Chinese search engine colossus Baidu and the BMW Group has formally announced they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), under which the BMW Group will join Apollo, the open autonomous driving platform by Baidu, as a board member.

Beijing has crowned itself as leader in Artificial Intelligence development with its newly opened AI park co-built by local government in the Haidian district and tech giant Baidu. This step aims to transform the Chinese capital into a global hub for tech innovation and Artificial intelligence and make Beijing, and the Haidian region in particular, a smart city.

Online spending in China has increased by 32 percent per year in the last five years, reaching $967 billion in 2016, according to a new report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which explores what makes China's rapid internet growth unique - and how foreign companies can crack vibrant digital markets.

A Chinese firm is currently under investigation following reports its CEO tested a driverless vehicle on public roads. Baidu, which is China's equivalent to Google, is its biggest search engine provider in the country and the organization announced earlier this week that it intends to invest in self-driving technology.

Artificial intelligence (Al) is regarded as a key to drive the world's future development. Although Europe and the United States are dominated by private enterprises, while the Mainland China is led by national entities, the core of AI formation, in fact, is rested on available top-notch talent. The 2017 Global AI Talent White Paper released by the Tencent Research Institute in December last year stated that there are approximately 300,000 AI researchers and practitioners in the world, while the market demand for AI talent is in millions. In the first 10 months of 2017, the demand for AI talent was twice of that in 2016. The report suggests that the bottleneck is education - though there are 20,000 graduates from related disciplines each year, the number is far from adequate to meet the demand.