Covering Scientific & Technical AI | Saturday, June 27, 2026
DeepMind, Google’s AI Unit, Reports Big Loss
DeepMind requires deep pockets. Reports surfaced this week that the London-based AI lab acquired in 2014 by Google parent Alphabet for about $600 million lost a staggering $649 million in the last year. The Financial Times and other media outlets also reported Thursday (Dec. 17) that Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) has written off roughly $1.5 billion ... Full article
Nvidia Moves Its Software Closer to Cloud Customers Through an AWS Storefront
Nvidia is making it easier for AWS cloud customers to find and integrate Nvidia software applications into their AI and deep learning projects through an all-new, all-in-one “storefront” in the AWS Marketplace. The storefront, which initially contains 21 applications from the Nvidia GPU Cloud (NGC) software application catalog, is designed to bring Nvidia applications right ... Full article
DARPA Expands Access to Chip IP
The Pentagon’s premiere R&D agency is expanding an initiative designed to provide technology startups with broader access to semiconductor and other intellectual property in hopes of stimulating innovation. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said this week it has recruited two additional corporate partners to provide access to IP. Verific Design Automation and CEVA Inc. ... Full article
Improving Chaos Engineering in the Cloud with AWS Fault Injection Simulator
AWS re:Invent 2020—For a long time, it has been serious challenge for IT teams to adequately stress-test cloud applications to find and fix their weaknesses, especially at scale. But at this year’s AWS re:Invent 2020 conference, vice president and CTO Dr. Werner Vogels unveiled Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) coming new tool, the AWS Fault Injection ... Full article
Nvidia Probes Accelerators, Photons, GPU Scaling
Nvidia spotlighted an AI inference accelerator, emerging optical interconnects and a new programming framework designed to scale GPU performance during this week’s GTC China virtual event. In a keynote, Bill Dally, Nvidia’s chief scientist, said the MAGNet inference accelerator achieved 100 tera-operations per watt in a simulation. Nvidia is also working with university researchers on ... Full article
Grafana, Prometheus Previews Launched by AWS as Managed Services
Grafana Labs, developer of a popular open source tool for visualizing logs and metrics, joins a growing list of Amazon Web Services partners, allowing AWS customer to run Grafana’s dashboards natively as a managed service. In a related move, AWS also this week unveiled a managed service for Prometheus, the machine data storage and monitoring platform ... Full article
AI in Fintech, Technology and Academia Is Focus of Nascent U.S. Tech Council
Finding ways to bring AI more deeply into the business worlds of fintech, technology and academia is the mission of the new National Council for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI). Bolstered by members so far including Microsoft, Visa, Mastercard, Nasdaq, the Brookings Institution, SUNY, and the University of Central Florida, the group aims to find ways to ... Full article
Edge AI Sensors Plot Analog, Digital Routs
AI vendors are rolling out a steady stream of edge processing platforms spanning everything from multicore systems-on-chips to analog approaches that seek to imbue sensors with greater intelligence while reducing power consumption in always-on devices. Along with lower latency, smart edge deployments require low-power AI processing via a variety of hardware and optimized software frameworks. ... Full article
AI Partners Seek ‘Engine of Scientific Discovery’
A research effort built around an automation platform that connects data and analytics applications will focus on advancing the use of AI and machine learning in bioscience and medical applications. The centerpiece of the R&D agreement between ICM University of Warsaw and Tokyo-based Systems Biology Institute (SBI) is the Garuda connectivity and automation platform. Garuda ... Full article
Honey I Shrunk the Model: Why Big Machine Learning Models Must Go Small
Bigger is not always better for machine learning. Yet, deep learning models and the datasets on which they’re trained keep expanding, as researchers race to outdo one another while chasing state-of-the-art benchmarks. However groundbreaking they are, the consequences of bigger models are severe for both budgets and the environment alike. For example, GPT-3, this summer’s ... Full article
Azure Digital Twins Now Available to Empower Enterprises with Virtual Product Modeling
Since its start as a beta project two years ago, Azure Digital Twins was designed as a tool to help enterprises digitally build virtual physical environments for product modeling and related critical business projects. Now Azure Digital Twins has matured to be generally available as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering to enterprises in Azure, where they ... Full article
Blaize, AI Chip Startup, Adds Edge Tool
As AI moves inexorably to the edge, placing machine learning models closer to where data is generated, more tools are emerging to enable ML operations needed for AI-based application development. Some are code-free software platforms that allow developers to drag-and-drop when deploying AI apps. Google led the way in 2018 with its AutoML service. Others ... Full article
Amazon and BP Expanding Their Year-Old Deal for Renewable Energy and AWS Cloud Services
For the last year, Amazon Web Services and BP have been working together as partners, with AWS providing BP with services to migrate more than 400 applications to the cloud and BP working to help Amazon use more renewable energy for its data centers. The ongoing project has been so successful that the two companies ... Full article
Cyber Defenses Get an AI Boost
Greater access to big data and HPC resources are enabling enterprise use of emerging AI tools and machine learning models to help protect corporate networks and secure enterprise applications. Cyber experts at this week’s Society of HPC Professionals annual meeting said those automation tools are improving as data analytics platforms scan billions of network signals ... Full article
AWS Delivering Deeper Machine Learning Tools and Services to Customers
AWS re:Invent 2020 – Simplifying the use of machine learning and deep learning processes for enterprise, manufacturing and industrial customers is the goal of a series of new ML tools and services unveiled this week by Amazon Web Services at the company’s annual re:Invent tech conference. The new tools include Amazon Neptune ML, which gives ... Full article
Esperanto Unveils ML Chip with Nearly 1,100 RISC-V Cores
At the RISC-V Summit yesterday, Art Swift, CEO of Esperanto Technologies, announced a new, RISC-V based chip aimed at machine learning and containing nearly 1,100 low-power cores based on the open-source RISC-V architecture. Esperanto Technologies, headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with other sites across the U.S. and Europe, was created in 2014 “with the goal ... Full article
AI Career Notes: December 2020 Edition
In this monthly feature we bring you up to date on the latest career developments in the enterprise AI community -- promotions, new hires and accolades: Shahar Bar-Or Infinidat, a provider of enterprise-class storage solutions, appointed Shahar Bar-Or as its chief product officer and general manager of its Israeli operations. Bar-Or will be lead research ... Full article
Open Source Survey Reviews Project Security and Sustainability Issues
A Linux Foundation report on trends in open-source software development assesses the factors driving contributors while urging more incentives to secure code and sustain community-based projects. The document, "Report on the 2020 FOSS Contributor Study," identifies key issues in improving the security and sustainability of free, open-source software (FOSS) due to its importance worldwide in ... Full article
Juniper Networks Gains New Automation Tools in Apstra Deal
Juniper Networks acquisition of intent-based networking specialist Apstra this week gives it another set of tools for applying AI to automate network functions in evolving data centers and cloud platforms. In an announcement Monday, (Dec. 7), Juniper (NYSE: JNPR) said it will integrate Apstra’s open architecture into Juniper's data center networking portfolio. Apstra supports the ... Full article
MIT Researchers See Neural Nets in a New Light
Convolutional neural networks that perform well in computer vision applications also can be used to predict behavioral and other brain-like data related to object recognition. One current limitation, however, is the model’s susceptibility to distortions called “adversarial attacks.” For instance, small changes to a few pixels can confuse a CNN model. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute ... Full article