
What's the betting
the Contract goes to a Net Curtain retailing company set up last year for £100 & owned by a mate of a Cabinet Minister, and the company then fails to deliver on it.
The UK government hopes to set up a dynamic purchasing system to help Blighty's public sector buy artificial intelligence services, with an estimated £200m on the table over four years. According to a tender notice, the whole shebang, once live, will give the public sector the opportunity to buy an extensive range of AI …
The "fails to deliver part" is a no brainer. The other parts - not so much. I could just as easily see it being set up by a former Cabinet Minister (no mate needed), or a large political donor, or even the "paramour" of a Cabinet Minister. And can we really leave out cousins, children, parents, and other relatives? I think not!
The problem is the members of this government suffer from rampant itchy backs, so they need to indulge in some “mutual back-scratching” with friends and relatives
"[AI] is more profound than fire or electricity" - Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet. His comment could have come just as easily from the CEO of Reynholm Industries.
It's just a load of hype that idiot MPs are completely taken in by. Another splurge of money on nothing much at all. Of course AI has its place, but when the government start seeing it as TBTSSB it ends up as another public sector IT money pit.
Consultants, corrupt MPs and lawyers are the only beneficiaries I can see from this.
It's just a load of hype that idiot MPs are completely taken in by. Another splurge of money on nothing much at all. .... Consultants, corrupt MPs and lawyers are the only beneficiaries I can see from this. .... USER100
MPs would be complete idiots to be taken in by those views, USER100.
And there may be an extremely valid worry and even practically real fear that AI will garner increased benefits from/for more than just the targeting and compromising/outing into the light with critical catastrophically damaging exposure of deep and dark webbed practices of consultants, corrupt MPs and lawyers, ..... although to imagine throwing any amount of money at the emerging expanding problem will help to stop the inevitable, rather than just sort of kick the can of worms further on down the road and into the future as opposed to have to presently deal/do deals with it, in whatever phorms it chooses to morph into in order to be more effective and/or most deadly, is surely nonsensical, but an old established and usually quite successful trick well used for the generation of false hope in a dire emergency. However, things may be far from normal so goodness knows what the future brings.
Indeed, there may be great parallels to observe in the paths not dissimilarly taken by AI and viruses like COVID-19 with the effects and results from both being of an extremely similar nature.
AI could always/already has been both tested and utilised as a hound hunting both for spread betting, elite great gamesplaying running man style antics running the course over GBNI as a anything goes playground could IT not?
Simply Reds pulling the strings in a CO V ID 19 ‘Moneys too tight to mention’ cant get another Brexit extension bus hurtling at Speed over the proberbial Cliff Thorburn well and truly snookered cliffs of DO V ER and everyone everywhere blissfully behind the masks of optimism populism and patriotism sadly the aforementioned offering little protection from the V ir us of a failed capitalist impractical ponzi scheme hidden beneath the ever decreasing Russian Dolls whenever unearthed in a whack a mole fashion to oversaturated exchange traded funds?
What promises on the side of that bus will arrive at the destination, or be exposed as catastrophic floundering lies will create the latest multimedia press propaganda in the latest and greatest hoodwink cloak and dagger danesgold future dramatics without a doubt ...
Maybe my wetware needs some (non-existent) AI help, but I have a few problems comprehending the buzzwords in this article.
What on earth is "a dynamic purchasing system"?
Why do organisations who spend taxpayer money need an "opportunity to purchase" something as ill defined as "AI"? (Which doesn't actually exist in any form which I'd apply the term to.)
Furthermore, what the hell do they need an AI for even if it did exist?
Why does providing them with this "opportunity" require blowing £200 million on something which sounds like a buzzword bingo invention?
Why can't these rich public organs access "a wide range of competition" (whatever that means) without a "dynamic purchasing system"?
Where did all this money to burn suddenly come from? Isn't the country broke?
I might not live in Blighty any more, but I don't seem to remember my skills in my mother tongue diminishing to such a extent that I can't understand an El Reg article any more.
Do I have early onset Alzheimer's disease? Or is my uncontrollable aversion to bullshit playing up again?
Please help!
Confused of Stockholm.
> What on earth is "a dynamic purchasing system"?
I've added it to the article. It's standard UK govt jargon for an electronic purchasing system that new suppliers can join at any time. That's the dynamic part.
> what the hell do they need an AI for even if it did exist?
There are loads of applications machine learning can be used in. Spotting patterns in road traffic, optimizing emergency service shifts, predicting supply and demand. YMMV. You'd hope there is human oversight involved so the computers don't run amok.
> Isn't the country broke?
No. The UK is still in the top 10 richest countries by GDP.
C.
AI or Artificial Intelligence is just a set of complex rules given a funky name to make it appeal to politicians and boardrooms. It is not intelligent or intelligence in any form yet is constantly sold as the next big thing that will solve all of mankind's problems. If AI really was intelligent then making self-driving cars would not be so difficult because, I guess they could "learn" proactively without having to have a human constantly check if the decision it made according to it's ruleset was correct.
This is just the same as "Cloud", another name for a virtual machine and some "software defined stuff" whether it be running in yours or someone else's data centre.
It appears that government[s] just don't get this new fangled and entangling AI thing, which more than just a few who might definitely know otherwise, realise is so easily capable of being, and therefore is surely going to be, extremely disruptive and even mind-bindingly destructive, for they (government[s]) appear to think [although obviously they are not thinking deeper nor clearly far enough] that principals would be as registered players in any of their existing systems/current databases.
As a novel supplier, registering access for the RM6200 Artificial Intelligence Dynamic Purchasing System Agreement would appear to be severely unsuitably limited and aimed at known entities?
Please note that to register you must have a valid DUNS number (as provided by Dun and Bradstreet) for the organisation which you are registering, who will be entering into a contract if invited to do so. ..... Artificial Intelligence Reference number: RM6200
Amazing really how good Racehorse becomes Swine, all due to resistence and resilience to a populist propaganda agenda.
“Man will destroy himself through greed, not my greed”, a message from the gods, perhaps a stalk warning to a road to nowhere but certain inevitable failure based on a compulsive capitalist struggling structure in East vs West, which is best ongoing societal new world disorder.
Any winners in such well prophesied great game?
https://youtu.be/VrERLeFseDA
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
In the latest episode of Black Mirror, a vast megacorp sells AI software that learns to mimic the voice of a deceased woman whose husband sits weeping over a smart speaker, listening to her dulcet tones.
Only joking – it's Amazon, and this is real life. The experimental feature of the company's virtual assistant, Alexa, was announced at an Amazon conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.
Rohit Prasad, head scientist for Alexa AI, described the tech as a means to build trust between human and machine, enabling Alexa to "make the memories last" when "so many of us have lost someone we love" during the pandemic.
Microsoft's GitHub on Tuesday released its Copilot AI programming assistance tool into the wild after a year-long free technical trial.
And now that GitHub Copilot is generally available, developers will have to start paying for it.
Or most of them will. Verified students and maintainers of popular open-source projects may continue using Copilot at no charge.
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