Beijing likes space. Big tech? Not so much – at least this week
Chinese tech giant Tencent has joined forces with the nation’s National Astronomical Observatories to journey into AI space exploration, CEO Pony Ma told the 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Thursday. The forward-looking announcement came during a tough week for Chinese tech companies, as Beijing tightened data security and antitrust regulations. Tencent is best known for its WeChat messaging service and very healthy gaming arm, but also operates a decent cloud and increasingly invests in AI through its in-house AI research division YouTu Lab. The company will leverage the latter two capabilities to conduct AI analysis in hopes of finding evidence of pulsars among the 30 million signal images collected each week by China’s 500-metre Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST). Tencent Vice-President Zhang Lijun reckons use of his company’s facilities will reduce the time to process a week’s worth of images from one year to three days.
