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The world’s first fully AI-generated movie has been announced with the trailer for Next Stop Paris predictably containing one too many fingers.

TCLtv+ Studios is a brand new production team and its first release will be a short AI-generated romcom featuring professional voice actors and an original script but the imagery will be generated with AI tools.

The studio is a brand of TCL (which stands for Technology Group Corp.), a partially state-owned Chinese company that predominantly sells consumer electronics including televisions, mobile phones, air conditioners, and more.

Three years after introducing its second-generation “neuromorphic” computer chip, Intel on Wednesday announced the company has assembled 1,152 of the parts into a single, parallel-processing system called Hala Point, in partnership with the US Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories.

The Hala Point system’s 1,152 Loihi 2 chips enable a total of 1.15 billion artificial neurons, Intel said, “and 128 billion synapses distributed over 140,544 neuromorphic processing cores.” That is an increase from the previous Intel multi-chip Loihi system, debuted in 2020, called Pohoiki Springs, which used just 768 Loihi 1 chips.

Sandia Labs intends to use the system for what it calls “brain-scale computing research,” to solve problems in areas of device physics, computer architecture, computer science, and informatics.

CWI senior researcher Sander Bohté started working on neuromorphic computing already in 1998 as a PhD-student, when the subject was barely on the map. In recent years, Bohté and his CWI-colleagues have realized a number of algorithmic breakthroughs in spiking neural networks (SNNs) that make neuromorphic computing finally practical: in theory many AI-applications can become a factor of a hundred to a thousand more energy-efficient. This means that it will be possible to put much more AI into chips, allowing applications to run on a smartwatch or a smartphone. Examples are speech recognition, gesture recognition and the classification of electrocardiograms (ECG).

“I am really grateful that CWI, and former group leader Han La Poutré in particular, gave me the opportunity to follow my interest, even though at the end of the 1990s neural networks and neuromorphic computing were quite unpopular”, says Bohté. “It was high-risk work for the long haul that is now bearing fruit.”

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) more closely resemble the biology of the brain. They process pulses instead of the continuous signals in classical neural networks. Unfortunately, that also makes them mathematically much more difficult to handle. For many years SNNs were therefore very limited in the number of neurons they could handle. But thanks to clever algorithmic solutions Bohté and his colleagues have managed to scale up the number of trainable spiking neurons first to thousands in 2021, and then to tens of millions in 2023.