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Source: MIT Technology Review
Top 10 of 50
1) Nvidia Continues to tweak its chips, originally developed for gaming, to help develop breakthrough technologies like deep learning and autonomous driving.
$3 billion: spending on R&D to create its new data-center chip
2) SpaceX Changing the economics of space travel with its successful landing and recycling of rockets to be recycled for multiple trips
10 percent: price discount being considered for customers who agree to fly their payloads on reused rockets
3) Amazon Creating an AI-powered store of the future with Amazon Go while expanding intelligent voice assistant Alexa into phones, cars, and more.
12,000: number of programs that software developers have published for Alexa
4) 23andMe Vindicated this year when the U.S. FDA granted permission to tell customers whether their DNA puts them at higher risk for some diseases.
1 million plus: number of customers who have consented to have their genetic information used for scientific research
5) Alphabet Continues to dominate research into AI while expanding innovation in phone systems, virtual reality, and self-driving cars.
40 percent: amount of energy the company says it saves applying machine-learning algorithms from its DeepMind subsidiary to cooling its data center.
6) iFlytek Its voice assistant technology is the Siri of China, and its real-time portable translator puts AI to remarkable use, overcoming dialect, slang, and background noise to translate between Chinese and a dozen other languages with surprising accuracy.
70 percent: iFlytek’s share of China’s market in voice-based technologies
7) Kite Pharma Nearing FDA approval of its experimental immunotherapy that uses a patient’s own blood cells to combat cancer.
39 percent: proportion of study participants very sick with lymphoma who showed no sign of the disease six months after a single treatment with Kite’s therapy
8) Tencent Turning its insanely popular chat platform WeChat into a virtual operating system featuring mini programs.
50 percent: proportion of WeChat’s 770 million daily users who are on the service at least 90 minutes a day
9) Regeneron The biotech company has a strong drug pipeline and track record treating eye and other diseases, and it’s testing treatments for rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and pain.
500,000: number of U.K. volunteers whose genetic data it is helping sequence
10) Spark Therapeutics Its blindness treatment could be the first gene therapy approved in the U.S. to treat an inherited disease.
1 in 30,000: estimated number of individuals affected by the disease, Leber hereditary optic neuropathy
Full list at: MIT Technology Review
