Artificial Intelligence - Page 35

TSMC has reportedly received a ton of "super rush orders" from mainland Chinese customers, who are looking to stock up on chips so fast they're willing to pay a 40% premium on them.

The Chinese companies buying chips made at TSMC are expecting a big impact from the 2024 US presidential election to have (more) negative effects on China's access to the latest chips, according to CNyes.

In a new report picked up by the site, "people familiar with the matter" said that TSMC's excellent gross profit margin for Q2 2024 was "unexpectedly" driven by a large number of orders from mainland China, many of which were super-urgent orders.

Artificial intelligence-powered tools and applications are certainly impressive in what they can generate, but where these AI companies get the data to train these impressive models remains ambiguous or completely closed off from public knowledge.

A new report revealed only last week that Apple, NVIDIA, Anthropic, and others used a public dataset containing hundreds of thousands of YouTube video transcripts to train their AI models. While Apple, NVIDIA, and others weren't the ones to download the transcripts, the data was still used to train AI models, which strictly violates YouTube's Terms of Service (ToS). Earlier in the year, YouTube's CEO stated that any data downloaded from its platform is a violation of its ToS.

Now, a new report from 404 Media states that the popular AI video generator company Runway trained its Gen-3 Alpha model on thousands of YouTube videos without obtaining permission from the creator or YouTube. The report also states the company used pirated content for AI model training. 404 Media was sent a spreadsheet that lists how many videos were taken from a specific source, and judging from the list, the sources are extensive and cover a large variety of channels.

NVIDIA AI Foundry is a new enterprise service where NVIDIA will help companies build AI 'Supermodels' - custom Llama 3.1 generative AI models built with NVIDIA software and expertise. These AI 'Supermodels' are custom-trained for specific industry use cases using proprietary and synthetic data from Llama 3.1 405B and the NVIDIA Nemotron Reward model.

Hardware-wise, it's powered by the NVIDIA DGX Cloud AI platform, which allows it to access the most advanced AI hardware, architecture, and technologies. It's an NVIDIA AI Foundry, so that's to be expected. Meta's open-source Llama 3.1 405B model was announced earlier this week, offering capabilities and power previously limited to closed-source models. This new partnership between NVIDIA and Meta is a big deal for companies everywhere.

"Meta's openly available Llama 3.1 models mark a pivotal moment for the adoption of generative AI within the world's enterprises," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.

iOS 18 is Apple's biggest overhaul to its operating system in years. It will be the first update to introduce AI-powered features to the Cupertino company's product lineup.

The new operating system update coming to the iPhone, Mac, and iPad contains Apple's version of artificial intelligence, which it's calling Apple Intelligence. Last week, Apple rolled out the public beta for iOS 18, but it doesn't include the suite of Apple Intelligence features, leaving users confused as Apple said it would be included in iOS 18. However, it will likely first go to developer beta and then to a public opt-in beta before being pushed out to the wider public.

So, when will you be able to try Apple's new AI features? I can see Apple limiting access to its AI features all the way up until the launch of the iPhone 16, as the company won't want to prematurely release its biggest selling point for its new generation of devices only to see its customers go out and buy now-discounted previous generations that are still AI compatible.

Microsoft has just announced Bing Generative Search, an overhaul and upgrade of Bing Search that is provides AI-generated results directly on the Bing search page.

At the top of Bing search you'll soon find an AI-generated answer that is created from small and large language models that have reviewed millions of sources to provide what Microsoft hopes is the most accurate (AI-powered) answer.

The AI-powered Bing Generative Search will break the answer down into a document index that provides more information about what you're searching for, if you want to know more. The Bing search page will also provide a list of sources that the AI-generated text was created from, and show traditional search results in the sidebar on the right, if you dont' care about the AI-powered Bing search.

SK hynix has announced its Q2 2024 financial results, with quarter revenues hitting an all-time high, and SK hynix cementing its position as the leader of AI memory providers.

The South Korean memory giant recorded 16.4 trillion won in revenue, 5.46 trillion won in operating profit (with an operating margin of 33%), and 4.12 trillion won in net profit (with a net margin of 25%) in Q2 2024.

SK hynix notes that quarter revenues reached an all-time high, "far exceeding" the previous record of 13.81 trillion won in Q2 2022. SK hynix said that the continuous rise in overall prices of DRAM and NAND products, with unstoppable demand for AI memory, including HBM, led to a 32% increase in revenues compared to the prior quarter.

How do you get $5 billion out of Tesla to invest into your AI startup? You poll your followers on X if you're Elon Musk, which is exactly what he did:

The Tesla and SpaceX founder asked his followers "should Tesla invest $5 billion into xAI, assuming the valuation is set by several credible outside investors? (Board approval & shareholders vote are needed, so this is just to test the waters).

He posted a poll which had 958,086 votes with 67.9% of his followers voting "yes" while 32.1% voted "no". I guess we'll see in the coming weeks if Tesla announces a $5 billion investment into xAI, we'll know where it's coming from. The public voting, and Elon using that as leverage to get Tesla to invest $5 billion into xAI is... different, to see.

Moor Insights & Strategy founder, CEO, and chief strategist Patrick Moorhead had some choice words for the AI market to come crashing down anytime soon, where in a chat with YahooFinance, he said: "This whole notion of AI coming to a screeching halt anytime soon is fiction".

Moorhead's comments are coming from some companies worried of an AI bust, and the entire market coming to a screeching halt, including SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won who recently said at the 47th KCCI Jeju forum, who compared the AI boom to the gold rush, and that "without making money, the AI boom could vanish, just as the gold rush disappeared".

The chat with YahooFinance was just the start of it, with Moorhead taking to his X account to continue with some even better comments on the AI market. Moorhead replied to Edward McKernan, who said "need to frame this within power demand over next few years... something most on Wall St don't know yet".

Morgan Stanley has said that the global supply chain will see a huge boost in orders from the industry for AI servers, with NVIDIA continuing (and clawing even more) market share to dominate the AI industry further.

NVIDIA is expected to ship between 60,000 and 70,000 units of its Blackwell GB200 AI servers, which will bring in $210 billion. Each server costs $2 million to $3 million, so 70,000 GB 200 AI servers at $3 million each = $210 billion. NVIDIA is making the NVL72 and NVL36 GB200 AI servers, as well as B100 and B200 AI GPUs on their own.

Morgan Stanley estimates that if NVIDIA's new NVL36 AI cabinet is used as the biggest seller by quantity, the overall demand for GB200 in 2025 will increase to 60,000 to 70,000 units. The big US cloud companies are the customers lining up -- or have already purchased -- NVL36 AI cabinets, but by 2025 we could expect NVL72 AI cabinets to be shipping in higher quantities than NVL36.

Meta has announced its release of Llama 3.1 405B, which is what the company is describing as the "world's largest" open-source large language model.

Meta explains via a new blog post that Llama 3.1 405B is "in a class of its own" with "state-of-the-art capabilities" that rival the leading AI models currently on the market when it comes to general knowledge, steerability, math, multilingual translation, and tool use. Meta directly compares Llama 3.1 405B with competing AI models, such as OpenAI's various GPT models, showcasing the recently released model trained on 15 trillion tokens. A token can be considered a fragment of a question and an answer.

To achieve the training of this 405 billion parameter model, Meta used 16,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, which cost $25,000 each. This means the AI model was trained by $400 million worth of NVIDIA GPUs, which required 30.84 million GPU hours and produced approximately 11,390 tons of CO2.

TSMC reportedly turned down a request by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang for the Taiwanese semiconductor giant to set up a dedicated packaging manufacturing line for NVIDIA's products.

In the world of chips, semiconductor fabrication and chip packaging have become increasingly important to pump out the amount of AI GPUs and advanced packaging as possible. Unlike fabrication capacity, packaging has struggled to keep up with the insatiable demand for chips, with TSMC having to dedicate considerable resources towards advanced packaging capacity.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang visited TSMC headquarters earlier this year, meeting with TSMC founder Dr. Morris Chang and the firm's former chairman. Industry sources said Jensen requested the company set up a dedicated packaging line for NVIDIA GPUs.

SIGGRAPH 2024 has confirmed it will be visited by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg to discuss AI advancements in the tech industry.

For those who don't know, SIGGRAPH 2024, which will be held in Denver, Colorado, from July 28 to August 1, is a conference and exhibition concentrating on the intersection between computer graphics and technology. This year will be the 51st conference and it will feature many keynote presentations from prominent industry figures.

But this year, attendees will get presentations from NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, the face of the company powering the now extremely hot large language models powering artificial intelligence tools, and Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, which is pioneering the push into virtual worlds with affordable virtual reality solutions. Huang will be discussing AI breakthroughs, generative AI, and open source empowering creators and developers.

Intel has just launched AI Playground into beta, an open-source project for Windows desktop PCs that runs on systems with an Intel Core Ultra-H processor with integrated Arc Intel Graphics or a dedicated Intel arc GPU with at least 8GB of VRAM. Intel Core Ultra-H support is 'coming soon,' but if you've got an Arc GPU, you can download and fire up AI Playground right now.

So, you're probably wondering what AI Playground is all about. It's described as an 'AI PC starter app' designed to make working with AI easy and flexible. Upon startup, you'll be provided with a list of various models to download and use, or you can provide one of your own. Advanced users will be able to tweak settings to customize the experience.

AI Playground runs locally, allowing users to generate images from text prompts at various resolutions, use AI to enhance or upscale images, or even change their style. AI chatbot functionality can also be called on to answer questions or summarize documents. If this sounds like Microsoft's Copilot+ features, you're on the right track. Apart from the whole "take screenshots of everything you do on your PC" part.

NVIDIA is reportedly working on a different version of its flagship Blackwell AI GPUs for the Chinese market that would adhere to strict US export controls. That new AI GPU would be the B20 AI GPU.

NVIDIA unveiled its fleet of Blackwell B100, B200, and GB200 AI chips earlier this year, with B200 being over 30x faster in some AI workloads than Hopper H100, but they're far too powerful to be allowed into China. However, a cut-down B20 AI GPU is reportedly in the works, which sticks under the metrics of US export regulations and is destined for China in Q2 2025.

In a new report from Reuters, we're learning that NVIDIA is reportedly preparing the B20 AI GPU for China. Their sources declined to be identified as NVIDIA has "yet to make a public statement." A spokesperson for NVIDIA declined to comment, too.

Elon Musk has just powered on xAI's new supercomputer, powered by 100,000 x NVIDIA H100 AI GPUs worth up to $4 billion at its Memphis Supercluster, the "most powerful AI training cluster in the world".

Elon Musk took to X, posting: "Nice work by xAI team, X team, NVIDIA and supporting companies getting Memphis Supercluster training started at ~4:20am local time. With 100K liquid-cooled H100s on a single RDMA fabric, it's the most powerful AI training cluster in the world!"

NVIDIA's current-gen Hopper H100 80GB AI GPUs cost between $30,000 and $40,000 per AI GPU, so Elon Musk's investment with xAI and its $6 billion raised in May 2024 at a valuation of $24 billion, sees Musk's AI startup investing somewhere between 50% and 67% of its fundraising in purchasing NVIDIA's leading H100 AI GPUs.

Samsung has just announced a new partnership with AMD, with the South Korean giant to provide high-performance substrates for AMD's next-gen CPUs and GPUs for data centers.

Samsung Electro-Mechanics (SEMCO) announced the collaboration with AMD today, to supply high-performance substrates for hyperscale data center compute applications. Market research firm Prismark predicts that the semiconductor substrate market will grow at an average annual rate of around 7% from 15.2 trillion KRW to 20 trillion KRW in 2028.

SEMCO is placing a 1.9 trillion KRW investment in the FCBGA factory shows it's committed to pushing substrate technology and manufacturing capabilities to meet the highest industry standards and future technology needs. SEMCO's collaboration with AMD focuses on meeting the unique challenges of integrating multiple semiconductor chips (chiplets) on a single large substrate.

NVIDIA was on the eve of unleashing its next-generation GB200 Superchip inside of new AI servers, until rumors of a "flooding" occurred.

UDN is reporting that the key water-cooling components from "major international manufacturers have been shipped out" causing water leakage inside of the GB200 AI server cabinet. The outlet reports that Taiwanese manufacturers like Shuanghong and Qihong are expected to come on-board for emergency rescue and receive transfer orders.

NVIDIA's issues with its new GB200-powered AI server cabinets seems to be coming from outsourcing some of the water cooling components, including the branch pipe, quick connector, and hose. If an issue happens through one of these components, as they're all related to the movement of coolant, a leakage can happen. That's not good for a top-of-the-line $3 million GB200 NVL72 server cabinet.

The Chairman of the Korean Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) and SK Group, Chey Tae-won had some choice words to say at the recent 47th KCCI Jeju forum.

The SK Group chairman compared the AI boom to the gold rush, adding: "When there was no more gold, the sellers became unable to sell pickaxes. Without making money, the AI boom could vanish, just as the gold rush disappeared".

Chey expects that NVIDIA will continue to be one of the biggest companies by market capitalization over the next three years. The AI boom recently led NVIDIA to a record $3.3 trillion market cap.

Tenstorrent has just launched its new Wormhole high-performance AI chip featuring the RISC-V architecture, with chip legend Jim Keller's fingerprints all over the Wormhole AI chip.

The new Tenstorrent Wormhole AI chip will be a cost-effective and scalable solution for AI customers. The company is also unveiling AI workstation solutions dedicated to its new Wormhole platform, meaning it offers consumers a full AI package.

Tenstorrent's new Wormhole AI chips will be offered in PCIe cards in two different configurations: the Wormhole n150 and Wormhole n300. The new Wormhole n150 features a single processor with 72 Tensix cores, with the company saying each Tensix core features 5 RISV-C baby cores, allowing scalability with multi-chip development much more efficiently.

The art of price negotiation used to be a big part of buying anything, where the listed or stated price for something marked the beginning of a back-and-forth between retailer and customer. In some countries, negotiating or haggling is a part of buying something and expected.

Even so, I wasn't expecting to see that there's already an AI Negotiation chatbot that can be plugged into online shopping portals to simulate the ancient art of haggling. The generative AI is called Nibble, and it's described as "the world's most experienced AI negotiation platform, creating win-win outcomes at scale."

The official site for Nibble states that over 200 organizations currently utilize AI and handle deals worth up to six figures. It works as expected: an AI chatbot where you can ask for a better deal. The fun or dystopian part (depending on your general take on AI popping up everywhere) is that Nibble talks precisely like a pushy salesperson.