Tencent could soon open a new AI research center in Seattle. The information comes from The Information, which says that the company might soon expand upon its presence from a Palo Alto office to a new, Seattle based data center. This will also be Tencent’s first important machine intelligence center in the country.
The news comes after Tencent announced that it will open its first data center in the Silicon Valley. The company’s US efforts are said to be powered by Yu Dong, who joined the company from Microsoft. He has been working upon area like speech recognition and deep learning. In the end, the goal is to create a personal assistant that could act as a central pillar to the company’s ecosystem.
The idea of having personal assistants at the center of a company’ product ecosystem is not new. Google is following a similar strategy and Microsoft and Apple are quite interested in enhancing the capabilities of their assistants as well. In view of all this, investing resources into new infrastructure certainly makes sense.
As far as the choice of Silicon valley and Seattle is concerned, Tencent is going to need quite a bit of engineering talent on-board and what better place to receive it? Tencent recently acquired Baidu’s Tony Zhang but it is going to need much more.
