Lifeboat Foundation

At this point, Nvidia is widely regarded as the 800 pound gorilla, when it comes to silicon and software for artificial intelligence.

Beyond AI, as I mentioned previously, all of Nvidia’s BUs realized quarterly growth. Though its Automotive group rose a modest 3% to $261M, the company’s automotive design win pipeline is projected at $14 billion in new business (numbers soon to be updated). Automotive design wins have a longer gestation period, and the company has noted that this revenue impact opportunity will begin materializing in 2024 and beyond. Shifting to Nvidia’s Professional Visualization business unit, sequential growth of 9.8% to $416 million was achieved, while the company’s OEM And Other business grew 10.6% to $73 million. Finally, Nvidia’s Gaming group delivered $2.856 billion for the quarter, compared to $2.49 billion in its previous Q2 quarter (up about 15%), and $2.24 billion quarter on quarter from a year ago. Here again, the company’s gaming GPUs and software are widely respected as the performance and feature leaders currently in the PC Gaming industry, though its chief rival AMD is beginning to execute better with its Radeon product line, along with its potent Ryzen CPUs as a 1–2 punch platform solution.

Moving forward, the company guided for a nice round $20 billion for its Q4 FY24 number, representing a projected 11% sequential gain. There will be a bit of headwind of course, from competitors like AMD that is expected to deliver its MI300 GPU AI accelerators in December at its Advancing AI event. That said, it’s going to be a tough slog for all competitors, due to Nvidia’s long-building inertia as the clear leader and incumbent in AI. Another component of the company’s data center silicon portfolio is just coming online now as well, with its Grace-Hopper combined CPU-GPU Superchip, competing for host processor AI data center sockets, which Huang noted is “on a very, very fast ramp with our first data center CPU to a multi-billion dollar product line.”

Continue reading “Nvidia Q3 Earnings Explode On Surging Data Center AI And Gaming Demand” »

As OpenAI employees threaten a mass exodus in the wake of CEO Sam Altman’s ouster by the board of directors, some OpenAI customers are beginning to look for the exits.

Startups built on OpenAI’s technology are looking for new options after the boardroom coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman.

Former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty and her three younger siblings all grew up to become high-powered business executives. This lesson from their mom helped, she says.

In early October, as the Nobel Foundation announced the recipients of this year’s Nobel prizes, a group of researchers, including a previous laureate, met in Stockholm to discuss how artificial intelligence (AI) might have an increasingly creative role in the scientific process. The workshop, led in part by Hiroaki Kitano, a biologist and chief executive of Sony AI in Tokyo, considered creating prizes for AIs and AI–human collaborations that produce world-class science. Two years earlier, Kitano proposed the Nobel Turing Challenge¹: the creation of highly autonomous systems (‘AI scientists’) with the potential to make Nobel-worthy discoveries by 2050.

It’s easy to imagine that AI could perform some of the necessary steps in scientific discovery. Researchers already use it to search the literature, automate data collection, run statistical analyses and even draft parts of papers. Generating hypotheses — a task that typically requires a creative spark to ask interesting and important questions — poses a more complex challenge. For Sendhil Mullainathan, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in Illinois, “it’s probably been the single most exhilarating kind of research I’ve ever done in my life”

According to OpenAI’s corporate governance, directors’ key fiduciary duty is not to maintain shareholder value, but to the company’s mission of creating a safe AGI, or artificial general intelligence, “that is broadly beneficial.” Profits, the company said, were secondary to that mission. OpenAI first began posting the names of its board of directors on its website in July, following the departures of Reid Hoffman, Shivon Zilis and Will Hurd earlier this year, according to an archived version of the site on the Wayback Machine.

One AI-focused venture capitalist noted that following the departure of Hoffman, OpenAI’s non-profit board lacked much traditional governance. “These are not the business or operating leaders you would want governing the most important private company in the world,” they said.

Here’s who made the decision for Altman to be fired, and for Brockman to be removed from its board of directors. Update: Altman didn’t get a vote, The Information has reported. Brockman posted an account of his version of events to X that indicated the board had acted without his knowledge as well.

It is a big setback for OpenAI, and could slow the industry as a whole | Business.

Amazon’s Alexa business is laying off “several hundred” employees, including those on its recently launched artificial general intelligence team, Business Insider has learned.

On Friday, Amazon’s VP of Alexa and Fire TV Daniel Rausch told his team about the layoffs, saying it’s intended to shift the company’s resources to focus on generative AI.

“As we continue to invent, we’re shifting some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities, and what we know matters most to customers — which includes maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI. These shifts are leading us to discontinue some initiatives, which is resulting in several hundred roles being eliminated,” Rausch wrote in the email, obtained by BI.

It was inevitable. Amazon, which got its start selling books, is getting into the car business.

The e-commerce giant along with new partner Hyundai announced Thursday at the 2023 LA Auto Show that it will start selling vehicles on its website in the second half of 2024. Hyundai vehicles will be the first vehicles sold on Amazon.com’s U.S. store with other brands following later in the year.

The Amazon car sales section will allow customers to shop for vehicles in their area based on a range of preferences, including model, trim, color, and features, choose their preferred car, and then check out online with their chosen payment and financing options. Customers will be able to buy a vehicle online and then pick it up or have it delivered by their local dealership, according to Amazon.

“Whoever leads in AI will rule the world,” President Vladimir Putin declared at an address commencing the 2017 Russian school year. Six years later, despite intense focus from senior leadership and heavy investment from the federal budget and state-owned enterprises, Russia remains a laggard in this field, hobbled by international isolation and structural challenges.

Military, political, and business leaders in Moscow have long understood the importance of controlling the information space to secure their grasp on power. After the scare of social media powered “color revolutions” on Russia’s doorstep, Moscow doubled down on these efforts. But facing both headwinds intrinsic to the nature of generative AI and deep, self-inflicted wounds from the war in Ukraine, the window for Russia to take a lead is closing quickly.

Russia’s leaders were caught flat-footed by the rise of social media. The supposed dangers of emerging technology were brought to the fore by Chisinau’s so-called “ Twitter revolution,” when protests organized in part on American social networks prevented Moldova’s ardently pro-Russian Party of Communists from winning the election in 2009.