Artificial Intelligence - Page 55

A US news station has announced its plans to release the very first AI-generated news anchors, which will be free and streamed on ad-supported services such as Crackle, Tubi, or Pluto.

The announcement comes from LA-based news station Channel 1, who said that they will be using AI-powered news anchors instead of real human people in what will likely be a world's first for a syndicated news station. A new report from the Daily Mail revealed that Channel 1's news segments will use a combination of AI-generated humans and digital avatars that were created through the use of real actors. Notably, Channel 1 will still be using real humans for its most important news stories.

The founder of Channel 1, Adam Mosam, spoke to The Daily Mail and said that the intention behind releasing AI-generated news anchors was to "get out in front and create a responsible use of technology." As for concerns regarding fake news and the potential impact on society for falsifying the news through the power of AI, Mosam says that Channel 1 intends to be extremely transparent with viewers about what footage is original and what has been generated by artificial intelligence.

[UPDATE AMD has responded to the below with updated benchmark results and new optimizations of its own to show that the MI300X still has the performance advantage - read all about it here]. AMD, like all of the big players in the chip game, is going all in on AI hardware, and with the company's recent flagship MI300X GPU launch, it made some bold claims that compared performance between the MI300X and NVIDIA's powerful H100 GPU. Up to 20% faster than the H100 in a direct 1 to 1 comparison and up to 60% faster in an 8 to 8 server comparison.

Every slide in AMD's 'Advancing AI' presentation that covered the performance of the AMD Instinct MI300X to the NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU shows the MI300X coming out on top or, at worse, performing on par. And with that, NVIDIA has taken the time to present its own results showing that the H100 GPU is 2X faster than the MI300X.

"At a recent launch event, AMD talked about the inference performance of the H100 GPU compared to that of its MI300X chip," NVIDIA's Dave Salvator and Ashraf Eassa write. "The results shared did not use optimized software, and the H100, if benchmarked properly, is 2X faster."

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has some fighting words to NVIDIA and its CUDA standard, where he said: "You know, the entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market".

Gelsinger claimed that inference technology will be more important than training for AI, just as it launches its new Intel Core Ultra and Intel 5th Gen Xeon "Emerald Rapids" CPUs at its "AI Everywhere" event in New York City. Gelsinger continued: "We think of the CUDA moat as shallow and small. Because the industry is motivated to bring a broader set of technologies for broad training, innovation, data science, et cetera".

Gelsinger used examples like MLIR, Google, and OpenAI, where he said they're moving towards a "Pythonic programming layer" that makes AI training more open.

NVIDIA is already dominating the AI GPU market, but now analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is expecting that the insatiable demand for AI GPUs will see NVIDIA AI GPU shipments surge 150% year-over-year in 2024.

NVIDIA has already reported absolutely stellar financials driven by its AI GPU dominance, where Team Green has a commanding 90%+ of the AI GPU market share. The company enjoyed an amazing 2023, but in the coming years the company is expecting to drive $300 billion from its AI business alone.

Tianfeng Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says that NVIDIA plans on boosting the volumes of AI GPU shipments in 2024; here's what the analyst expects to see in 2024:

AMD's Chief Financial Officer Jean Hu has said that the AI PC will drive consumer sales in 2025, but we won't see the fruits of AI PC labor in 2024 as much as we will in the year after.

The AMD CFO was questioned during the Barclays Global Technology Conference, where she was asked about the future of PC markets and the upcoming trend of the "AI PC" and how much of an influence AI PCs will have in boosting sales. Hu said that the PC industry is moving towards recovery in the post-pandemic world, with revenue forecasts and consumer demand to increase in 2024-2025.

AMD CFO Jean Hu said during the Barclay Global Technology Conference: "Going forward, you will see the typical seasonality in Q1 and then, you know, next year, based on industry and it's economic-sensitive sector, too. So, we don't know what the macroeconomic situation will be. But in the end, the PC market is stabilized".

US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said that the US government is looking into the three new AI GPUs that NVIDIA is developing for China, making sure Team Green isn't breaking any new rules that the Biden administration has slapped down with its recent US sanctions.

During an interview with Bloomberg News when Raimondo was visiting Nashua, New Hampshire, she said: "We look at every spec of every new chip, obviously to make sure it doesn't violate the export controls. We talk to NVIDIA regularly, and I should say they're a good partner. We have a close working relationship with them. They share information".

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning was asked about the US actions on Tuesday, where they said that they "undermine the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies and will not be conducive to the stability of the global and industrial supply chains". She added during a regular press briefing in Beijing that the new moves contradicted "the principles of market economy and fair competition".

It was only a few days ago that Elon Musk rolled out the new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot Grok, developed by his AI company xAI.

Grok was rolled out to Premium+ X subscribers across the United States, and according to official statements, the new chatbot is powered by the generative model called Grok-1. That is an important fact, as it's a different underlying model powering OpenAI's ChatGPT, which is currently GPT-4. Notably, Grok differentiates itself from other competing chatbots by incorporating real-time data from X, enabling it to provide responses on posts occurring on X in real-time.

Now, all AI-powered chatbots are prone to hallucinations, which is when the chatbot provides a response that contains false or misleading information. This phenomenon occurs in all Large Language Models (LLMs), which is the underlying technology powering the experience (Grok-1, or ChatGPT's GPT-4).

Tesla has just lost the project lead for its Dojo supercomputer project, according to "people familiar with the matter" in a new report from Bloomberg.

Ganesh Venkataramanan was the former head of the Dojo supercomputer project at Tesla, in that position for the last five years, leaving Tesla last month in November 2023. Tesla has appointed former Apple executive and director at Tesla for the last seven years, Peter Bannon, to lead the Dojo project.

What is Tesla's new Dojo supercomputer? Tesla announced its in-house Dojo D1 AI processor in August 2021 as a Tesla-designed supercomputer that has been created to train the machine learning models for Tesla's self-driving technology. The Dojo AI processor will take in all of the data captured by the Tesla vehicle you're driving and process it faster than ever before and would lead to the future of self-driving technology in autonomous cars.

Meta has published a new website called Imagine, the company's new artificial intelligence-powered text-to-image generator.

Meta is making it clear that it's fully getting onto the artificial intelligence-powered train that many big technology companies are quickly adopting. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg even said earlier this year that the company would be integrating AI into "every single one of our products," and this recent announcement is a reflection of that. The new image generator will be using Meta's Emu model and will be capable of generating four images every prompt.

Notably, these images each have a visible watermark located in the bottom left corner. This watermark appears on every generated image and informs viewers of the image it was created using Meta AI. However, this visible watermark isn't likely to last long as Meta says they are currently in the process of testing an invisible watermark technique that is "resilient to common image manipulations like cropping, color change (brightness, contrast, etc.), screen shots and more."

Google has just unveiled its new performance-tweaked version of its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), which is called the TPU v5p and is Google's most powerful, scalable, and flexible AI accelerator so far.

TPUs have been the basis for training and serving AI-powered products, including YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Play, and Android. Google's just-announced generative AI model -- Gemini -- was trained on and is served using TPUs from Google. The company is also announcing AI Hypercomputer and Google Cloud. This new groundbreaking supercomputer architecture uses an integrated system of performance-optimized hardware, open software, leading ML frameworks, and flexible consumption models.

Google says its new TPU v5p is capable of 459 teraFLOPS of bfloat16 performance or 918 teraOPS of Int8, with a huge 95GB of HBM3 memory with up to 2.76TB/sec of memory bandwidth. Google can use as many as 8960 x TPU v5p AI accelerators together in a single pod, using Google's in-house 600GB/sec inter-chip interconnect to train models faster or at a greater precision. This is 35% bigger than what was possible with TPU v5e and over twice as large as what was possible on TPU v4.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang spoke with reporters in Singapore on Wednesday, talking about their dominant position in the AI market with increasing AI GPU competition, as well as saying it'll comply with new US regulations.

China has a booming AI chip market that is worth $7 billion, and NVIDIA takes a dominating 90% share of that AI chip market, which is why the recent US sanctions are going to change that. The new US sanctions also create an opportunity for Chinese rivals to boost their own AI chip foothold while NVIDIA creates alternate AI GPU solutions.

Huang spoke with reporters while he was in Singapore on Wednesday, where he is meeting up with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to talk about all things AI. Huang said: "NVIDIA has been working very closely with the U.S. government to create products that comply with its regulations. Our plan now is to continue to work with the government to come up with a new set of products that comply with the new regulations that have certain limits".

AMD has officially launched its new Instinct MI300X, its new flagship AI accelerator that will take the AI GPU battle to NVIDIA's door, where it's up to 60% faster than the H100 AI GPU.

AMD's new Instinct MI300X is a technological marvel featuring chiplets and advanced packaging technologies from TSMC to craft the new AI GPU. We have the new CDNA 3 architecture, which has a blend of both 5nm and 6nm IPs that have up to an insane 153 billion transistors on the Instinct MI300X.

Inside, we have the main interposer laid out with a passive die that houses the interconnect layer using a 4th Gen Infinity Fabric solution, with the interposer featuring a total of 28 dies that include 8 x HBM3 packages, 16 dummy dies between the HBM packages, and 4 active dies with each of these active dies featuring 2 compute dies.

It has happened a lawmaker has used OpenAI's ChatGPT to write a proposal for a new law to be passed, which it later was - unanimously.

The politician is city councilman Ramiro Rosário, and the new law he proposed was entirely written by ChatGPT, according to a new report from AP where the politician is quoted admitting to using the AI-powered technology. Rosário said that he asked OpenAI's ChatGPT to write him a proposal to prevent the city from charging taxpayers to replace water consumption meters if they are stolen. The chatbot spat out the answer, and he took it directly to his 35 peers without informing them of its origin.

Artificial intelligence-powered face scanning technology may soon become a mandatory feature of adult-only websites, as regulators want to prevent minors from accessing pornography.

The UK's Office of Communications (Ofcom) has released a press release that explains that it's making moves to enforce the UK's legal age to watch porn (18 years old), and a new way to make sure pornography websites are being accessed by users of the legal age the regulator will soon be enforcing all apps and sites displaying adult-only content to implement a new "age assurance" systems that verify the age of users.

If a site or app doesn't "ensure that children are not normally able to encounter pornography on their service," they are at risk of fines. Out with the old, in with the new. Ofcom writes that any technology such as "self-declaration of age," online payment that's accessible to minors, and "general terms, disclaimers or warnings" would no longer prevent adult sites from receiving penalties.

Samsung has reportedly ordered a "significant number" of 2.5D packaging equipment from Japanese company Shinkawa, according to the latest reports.

We're hearing the news from TheElec's sources, who said Samsung has ordered 16 units of the equipment from the packaging firm, with the South Korean giant receiving 7 of the units already, and will request the rest of them when they need them. We should expect Samsung is preparing to supply NVIDIA with its new HBM3 memory and 2.5D packaging for its next-gen Blackwell B100 AI GPUs coming in 2024.

Now that Samsung has 7 of them in-house, the other 9 units will be ordered when NVIDIA begins ordering the parts required from Samsung for its new B100 AI GPU. Samsung should be providing HBM3 memory, the interposer, and 2.5D package from Samsung while its main partner for fabrication will still be TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company).

Earlier this week, Amazon announced it was jumping into the AI chatbot arms race with its own chatbot called Q.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that Q isn't designed to directly compete with goliath AI-powered tools developed by OpenAI, such as ChatGPT, but instead will go head to head against Microsoft's AI developer assistant called Copilot. AWS CEO Adam Selipsky announced that Amazon Q would be the AI assistant businesses would query about their business using their own business data. Examples of this would be employees asking Q about relevant company information and sifting through large swaths of data.

Leaked documents obtained by Platformer has revealed that Q has begun to suffer "severe hallucinations" and is, unfortunately, "leaking confidential data". Notably, this wasn't just a small leak of confidential data, as reports indicate AWS engineers were forced to work through the weekend to repair an error labeled "sev 2". This error actually leaked the locations of AWS data centers and unreleased features.

The search for "killer apps" for AI is on, leading up to the AI PC revolution that will kickstart with Windows 12 from Microsoft and the evolution of AI inside of our PCs starting in 2024.

We've seen the meteoric rise of generational AI advances from the likes of OpenAI, with Microsoft offering its own AI-powered service with Copilot, something we'll be seeing much more of as we ramp into the release of Windows 12. AMD has been at the forefront of AI processors with Ryzen AI out earlier this year, Intel has an AI-dedicated chip on its upcoming Meteor Lake CPUs, and Qualcomm has AI on-board for its upcoming Snapdragon SoC for Windows devices.

It's all systems go for AI, AI, AI... and now we're hearing about tech companies lusting after that elusive "killer app" of AI, because we all know it's going to come down to the best apps built for AI. Think of like, Angry Birds but for AI. Or the Tetris of AI. The Mario Kart (64) of AI. It's coming, and tech companies want it.

Meta's chief scientist has had some interesting words to say about the AI industry, the quantum computing business, and even a few potshots at the AI GPU champion: NVIDIA.

During Meta's recent 10-year anniversary of its Fundamental AI Research team, Meta's Chief AI Scientist, Yann LeCun, talked about NVIDIA and AI, where he said: "I know Jensen. There is an AI war, and he's supplying the weapons. [If] you think AGI is in, the more GPUs you have to buy".

LeCun continued, talking about AI and how we're seeing the industry progress through using LLMs (Large Language Models) and that AI learning from only text data is simply not the "optimal" way. What is being done now isn't enough to create human-like AI systems... which is the goal of the likes of AI giants like OpenAI, in search of AGIs (artificial general intelligence).

Update: an NVIDIA spokesperson reached out to me shortly after this story went live, and said: "We are engaged with the U.S. government and, following the government's clear guidelines, are working to offer compliant data center solutions to customers worldwide".

Original story: US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has some fighting words for NVIDIA: don't ship China any of your AI GPUs, and that her department needs more funding to stop China from catching up on cutting-edge semiconductors.

During the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, on Saturday, Raimondo said: "We cannot let China get these chips. Period. We're going to deny them our most cutting-edge technology". She added that she has a $200 million budget, referring to that $200M as "that's like the cost of a few fighter jets. Come on. If we're serious, let's go fund this operation like it needs to be funded".

Amazon is the latest company to release a text-to-image generator, joining other big tech companies such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and numerous start-ups that are all jumping on the AI-powered train.

Amazon's AI-powered image generator is called Titan and was officially unveiled at the AWS re: Invent 2023 conference that was held on November 30. The new AI-powered tool is currently available to AWS customers on Bedrock, Amazon's AI development platform. So, what can it do? Amazon has equipped Titan with the capability to create images from text prompts while also giving it the power to customize existing images. An example would be swapping out the background of an image.

The company explained that the Titan Image Generator was trained on a "diverse set of datasets" that encompass a "broad range of domains". Engineers have implemented mitigation techniques for toxicity and bias, but it's currently unknown how effective those mitigation techniques are without public testing. Additionally, Amazon didn't reveal where it acquired its datasets or if it will be compensating creators of the images used to train Titan.