silicon

Toyota Motor Corp said on Friday it will set up a research and development company with a focus on artificial intelligence in Silicon Valley, as competition to develop self-driving cars intensifies. The world's top-selling automaker plans to invest $1 billion in R&D over the next five years in a departure from its cautious stance on automated drive. “I used to say, quite until recently, that we will go ahead with automated drive only if they beat humans in a 24-hour car race,” Toyota President Akio Toyoda told a news conference.

By Foo Yun Chee BRUSSELS (Reuters) – U.S. tech firm Disconnect has filed a complaint to EU antitrust regulators against Google's ban on its privacy app, accusing the Silicon Valley giant of abusing its dominant market position. Disconnect, set up four years ago by former Google engineers, says its app protects users of the Android operating system from invisible tracking and malware distributed through advertisements. It said Google had abused its position by blocking the app from the Google Play store last year, and had gained an unfair advantage over competitors by integrating its own privacy and security services into its own products.

Google Inc submitted plans on Friday for a vastly expanded headquarters at the Silicon Valley city where the tech giant is based, presenting a bucolic vision of movable structures to be built under curving and translucent canopies. The submission of the plan to the City Council in Mountain View, California, which the company chose for its headquarters 15 years ago, marks the first step in what city officials describe as a long review process. The new headquarters would give the Internet company the room for an additional 10,000 employees, compared to the 20,000 Google staffers that currently work in the city, a Google spokeswoman said. Google's blueprint for new headquarters in the city's North Bayshore district has gathered widespread attention because the design is seen as architecturally innovative.