Canada turns to Nokia for 5G; China blocks Bing; Google’s AI beats human pro gamers.
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Trending on Reddit, After the relationship between Canada and China soured over the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wan Zhou, Canada is looking to invest $40 million in Nokia to continue its 5G infrastructure research. Just last week, Chinese envoy warned Canada that there could be repercussions if it prevents Huawei from building the country’s 5G network. Federal innovation minister Navdeep Bains commented that Huawei isn’t the only company allowed to build 5G infrastructures in Canada. Telus, Ericsson, and others are equally competitive contenders.
Trending on Reddit, most of our beloved search engines and social media platforms are shut out by China’s great firewall, and it seems like Microsoft Bing is its latest victim. For years, Microsoft Bing is the only US search engine allowed to operate in China since it complies to the government’s censorship guidelines. But on Wednesday, a number of users across China reported outages when they tried to access Bing’s services. Soon after, Microsoft announced that Bing was indeed inaccessible in China and that it was looking to determine the next steps. While it didn’t say outright that it’s a move made by the government, its involvement was heavily implied.
Trending on Google, Google’s AlphaStar AI mopped the floors with pro gamers in Starcraft II, a competitive real-time strategy game, scoring an astounding 10-1 victory against players TLO and MaNa. The AI was trained for a mere week using Google’s DeepMind learning algorithm, but in that short week, it accumulated over 200 years of playtime. By the end of its training session, AlphaStar derived strategies using five agents it deemed least exploitable, eventually crushing the human pros. All the game replays are available online if you want to see how the AI eeked out the win.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. I’m your host Tom Li. Thanks for listening!
