Alibaba joins autonomous car race

Alibaba joins its rival internet giants Baidu and Tencent (BAT) in the artificial intelligence-driven industry. The company is looking to hire 50 more self-driving specialists for its AI research lab, said an Alibaba spokeswoman to the South China Morning Post.  It is understood that Alibaba is now running road tests of autonomous cars on a regular basis and has the capabilities for open road trials, and that its goal is to achieve Level 4 autonomous capability, which means cars can self-drive in most conditions without human intervention. BAT is already working on Level 4 capabilities and was also identified by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology as national champion in China’s efforts in self-driving cars. China is likely to emerge as the world’s largest market for autonomous vehicles and mobility services, worth more than US$500 billion by 2030, according to a McKinsey report released on Monday. Alibaba’s research into the technology dates back to March last year when Wang Gang, a former associate professor of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and specialist in computer vision and autonomous driving, was recruited as chief scientist of Alibaba AI Labs to lead the project. The move is seen as an extension of Alibaba’s ambitions to connect devices and manage city traffic via “smart brains”. “Our vision is to build an intelligently connected world through transformative [internet of things] technologies,” Simon Hu Xiaoming, the president of Alibaba Cloud, said on the sidelines of a cloud computing conference last month, adding that the plan was to build a network of 10 billion connected devices within the next five years.