Lifeboat Foundation

AI has already started replacing voice agents’ jobs. Now, companies are exploring ways to replace the existing computer-generated voice models with synthetic versions of human voices. Truecaller, the widely known caller ID service, is the latest to take this approach with its announcement that it will now allow customers to use its AI-powered Assistant to answer phone calls in their own voice.

The new experience comes via a partnership with Microsoft that allows the Swedish company to use the Redmond giant’s Personal Voice technology, introduced in November as part of Azure AI Speech.

By using Microsoft’s Personal Voice, Truecaller’s Assistant, available to paid users, will be able to replicate users’ voices in order to greet and respond to callers. This is in addition to the preset system-generated voice options available to users through the digital assistance feature that helps answer phone calls for you, screen unknown calls, take messages, respond on your behalf or even record the call.

More funding is being poured into startups focused on AI. DeepL, which builds automated text translation and writing tools that compete against the likes of Google Translate and Grammarly, said on Wednesday that it has raised an additional $300 million. It is now valued at $2 billion, post-money.

This round, led by Index Ventures, underscores the frenetic interest that investors have in AI startups at the moment and how companies are capitalizing on that opportunity while they can. DeepL, which is still not profitable, was valued at $1 billion in January 2023, when it raised just over $100 million.

The new money will be used to drive more sales and marketing, as well as further research and development.

NY-based startup and EV infrastructure specialist Gravity has launched a new line of universal EV charger “trees” it hopes will bring convenient charging sessions curbside on city streets. The deployment will start modestly, but Gravity is targeting a street charging network that is” more expansive than Tesla’s current Supercharger network.”

Gravity Inc. is a startup focused on sustainable fleets and the infrastructure required to operate them efficiently. In 2021, Gravity began rolling out a fleet of all-electric Mustang Mach-E yellow cabs around New York City while partnering with building owners and parking operators to implement electric vehicle charging infrastructure to support individual drivers and large EV fleets.

At that time, Gravity was already teasing plans to open the “only true fast-charging site in Manhattan” to support the taxis and local EV owners. In October 2023, Gravity released a full suite of 500kW EV chargers, some of the fastest we’ve seen.

Editor’s note: This story is part of ‘Meet a UChicagoan,’ a regular series focusing on the people who make UChicago a distinct intellectual community. Read about the others here.

When asked to explain the difference between recyclable plastics, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering graduate student Sam Marsden pulled out a paperclip chain and a length of small strings crudely knotted together.

The paperclip chain represented a highly recyclable plastic like the polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, found in soda bottles and the fibers in clothes. These can be broken down to the molecular level—ie., the individual paperclips—and rebuilt into like-new materials.

An electric car doesn’t need a clutch, but GM’s potentially developing one anyway.

NVIDIA’s Blackwell GB200 AI servers are anticipated to see major traction, reaching 2 million units shipped in 2025 & utilizing new packaging tech.

NVIDIA To Overcome CoWoS Supply Chain Bottlenecks By Shifting To The Newer “PFLO” Standard, 420K Units Shipping This Year With Up To 2 Million Anticipated For 2025

The success of NVIDIA’s Hopper AI products last year not only uplifted the company’s economics to new heights but also revealed massive flaws in the supply chain. Due to these flaws, the products became victims of long order backlogs. The main culprits at that time were HBM & CoWoS supply, which was in a much inferior position to what it is today. Despite seeing massive upgrades, NVIDIA has decided to resolve CoWoS issues with its latest Blackwell product, as the firm is rumored to have switched to a newer packaging technology by 2025–2026.

It’s called the magnetotail, of course.

So dl what you can…

WASHINGTON, May 22 (Reuters) — The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to advance a bill that would make it easier for the Biden administration to restrict the export of artificial intelligence systems, citing concerns China could exploit them to bolster its military capabilities.

The bill, sponsored by House Republicans Michael McCaul and John Molenaar and Democrats Raja Krishnamoorthi and Susan Wild, also would give the Commerce Department express authority to bar Americans from working with foreigners to develop AI systems that pose risks to U.S. national security.

Continue reading “US lawmakers advance bill to make it easier to curb exports of AI models” »

At a minimum, systems will need 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, to accommodate both the memory requirements and the on-disk storage requirements needed for things like large language models (LLMs; even so-called “small language models” like Microsoft’s Phi-3, still use several billion parameters). Microsoft says that all of the Snapdragon X Plus and Elite-powered PCs being announced today will come with the Copilot+ features pre-installed, and that they’ll begin shipping on June 18th.

But the biggest new requirement, and the blocker for virtually every Windows PC in use today, will be for an integrated neural processing unit, or NPU. Microsoft requires an NPU with performance rated at 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS), a high-level performance figure that Microsoft, Qualcomm, Apple, and others use for NPU performance comparisons. Right now, that requirement can only be met by a single chip in the Windows PC ecosystem, one that isn’t even quite available yet: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus, launching in the new Surface and a number of PCs from the likes of Dell, Lenovo, HP, Asus, Acer, and other major PC OEMs in the next couple of months. All of those chips have NPUs capable of 45 TOPS, just a shade more than Microsoft’s minimum requirement.