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Microsoft president says AI is ‘the electricity of our age’ as company prepares to hit $80 billion spend

“The Chinese wisely recognize that if a country standardizes on China’s AI platform, it likely will continue to rely on that platform in the future,” Smith said.

The US should move quickly to promote its AI technology as superior and more trustworthy, enlisting allies in the effort, he recommended.

For its part, Microsoft is on pace to invest about $80 billion this year to build out AI datacenters, train AI models and deploy cloud-based applications around the world, according to Smith.

Nvdia’s CES 2025 Event: Everything Revealed in 12 Minutes

At CES 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang kicks off CES, the world’s largest consumer electronics show, with a new RTX gaming chip, updates on its AI chip Grace Blackwell and its future plans to dig deeper into robotics and autonomous cars.

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A brain-inspired algorithm that mitigates catastrophic forgetting of artificial and spiking neural networks with low computational cost

Neuromodulators in the brain act globally at many forms of synaptic plasticity, represented as metaplasticity, which is rarely considered by existing spiking (SNNs) and nonspiking artificial neural networks (ANNs). Here, we report an efficient brain-inspired computing algorithm for SNNs and ANNs, referred to here as neuromodulation-assisted credit assignment (NACA), which uses expectation signals to induce defined levels of neuromodulators to selective synapses, whereby the long-term synaptic potentiation and depression are modified in a nonlinear manner depending on the neuromodulator level. The NACA algorithm achieved high recognition accuracy with substantially reduced computational cost in learning spatial and temporal classification tasks. Notably, NACA was also verified as efficient for learning five different class continuous learning tasks with varying degrees of complexity, exhibiting a markedly mitigated catastrophic forgetting at low computational cost. Mapping synaptic weight changes showed that these benefits could be explained by the sparse and targeted synaptic modifications attributed to expectation-based global neuromodulation.

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Thin, Fast, and Powerful: MIT’s “Stacked” 3D Chips Shatter Industry Constraints

An electronic stacking technique has the potential to exponentially boost the number of transistors on chips, paving the way for more efficient AI hardware.

The electronics industry is approaching a limit to the number of transistors that can be packed onto the surface of a computer chip. So, chip manufacturers are looking to build up rather than out.

Instead of squeezing ever-smaller transistors onto a single surface, the industry is aiming to stack multiple surfaces of transistors and semiconducting elements — akin to turning a ranch house into a high-rise. Such multilayered chips could handle exponentially more data and carry out many more complex functions than today’s electronics.

Meta unveils HOT3D dataset for advanced computer vision training

While most humans can innately use their hands to communicate with others or grab and manipulate objects, many existing robotic systems only excel at simple manual tasks. In recent years, computer scientists worldwide have been developing machine learning-based models that can process images of humans completing manual tasks, using acquired information to improve robot manipulation, which could in turn enhance a robot’s interactions with both humans and objects in its surroundings.

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