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The firm developed vertical farming and integrated advanced robotics to handle tasks such as planting, harvesting, and ensuring efficient, automated processes.


A cutting-edge technology indoor vertical farm could transform food production. Plenty, a San Francisco-based company, curated a high-tech robot farm.

Vertical farming involves growing crops in stacked towers indoors while advanced robotics handle tasks from seed planting to harvesting, ensuring efficient, automated processes.

What’s so ‘high-tech’ about Plenty’s farm?

Jason Banta, vice president of AMD, believes that integrating AI into computers will make them more personal, more secure, and better able to understand what users want.

Banta predicts wider adoption of AI-enabled laptops by 2024, with a “major inflection point” starting in 2025. The biggest challenge will be scaling down models to run efficiently on laptops.

In general, Banta expects to see a shift from cloud AI applications to smaller models that run directly on computers in real-time and can be trained locally.

Google has been dominating the development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems for years. This has undoubtedly been helped by its 2014 acquisition of DeepMind, the London-based startup focused on AI research that developed AlphaGo, a program capable of defeating a grand champion of complex Asian board game Go, which opened debate on whether the AI would eventually surpass the human mind.

But Google’s unquestioned dominance was interrupted last year by another startup — OpenAI. The launch of ChatGPT, the most successful application in history, caught big technology companies off guard, and forced them to accelerate their AI programs. In April of this year, DeepMind — which until then had functioned as a relatively independent research laboratory— and Google Brain — the technology company’s other major research division — merged into a single organization: Google DeepMind, which has some of the best AI scientists in the world.

Colin Murdoch, 45, is the chief business officer of Google’s new AI super division, which has just presented its first toy: Gemini, a multimodal generative AI platform that can process and generate text, code, images, audio and video from different data sources. Those who have used it say that it far surpasses the latest version of ChatGPT, and that it puts Google back in the fight to dominate the market.

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, “Say what?” It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google’s take on a modular supercomputer with a healthy dose of its homegrown TPU v5p AI accelerators, which were also announced this month.

The modular design also allows workloads to be sliced up between TPUs and GPUs, with Google’s software tools doing the provisioning and orchestration in the background. Theoretically, if Google were to add a quantum computer to the Google Cloud, it could also be plugged into the Hypercomputer.

While the Hypercomputer was advertised as an AI supercomputer, the good news is that the system also runs scientific computing applications.