Items tagged with AI
Even though many are out of the office right now, Microsoft has made a sly announcement of a new version of Office software. This recent Office announcement came at Microsoft Ignite 2020, and the latest software is slated for the second half of 2021. At the conference, Microsoft announced the next versions of Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, Skype for Business Server, and Project Server coming in the latter part of 2021. Just below that, though, was a little blurb about a new Microsoft Office edition: Microsoft Office will also see a new perpetual release for both Windows and Mac, in the second half of 2021. The first takeaway from this is that a new version of Microsoft Office is in the works....
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Microsoft is making AI a priority with its products from now on and this week they have announced a partnership with OpenAI to license the GPT-3 AI model exclusively. With this license, Microsoft can develop programs to write, translate language, and summarize long-form code. Back in March, Microsoft and OpenAI teamed up to develop an Azure-based supercomputer. Besides knowing that it would have 285,000 cores, 10,000 GPUs, and 400Gb/s network connectivity, details were scarce. Since Microsoft was working with OpenAI, it could be assumed that training AI would be the supercomputer's purpose. Now, it seems the relationship has blossomed into something more. Recently, OpenAI announced the GPT-3...
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Last year, Qualcomm announced their Cloud AI 100 platform to provide low-power high-performance AI inference acceleration. Now, these devices are coming to fruition in a variety of form factors for the data center and the individual user. AI inferencing is an important step in developing AI and utilizing it effectively. Inferencing in general is used in many technologies. AI inferencing, as the name states, is a way for AI to “infer” things about what it is trained on. Basically, AI can condense what it knows, reduce the number of steps to figure something out, and infer from there. This optimizes the AI and how it runs, making it so you do not need as strong of hardware to complete...
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Google Maps is used by millions of people every day to make commutes easier and hopefully faster. As the saying goes, “work smarter, not harder,” but Google is looking to translate that to “drive smarter, not harder” with AI implementation into Google Maps. According to Google, over 1 billion kilometers (621371189mi) are traveled every day with Google Maps. Subsequently, a whole load of aggregate location data is collected. While this feature has been manipulated, it generally provides data on what traffic looks like immediately. Immediate information, however, does not help you plan a route when things can change spontaneously. As Google states, the gap between now and...
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For a little while now, Elon Musk’s side project, Neuralink, has made the news rounds. Now, we may finally get to see something tangible during a webcast coming up on Friday. Founded in 2017, the Neuralink Corporation is Elon Musk’s business for creating a brain-machine interface. Over time, bits of information have slowly started to trickle out. On August 1st of this year, information was released pertaining to the capabilities of the Neuralink project. When someone on Twitter asked Elon Musk about listening to music through Neuralink, he replied with a simple “yes.” When asked about other features, Musk confirmed things such as possibly controlling hormone levels,...
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The United States Patent and Trademark Office recently ruled that only flesh and blood humans can be granted patents, not artificial intelligence systems, thus ensuring that a Skynet scenario will play out (you didn't think I'd talk about AI without a Skynet reference, did you? Pshaw!). Now it faces a lawsuit over its decision. What set this in motion is the filing of two patent applications in July of last year by Stephen Thaler, a physicist and AI researcher, on behalf of an AI "creative engine" called DABUS. One of the patents relates to an adjustable food container and the other one has to do with an emergency flashlight. On both applications, Thaler listed DABUS as the inventor. While neither...
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Since 2014, the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has been working on wireless monitoring technologies. Now, they have paired this technology with artificial intelligence to transcribe what a person is doing in a room accurately. The team, led by Professor Dina Katabi, has taken their project to a new level: identifying activities. According to their article, “their system can now identify what activity a person is doing, whether that’s sleeping, reading, cooking or watching TV - and all without capturing any sensitive visual data of the activities.” This system, dubbed RF-Diary, paired floor maps and wireless signals to train AI to recognize...
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As artificial intelligence expands exponentially, the hardware powering it must expand as well. Therefore, Microsoft’s Azure is announcing their powerful ND A100 v4 virtual machine series. Each device will be kitted out with eight impressive NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPUs. The ND A100 v4 won’t work alone, however, as the Azure blog post states that, “Just like the human brain is composed of interconnected neurons, our ND A100 v4-based clusters can scale up to thousands of GPUs with an unprecedented 1.6 Tb/s of interconnect bandwidth per VM.” When this horsepower is put together and scaled properly, any level of AI work can be accomplished. Azure claims that the bandwidth...
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Who needs earbuds when you can simply listen to your favorite songs in your head? Elon Musk recently provided more information about the mysterious Neuralink. Neuralink will reportedly be able to provide users with “enhanced abilities and reasoning” and allow them to stream music straight to their brains. The Neuralink Corporation was originally founded in 2017 by Elon Musk and other contributors. The corporation held their first press conference in 2019 and introduced the Neuralink brain-machine interface (BMI). According to a paper published in August 2019, Neuralink has built a machine that is capable of inserting arrays of very flexible electrode threads into the human brain....
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For the third time in a row, NVIDIA ran a clean sweep of MLPerf's set of AI and machine learning performance benchmarking suite. This time, however, the distinction of fastest GPU went to NVIDIA's A100 Tensor Core graphics solution, which is based on the company's 7-nanometer Ampere architecture that was recently introduced. "The A100 Tensor Core GPU demonstrated the fastest performance per accelerator on all eight MLPerf benchmarks. For overall fastest time to solution at scale, the DGX SuperPOD system, a massive cluster of DGX A100 systems connected with HDR InfiniBand, also set eight new performance milestones," NVIDIA stated in a celebratory blog post. MLPerf is an industry benchmarking group...
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NVIDIA has partnered with the University of Florida (UF) to build an artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer that will be the fastest in all of academia. Or more specifically, it will be capable of a whopping 700 petaflops of AI performance, made possible by enhancing the university's existing HiPerGator supercomputer with NVIDIA's DGX SuperPod architecture. This essentially represents an infusion of NVIDIA's DGX A100 systems, each of which wields eight Tensor Core GPUs based on the company's 7-nanometer Ampere architecture. And each of those GPUs touts 54 billion transistors capable of delivering 5 petaflops of performance in a single node, along with the ability to handle 1.5TB of data per...
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There are currently several AI tools whose purpose is to create more life-like images. The most recent addition is PULSE (Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration), an AI-infused application that can transform low-resolution pixelated images into high-resolution images. The creators of PULSE’s mainly focused on human faces, but others have already used the tool to create slightly terrifying images of video game characters that may just haunt your dreams. PULSE was developed by a team at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. It varies from other tools because “instead of starting with the LR (low resolution) image and slowly adding detail, PULSE traverses the high-resolution...
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has many different uses, including facial recognition and the creation of photo-realistic human faces. However, these various AI applications have not always hit the mark. They often create very basic or unnerving images that fail to bridge the "uncanny valley" gap. A team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and City University of Hong Kong have created one of the most advanced image generators to date. DeepFaceDrawing relies on artificial intelligence to transform sketches of human faces into high-quality images. Similar AI frameworks require detailed, well-drawn sketches. DeepFaceDrawing is intended to help those with very little drawing experience....
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John Henry was a steel driving railroad man who, according to legend, bested a steam-powered rock drilling machine in a competition many, many years ago. I'm reminded of this because it's one of my favorite songs performed by my late grandfather and great uncle, and now decades later, man versus machine is still a relevant topic as the United States Air Force gets read to pit a AI-powered autonomous fighter jet against a human pilot. Things have changed dramatically since the days of John Henry and steam-powered machines. Artificial intelligence has improved machines by leaps and bounds, and every so often, we are reminded of the potential AI holds. For example, when IBM's Watson beat the greatest...
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Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are hot topics in virtually all tech sectors at this moment in time. The technology is gaining traction in many industries, from massive social networks that are analyzing mountains of data, to the tiniest of IoT smart home and mobile devices. Even during our everyday workflow here at HotHardware, we currently utilize a few key AI-enabled applications to enhance our content. Further, if you’ve ever talked to a smartphone for speech-to-text messaging or for Google Assistant recommendations, AI has impacted your connected experiences as well. For those that may be unfamiliar with how machine learning and AI technologies work, we should probably...
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One of the first arcade games you may remember playing on an Atari 2600, what seems like a million years ago, was Pac-Man. However, this was not exactly a faithful recreation of the true classic co-op arcade version. Now, several decades later, NVIDIA trained an AI model called GameGAN to recreate a proper recreation, and what makes this so interesting is that there is no underlying game engine, whatsoever. These days, the original Pac-Man arcade game is easy enough to recreate on virtually any modern platform, though this approach with NVIDIA machine learning is unique and far more challenging. GameGAN did not have the benefit of being programmed with the game's fundamental rules or...
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Microsoft recently announced that it teamed up with OpenAI to create one of the world's fastest supercomputers running on the Azure infrastructure. The supercomputer project received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft, and while it hasn't offered complete details on the machine, it has said the supercomputer has 285,000 cores and would have ranked in the top five of the TOP500 supercomputer rankings. The only other specifications that Microsoft offers on the supercomputer is that the machine has 10,000 GPUs and 400 Gb/s of networking connectivity per server. With Microsoft claiming that the machine would've been in the top five of the supercomputer rankings, it would need to reach more than...
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Researchers around the world are working on new types of artificial intelligence (AI) that can dominate in games created by humans. Typically, these AI complete video games with much higher scores than a human is capable of achieving. A team of Uber AI researchers has developed a new set of algorithms capable of defeating any Atari 2600 game, and it's called Go-Explore. The developers say that Go-Explore can defeat Atari 2600 games with "superhuman" scores, including games that previous AI had trouble with. The team says the key to their new system is that it remembers promising states and returns to the states before it begins exploring the game. Uber AI researchers say that Go-Explore improved...
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Anyone who has ever spent half an hour creating the perfect meme to express what you could have typed in a few words has probably used Imgflip before. The folks at Imgflip created a deep artificial neural network that takes the images that are commonly used to create memes and puts its own text along with them. Artificial Intelligence and neural networks have been harnessed to do just about everything these days. After spending vastly too much time clicking on the various images and seeing what the deep artificial neural network to come up with, we may have finally harnessed the true power of AI. Imgflip says that nothing about the text generation is hardcoded except a maximum length that is...
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We’ve seen Alphabet/Google’s DeepMind AI crush human opponents in games like StarCraft II, but now the team is going back in time to tackle games from 4 decades ago. Dubbed Agent57, this new AI is gaining attention for learning how to play a total of – you guessed it – 57 Atari 2600 games. The DeepMind team often looks to existing games to help improve its AI routines, and it explains that they provide “excellent testing ground for building adaptive algorithms” that can encompass a “rich suite of tasks which players must develop sophisticated behavioral strategies to master.” More importantly, each game has its own high...
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Microsoft says that the health of people and communities around the world has been improving, noting that the steep decline in child and maternal mortality is a key indicator of improvement. Despite that improvement, the company says that progress is not equal around the world, and there is a need to focus on societal issues such as reducing health inequality and improving access to care for underserved populations. The software giant believes that advancements in technology can help accelerate the scale of new solutions, and it is introducing the AI for Health initiative. The AI for Health initiative is Microsoft's fifth Microsoft AI for Good program, which is a $165 million initiative to empower...
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Each year at CES in January, manufacturers from many different parts of the consumer electronics and gadget industries head to Las Vegas to show off their latest wares. Samsung is is always at the show and typically shows off its latest computers, TVs, smartphones, and other devices. However, Samsung will be at CES 2020, and it will be unveiling something vastly different than what it has shown off before, and he, she, it is called Neon. Neon is said to be an artificial intelligence technology that was developed by Samsung Technology and Advanced Research Lab in the U.S. and is expected to be introduced as a new AI platform from the Korean tech giant. Neon also currently has an official...
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