Yay, we got a B for maths. Literally, a bee: Little nosy nectar nerds smart enough to add, abstract numbers • The Register Forums

User topics

Article topics

Log in Sign up

Other stories you might like

AMD’s AI strategy comes into view with Xilinx, GPU, software plans

Chip designer hopes to have broad inference and training coverage from the edge to the cloud

Dylan Martin Mon 13 Jun 2022 // 19:30 UTC

Analysis After re-establishing itself in the datacenter over the past few years, AMD is now hoping to become a big player in the AI compute space with an expanded portfolio of chips that cover everything from the edge to the cloud.
It's quite an ambitious goal, given Nvidia's dominance in the space with its GPUs and the CUDA programming model, plus the increasing competition from Intel and several other companies.
But as executives laid out during AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2022 event last week, the resurgent chip designer believes it has the right silicon and software coming into place to pursue the wider AI space.

Continue reading
Train once, run anywhere, almost: Qualcomm's drive to bring AI to its phone, PC chips

Software toolkit offered to save developers time, effort, battery power

Dylan Martin Thu 23 Jun 2022 // 18:51 UTC

Qualcomm knows that if it wants developers to build and optimize AI applications across its portfolio of silicon, the Snapdragon giant needs to make the experience simpler and, ideally, better than what its rivals have been cooking up in the software stack department.
That's why on Wednesday the fabless chip designer introduced what it's calling the Qualcomm AI Stack, which aims to, among other things, let developers take AI models they've developed for one device type, let's say smartphones, and easily adapt them for another, like PCs. This stack is only for devices powered by Qualcomm's system-on-chips, be they in laptops, cellphones, car entertainment, or something else.
While Qualcomm is best known for its mobile Arm-based Snapdragon chips that power many Android phones, the chip house is hoping to grow into other markets, such as personal computers, the Internet of Things, and automotive. This expansion means Qualcomm is competing with the likes of Apple, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, and others, on a much larger battlefield.

Continue reading
Microsoft promises to tighten access to AI it now deems too risky for some devs

Deep-fake voices, face recognition, emotion, age and gender prediction ... A toolbox of theoretical tech tyranny

Katyanna Quach Tue 21 Jun 2022 // 22:54 UTC

Microsoft has pledged to clamp down on access to AI tools designed to predict emotions, gender, and age from images, and will restrict the usage of its facial recognition and generative audio models in Azure.
The Windows giant made the promise on Tuesday while also sharing its so-called Responsible AI Standard, a document [PDF] in which the US corporation vowed to minimize any harm inflicted by its machine-learning software. This pledge included assurances that the biz will assess the impact of its technologies, document models' data and capabilities, and enforce stricter use guidelines.
This is needed because – and let's just check the notes here – there are apparently not enough laws yet regulating machine-learning technology use. Thus, in the absence of this legislation, Microsoft will just have to force itself to do the right thing.

Continue reading
Is computer vision the cure for school shootings? Likely not

Gun-detecting AI outfits want to help while root causes need tackling

Brandon Vigliarolo Tue 28 Jun 2022 // 18:58 UTC

Comment More than 250 mass shootings have occurred in the US so far this year, and AI advocates think they have the solution. Not gun control, but better tech, unsurprisingly.
Machine-learning biz Kogniz announced on Tuesday it was adding a ready-to-deploy gun detection model to its computer-vision platform. The system, we're told, can detect guns seen by security cameras and send notifications to those at risk, notifying police, locking down buildings, and performing other security tasks.
In addition to spotting firearms, Kogniz uses its other computer-vision modules to notice unusual behavior, such as children sprinting down hallways or someone climbing in through a window, which could indicate an active shooter.

Continue reading
Photonic processor can classify millions of images faster than you can blink

We ask again: Has science gone too far?

Tobias Mann Wed 8 Jun 2022 // 07:27 UTC

Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania say they've developed a photonic deep neural network processor capable of analyzing billions of images every second with high accuracy using the power of light.
It might sound like science fiction or some optical engineer's fever dream, but that's exactly what researchers at the American university's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences claim to have done in an article published in the journal Nature earlier this month.
The standalone light-driven chip – this isn't another PCIe accelerator or coprocessor – handles data by simulating brain neurons that have been trained to recognize specific patterns. This is useful for a variety of applications including object detection, facial recognition, and audio transcription to name just a few.

Continue reading
If AI chatbots are sentient, they can be squirrels, too

Plus: FTC warns against using ML for automatic content moderation, and more

Katyanna Quach Mon 20 Jun 2022 // 15:00 UTC

In Brief No, AI chatbots are not sentient.
Just as soon as the story on a Google engineer, who blew the whistle on what he claimed was a sentient language model, went viral, multiple publications stepped in to say he's wrong.
The debate on whether the company's LaMDA chatbot is conscious or has a soul or not isn't a very good one, just because it's too easy to shut down the side that believes it does. Like most large language models, LaMDA has billions of parameters and was trained on text scraped from the internet. The model learns the relationships between words, and which ones are more likely to appear next to each other.

Continue reading
Cerebras sets record for 'largest AI model' on a single chip

Plus: Yandex releases 100-billion-parameter language model for free, and more

Katyanna Quach Mon 27 Jun 2022 // 04:16 UTC

In brief US hardware startup Cerebras claims to have trained the largest AI model on a single device powered by the world's largest Wafer Scale Engine 2 chip the size of a plate.
"Using the Cerebras Software Platform (CSoft), our customers can easily train state-of-the-art GPT language models (such as GPT-3 and GPT-J) with up to 20 billion parameters on a single CS-2 system," the company claimed this week. "Running on a single CS-2, these models take minutes to set up and users can quickly move between models with just a few keystrokes."
The CS-2 packs a whopping 850,000 cores, and has 40GB of on-chip memory capable of reaching 20 PB/sec memory bandwidth. The specs on other types of AI accelerators and GPUs pale in comparison, meaning machine learning engineers have to train huge AI models with billions of parameters across more servers.

Continue reading
Samsung invests in ML chip startup NeuReality

Coining the term hardware-based 'AI hypervisor' has to be worth several million, dontcha think?

Dylan Martin Tue 21 Jun 2022 // 23:28 UTC

The venture capital arm of Samsung has cut a check to help Israeli inference chip designer NeuReality bring its silicon dreams a step closer to reality.
NeuReality announced Monday it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Samsung Ventures, adding to the $8 million in seed funding it secured last year to help it get started.
As The Next Platform wrote in 2021, NeuReality is hoping to stand out with an ambitious system-on-chip design that uses what the upstart refers to as a hardware-based "AI hypervisor."

Continue reading
Zscaler bulks up AI, cloud, IoT in its zero-trust systems

Focus emerges on workload security during its Zenith 2022 shindig

Jeff Burt Wed 22 Jun 2022 // 23:40 UTC

Zscaler is growing the machine-learning capabilities of its zero-trust platform and expanding it into the public cloud and network edge, CEO Jay Chaudhry told devotees at a conference in Las Vegas today.
Along with the AI advancements, Zscaler at its Zenith 2022 show in Sin City also announced greater integration of its technologies with Amazon Web Services, and a security management offering designed to enable infosec teams and developers to better detect risks in cloud-native applications.
In addition, the biz also is putting a focus on the Internet of Things (IoT) and operational technology (OT) control systems as it addresses the security side of the network edge. Zscaler, for those not aware, makes products that securely connect devices, networks, and backend systems together, and provides the monitoring, controls, and cloud services an organization might need to manage all that.

Continue reading
AI's most convincing conversations are not what they seem

It's time to toss the Turing test – it's not really about the machines at all

Rupert Goodwins Mon 20 Jun 2022 // 09:15 UTC

Opinion The Turing test is about us, not the bots, and it has failed.
Fans of the slow burn mainstream media U-turn had a treat last week.
On Saturday, the news broke that Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer charged with monitoring a chatbot called LaMDA for nastiness, had been put on paid leave for revealing confidential information.

Continue reading

ABOUT US

MORE CONTENT

SITUATION PUBLISHING

The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing

SIGN UP TO OUR DAILY NEWSLETTER

Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022

Do not sell my personal information Cookies Privacy Ts&Cs