Tencent’s Foray into Artificial Intelligence

Tencent Holdings Limited, Asia’s most valuable company has established itself as a force to reckon with when it comes to advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI). With its vision to “Make AI Everywhere”, Tencent focuses its research mainly on speech recognition, machine learning, and natural language processing to name a few.

Tencent’s YouTu Lab, which leads to machine learning and boasts of several outstanding technological breakthroughs in image and face analysis, aims to integrate AI technology into cloud services. With its new lab in Bellevue, Washington, Tencent’s AI team consists of over 50 researchers and 200 scientists in China and the United States, solely dedicated to expanding the Chinese titan’s AI outreach.

Tencent is China's largest internet company with more than half of China's entire mobile internet usage on its platforms. The company has over a billion users on its app WeChat and 632 million user accounts on its social networking platform Qzone. In addition to social networking, Tencent has also extended to gaming, mobile payments, and cloud storage and so on. With its vast share of the internet services market in China, Tencent has everything to gain with its rapid foray into AI. Tencent’s platforms are already in use for payments, ticket booking, chatting and many more. Moreover, over 38,000 medical institutions have a WeChat account and more than half of those allow patients to book appointments online.

With so many services over the internet, Tencent has no shortage of user data to train its algorithms. With newer data on a regular basis, machine learning programs can continue to optimize their functioning and improve upon existing services.