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There is a joke about the daughter who asks her dad why he speaks so quietly around the house. “Because there is artificial intelligence everywhere that is listening to what we say,” the dad replies. The daughter laughs, the father laughs. And Alexa laughs.

Artificial intelligence does seem to be injecting itself into more and more aspects of our lives. And as AI brains earn the equivalent of a million doctoral degrees while absorbing trillions of bits of data and in turn generate responses with an engaging tone and demeanor that sound as simple and humanlike as your favorite old college professor, some feel compelled to ask: Are computers becoming sentient?

A cynic would respond, “Of course not. Computers may solve problems in seconds that would take humankind generations to solve, but they can’t feel love and pain, can’t see and appreciate the moon and the stars, can’t smell the coffee we spill on the keyboard.”

The statement that may not be obvious is that the sleeping giant, Google has woken up, and they are iterating on a pace that will smash GPT-4 total pre-training FLOPS by 5x before the end of the year. The path is clear to 100x by the end of next year given their current infrastructure buildout. Whether Google has the stomach to put these models out publicly without neutering their creativity or their existing business model is a different discussion.

Today we want to discuss Google’s training systems for Gemini, the iteration velocity for Gemini models, Google’s Viperfish (TPUv5) ramp, Google’s competitiveness going forward versus the other frontier labs, and a crowd we are dubbing the GPU-Poor.

Access to compute is a bimodal distribution. There are a handful of firms with 20k+ A/H100 GPUs, and individual researchers can access 100s or 1,000s of GPUs for pet projects. The chief among these are researchers at OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Inflection, X, and Meta, who will have the highest ratios of compute resources to researchers. A few of the firms above as well as multiple Chinese firms will 100k+ by the end of next year, although we are unsure of the ratio of researchers in China, only the GPU volumes.

Aude Oliva is a prominent Cognitive and Computer Scientist directing the MIT Computational Perception and Cognition group at CSAIL while also leading the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and co-leading the MIT AI Hardware Program. With research spanning computational neuroscience, cognition, and computer vision, she pioneers the integration of human perception and machine recognition. Her contributions extend across academia, industry, and research, making her a distinguished figure at MIT.

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Construction is set to break ground by the end of this year, and the company expects to move into the new space by the end of 2024. The production facility for semiconductor quartz will include a clean room, high-purity cleaning system and allow them to expand an automation component of their business that they’ve been capitalizing on for years.

“We knew that our customers all over the world were expanding at a rate we couldn’t keep up with,” said Scott Lingren, SXT’s managing director and U.S. chairman. “As you see all these expansions from Samsung in Taylor to Texas Instruments Inc. in the Dallas area to all over the world … we just have to keep up.”

SXT – which is headquartered in the Netherlands and owned by the privately-held Schunk Group in Germany – supplies semiconductor manufacturers around the world, like Samsung, which has had a presence in Central Texas for decades and is potentially adding to its existing Austin campus and its new site in Taylor. Other major players in the industry include Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which is expanding in Arizona, and Intel Corp., which is expanding to Ohio.

GM’s self-driving robotaxi unit, Cruise, is poised to deploy a small fleet of autonomous cars in Seattle, Washington. The initial deployment of the vehicles will reportedly include safety drivers.

Cruise’s deployment in the city will begin in sections of downtown Seattle, Capitol Hill, Queen Anne, Fremont, the University District, and West Seattle. From this, Cruise would be able to collect valuable real-world data. The robotaxi provider would be joining other self-driving units that are also operating in Seattle today, such as Zoox.

In a comment to Geek Wire, Cruise executive VP of engineering Mohamed Elshenawy noted that Seattle would be a great testing ground for the company’s self-driving robotaxis. The city, after all, features hilly areas and inclement weather conditions, which should present Cruise with some interesting edge cases and challenges.

By: Vikas Datta/IANS

Bali (Indonesia): It is not new technology, but Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now raising concerns with the advent of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, which may have significant repercussions across the cyber landscape, as they foster phenomenon like “suffering distancing syndrome”, “responsibility delegation”, and “AI hallucination” for those simply using it to find or validate information, says a senior Kaspersky Labs cyberthreat expert.

That was fast.

The Columbus Dispatch, a newspaper serving the Columbus, Ohio area, has suspended its AI efforts after its AI-powered sports writing bot was caught churning out horrible, robotic articles about local sports, Axios reports.

The Dispatch — which is notably owned by USA Today publisher Gannett — only started publishing the AI-generated sports pieces on August 18, using the bot to drum up quick-hit stories about the winners and losers in regional high school football and soccer matches. And though the paper’s ethics disclosure states that all AI-spun content featured in its reporting “must be verified for accuracy and factuality before being used in reporting,” we’d be surprised if a single human eye was laid on these articles before publishing.