Lifeboat Foundation

DETROIT (AP) — Computer chip maker Intel paid handsomely for a piece of the next big thing Monday as it offered more than $15 billion for Mobileye, an Israeli company at the forefront of autonomous vehicle technology.

The purchase, scheduled to close by year’s end, creates another major player in self-driving technology as traditional automakers and tech companies vie to put the cars into public use. Most companies have predicted autonomous vehicles will be carrying people in the next three-to-five years.

The big investment by Intel validates predictions that autonomous cars will someday come in large numbers, signifying a sea change in the way we all get around, said Timothy Carone, a Notre Dame University professor who has written about the future of automation. “Major players are finding ways finding ways to position themselves for a change as seminal as the personal computer revolution,” he said.

Three months ago, Google announced it would in early 2017 launch support for high-end graphics processing units (GPUs) for machine learning and other specialized workloads. It’s now early 2017 and, true to its word, Google today officially made GPUs on the Google Cloud Platform available to developers. As expected, these are Nvidia Tesla K80 GPUs, and developers will be able to attach up to eight of these to any custom Compute Engine machine.

These new GPU-based virtual machines are available in three Google data centers: us-east1, asia-east1 and europe-west1. Every K80 core features 2,496 of Nvidia’s stream processors with 12 GB of GDDR5 memory (the K80 board features two cores and 24 GB of RAM).

Continue reading “Google launches GPU support for its Cloud Platform” »

Self-driving cars are about to face their toughest test.

Anyone who watched HBO’s Westworld and came away from it with the desire to have sex with a robot is now in luck. A brothel full of sex dolls has opened up in Barcelona, Spain.

Lumi Dolls offers four models that anyone can reserve for a set amount of time. Thanks to new technology, Lumi Dolls brags that its dolls are among the most realistic on the market — and they cost around €120 per hour, which is about $127. The brothel offers other services as well, including overnight stays and options for couples, but those price quotes require a consultation. Reservations are taken online.

Each of the models come complete with a sort of character page on the Lumi Dolls website, which houses a description of the doll’s anatomy, creative inspiration, and what to look forward to in the doll’s room.

Continue reading “Sex Robot Brothel Opens Up in Barcelona” »

Boston Dynamics’s Handle is a humanoid robot on wheels, and it’s amazing.

In Brief Universal Basic Income is being touted by experts as the only way for humanity to survive in the coming age of automation. There are various experiments being conducted this year that could pave the way for the practice in the future.

In the self-driving future envisioned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, car owners might be saying “goodbye” to a whole lot more than steering wheels.

Musk is so sure of the safety features bundled into Tesla vehicles that his company has begun offering some customers a lifetime insurance and maintenance package at the time of purchase.

No more monthly insurance bills. No more unexpected repair costs.

Continue reading “Tesla is so sure its cars are safe you’ll say goodbye to a lot more than just steering wheels” »

Like all great programmers I get most of my code from StackOverflow questions. Can’t figure out how to add authentication to Flask? Easy. Want to shut down sendmail? Boom. Now, thanks to all the code on the Internet, a robot can be as smart as a $180,000 coder.

The system, called DeepCoder, basically searches a corpus of code to build a project that works to spec. It’s been used to complete programming competitions and could be pointed at a larger set of data to build more complex products.

From the paper:

Continue reading “DeepCoder builds programs using code it finds lying around” »

Uber Technologies’ Gary Marcus said he is stepping down from his post as head of AI Labs, four months after the unit was created.

Gary Marcus, head of the recently launched AI Labs, said in a Facebook post on Wednesday that he is stepping down and will serve as a special advisor to AI Labs.

The ride-hailing app created AI Labs last year and also acquired Geometric Intelligence to form the initial AI Labs team.

Continue reading “Uber’s Artificial Intelligence Research Guru Steps Down” »