
It's all a conspiracy!
They've designed them simply to mine bitcoin as their ad profits are declining!
If you've been curious about the potential performance of Google's TPU2 – its second-generation custom neural-network math acceleration chip – well, here's an early Christmas present. Google engineering veteran Jeff Dean and fellow Googler Chris Ying unveiled a few more details [PDF] about the silicon at the Neural Information …
For bigger matrix multiplications single precision floats often lead to unacceptable accumulation of round-off errors. I am surprised no double-precision figures are given. I would also be very interested in the power drain of these TPUs. In robots with a limited battery capacity, you really need to think hard about power draw from the computers (and yes, I know these won't be available for us any time soon). There are some excellent deep-learning based stereo methods, but they do require a GPU, so we are looking at hand-crafted methods which hopefully give similar accuracy, whilst running on a Raspberry Pi (not sure that will work, of course, but if successful it will seriously reduce power issues).
As usual, It All Depends. The industry has become accustomed to using DP, so of course using SP for DP-designed algorithms is problematic. BUT, if you know what you are doing, you can get whatever level of precision you need, so long as you know what the hardware will do. It can be slow, of course. But suppose you have an algorithm that requires DP-level precision for some concentrated 1% of its work. Even if it costs 10x as much to achieve on SP-hardware, you still are way ahead as long as the remaining 99% only costs 60% as much to run on SP as on DP.
Personally, I would be shocked if these were fullly IEEE-754 compatible at all. Certain parts of that standard are EXTREMELY expensive to support. I advocated for IBM, Intel, and AMD to get together and repudiate IEEE-754 in the late nineties. Instead, we got the rise of graphics chips--which don't support IEEE-754. (I'm mostly talking about denormals here.)
I've not seen any NN work that requires FP* let alone 32 bit precision.
* its easier to program in FP but 15bit +sign is more than sufficient for most. Indeed I'd hazard to bet that if your weights for inference need any where near that accuracy you're holding it wrong.
Items in Your Bag
iMac Pro Item Price: $13,348.00 Quantity (iMac Pro) 1
Line Price: $13,348.00 Remove from bag (iMac Pro) Part number: Z0UR, Ships: 6–8 weeks
Hardware 2.3GHz 18-core Intel Xeon W processor, Turbo Boost up to 4.3GHz, 128GB 2666MHz DDR4 ECC memory, 4TB SSD, Radeon Pro Vega 64 GPU compute engine with 16GB of HBM2 memory
Magic Mouse 2 + Magic Trackpad 2 - Space Gray
Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad - US English - Space Gray
Accessory Kit
Software: Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Photos, iMovie, GarageBand, macOS
Gift Options: Gift Options (iMac Pro), Add Gift Message to Packing Slip - Free (iMac Pro) "ideal xmas shiny" or maybe i'd rather have an TPU2?
It is interesting they have gone back up to using 32 bit floats. Most chip makers are pushing in the opposite direction, with 8 or 16 bit calculations. I think the reason is that layer after layer the nonlinear behavior of neural networks compounds (as in compound interest.) This results in chaos theory type behavior (the weighted sum operation in the networks being only partially cancel out the nonlinear aspects.) Then you have a butterfly effect where very small changes in the input or weights in early layers can have a very large effect at the output. Basically bifurcations define the decision boundaries between attractor states. That would also explain why deep neural networks are susceptible to adversarial attacks, where minor changes in the input result in gross misclassification.
You can correct that problem by putting multiple lean neural networks in a parallel ensemble, which results in a chaos canceling effect.
Google has a fresh list of reasons why it opposes tech antitrust legislation making its way through Congress but, like others who've expressed discontent, the ad giant's complaints leave out mention of portions of the proposed law that address said gripes.
The law bill in question is S.2992, the Senate version of the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), which is closer than ever to getting votes in the House and Senate, which could see it advanced to President Biden's desk.
AICOA prohibits tech companies above a certain size from favoring their own products and services over their competitors. It applies to businesses considered "critical trading partners," meaning the company controls access to a platform through which business users reach their customers. Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta in one way or another seemingly fall under the scope of this US legislation.
A former Google video producer has sued the internet giant alleging he was unfairly fired for blowing the whistle on a religious sect that had all but taken over his business unit.
The lawsuit demands a jury trial and financial restitution for "religious discrimination, wrongful termination, retaliation and related causes of action." It alleges Peter Lubbers, director of the Google Developer Studio (GDS) film group in which 34-year-old plaintiff Kevin Lloyd worked, is not only a member of The Fellowship of Friends, the exec was influential in growing the studio into a team that, in essence, funneled money back to the fellowship.
In his complaint [PDF], filed in a California Superior Court in Silicon Valley, Lloyd lays down a case that he was fired for expressing concerns over the fellowship's influence at Google, specifically in the GDS. When these concerns were reported to a manager, Lloyd was told to drop the issue or risk losing his job, it is claimed.
After offering free G Suite apps for more than a decade, Google next week plans to discontinue its legacy service – which hasn't been offered to new customers since 2012 – and force business users to transition to a paid subscription for the service's successor, Google Workspace.
"For businesses, the G Suite legacy free edition will no longer be available after June 27, 2022," Google explains in its support document. "Your account will be automatically transitioned to a paid Google Workspace subscription where we continue to deliver new capabilities to help businesses transform the way they work."
Small business owners who have relied on the G Suite legacy free edition aren't thrilled that they will have to pay for Workspace or migrate to a rival like Microsoft, which happens to be actively encouraging defectors. As noted by The New York Times on Monday, the approaching deadline has elicited complaints from small firms that bet on Google's cloud productivity apps in the 2006-2012 period and have enjoyed the lack of billing since then.
Special report Seven months from now, assuming all goes as planned, Google Chrome will drop support for its legacy extension platform, known as Manifest v2 (Mv2). This is significant if you use a browser extension to, for instance, filter out certain kinds of content and safeguard your privacy.
Google's Chrome Web Store is supposed to stop accepting Mv2 extension submissions sometime this month. As of January 2023, Chrome will stop running extensions created using Mv2, with limited exceptions for enterprise versions of Chrome operating under corporate policy. And by June 2023, even enterprise versions of Chrome will prevent Mv2 extensions from running.
The anticipated result will be fewer extensions and less innovation, according to several extension developers.
Updated Another kicking has been leveled at American tech giants by EU regulators as Italy's data protection authority ruled against transfers of data to the US using Google Analytics.
The ruling by the Garante was made yesterday as regulators took a close look at a website operator who was using Google Analytics. The regulators found that the site collected all manner of information.
So far, so normal. Google Analytics is commonly used by websites to analyze traffic. Others exist, but Google's is very much the big beast. It also performs its analysis in the USA, which is what EU regulators have taken exception to. The place is, after all, "a country without an adequate level of data protection," according to the regulator.
Google Cloud's Anthos on-prem platform is getting a new home under the search giant’s recently announced Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) portfolio, where it will live on as a software-based competitor to AWS Outposts and Microsoft Azure Stack.
Introduced last fall, GDC enables customers to deploy managed servers and software in private datacenters and at communication service provider or on the edge.
Its latest update sees Google reposition Anthos on-prem, introduced back in 2020, as the bring-your-own-server edition of GDC. Using the service, customers can extend Google Cloud-style management and services to applications running on-prem.
The United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on Friday said it intends to launch an investigation of Apple's and Google's market power with respect to mobile browsers and cloud gaming, and to take enforcement action against Google for its app store payment practices.
"When it comes to how people use mobile phones, Apple and Google hold all the cards," said Andrea Coscelli, Chief Executive of the CMA, in a statement. "As good as many of their services and products are, their strong grip on mobile ecosystems allows them to shut out competitors, holding back the British tech sector and limiting choice."
The decision to open a formal investigation follows the CMA's year-long study of the mobile ecosystem. The competition watchdog's findings have been published in a report that concludes Apple and Google have a duopoly that limits competition.
Google has promised to cough up $118 million to settle a years-long gender-discrimination class-action lawsuit that alleged the internet giant unfairly pays men more than women.
The case, launched in 2017, was led by three women, Kelly Ellis, Holly Pease, and Kelli Wisuri, who filed a complaint alleging the search giant hires women in lower-paying positions compared to men despite them having the same qualifications. Female staff are also less likely to get promoted, it was claimed.
Gender discrimination also exists within the same job tier, too, the complaint stated. Google was accused of paying women less than their male counterparts despite them doing the same work. The lawsuit was later upgraded to a class-action status when a fourth woman, Heidi Lamar, joined as a plaintiff. The class is said to cover more than 15,000 people.
Spyware developed by Italian firm RCS Labs was used to target cellphones in Italy and Kazakhstan — in some cases with an assist from the victims' cellular network providers, according to Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG).
RCS Labs customers include law-enforcement agencies worldwide, according to the vendor's website. It's one of more than 30 outfits Google researchers are tracking that sell exploits or surveillance capabilities to government-backed groups. And we're told this particular spyware runs on both iOS and Android phones.
We understand this particular campaign of espionage involving RCS's spyware was documented last week by Lookout, which dubbed the toolkit "Hermit." We're told it is potentially capable of spying on the victims' chat apps, camera and microphone, contacts book and calendars, browser, and clipboard, and beam that info back to base. It's said that Italian authorities have used this tool in tackling corruption cases, and the Kazakh government has had its hands on it, too.
Brave Software, maker of a privacy-oriented browser, on Wednesday said its surging search service has exited beta testing while its Goggles search personalization system has entered beta testing.
Brave Search, which debuted a year ago, has received 2.5 billion search queries since then, apparently, and based on current monthly totals is expected to handle twice as many over the next year. The search service is available in the Brave browser and in other browsers by visiting search.brave.com.
"Since launching one year ago, Brave Search has prioritized independence and innovation in order to give users the privacy they deserve," wrote Josep Pujol, chief of search at Brave. "The web is changing, and our incredible growth shows that there is demand for a new player that puts users first."
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022