As internet giants all over the world herald their advances in AI, one company has been conspicuously absent—Tencent, the Chinese social media giant, now worth over $300 billion. But the company’s relative silence in matters of artificial intelligence looks set to change quickly.

On May 2 Tencent confirmed that it would open an laboratory in Seattle dedicated solely to artificial intelligence research, to be headed by Yu Dong, a former scientist at Microsoft Research. The news is the latest in a steady stream of announcements indicating the company is making a foray into artificial intelligence. In March the company announced that it had poached Zhang Tong, former head of Baidu’s Big Data Lab in Beijing. And in December 2016, the company confirmed it had established an AI lab in Shenzhen, the company’s home city, earlier that year.

Tencent, at least insofar as it has discussed its efforts publicly, has arrived to AI relatively late. Baidu, China’s Google analog, established its first US-based AI lab in 2013, and has two more in China. Like its American counterpart, the company has poured resources into researching artificial intelligence, image recognition, and self-driving cars.

In the US, Google and Apple have deployed voice assistants on iPhones and Android devices for years. Facebook has been publishing papers on AI since 2014, led by some of the field’s top researchers. Amazon has perhaps enjoyed the most tangible success in the industry, having sold an estimated 11 million Amazon Echo home assistants to date. But there’s reason to believe that Tencent—which remains barely known outside China—will become the field’s sleeping giant. That’s because its flagship product, WeChat, is uniquely positioned to absorb users’ data and devise algorithms from it.

“Basically, anything you need to do online can be done through WeChat,” says Dr. Andy Chun, a leading AI expert and Associate Professor at City University of Hong Kong. “WeChat is much more ingrained into the average Chinese citizen’s daily life than Alibaba or Baidu. Amazon and Google do not have anything comparable.”.....

Above content is from the published article in the "Quartz" on 3 May 2017. To read the full article, please visit here.