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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,129

Intel buys AI chipmaker Habana for $2 billion

Intel this morning issued a statement noting that it has picked up Israeli AI chipmaker Habana Labs. The deal, valued at around $2 billion, is the latest piece of some hefty investments in artificial intelligence that include names like Nervana Systems and Movidius.

In July, Habana announced its Gaudi AI training processor, which the Tel Aviv startup promised was capable of beating GPU-based systems by 4x. The company has been rumored to be a target for an Intel acquisition for a while now, as Intel looks to get out in front of the AI market. The company clearly doesn’t want to repeat past mistakes like missing the boat on mobile.

So far, the strategy looks like it just may pay off, giving Intel a marked advantage in a category it notes will be worth around $24 billion by 2024. In 2019 alone, Intel notes, the company expects to generate in excess of $3.5 billion in “AI-driven revenue,” a 20% increase over the year prior.

Telepathic communication just ‘a matter of time’ as twins reveal blueprint for brain interface

Studying how a set of conjoined twins know what the other is seeing has “validated” a ground-breaking approach to brain implants that could have come straight from the science fiction TV series Black Mirror.

Despite having separate brains, the twins in Canada can communicate thoughts and see or feel each other’s sensory input, even if their respective eyes are closed, prompting scientists from a US-based artificial intelligence (AI) developer to take a closer look.

Dr Phillip Alveda, founding chief executive of Corticol.ai, said functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) showed the twins’ brains were connected via a single passage which led into each thalamus.

AI is outpacing Moore’s Law

In 1965, American engineer Gordon Moore made the prediction that the number of transistors integrated on a silicon chip doubles every two years or so. This has proven to be true to this day, allowing software developers to double the performance of their applications. However, the performance of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms seems to have outpaced Moore’s Law.

According to a new report produced by Stanford University, AI computational power is accelerating at a much higher rate than the development of processor chips.

“Prior to 2012, AI results closely tracked Moore’s Law, with compute doubling every two years,” the authors of the report wrote. “Post-2012, compute has been doubling every 3.4 months.”

Lofty promises for autonomous cars unfulfilled

The first driverless cars were supposed to be deployed on the roads of American cities in 2019, but just a few days before the end of the year, the lofty promises of car manufacturers and Silicon Valley remain far from becoming reality.

Recent accidents, such as those involving Tesla cars equipped with Autopilot, a driver assistance software, have shown that “the technology is not ready,” said Dan Albert, critic and author of the book “Are We There Yet?” on the history of the American automobile.

He questioned the optimistic sales pitch that autonomous cars would help reduce road deaths — 40,000 every year in the United States, mostly due to human error — because these vehicles themselves have caused deaths.

European Space Agency To Launch Craft to Grab Space Debris

The European Space Agency (ESA) is launching the first mission to remove a piece of space debris, set for 2025. The ClearSpace-1 mission will collect a piece of the Vespa (Vega Secondary Payload Adapter) second stage which was left by an ESA mission in 2013, which weighs approximately 100 grams and is the size of a small satellite.

The ESA selected a Swiss startup called ClearSpace to lead the mission. “This is the right time for such a mission,” Luc Piguet, founder and CEO of ClearSpace, said in a statement. “The space debris issue is more pressing than ever before. Today we have nearly 2000 live satellites in space and more than 3000 failed ones. And in the coming years, the number of satellites will increase by an order of magnitude, with multiple mega-constellations made up of hundreds or even thousands of satellites planned for low Earth orbit to deliver wide-coverage, low-latency telecommunications and monitoring services. The need is clear for a ‘tow truck’ to remove failed satellites from this highly trafficked region.”

The problem of space debris is becoming increasingly urgent, with more and more potentially hazardous objects in orbit around the planet, some at extremely high speeds. Debris can pose a risk to manned missions and the International Space Station as well as satellites and other unmanned missions.

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