TikTok will reportedly become an independent, U.S.-based company, with a majority stake held by its current parent company ByteDance. ByteDance will retain control of TikTok’s AI algorithm, in accordance with the Chinese government’s new restrictions on AI and other technology exports. Oracle will be given a minority stake in the new company and will be responsible for processing U.S. users’ data, which will be stored in the U.S.

More:

• ByteDance rejected Microsoft's offer to take over TikTok's U.S. operations. Last month, we reported on how Microsoft wanted to use video data from the acquisition to train AI systems and learn more about its consumers.
• Last week, TikTok revealed details about the algorithm and data practices that have been key assets at making the company viable. The algorithm helps recommend the next videos based on machine learning techniques that decide what content users are most likely to click on.
• TikTok collects data about a user and maps his or her preferences into clusters based on other users' preferences. The algorithm works by suggesting videos to users based on their proximity to other clusters.
• TikTok plans to hire dozens of data, security, and privacy experts by the end of this year.

The back-up safety driver present inside of an Uber autonomous self-driving vehicle that fatally hit a woman in Arizona in 2018 has been charged with negligent homicide. Rafaela Vasquez pleaded not guilty on Tuesday after being charged with the death of Elaine Herzberg on August 27, according to court records. The trial is slated to begin in February 2021.

More:

• Vasquez was apparently distracted at the time of the accident, as she was watching an episode of “The Voice” on her phone while driving, according to internal camera footage. Tempe Police has said the crash was “entirely avoidable.”
• The accident will likely set a precedent for the autonomous vehicle industry, as prosecutors did not charge Uber with any criminal liability in the accident in March 2019, but did charge the back-up safety driver.
• In November 2019, the NTSB did fault Vasquez’s actions, but also held Uber responsible for inadequate attention to safety when developing its autonomous vehicle systems. The automated software in the modified Volvo SUV did not properly identify Herzberg as a pedestrian. The NTSB said that automation can often lead to a driver's attention loss.

A version of this story first appeared in Inside Electric vehicles. To subscribe, click here.

Deep Dive: Europeans’ concerns about AI

A survey conducted across nine EU countries - Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden - gauged consumers’ knowledge, concern, and trust in AI and their views on a regulatory AI framework.

One major finding: About two-thirds of Belgium, Italy, Portugal, and Spain respondents believe authorities should ban AI because it's hazardous.

In this special feature, we delve deeper into the findings...

AI call center startup Observe.ai raised $54 million to expand its R&D efforts. The Series B funding round was led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Next 47 Ventures and NGP Capital. Observe.ai has now raised $88 million since it was founded three years ago.

More:

• The San Francisco-based company develops and sells AI transcription and analytics software for call centers, which is a growing market as companies try to fill gaps in service exacerbated by the pandemic.
• Its AI can analyze calls based on speakers' language and emotion and make suggestions for improvements. It plans to use the fresh funding to expand in areas like interaction analytics, omnichannel support, and real-time coaching.
• Observe's revenue has grown 600% over the last year with 20,000 agent licenses sold. It has acquired more than 150 customers, including Concentrix and Pearson, since the pandemic started.
• In July, Amazon made its Contact Lens AI contact center product generally available. The AWS service uses machine learning to help transcribe and analyze customer calls at contact centers.

Qualcomm says it plans to begin volume shipments of its Cloud AI 100 artificial intelligence chip in the first half of 2021. The company recently unveiled further details about the AI chip's capabilities, which are designed for running machine learning models after they're trained and then processing the live data.

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• Qualcomm initially announced the Cloud AI 100 AI accelerator 18 months ago and has since manufactured and shipped an initial set of units to early users.
• The chip and platform are geared for near-edge applications, such as 5G edge boxes and enterprise data centers. For example, they can power recommendation engines to serve ads and personalize newsfeeds.
• Qualcomm’s entrance into the AI chip market will compete with leader Nvidia and others as companies seek to meet the demand for machine learning hardware. Qualcomm claims its chip can outperform Nvidia’s A100 graphics card in certain scenarios.
• The Cloud AI 100 for inference has 16 AI cores that can collectively perform up to 400 trillion calculations per second of INT8 inference MAC throughput.
• Qualcomm plans to sample its Edge Development Kit in October.

Facebook Live and Workplace Live now have automatic closed captions, thanks to recent advancements in the company's automated speech recognition. Facebook says the automation can ensure that people with hearing impairments receive the latest public health news during the pandemic.

More:

• The automatic captioning technologies are available in six languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and French.
• While Facebook's captioning technology is a vast improvement since the initial ASR in the late 2000s, it still struggles with certain speech like accents. Researchers want to improve the models by training them on unlabelled online audio.
• Last month, we reported on how Facebook saw a 134% jump in the number of hate posts it removed in Q2 2020 compared to Q1. The company attributed the increase to better AI detection systems and improved automation technology for its Spanish, Arabic, and Indonesian posts.

QUICK HITS

• Over 1,000 parents have signed Fight for the Future's letter calling for a ban on facial recognition at U.S. schools.
• Academic teams can now apply for Amazon's Alexa Prize Socialbot Challenge, which carries a $500,000 grand prize for the team that designs the most conversational chatbot.
• Germany-based DaVinci Kitchen is developing a robotic kiosk for pasta-making.
• Oracle is making its Tribuo Java machine learning library available for free under an open source license.
• Slack is gathering industry leaders and product experts at Slack Frontiers, a free virtual conference dedicated to digital transformation.*

*This is a sponsored post.

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Tweet of the Day: Microsoft AI VP Mitra Azizirad will host a live AMA on Twitter next Tuesday.