Lifeboat Foundation

“I’m starting to see these companies and startups that are, ‘How do you optimize your cloud, and how do you manage your cloud?’ There’s a lot of people focused on questions like, ‘You’ve got a lot of data, can I store it better for you?’ Or, ‘You’ve got a lot of new applications; can I help you monitor them better?’ Because all the tools you used to have don’t work anymore,” he said. Maybe the age of digital transformation is over, he said, and we’re now in the age of cloud optimization.

United itself has bet heavily on the cloud, specifically AWS as its preferred cloud provider. Unsurprisingly, United, too, is looking at how the company can optimize its cloud usage, from both a cost and reliability perspective. Like for so many companies that are going through this process, that also means looking at developer productivity and adding automation and DevOps practices into the mix. “We’re there. We have an established presence [in the cloud], but now we’re kind of in the market to try to continue to optimize as well,” Birnbaum said.

But that also comes back to reliability. Like all airlines, United still operates a lot of legacy systems — and they still work. “Frankly, we are extra careful as we move through this journey, to make sure we don’t disrupt the operation or create self-inflicted wounds,” he said.

In this edition of TechCrunch’s Week in Review (WiR) newsletter, we cover Boston Dynamics’ new humanoid robot and more.

Concern about a generative AI bubble is growing. To defend against disillusionment, measure its concrete value.

Researchers at the University of Bristol have uncovered the secrets behind the quiet operation of futuristic aircraft equipped with innovative embedded engines.

The study sheds light on the noise generation and transmission mechanisms of boundary layer ingesting (BLI) ducted fans. These engines draw in air from both the front and the surface of the aircraft’s body and operate with high efficiency, reducing fuel consumption compared to traditional engines.

Researchers have developed a high-power hybrid sodium-ion battery that can be charged in seconds, potentially replacing lithium-ion batteries.

FineWeb: 15 trillion tokens of high quality web data the web has to offer.

The 🍷 dataset consists of more than 15T tokens of cleaned and deduplicated english web data from CommonCrawl.

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

The LASSIE project is preparing for a time when people and robots explore space together.

Learn more about how the #space economy can improve life on #Earth from our new insight report, ‘Space: The $1.8 Trillion Opportunity for Global Economic Growth’:

Space is approaching a new frontier. The space economy is expected to be worth $1.8 trillion by 2035 as satellite and rocket-enabled technologies become increasingly prevalent, according to a new report.

Continue reading “Space is booming. Here’s how to embrace the $1.8 trillion opportunity” »

Everyone is in a big hurry to get the latest and greatest GPU accelerators to build generative AI platforms. Those who can’t get GPUs, or have custom devices that are better suited to their workloads than GPUs, deploy other kinds of accelerators.

The companies designing these AI compute engines have two things in common. First, they are all using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co as their chip etching foundry, and many are using TSMC as their socket packager. And second, they have not lost their minds. With the devices launched so far this year, AI compute engine designers are hanging back a bit rather than try to be on the bleeding edge of process and packaging technology so they can make a little money on products and processes that were very expensive to develop.

Nothing shows this better than the fact that the future “Blackwell” B100 and B200 GPU accelerators from Nvidia, which are not even going to start shipping until later this year, are based on the N4P process at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. This is a refined variant of the N4 process that the prior generation of “Hopper” H100 and H200 GPUs used, also a 4 nanometer product.

Construction is the world’s largest industry, employing seven percent of the planet’s working-age adults, contributing 13 percent of the world’s GDP and completing floor space equivalent to the city of Paris every seven days.

The construction industry is also the most inefficient, least digitised and most polluting industry (37% of ALL emissions), so change is imperative from macro economic necessity alone. For the builders of the world faced with a jigsaw puzzle of partial digital solutions and chronic labor and supply chain issues, the margins are growing ever-thinner and the necessity is to change or perish.

British company Automated Architecture (AUAR) has a thoroughly ingenious solution and it has enlisted an all-star cast of financial backers in short order: Morgan Stanley, ABB Robotics, Rival Holdings (USA), Vandenbussche NV (Belgium) with VCs such as Miles Ahead and Bacchus Venture Capital (Jim Horowitz et al) helping to get the initial idea off the ground.