Covering Scientific & Technical AI | Tuesday, June 30, 2026
VC Investment in AI Slows, But Don’t Expect Another AI Winter Just Yet
AI firms attracted a record $9.33 billion in investments from venture capital firms in 2018, nearly a 10 percent increase from 2017. So far this year, AI funding has dipped a bit, but that doesn’t mean another AI winter is coming. AI firms attracted $2.0 billion in investments during the first quarter of 2019, according ... Full article
AI Definitions: Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning vs. Cognitive Computing vs. Robotics vs. Strong AI….
AI comes in many forms, each at its own stage of development with its own definition, techniques and capabilities. Some forms – such as Artificial General Intelligence, AI super-intelligence or Strong AI, the kind of AI that might someday automate all work and that we might lose control of – live in the future and ... Full article
Coping with Higher Hyperscale Rack-Power Density
According to the Cisco Global Cloud Index 2015-2020/Synergy Research, by 2020, 47 percent of all servers sold are expected to go to hyperscalers, which deploy distributed computing environments ranging up to tens of thousands of servers. For legacy hardware providers this trend portends a narrower customer base with both a higher technical acumen and closer ... Full article
AMD Spotlights HPC Processor, GPU Roadmaps
Advanced Micro Devices continued to play its hot hand at this week’s Computex event in Taipei, Taiwan, highlighting its processor roadmap at the cutting-edge 7-nanometer process node that includes the next generation of its Rome HPC processor for datacenters and Radeon GPUs mostly for high-volume gaming but increasingly for enterprise cloud workloads. “We’ve really been ... Full article
Nvidia EGX Pushes Real-Time AI to the Edge
Nvidia is putting a combination of its GPU processors and AI software stack out at the edge within a scalable compute platform designed to enable low latency edge AI “to perceive, understand and act in real time on continuous streaming data between 5G base stations,” according to the company. Announced at Computex in Taipei, Nvidia’s ... Full article
Microsoft AI ‘Distills’ Knowledge with New NLP Approach
A technique known as “ensemble learning” has been used to improve the performance of natural language processing models. However, the approach typically consists of hundreds of different deep neural network models, making deployment prohibitively expensive owing to the heavy computing costs associated with inference runtimes. AI researchers at Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) came up with a ... Full article
AI Projects Stalled by Messy Data
Tens of billions will be spent this year on AI development, but those efforts continue to be stymied by ratty data that has undermined model training efforts and burned through project budgets. That’s the sobering conclusion of a vendor survey of data scientists, AI technologist and business executives that uncovered widespread problems with data quality, ... Full article
Machine Learning and Supercomputing Ferret out Phishing
The relentless ingenuity driving cyber hacking is a global engine that knows no rest. Anyone with a laptop, some programming skills and a mother’s basement can buy or rent a phishing kit and start attacking – or it can be done by professionals with increasingly devious techniques. For cyber-crooks, it’s a numbers game: the one ... Full article
Cray – and the Cray Brand – to Be Positioned at Tip of HPE’s HPC/AI Spear
More so than with most acquisitions of this kind, HPE’s purchase of Cray for $1.3 billion, announced last week, seems to have elements of that overused, often abused term: transparency. Another surprise: HPE apparently isn’t paying the usual lip service when it says Cray will live as an entity under the HPE umbrella and that ... Full article
Kubernetes Seen Driving Bare-Metal Comeback
Hardware vendors are betting the transition to 5G wireless networks supporting myriad connected consumer and industrial devices also will accelerate the shift to heavy-duty bare-metal servers as a way to provision cloud-native tools like the Kubernetes cluster orchestrator. The expansion of the Kubernetes ecosystem as a de facto standard for managing application containers is reflected ... Full article
Tech Sector Frets Over U.S. Export Controls
As regulators prepare to tighten U.S. export controls with an eye toward restricting technology transfers to China, industry groups are pushing back, arguing that overly restrictive rules would cost U.S. industry hundreds of billions in export sales. Trade groups are meanwhile seeking to ensure that export control issues are not swept up in the current ... Full article
Microsoft Transfers Vector Search To GitHub
Since acquiring GitHub in June 2018, Microsoft has sought to make good on its pledge to retain the project collaboration platform’s “developer-first ethos.” This week it turned over to GitHub an AI search tool as an open-source project. The vector search approach encapsulated in an algorithm called Space Partition Tree and Graph attempts to address the ... Full article
More HPC M&A: HPE to Acquire Cray for $1.3B
Venerable supercomputer pioneer Cray Inc. will be acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $1.3 billion under a definitive agreement announced this morning. The news follows HPE’s acquisition nearly three years ago of supercomputer vendor SGI, for $275 million, both moves bolstering the company’s HPC technology portfolio and, presumably, HPE’s no. 1 position in the HPC ... Full article
Looking at AI/ML Edge-Core-Cloud Workflows
Edge computing is emerging as the killer app for AI and ML, with staggering growth predictions. Projections indicate there will be more than 50 billion internet-connected objects and devices by 2020, representing an $11 trillion market opportunity, across all major verticals combined. The global autonomous vehicle market alone is expected to surpass $50 billion this ... Full article
Net Appliances Emerge to Handle Data Deluge
Network infrastructure has had a hard time keeping up with the data explosion and surging demand for real-time capabilities as everything but the kitchen sink is networked. Incremental progress has been made via open and virtual networking efforts that have yielded next generation switching and routing technologies, including 100-gigabit/second Ethernet switches. But demand for datacenters ... Full article
Beware Nuclear Winter: Another on the Way?
 Hot as AI is right now, there are growing concerns that technology vendors may cause AI climate change – a new AI winter brought on by hype and unmet expectations. AI is in a classic phase of the technology life cycle in which vendors, media and industry analysts are out ahead – possibly way out ... Full article
VMware Boosts Multi-Cloud Push with Bitnami Deal
VMware continues its push into micro-services for multi-cloud deployments with its acquisition of Bitnami, a provider of server applications and development tools running virtually or hosted in the cloud. The deal for Bitnami announced Wednesday (May 15) follows VMware’s acquisition of Kubernetes startup Heptio last November. Heptio was founded by the creators of the Kubernetes cluster ... Full article
Deep Learning Competitors Stalk Nvidia
There is no shortage of processing architectures emerging to accelerate deep learning workloads, with two more options emerging this week to challenge GPU leader Nvidia. First, Intel researchers claimed a new deep learning record for image classification on the ResNet-50 convolutional neural network. Separately, Israeli AI chip startup Hailo.ai released a new deep learning processor ... Full article
Nvidia Claims 6000x Speed-Up for Stock Trading Backtest Benchmark
A stock trading backtesting algorithm used by hedge funds to simulate trading variants has received a massive, GPU-based performance boost, according to Nvidia, which has announced a 6,250x acceleration to the STAC-A3 “parameter sweep” benchmark. Using an Nvidia DGX-2 system to run accelerated Python libraries, Nvidia said in one case the system ran 20 million ... Full article
Network Automation: Trust = Visibility
Network virtualization and software-actuated networking are finally moving past the hype stage and it’s likely you’re now considering a real investment in automation. But before you start, consider this: Don’t bother.  Don’t adopt any of it — from intent-based networking to managing an SD-WAN — if you don’t incorporate comprehensive monitoring. Because unlike humans, automation ... Full article