Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 492

xAI, Elon Musk’s 10-month-old competitor to the AI phenom OpenAI, is raising $6 billion on a pre-money valuation of $18 billion, according to one trusted source close to the deal. The deal — which would give investors one quarter of the company — is expected to close in the next few weeks unless the terms of the deal change.

The deal terms have changed once already. As of last weekend, Jared Birchall, who heads Musk’s family office, was telling prospective investors that xAI was raising $3 billion at a $15 billion pre-money valuation. Given the number of investors clamoring to get into the deal, those numbers were quickly adjusted.

Says our source, “We all received an email that basically said, ‘It’s now $6B on $18B, and don’t complain because a lot of other people want in.”

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Sanctuary AI often isn’t mentioned in the same breath as humanoid robotics firms like Boston Dynamics, Agility, Figure and 1X, but the Canadian company has been operating in the space for some time. In fact, a new robot introduced on Thursday is actually the seventh-generation of its Phoenix line.

While a recent iteration introduced legs into the line, Sanctuary is most concerned with what’s happening from the waist up. Tellingly, new videos of the latest robot are focused on the system’s torso. The Canadian firm is highlighting the system’s human-like movements while sorting product, as well as the speed with which it can learn such tasks.

Much of the humanoid coverage up to this point has (understandably) revolved around mechatronics — specifically how these robots look as they navigate their way through the world. Boston Dynamics’ recent video is a perfect example of how much can be communicated in a few short seconds.

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Advances in generative AI have taken the tech world by storm. Biotech investors are making a big bet that similar computational methods could revolutionize drug discovery.

On Tuesday, ARCH Venture Partners and Foresite Labs, an affiliate of Foresite Capital, announced that they incubated Xaira Therapeutics and funded the AI biotech with $1 billion. Other investors in the new company, which has been operating in stealth mode for about six months, include F-Prime, NEA, Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures and SV Angel.

Xaira’s CEO Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a former Stanford president and chief scientific officer at Genentech, says the company is ready to start developing drugs that were impossible to make without recent breakthroughs in AI. “We’ve done such a large capital raise because we believe the technology is at an inflection point where it can have a transformative effect on the field,” he said.

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The Lenovo ThinkAgile MX455 V3 Edge Premier Solution extends AI and real-time data analysis capabilities to the edge. The new solution integrates with Microsoft’s Azure Stack HCI, providing a versatile platform that delivers enhanced AI and compute performance while maintaining strong power efficiency. This is ideal for use in distributed edge environments such as retail, manufacturing, and healthcare, where on-premises AI is crucial.

Powered by AMD EPYC 8,004 processors, the new ThinkAgile MX455 V3 Edge Premier Solution offers high performance with lower power consumption. According to Lenovo, this makes it one of the market’s most power-efficient Azure Stack HCI solutions.

Lenovo’s new suite of AI-centric infrastructure systems and solutions, developed in collaboration with AMD, are significant additions to the company’s hybrid AI portfolio. These offerings, from the ThinkSystem SR685a V3 to the ThinkAgile MX455 V3 Edge Premier Solution, deliver the performance, flexibility, and scalability needed to support the growing demands of AI workloads.

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Not many devices in the datacenter have been etched with the Intel 4 process, which is the chip maker’s spin on 7 nanometer extreme ultraviolet immersion lithography. But Intel’s Loihi 2 neuromorphic processor is one of them, and Sandia National Laboratories is firing up a supercomputer with 1,152 of them interlinked to create what Intel is calling the largest neuromorphic system every assembled.

With Nvidia’s top-end “Blackwell” GPU accelerators now pushing up to 1,200 watts in their peak configurations, and require liquid cooling, and other accelerators no doubt following as their sockets get inevitably bigger as Moore’s Law scaling for chip making slows, this is a good time to take a step back and see what can be done with a reasonably scaled neuromorphic system, which not only has circuits which act more like real neurons used in real brains and also burn orders of magnitude less power than the XPUs commonly used in the datacenter for all kinds of compute.

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