Items tagged with Artificial Intelligence
Facebook's artificial intelligence division has announced a new long-term research project called Ego4D, which is an ambitious effort to expand the boundaries and capabilities of AI to understand and learn our habits from a first-person perspective, via AR glasses and headsets. The hardware aspect, while critical, is secondary to the scope of what Facebook is trying to accomplish. At face value, this is about teaching AI to perceive and the world through your own eyes, to help you with a variety of everyday and/or occasional tasks. That's where some kind of head gear comes into play—it serves as the first-person conduit from which the AI is fed external data from your surroundings, experiences,...
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NVIDIA is thumping its chest over a round of impressive benchmark runs that highlight the potency of mixing its A100 accelerators with either Arm or x86 hardware. Regardless of the CPU platform, NVIDIA contends that its accelerators enable the "best results in AI inference," and it has another batch of benchmarks to support its claim. The GPU maker is especially interested in highlighting results obtained with A100 and Arm hardware. Traditionally, data centers have turned to x86 silicon, which is well-suited for the kinds of demanding workloads they're constantly being hammered with, for a variety of applications. But Arm has been gaining ground. "The Arm architecture is making headway into data...
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Drivers contracted to make delivers for Amazon claim that special cameras installed in their delivery vans are unfairly dinging them for road violations that did not occur, resulting in loss of extra income and other bonuses that they might otherwise be eligible to receive. Amazon, meanwhile, says the cameras have led to fewer accidents and less instances of distracted driving. Amazon earlier this year partnered with Netradyne to install the camera systems into Amazon-branded delivery vans. Called "driveri," these are more than simple cameras. They're quad-camera systems with four HD lenses, including one that faces the road, another that faces the driver, and two side lenses that collectively...
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Most people would be happy just to get their mitts on a single GPU, in the current landscape. The US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory is much more fortunate, having procured a whopping 2,240 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs (based on Ampere) for its Polaris supercomputer to "supercharge researcher and discovery." As such, Polaris qualifies as the largest GPU-based supercomputer on the planet, with thousands of A100s working in tandem with hundreds of second-generation and, sometime later, third-generation AMD EPYC server processors. More precisely, there are 560 nodes spread out over 40 racks, each with four A100 GPUs. As currently constructed, each node features a 32-core/64-thread...
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I have only dabbled in programming, and from my limited experience, I can appreciate that really good coding is an art form that not everyone possesses. Whether I have it or not, I can't say—I've never dived too deeply into programming to find out. If I ever do, Microsoft's new GitHub Copilot might prove to be a boon. What exactly is Copilot? It is an AI pair programmer that helps coders hammer out lines and functions faster and with less work, especially with the more mundane stuff. Developed in collaboration with OpenAI, an AI researcher company co-founded by Elon Musk and backed by Microsoft (by way of a $1 billion investment in 2019), Copilot taps into the power of artificial intelligence...
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Scientists and researchers are forever on the pursuit of increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence technologies, especially today, with AI playing such a big role in so many different products and services. One of the more interesting developments in AI has to do with nanowire networks being trained to solve simple problems in a chaotic state. The underlying concept is based on the scientific theory that human brains function best when they are "at the edge of chaos," otherwise known as a "critical state." This is where some neuroscientists say humans can achieve maximum brain performance. As such, an international team of scientists at the University of Sydney and Japan's National Institute...
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During its GTC 2021 keynote today, NVIDIA unveiled a new product for high performance computing (HPC) clients, its first-ever data center CPU called Grace. Based on Arm's architecture, NVIDIA claims Grace serves up 10x better performance than the fastest servers on the market currently, for complex artificial intelligence and HPC workloads. To be clear, though this is NVIDIA's first data center CPU, it is not intended to compete head-to-head against Intel's Xeon lineup and AMD's EPYC processors. NVIDIA made a point to say this, noting it continues to provide full support for all big iron server CPUs, including x86, Arm, and Power architectures. Instead, Grace is more of a niche product, in that...
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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 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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Anyone who has ever tried to touch up a professional photograph knows that it can be a slow, painstaking process, depending on the image and what exactly needs manipulated. To help with that, NVIDIA is introducing GPU-accelerated neural filters to Adobe Photoshop, which leverage artificial intelligence and its GeForce RTX GPUs to potentially speed up these kinds of edits in a big way. Or you could just play around with all this fancy technology to see what you might look like in 30 years. You can see this in the collage above. The subject in the center is the original photo, flanked on other side by a younger version of himself and an older depiction, both obtained by adjusting a simple slider...
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Many in the tech world are familiar with the term “Moore’s Law.” Moore’s Law has served as a guiding light for many tech companies over the last few decades when it comes to increasing transistor density. However, both scientists and tech industries have been concerned about when Moore’s Law will cease to be relevant. What will then come next? It was recently proposed that “Huang’s Law” may be the next big thing, especially with respect to artificial intelligence. Moore’s Law is an observation named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. Moore observed in the 1960s that transistor densities doubled every year and that this process would...
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Star Wars fans are likely familiar with the scene where Luke Skywalker receives a new hand. Luke twitches his hand as he responds to being poked by a robot. This kind of technology is no longer only attainable in fantasy or science fiction. Researchers at RMIT University have created new electronic skin that replicates the way human skin feels pain. According to lead researcher Dr. Madhu Bhaskaran, “We’re sensing things all the time through the skin but our pain response only kicks in at a certain point, like when we touch something too hot or too sharp.” Previous technologies were unable to mimic what human skin typically does when it feels pain from temperature or pressure...
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The proliferation of 'fake news' on social media is not just annoying, it has the potential to influence elections and policies, depending on the subject matter and how believable the content. In an effort to weed out misleading content and "combat disinformation," Microsoft is launching its Video Authenticator tool to detect so-called deepfakes. A 'deepfake' is a type of synthetic media—photos, videos, or audio files—that has been manipulated by artificial intelligence, and can sometimes be hard to spot. That's not always the case. In some instances, deepfakes are creepily obvious. But in other instances, a deepfake can make it seem as though a person said or did something, when...
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Are artificially intelligent pilots better at taking to the skies than human fliers? We are about to find out. The final competition in DARPA's AlphaDogfight trials are set to take place on August 18-20, though virtually instead of in-person because of the Coronavirus pandemic. And don't worry, nobody will be harmed in this competition (just potentially hurt egos). Human pilots and AI opponents will not actually be flying real fighter jets and shooting one another down. The dogfights will take place in a virtual reality F-16 simulator. The matchup will culminate on the last day of the competition, pitting the top AI against an experienced Air Force fighter pilot, where virtual pride is on the...
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Sometimes I get a hankering for a juicy burger, and if I happen to pass by a Burger King, a Whopper (with extra pickles, don't @me) will suffice. It looks like I'm not the only one. Apparently the Autopilot feature in Tesla vehicles can confuse circular Burger King restaurant signs with stop signs, and will slow down accordingly. This is part of a new "Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control" feature that Tesla is beta testing, though to be clear, it's not supposed to slow down for restaurant signs, Burger King or otherwise. Burger King ran with the idea anyway, and for a brief period, was offering a free Whopper to Tesla owners who shared a picture of their smart car stopped at one of its locations....
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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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NVIDIA made some big promises when it first outed its Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology. Through the wonders of artificial intelligence and machine learning, DLSS aimed to make games look better at higher resolutions, and boost framerates without overburdening the GPU. Results were mixed, though, and certain limitations held the technology back. Now with the introduction of DLSS 2.0, NVIDIA is promising even bigger and better things. DLSS 2.0 delivers a "big leap in AI rendering" and breaks free of several existing constraints. The biggest one is game support—DLSS 2.0 has the potential to be more broadly supported in games because, unlike before, it does not require training...
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Multiple facets of technology are trending towards artificial intelligence these days, in applications both big and small. As that's been happening, graphics processing units (GPUs) have taken on the heavy lifting, though researchers at Rice University have cooked up a new machine learning scheme they say is more efficient when run on central processing units (CPUs). It should come as no surprise that the computer scientists from Rice University are being supported by collaborators from Intel, which has a vested interest in anything that can tap into its CPUs. There's a lot of money to be made by leveraging AI—NVIDIA, for example, reported a 41 percent increase in its fourth quarter revenue,...
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The true measure of a chatbot is not simply its ability to offer responses to questions, or even to just to make sense when 'conversing' with a human. Instead, it is the ability to allow a flesh and blood person to suspend disbelief and feel as though they are chatting with an actual intelligent being (and do it without being offensive, which is challenging, as Microsoft discovered). Google claims its new Meena chatbot is better at this than another other "conversational agent." Calling Meena a chatbot is selling it short. It is an end-to-end, neural conversational model that learns to respond with replies that make actual sense, given whatever context is at hand. Google says Meena consists of...
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Just a few days prior to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Samsung teased the creation of an artificial human, and it had our minds racing at the possibilities. Turns out the it is not quite what we thought. Samsung subsidiary STAR Labs lifted the curtain on Project NEON, which is essentially a set of digital avatars for glorified chatbots. To be fair, that is soft of an oversimplification. At least, I think it is. In no uncertain terms, STAR Labs says NEON is "not an assistant" like Siri or Alexa, and "not an interface to the internet." It is also "not a music player," in case anyone is confused about that. Simply put, STAR Labs refers to NEON as "a friend," albeit a virtual...
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River Networks is injecting a bit of artificial intelligence (AI) into is Killer Intelligence Engine to bolster wireless connections. The general idea behind this is to constantly monitor and "score" Wi-Fi access points in order to ensure a user is connected to the best available one, thereby resulting in a stronger, faster, and more reliable connection. According to Rivet Networks, simply moving to a better access point can have a dramatic impact on the wireless experience, reducing latency by up to 50 percent and increasing throughput by over 100 percent. I'm not sure where Rivet Networks plucked those specific figures from, though the company is correct in asserting a stronger access point...
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