Lifeboat Foundation

Microsoft is looking at next-generation nuclear reactors to power its data centers and AI, according to a new job listing for someone to lead the way.

Microsoft thinks next-generation nuclear reactors can power its data centers and AI ambitions, according to a job listing for a principal program manager who’ll lead the company’s nuclear energy strategy.

Data centers already use a hell of a lot of electricity, which could thwart the company’s climate goals unless it can find clean sources of energy. Energy-hungry AI makes that an even bigger challenge for the company to overcome. AI dominated Microsoft’s Surface event last week.

Continue reading “Microsoft is going nuclear to power its AI ambitions” »

When OpenAI first unveiled GPT-4, its flagship text-generating AI model, the company touted the model’s multimodality — in other words, its ability to understand the context of images as well as text. GPT-4 could caption — and even interpret — relatively complex images, OpenAI said, for example identifying a Lightning Cable adapter from a picture of a plugged-in iPhone.

But since GPT-4’s announcement in late March, OpenAI has held back the model’s image features, reportedly on fears about abuse and privacy issues. Until recently, the exact nature of those fears remained a mystery. But early this week, OpenAI published a technical paper detailing its work to mitigate the more problematic aspects of GPT-4’s image-analyzing tools.

To date, GPT-4 with vision, abbreviated “GPT-4V” by OpenAI internally, has only been used regularly by a few thousand users of Be My Eyes, an app to help low-vision and blind people navigate the environments around them. Over the past few months, however, OpenAI also began to engage with “red teamers” to probe the model for signs of unintended behavior, according to the paper.

Kolena, a startup building tools to test, benchmark and validate the performance of AI models, today announced that it raised $15 million in a funding round led by Lobby Capital with participation from SignalFire and Bloomberg Beta.

The new cash brings Kolena’s total raised to $21 million, and will be put toward growing the company’s research team, partnering with regulatory bodies and expanding Kolena’s sales and marketing efforts, co-founder and CEO Mohamed Elgendy told TechCrunch in an email interview.

“The use cases for AI are enormous, but AI lacks trust from both builders and the public,” Elgendy said. “This technology must be rolled out in a way that makes digital experiences better, not worse. The genie isn’t going back in the bottle, but as an industry we can make sure we make the right wishes.”

The two major problems with most AI generated human images is with teeth and fingers. Most of the AI tools don’t get these two human features correct. But The Multiverse has eliminated the problem by training their model and eliminating the need to include fingers in your headshots. The company recently announced its latest AI model, Upscale to further enhance the AI headshots.

Upscale is a new imaging model that improves lighting, skin texture, and hair which are notoriously challenging for imaging models. The results are really good. I’ve been following The Multiverse AI on socials, and have been reading great things about them, so much so that their revenue has grown more than 10 times through word of mouth in a period of last four weeks.

The Multiverse AI works by leveraging a latent diffusion model to engineer a custom headshot. According to the company, up to “80% of images look like studio quality professional headshots of the user, with the percentage depending on the quality of input images.” While there is no criteria to define and measure that percentage, I agree on the part that at least a few of the 100 generated images can be used on your LinkedIn and resume.

The SN40L chip will allow for improved enterprise solutions.

Palo Alto-based AI chip startup SambaNova has introduced a new semiconductor that can be used in running high-performance computing applications, like the company’s LLM platform SambaNova Suite, with faster training of models at a lower total cost.

SambaNova announced the chip, SN40L, can serve a 5 trillion parameter model with 256k+ sequence length possible on a single system node. It is being touted as an alternative to NVIDIA, which is a frontrunner in the chip race and recently unveiled what will possibly be the most powerful chip in the market – GH200 – which can support 480 GB of CPU RAM and 96 GB of GPU RAM.

Continue reading “SambaNova’s new chip runs AI models to 5 trillion parameters” »

A color-changing system inspired by the wings of butterflies can also help scientists provide compound eye vision to robots, but why do scientists want robots to see like insects?

Would you like to try a T-shirt whose color changes with the weather? How about a bandage that alerts you by changing its color when an infection occurs at the site of an injury?

Continue reading “Robots may soon have compound eye vision, thanks to MoCA” »

Tesla is reportedly increasing the orders for its Dojo D1 supercomputer chips. The D1 is a custom Tesla application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that’s designed for the Dojo supercomputer, and it is reportedly ordered from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

Citing a source reportedly familiar with the matter, Taiwanese publication Economic Daily noted that Tesla will be doubling its Dojo D1 chip to 10,000 units for the coming year. Considering the Dojo supercomputer’s scalability, expectations are high that the volume of D1 chip orders from TSMC will continue to increase until 2025.

Dojo, after all, is expected to be used by Tesla for the training of its driver-assist systems and self-driving AI models. With the rollout of projects like FSD, the dedicated robotaxi, and Optimus, Dojo’s contributions to the company’s operations would likely be more substantial.

Tesla TSLA CEO Elon Musk responded positively to a social media post when a user’s spouse approved of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature.

What Happened: Matt Smith, an Equity Analysis at Halter Ferguson, posted about his wife’s newfound approval of Tesla Inc.’s FSD feature during a 40-minute drive. Musk responded to the post with “Great story”.

See Also: Elon Musk Warned, ‘We’re Running Out Of Dead Dinosaurs, And Betting Against Science Is the Dumbest Experiment In History’ Amid One Of The Biggest Challenges The World Has Ever Faced.

Novo Nordisk A/S agreed to partner with the US technology company Valo Health Inc. to use artificial intelligence to find new drugs in a deal that could be worth as much as $2.7 billion.