Aurora

AI startups continue to roared ahead, global pandemic or no. Tech industry analyst CB Insights published its fifth annual list of the 100 most promising private AI companies.

A new breed of self-driving car could kick the autonomous-vehicle industry into a higher gear. Zoox unveiled its first product, an all-electric, driverless taxi designed fully in-house.

The pandemic has forced self-driving car companies off the road. Now they’re moving forward by refining their mountains of training data. Self-driving cars typically collect real-world training data with two human operators onboard, but Covid-19 makes that unsafe at any speed.

Many of this year’s hottest AI companies are taking the spotlight from last year’s darlings.What’s new: CB Insights, which analyzes early-stage companies, published its annual list of the 100 “most promising” startups in AI.

The future of machine learning may depend less on amassing ground-truth data than simulating the environment in which a model will operate. Deep learning works like magic with enough high-quality data. When examples are scarce, though, researchers are using simulation to fill the gap.