anger activists. One state-owned newspaper in China, Securities Daily, dismissed the report. "We provide a number of mobile apps in China, such as Google Translate and Files Go, help Chinese developers, and have made significant investments in Chinese companies like JD.com," it said.

James Damore, the Google engineer who penned an anti-diversity manifesto that has shaken Silicon Valley, is seeking'legal remedies' after his firing. SAN FRANCISCO -- At Wednesday's shareholder meeting, a Google employee will step up to the microphone to argue that executive compensation should be tied to diversity goals. The push for a shareholder proposal opposed by parent company Alphabet marks a sharp escalation in the increasingly public disagreements between the Internet giant and some of its 80,000-plus staff. An employee revolt last week forced Google to back off a controversial and potentially lucrative military drone project. This week employees are finding their voices again by joining shareholder groups to pressure Google to increase the racial, ethnic and gender diversity of its workforce.