Today in Tokyo, Toyota announced that it is investing US $1 billion over the next five years to establish a new R&D arm headquartered in Silicon Valley and focused on artificial intelligence and robotics. The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) plans to hire hundreds of engineers to staff a main facility in Palo Alto, Calif., near Stanford University, and a second facility located near MIT in Cambridge, Mass.
Former DARPA program manager Dr. Gill Pratt, an executive technical advisor at Toyota, was named CEO of TRI, which will begin operations in January. Toyota president Akio Toyoda said in a press conference that the company pursues innovation and new technologies "to make life better for our customers and society as a whole," adding that he wanted to "work with Gill not just because he's an amazing researcher and engineer, but because I believe his goals and motivations are the same as ours."
West Coast Soylentils, time to burnish those resumes.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday November 10 2015, @07:11PM
About that billion... where's MY part?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 10 2015, @07:27PM
billion what? billion friends?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 10 2015, @07:29PM
Your part? You get the privilege of buying one of their cars packed full of tech-shit that will spy on you and drive you into a wall - with no culpability on the part of Toyota. Don't like it? Go buy something else that doesn't have all that crap... oh, right, you can't! *opens nipple flaps, rubs nipples*
(Score: 3, Funny) by vux984 on Tuesday November 10 2015, @10:56PM
*opens nipple flaps, rubs nipples*
Thanks for that, I am now going to silently append that to all troll posts I read on the internet.