Last year Apple invested $1 billion in Chinese rival Uber. And now Didi Chuxing by server Recode opens a laboratory for the development of artificial intelligence next to the headquarters of the Cupertino company.
Didi Chuxing is opening a lab in Mountain View, California, not far from the companies' labs Apple, Google and Tesla, which are also working on artificial intelligence to drive cars. "The Chinese company has a new US lab that will focus on intelligent drive systems and artificial intelligence for transportation, also formalizing what many already knew: Didi is working on self-driving vehicles," the report said. The Chinese firm first expanded outside of China, but is expanding through investments in various firms and in other areas, including Southeast Asia, India and Brazil.
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Additionally, Didi Chuxing hired Charlie Miller to oversee development security. If you haven't heard of this guy, you might have heard of the case where a man hacked into a Jeep's system and stopped it remotely. And that was Charlie Miller, who even supervised the safety of self-driving technology at Uber for a year and a half.
The Chinese company previously received an investment from Waymo (belonging to the Google family), which deals with self-driving technologies. And Jia Zhaoyin, who was originally a senior software engineer at Waymo, is now Didi's chief engineer.
Tim Cook explained that the company Apple invested in Didi for strategic reasons. One of the reasons was that the Cupertino giant wants to learn more about certain segments of the Chinese market. “We are investing for a number of strategic reasons and also to learn more about certain segments of the Chinese market,” he said Tim Cook"Of course, we believe that this will bring us a high return over time."
Source: 9TO5Mac
