Lifeboat Foundation

The crushing demand for AI has also revealed the limits of the global supply chain for powerful chips used to develop and field AI models.

The continuing chip crunch has affected businesses large and small, including some of the AI industry’s leading platforms and may not meaningfully improve for at least a year or more, according to industry analysts.

The latest sign of a potentially extended shortage in AI chips came in Microsoft’s annual report recently. The report identifies, for the first time, the availability of graphics processing units (GPUs) as a possible risk factor for investors.

For a company the size of Amazon, it takes a lot to move the needle. It’s hard to enter new businesses that have enough upside to make a material difference. Advertising is one of them. With its recent change to break out results for its advertising business, Amazon is signaling it’s all in on staking its claim to as much of the market as it can.

That market is growing, but Amazon’s business is growing much faster. That means it’s taking share away from its competitors. Amazon is already the third-largest advertising platform. I wouldn’t bet against it someday soon becoming the biggest.

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Andy Jassy used Thursday’s earnings call to underscore just how much the company is investing in artificial intelligence.

“Every single one” of Amazon’s businesses has “multiple generative AI initiatives going right now,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on the company’s Q2 2023 earnings call on Thursday. The company offers infrastructure and services via AWS that can help power many generative artificial intelligence applications, which Jassy did discuss on the call, but he also stressed just how important AI is across the company as a whole.

Here’s more from Jassy about those generative AI initiatives:

Continue reading “‘Every single’ Amazon team is working on generative AI, says CEO” »

Meta has released AudioCraft, a new open-source generative AI framework that can produce music from simple text prompts. AudioCraft is based on a dynamic framework that enables high-quality, realistic audio and music generation from text-based user inputs. It aims to revolutionize music generation by empowering professional musicians to explore new compositions, indie game developers to enhance their virtual worlds with sound effects, and small business owners to add soundtracks to their Instagram posts, all with ease.

AudioCraft is based on a dynamic framework that enables high-quality, realistic audio and music generation from text-based user inputs. It aims to revolutionize music generation by empowering professional musicians to explore new compositions, indie game developers to enhance their virtual worlds with sound effects, and small business owners to add soundtracks to their Instagram posts, all with ease.

AudioCraft is a collection of three robust models: MusicGen, AudioGen and EnCodec. While MusicGen uses text-based user inputs to generate music, AudioGen performs a similar role for ambient sounds. Both are trained with Meta-owned and specifically licensed music and public sound effects, respectively. A recent release from the company offers an improved version of EnCodec. This decoder allows for high-quality music generation with fewer artifacts, based on the pre-trained AudioGen and all AudioCraft model weights and code.

MySpace gave us co-founder Tom right off the bat: join the social network and you started with at least one friend, even if he never interacted with you. Now social platforms like Snapchat and Facebook are using generative artificial intelligence to give us smarter and more engaging friends.

When Facebook parent company Meta reported financial results last week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he saw the AI friend as an assistant or coach that “can help you interact with businesses.” Facebook’s AI chatbots will reportedly offer a range of personalities and capabilities, presumably in the hope that at least one will appeal to most if not all Facebook users.

According to Financial Times reporting, Zuckerberg is “spending all his energy and time” on this: a massive shift from the metaverse and virtual reality, his previous idée fixe.

Original Motion Picture — Score from the movie Blade Runner (1982)
Expanded Version.
Composed by Vangelis.

Enjoy!

Let’s look at some examples of this software-defined momentum at the edge. In manufacturing, AI enables weld quality detection in real time on factory floors, improving production yields. In agriculture, farmers can use AI-driven systems to move from focusing on entire crops to looking at individual plants in a field to determine where to fertilize, irrigate or weed. Healthcare is transforming at every level—from the granularity of tracking nerve structures for anesthesia during surgery to the scale and scope of securing patient privacy and data across healthcare networks. An intelligent, software-defined edge aids in delivering resilience for evolving business needs.

AI tools and platforms are now widely available, allowing businesses to harness their power to build solutions faster and gain a competitive edge. This accessibility is crucial for scaling their usefulness, as it shifts solutions from being built solely by data scientists and software engineers to being used by domain experts with less coding experience. With simplified AI model toolkits and an open development platform, these users can stitch together their own solutions and deploy them anywhere.

Let’s take the example of a quick service restaurant (QSR). QSRs could improve their operations by monitoring orders and ingredient levels, then dynamically resupplying their inventories. Lowering barriers to AI means businesses like a QSR can tap into automation and intelligent software solutions on any device, such as a point-of-service system, laptop or mobile device. Customers are happier, food waste is reduced and process efficiencies help QSRs maintain operations even in our current labor shortage.

Editor’s note: “Nuclear Power Breakthrough Makes “Limitless” Energy Possible” was previously published in May 2023. It has since been updated to include the most relevant information available.

For a moment, imagine a world of limitless energy – one where energy is so abundant that everyone can power their homes and businesses for mere pennies.

These days, it’s tough to imagine a world like that. Last winter, the average U.S. heating bill was $1,000.

ATLANTA (AP) — A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.

Georgia Power Co. announced Monday that Unit 3 at Plant Vogtle, southeast of Augusta, has completed testing and is now sending power to the grid reliably.

At its full output of 1,100 megawatts of electricity, Unit 3 can power 500,000 homes and businesses. Utilities in Georgia, Florida and Alabama are receiving the electricity.