Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit has filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. after an eleventh-hour scramble to secure further funding failed, the satellite company announced on Tuesday, marking the end of a sudden spiral that followed a botched high-profile launch attempt out of Britain in January.
Virgin Orbit has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, documents show.
Virgin Orbit said it had failed to secure sufficient funding to stay in business and the decision comes less than a week after it laid off most of its staff and ceased operations.
Virgin Orbit, which laid off most of its staff last week, struggled to secure funding after a failed satellite launch from the U.K. in January.
It also says that it has a healthy pipeline for chips in the future.
Search engine giant Google has claimed that the supercomputers it uses to develop its artificial intelligence (AI) models are faster and more energy efficient than Nvidia Corporation’s. While processing power for most companies delving into the AI space comes from Nvidia’s chips, Google uses a custom chip called Tensor Processing Unit (TPU).
Google announced its Tensor chips during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic when businesses from electronics to automotive faced the pinch of chip shortage.
AI-designed chips to further AI development
Interesting Engineering reported in 2021 that Google used AI to design its TPUs. Google claimed that the design process was completed in just six hours using AI compared to the months humans spend designing chips.
For most things associated with AI these days, product iterations occur rapidly, and the TPU is currently in its fourth generation. As Microsoft stitched together chips to power OpenAI’s research requirement, Google also put together 4,000 TPUs to make its supercomputer.
An open letter signed by more than 1,100 technology and business industry leaders calls for a six-month moratorium on the race to develop artificial intelligence (AI), and in particular large language models like ChatGPT-4.
ChatGPT-4 is an example of AI exhibiting human-competitive intelligence and poses a risk to humanity without managed care.
Anti AI / AI ethics clowns now pushing.gov for some criminalization, on cue.
A nonprofit AI research group wants the Federal Trade Commission to investigate OpenAI, Inc. and halt releases of GPT-4.
OpenAI “has released a product GPT-4 for the consumer market that is biased, deceptive, and a risk to privacy and public safety. The outputs cannot be proven or replicated. No independent assessment was undertaken prior to deployment,” said a complaint to the FTC submitted today by the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Policy (CAIDP).
Calling for “independent oversight and evaluation of commercial AI products offered in the United States,” CAIDP asked the FTC to “open an investigation into OpenAI, enjoin further commercial releases of GPT-4, and ensure the establishment of necessary guardrails to protect consumers, businesses, and the commercial marketplace.”
The release of ChatGPT in late November 2022 lit a fire under the subdued venture capital sector, a hesitant business community, and the work of academics and regulators. While venture funding decreased by 19% from Q3’22 to Q4’22, AI funding increased 15% over the same period, according to CB Insights’ State of AI 2022 Report (annual AI funding dropped by 34% in 2022, mirroring the broader venture funding downturn). Looking specifically at generative AI startups, CB Insights found that 2022 was a record year, with equity funding topping $2.6 billion across 110 deals.
OAKLAND, California, March 28 (Reuters) — Artificial intelligence chip startup Cerebras Systems on Tuesday said it released open source ChatGPT-like models for the research and business community to use for free in an effort to foster more collaboration.
Silicon Valley-based Cerebras released seven models all trained on its AI supercomputer called Andromeda, including smaller 111 million parameter language models to a larger 13 billion parameter model.
“There is a big movement to close what has been open sourced in AI…it’s not surprising as there’s now huge money in it,” said Andrew Feldman, founder and CEO of Cerebras. “The excitement in the community, the progress we’ve made, has been in large part because it’s been so open.”
A serious flaw has been found in WooCommerce, a popular plug-in for managing online businesses that are built on the WordPress platform. This flaw might enable cybercriminals to take control of websites. Nevertheless, the WooCommerce team has provided fixes, and attackers are able to reverse-engineer the patch. Technical specifics concerning the vulnerability have not yet been disclosed. There are presently approximately 500,000 active installations of the WooCommerce Payments plug-in, which is the component that includes the vulnerability. The creators of WooCommerce have stated that managed WordPress hosting providers such as WordPress.com, Pressable, and WPVIP have automatically updated websites that are hosted on their platforms. But, if the other websites don’t already have automatic updates turned on, the administrators of those websites should immediately apply the update that is specific to their version.
Any versions of WooCommerce Payments that were created after 4.8.0, which was published at the end of September, are susceptible to the vulnerability. The following updated versions were made available by Automattic: 4.8.2, 4.9.1, 5.0.4, 5.1.3, 5.2.2, 5.3.1, 5.4.1, 5.5.2 and 5.6.2.
As soon as a patched version of WooCommerce has been installed, administrators of websites using WooCommerce should verify their sites for any unusual admin users or postings. The creators of WooCommerce suggest that, in the event that suspicious behavior is discovered on a website, the passwords of all administrative users on the site be changed, in addition to any API credentials for WooCommerce and payment gateways.
In 2015, European countries formulated the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which aimed to end TB by 2030. However, in September 2018, global leaders at the first United Nations (UN) General Assembly High-Level Meeting on the Fight Against TB agreed on an ambitious target of eradicating TB by 2022. They strategized that increased access to TB treatment and preventive measures would help achieve their goal quickly. Another measure adopted to progress the TB eradication goal was increasing the funds related to TB research and services.
An uneven progress regarding TB eradication by 2030 was observed in some European regions by the World Health Organization (WHO). Although the majority of Western European countries were on track for TB elimination, Eastern European and Central Asian countries reported a high number of incidences of drug-resistant (DR) TB.
In the European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA), TB prevalence is low. Based on the TB surveillance conducted in Europe, out of 30 countries, 24 reported less than 10 TB cases per 100,000 population in 2021. These countries have been encouraged to maintain this low rate and attain the pre-elimination phase of less than 10 TB cases per million population per year. A recent Eurosurveillancejournal editorial discussed the progress in the EU/EEA, between 2018 and 2021, towards achieving the 2030 targets for TB elimination.
Microsoft Teams has been totally overhauled to run faster and have a more simplified interface.
Microsoft is overhauling its Teams app today to make it faster and easier to use. Microsoft Teams has been rebuilt from the ground up, with a new preview available today for businesses to try out this radical rework that has been years in the making.
“The new Teams is faster, simpler, and more flexible than ever before,” says Sumi Singh, CVP of engineering for Microsoft Teams, in an interview with The Verge. “We’ve made tremendous strides in performance and usability. The new Teams is 2x faster while using 50 percent fewer resources.”
The new Microsoft Teams isn’t all about looks and performance, though. Microsoft is also adding in some very useful improvements. If you’ve ever had issues switching between different Microsoft Teams accounts in your organization, the new client has an improved method to let you see all of your accounts and notifications in a single drop-down menu. You won’t have to log out of accounts and switch tenants to get access to different Teams instances.
If you’re used to meetings with raised hands even after someone has asked a question, Microsoft is now improving this experience by automatically lowering hands after the person has spoken. Whiteboard is also getting the ability to paste Loop components to make the canvas even more collaborative. AI-powered video filters are also coming to Microsoft Teams, with a number of animated frames and the ability to change your video’s hue in presentations.
Apple has quietly acquired a Mountain View-based startup, WaveOne, that was developing AI algorithms for compressing video.
Apple wouldn’t confirm the sale when asked for comment. But WaveOne’s website was shut down around January, and severalformeremployees, including one of WaveOne’s co-founders, now work within Apple’s various machine learning groups.
WaveOne’s former head of sales and business development, Bob Stankosh, announced the sale in a LinkedIn post published a month ago.
