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Artificial Intelligence is making its presence felt in thousands of different ways. It helps scientists make sense of vast troves of data; it helps detect financial fraud; it drives our cars; it feeds us music suggestions; its chatbots drive us crazy. And it’s only getting started.

Are we capable of understanding how quickly AI will continue to develop? And if the answer is no, does that constitute the Great Filter?

The Fermi Paradox is the discrepancy between the apparent high likelihood of advanced civilizations existing and the total lack of evidence that they do exist. Many solutions have been proposed for why the discrepancy exists. One of the ideas is the ‘Great Filter.’

The third proof point is both the increase in manufacturing capacity investment and the change in how that investment will be managed. With the interest in governments to secure future semiconductor manufacturing for both supply security and economic growth, Mr. Gelsinger went on a spending spree with investment in expanding capacity in Oregon, Ireland, and Israel, as well as six new fabs in Arizona, Ohio, and Germany. Most of the initial investment was made without the promise of government grants, such as the US Chips Act. However, Intel has now secured more than $50B from US and European government incentives, customer commitments starting with its first five customers on the 18A process node, and its financial partners. Intel has also secured an additional $11B loan from the US government and a 25% investment tax credit.

In addition to it’s own investment in fab capacity, Intel is partnering with Tower Semiconductor and UMC, two foundries with long and successful histories. Tower will be investing in new equipment to be installed in Intel’s New Mexico facility for analog products, and UMC will partner with Intel to leverage three of the older Arizona fabs and process nodes, starting with the 12nm, to support applications like industrial IoT, mobile, communications infrastructure, and networking.

The second side of this investment is how current and future capacity will be used. As strictly an IDM, Intel has historically capitalized on its investments in the physical fab structures by retrofitting the fabs after three process nodes, on average. While this allowed for the reuse of the structures and infrastructure, it eliminated support for older process nodes, which are important for many foundry customers. According to Omdia Research, less than 3% of all semiconductors are produced on the latest process nodes. As a result, Intel is shifting from retrofitting fabs for new process nodes to maintaining fabs to support extended life cycles of older process nodes, as shown in the chart below. This requires additional capacity for newer process nodes.

A relatively new malware called Latrodectus is believed to be an evolution of the IcedID loader, seen in malicious email campaigns since November 2023.

The malware was spotted by researchers at Proofpoint and Team Cymru, who worked together to document its capabilities, which are still unstable and experimental.

IcedID is a malware family first identified in 2017 that was originally classified as a modular banking trojan designed to steal financial information from infected computers. Over time, it became more sophisticated, adding evasion and command execution capabilities.

Cybercriminals are selling custom Raspberry Pi software called ‘GEOBOX’ on Telegram, which allows inexperienced hackers to convert the mini-computers into anonymous cyberattack tools.

GEOBOX is sold on Telegram channels for a subscription of $80 per month or $700 for a lifetime license, payable in cryptocurrency.

Analysts at Resecurity discovered the tool during an investigation into a high-profile banking theft impacting a Fortune 100 company.

Qualcomm, Intel, and Google have reportedly formed a new “strategic” coalition in an attempt to dethrone NVIDIA from the AI markets.

It Takes Not One But Three Big Tech Companies Such as Qualcomm, Intel & Google, To Have A Chance To Dethrone NVIDIA’s CUDA Supremacy In AI

Now, this does sound interesting, and it is probably a development to watch out for since we haven’t seen such a massive collaboration among companies to target a single entity. NVIDIA’s dominance in the AI market has shocked competitors to a vast extent since such financial growth and adoption weren’t seen previously. NVIDIA has gobbled up the bulk of the share of AI in tech industry, leaving no space for competitors to fill in, and this has troubled many of the firms who have now formulated a united front against NVIDIA.

Probabilistic computing with stochastic devices.


In recent decades, artificial intelligence has been successively employed in the fields of finance, commerce, and other industries. However, imitating high-level brain functions, such as imagination and inference, pose several challenges as they are relevant to a particular type of noise in a biological neuron network. Probabilistic computing algorithms based on restricted Boltzmann machine and Bayesian inference that use silicon electronics have progressed significantly in terms of mimicking probabilistic inference. However, the quasi-random noise generated from additional circuits or algorithms presents a major challenge for silicon electronics to realize the true stochasticity of biological neuron systems. Artificial neurons based on emerging devices, such as memristors and ferroelectric field-effect transistors with inherent stochasticity can produce uncertain non-linear output spikes, which may be the key to make machine learning closer to the human brain. In this article, we present a comprehensive review of the recent advances in the emerging stochastic artificial neurons (SANs) in terms of probabilistic computing. We briefly introduce the biological neurons, neuron models, and silicon neurons before presenting the detailed working mechanisms of various SANs. Finally, the merits and demerits of silicon-based and emerging neurons are discussed, and the outlook for SANs is presented.

Keywords: brain-inspired computing, artificial neurons, stochastic neurons, memristive devices, stochastic electronics.

This apparent paradox has a simple yet surprising explanation, according to Meredith Whitney: Employers are finally exacting revenge on remote workers who’ve secretly had a second job.

The veteran researcher, who became known as the “Oracle of Wall Street” for her early warnings about banks before the financial crisis, is no stranger to thinking outside the box about everything from the housing market to the economy, and this theory is no exception.

But there’s evidence to support Whitney’s thesis that many of the job cuts made have been to remote positions that were filled by people working at multiple companies under the radar.