Hashtag Trending – Canada invests in Nokia for 5G; China blocks Bing; AI beats human pro gamers

Canada turns to Nokia for 5G; China blocks Bing; Google’s AI beats human pro gamers.

Hashtag Trending on Amazon Alexa Google Podcasts badge - 200 px wide

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!

Would you recommend this article?

Share

Thanks for taking the time to let us know what you think of this article!
We'd love to hear your opinion about this or any other story you read in our publication.


Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

Featured Download

Tom Li
Tom Li
Telecommunication and consumer hardware are Tom's main beats at IT World Canada. He loves to talk about Canada's network infrastructure, semiconductor products, and of course, anything hot and new in the consumer technology space. You'll also occasionally see his name appended to articles on cloud, security, and SaaS-related news. If you're ever up for a lengthy discussion about the nuances of each of the above sectors or have an upcoming product that people will love, feel free to drop him a line at tli@itwc.ca.

Featured Articles

Cybersecurity in 2024: Priorities and challenges for Canadian organizations 

By Derek Manky As predictions for 2024 point to the continued expansion...

Survey shows generative AI is a top priority for Canadian corporate leaders.

Leaders are devoting significant budget to generative AI for 2024 Canadian corporate...

Related Tech News

Tech Jobs

Our experienced team of journalists and bloggers bring you engaging in-depth interviews, videos and content targeted to IT professionals and line-of-business executives.

Tech Companies Hiring Right Now