Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

[security Exhibition Network Market Analysis] in recent years, countless people have poured into the AI market with capital and technology, as if a new tuyere is rising. As of 2018, global artificial intelligence companies have raised a total of $78.48 billion, including $37.36 billion in the United States and $27.63 billion in China, according to a report released by Wuzhen think tank. In 2019, the financing amount of artificial intelligence enterprises continues to increase (take our country as an example):

On February 27, AI Chip Horizon announced that round B financing had received about $600 million, with a post-financing valuation of $3 billion.

On March 27th, big data and artificial Intelligence Unicorn completed a 2 billion yuan D-round financing led by Tencent and upgraded it to "Mingluo Technology Group".

On May 8, Fuzhou Technology announced the completion of D-round 's second phase of equity financing, with a total financing amount of about US $750 million at present.

On August 12, Teslian, a unicorn company in the smart Internet of things, announced the completion of the C1 round of financing. The financing amount of this round is 2 billion yuan, led by Everbright Holdings, followed by JD.com, iFLYTEK, Wanda Investment and so on.

However, not all AI startups have a smooth road ahead. Many artificial intelligence start-ups have become martyrs with the dream of becoming a prophet. Today, we will focus on several overseas start-ups that have encountered a "Waterloo" in order to explore the dilemma faced by AI in the process of entrepreneurial development.

Robot star startup Anki: getting into financial difficulties

In the past few years, Anki has released a number of high-profile products with remarkable results. According to public data, as of August 2018, Anki had sold more than 1.5 million robot products, including hundreds of thousands of Cozmo robots, and the company had revenue of more than $100m in 2018.

At the end of April 2019, however, things took a turn for the worse when Anki CEO Boris Sofman announced that he would end the company's operations in the coming week, and nearly 200 employees of the company would be compensated for a week's salary.

It is reported that after falling into a new round of funding difficulties, Anki has been trying to find more funds, but unfortunately failed. In fact, although the current money-burning war in the field of AI is in full swing, AI is only the direction of technological evolution. So far, AI has no mature business model. For AI enterprises, if there is no large amount of funds to support the hardware and software business, the development is difficult to sustain.

Self-driving company Drive.ai sells itself to Apple

At 9: 00 p.m. on June 25, 2019, Apple confirmed to the technology media Axios and The Verge that it had confirmed the acquisition of Drive.ai. It is understood that Apple is preparing to hire a group of hardware and software engineers from the remaining employees of Drive.ai, which also seems to be a new attempt in Apple's mysterious driverless car plan.

The collapse of Drive.ai, a self-driving startup that was valued at $200m, is a sign that self-driving startups are in bad shape, and many experts believe that self-driving cars are at least decades away from being fully used. Although investors have invested billions of dollars in self-driving car startups, many of them are slow or face technical challenges. Self-driving is the trend of the times, but the huge cost is one of the important reasons that hinder its large-scale commercial use.

Engineer.ai, an Indian company: behind automatic development are human programmers

Engineer.ai, an AI start-up founded by two Indian founders, claims to be able to "assemble" new code automatically through artificial intelligence programs to assist companies that lack engineers, and automatically generate websites and mobile APP for anyone and companies, thus attracting Deepcore Inc, a special fund for AI, owned by SoftBank. And several other well-known investment companies totaling 29.5 million US dollars in venture capital.

But as recently as August 14, 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that employees inside the company revealed that Engineer.ai did not have an AI or a decent R & D team, and that what could be called technology inside was the decision tree (which appeared in the 1950s).

In the final analysis, the purpose of this kind of AI start-up gimmick is nothing more than to get a lot of investment. A survey by MMC, a London-based venture capital firm, in early 2019 showed that 40 per cent of European start-ups classified as AI did not actually use AI heavily in their businesses. Therefore, although the artificial intelligence industry has great development prospects, chaotic phenomena such as investment bubbles and pseudo-artificial intelligence enterprises are worth our vigilance.

Conclusion: Amara's law states that people always overestimate the short-term benefits of a technology, but underestimate its long-term impact. Artificial intelligence is true, but when the wind passes, pigs without wings will be killed. The war of burning money has not only accelerated the development of AI, but also led to the continuous expansion of the industry bubble.

Https://www.toutiao.com/i6725695648168952324/

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.