Items tagged with AI
For years, we have known that AI can beat humans at games like Go, Starcraft, and up to 57 different Atari 2600 games. However, it is commonly believed that AI cannot beat humans at designing things, but that is not necessarily the case. Google has decided to use AI to design microchips for its next generation of Google Tensor Processing Unit, and it can be done in 6 hours, whereas humans can take several months or longer. When it comes to designing computer chips, one of the more laborious yet highly important tasks is laying out the components in what is called a chip floorplan. Where all the physical parts go can have a massive impact, affecting power consumption, performance, and chip area....
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Games are one of the best testbeds for AI as they require problem-solving, forward-thinking, and other skills that normally only humans possess. So far, AI has gotten a handle on games like Go and up to 57 different Atari 2600 titles, but those are not terribly difficult. What if AI was pitted against one of the most notoriously hard games of all time? As it turns out, that is exactly what Facebook wants to do to bring down NetHack. NetHack is an 80s text-based single-player dungeon exploration game with a focus on “discovering the detail of the dungeon and not simply killing everything in sight,” as the NetHack website explains. If you decide to kill everything in sight, or at least...
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During yesterday’s Google I/O event, we heard about several updates to Google software products, including Android 12 and Wear OS. Google also managed to bring in actor Michael Peña to tour the new Google quantum computing and AI campus. Today, we get to take a closer look at it so let us dive right in… Google’s Quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara, California, is a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility. It features the company’s first quantum data center, quantum hardware research laboratories, and quantum processor chip fabrication facilities that will all be used to facilitating the building of the first “error-corrected quantum computer for the...
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Do you remember discussing (or arguing) with your schoolteacher about how you would never use some of the lessons that they they taught? There were probably some things that you never used and simply forgot about, but what if you could never forget such extraneous information? As it turns out, AI and machine learning have this exact problem, but Facebook AI researchers are looking to tackle it by teaching AI to forget things. Typically, AI is rather good at various tasks, but when it comes to searching long-term memories, performance drops, and the cost of storage grows exponentially. This can be quite the problem as time goes on since we constantly take in new information that would need to...
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AI is spreading, and not in the creepy sci-fi dystopian kind of way, but by way of programs to help manage large tasks in critical business sectors, such as healthcare, finance, and defense. Now, Microsoft is releasing a tool called Counterfit, an “automation tool for security testing AI systems as an open-source project.” This way, companies will be able to “ensure that the algorithms used in their businesses are robust, reliable, and trustworthy.” As mentioned, AI systems are becoming more prevalent in business, powering many different services. Thus, these systems must be secure from adversaries so that important or confidential information is not lost. However, performing...
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Autonomous vehicles will likely become the future for getting around, but the technology is not quite there yet. We still hear about accidents that occur due to a driver not being behind the car's wheel or simple dumb mistakes. To help quell these issues in the future, NVIDIA has created the NVIDIA DRIVE Sim through its Omniverse, a collection of the company's core technologies. During the GTC keynote, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced the "next generation of autonomous vehicle simulation," called the NVIDIA DRIVE Sim. Purportedly, the sim provides a "high-fidelity simulation by tapping into NVIDIA's core technologies to deliver a powerful, cloud-based computing platform," which can...
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Nuance Communications is a company everyone has heard from but not many have heard of. The company’s technology powers Apple’s Siri voice assistant alongside various communications for healthcare and enterprise organizations. In 2014, it was rumored that Samsung might be interested in purchasing Nuance, but that deal never came to fruition. Now, tech-giant Microsoft has announced a plan to purchase Nuance for a hefty $19.7 billion, including debts, to focus on the healthcare industry. For quite some time, Microsoft has been working on improving global healthcare with technology and artificial intelligence (AI). In 2020, the company announced the AI for Health initiative to accelerate...
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Years ago, the method of navigating was either printing out directions from MapQuest or pulling out the absurdly large Rand-McNally map for the state and figuring it out the quickest way to your destination. You would not have access to live data like accidents, police activity, and road conditions as you do now with mobile devices. Since the “dark times,” Google has been “pushing the boundaries of what a map can do, propelled by the latest machine learning” and is “on track to bring over 100 AI-powered improvements to Google Maps.” Indoor Navigation Have you ever gotten lost or turned around in an airport, mall, train station, or other large, yet crowded location?...
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Amazon delivery drivers will have a tough choice ahead if they want to continue working for the retail giant. Starting this week, Amazon is requiring delivery drivers to agree to a "biometric consent" form giving the company permission to use surveillance equipment installed onboard all its delivery vans to track activities (inside and outside the vehicle) and even their behavior while driving. This move comes after a February report confirmed that the surveillance system manufactured by Netradyne, called Driveri, is designed to "[improve] driver behavior" and monitor behavior such as speeding, making illegal U-turns, braking too hard, and failing to acknowledge stop signs. The system can...
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In March, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on a podcast to talk about the future of augmented and virtual reality. In his discussion, he explained that he wanted to see Facebook manufacture its own hardware and thought that the platforms would be the next big thing in tech. Furthermore, he explained that interacting with AR/VR worlds would require neural interfaces for human-computer interaction. Now, Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) Research is showing off technology in that vein. As augmented reality and virtual reality technologies mature and develop, new ways of interacting with these platforms are needed. If the technology is used in public, it would be not easy to use voice commands or have...
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Deepfakes are beginning to grow in popularity and quality, such as the recent Tom Cruise deepfakes posted to TikTok. Deepfakes raise concerns over what is and isn't real when it comes to various media formats. Subsequently, researchers at the University of Buffalo have developed an AI system that can detect whether an image is real or not with some clever tricks. One of the most popular ways of generating human faces is using a generative adversary network (GAN) model. As the researcher's paper explains, these models can "synthesize highly realistic human faces that are difficult to discern from real ones visually." In fact, the images you see above are what the researchers used, and they came...
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OpenAI’s CLIP, a general-purpose vision system, is gaining attention this week for some rather interesting findings regarding its performance. From being tricked using text to perhaps being a little bit racist, CLIP still has a lot to learn. As the OpenAI blog explains, fifteen years ago, “Quiroga et al. discovered that the human brain possesses multimodal neurons,” which are neurons that react to abstract concepts rather than specific things. Recently, researchers found that CLIP had these multimodal neurons as well, and they only fired for specific things. In CLIP's case, the researchers found a “Spider-Man” neuron that fired when images of spiders, the text...
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Deepfakes have been around for a few years now, and with each passing day, it seems as though the technology keeps getting better and more lifelike. We saw this last year with a Back To The Future deepfake starring Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Holland, rather than real Doc and Marty. Now, deepfaker and visual effects artist Chris Ume has taken Tom Cruise’s face and put it on an actor to make a deepfake TikTok series, and it is wild. For those who do not know, deepfakes are AI-generated images or video which can be made to look like a specific person. The way they work, in essence, is by training AI with millions of images of the targeted person. The trained AI is then paired with an...
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Recently, Microsoft patented the creation of an AI chatbot for a specific person, whether they were alive or not. Now, a genealogy company called MyHeritage has partnered with deep learning and image processing company D-ID to create something called “Deep Nostalgia.” This technology can bring a person's ancestors back to life by running a process that upscales, sharpens, and animates any image uploaded. Announced at RootsTech Connect 2021, the world’s largest genealogy conference, “Deep Nostalgia” is a licensed technology that uses D-ID’s AI Face Platform in the backend. Essentially, MyHeritage filmed people for a basic set of motions which could then be paired...
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You might not be able to find a current generation graphics card in stock and/priced anywhere close to MSRP, but be that as it may, NVIDIA still managed to rake in $5 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter, its most ever for the last quarter of the year. Not only did NVIDIA set a record, it increased its Q4 revenue by a staggering 61 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago. That's a big time gain. "Q4 was another record quarter, capping a breakout year for NVIDIA’s computing platforms," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Our pioneering work in accelerated computing has led to gaming becoming the world’s most popular entertainment, to supercomputing being...
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How do you make high bandwidth memory (HBM) even better? Lower for the price, for one. But aside from that, infusing it with artificial intelligence (AI) processing power is a surefire way to make HBM even more attractive for certain market segments, and that is precisely what Samsung has done—it has developed the world's HBM with AI processing power, and is calling it HBM-PIM (processing in memory). "Our groundbreaking HBM-PIM is the industry’s first programmable PIM solution tailored for diverse AI-driven workloads such as HPC, training and inference. We plan to build upon this breakthrough by further collaborating with AI solution providers for even more advanced PIM-powered applications,"...
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Today, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise announced a partnership to bring Azure and edge computing to the ultimate edge: space. This will allow Azure workloads, local computing, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to be leveraged on the International Space Station (ISS). As Tom Keane, Corporate VP of Azure Global, explains, “Astronauts and space explorers deserve access to the best cloud computing technologies and advanced processing.” When it comes to working and computing in space, “Sometimes analysis needs to be done immediately at the edge,” or “other times the analysis is so massively complex that it can only be performed with the power of the...
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Today is a pretty big day for gamers on the go—it marks the launch of GeForce RTX 30 series laptops sporting the company's latest generation Ampere GPUs, in mobile form. And right on cue, NVIDIA has released a driver update and a bolstered version of its GeForce Experience utility, the latter of which brings support for WhisperMode 2.0. There is a bit to unpack there. Let's start with the laptop GPUs, of which there are three main versions: GeForce RTX 3080, GeForce RTX 3070, and GeForce RTX 3060. Each one can be configured to different power profiles and clockspeeds by the OEMs. And if you are curious what to expect, have a look at our GeForce RTX 3080 laptop performance preview, as well...
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In 2017, Microsoft filed a patent entitled “Creating a Conversational Chat Bot Of A Specific Person,” which was recently finally approved by the USPTO on December 1st, 2020. Over 21 pages of material are provided in the patent, covering the software, hardware, and other minutiae that come up with this idea. However, the basic premise is that Microsoft will scan and scrape "social data" from the internet about you, another person or perhaps even a loved one that has passed away. Then, the company will use that data to create a chatbot with the personality of the person being targeted, for a sort of persona replication, using machine learning and AI. This chatbot can then be paired...
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Today we have an assortment of digital assistants to help us look up the weather, control the lighting, and all sorts of other tasks. Whether it's enlisting the aid of Siri or tapping into Alexa's growing set of skills, there is a new level of convenience at our disposal. Pretty cool, but take heed—one day it be us doing the bidding of super smart artificial intelligence (AI) schemes instead of the other way around. Sounds like science fiction, because right now, that is exactly what it is—Skynet scenarios and all that jazz. However, an international team of scientists and researchers have published an article outlining why an advanced AI would present "catastrophic risks" to humankind,...
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Natural language understanding (NLU) is a massive yet challenging goal for AI. According to Microsoft, one of the benchmarks for NLU, SuperGLUE, is “currently among the most challenging”. It seems that the test was not all that bad, though, as Microsoft is now at the top of the leaderboard, beating out human baselines. The SuperGLUE benchmark has a series of ten tasks, which include things such as question answering, use of context, premise, and other language components to test AI. Microsoft uses the example of a task with the following: Given the premise “the child became immune to the disease” and the question “what’s the cause for this?,” the model...
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Boston Dynamics has long impressed us with its robotic creations, from the adorable Spot robot dog to the humanoid-like Atlas. Good ol' Spot is now a commercial product, and is available for anyone with enough coin ($74,500 to be exact) to purchase one; heck, it will even fetch you a beer. Atlas, on the other hand, has impressed us with its gymnastic skills and its calm demeanor even when abused by its human handlers. Now Boston Dynamics' family of robots is having some fun to celebrate the close of 2020. Spot and Atlas were joined by their oddball sibling Handle to shake their booties on the dance floor to "Do You Love Me" by The Contours. The video starts off impressive enough...
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