President Biden kicked-off his three-day visit to South Korea with a trip to a Samsung Electronics semiconductor plant, emphasizing an interest in strengthening supply chains and boosting competition with China in the technology sector. Biden remarked that the U.S. wants to shore-up business ties with allies including South Korea to offset the influence of  “countries that don’t share our values.” Located in Pyeongtaek, the plant churns out some of Samsung’s most advanced memory chips and is the largest semiconductor manufacturing facility in the world. South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol was present, marking the pair’s first in-person visit. Continue reading Biden Visits a Samsung Semiconductor Plant in South Korea

Amazon and Peacock both showcased virtual product placement tech solutions at the NewFronts, demonstrating how marketers can substitute new brands into previously produced material. Currently in beta, Amazon’s new VPP tool lends immediacy to marketing decisions that were once locked months, if not years, in advance, placing products directly into existing content streams from Amazon Prime Video and the company’s Freevee streaming service. Peacock takes a slightly different approach with “In-Scene,” which identifies in-show opportunities for message-freshening during post. Both developments tap artificial intelligence to improve on past practices. Continue reading NewFronts: Amazon, Peacock Demo Product Placement Tech

Alphabet-backed research lab DeepMind last week released a new AI system called Gato that takes a step toward artificial general intelligence, or AGI, technology that enables machines to undertake and learn the same tasks as humans. Described by DeepMind as a “general purpose AI, Gato’s debut coincides with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman securing $225 million to fund Inflection AI, an artificial intelligence company the pair launched earlier this year to simplify communication between humans and computers. Neither investors nor valuation were disclosed. Continue reading DeepMind’s Gato Moves Toward Artificial General Intelligence

Google seems to be angling for a slice of Apple’s pie, unveiling a universe of interconnected Pixel-branded gadgets across an ecosystem of watches, earbuds, smartphones and tablets. The Google I/O developers conference previewed next-generation Pixel 7 and 7 Pro smartphones, a new tablet and the highly anticipated Pixel Watch smartwatch. The company also showcased Pixel Buds Pro with noise cancellation and the budget Pixel 6a smartphone, ending with a teaser for AR glasses that translate languages. Google CEO Sundar Pichai led the Wednesday event, talking up the new Immersive View, coming soon to Maps. Continue reading Google Reveals AR Glasses, Immersive View for Maps, More

Nvidia has begun previewing its latest H100 Tensor Core GPU, promising “an order-of-magnitude performance leap for large-scale AI and HPC” over previous iterations, according to the company. Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced the Hopper earlier this year, and IT professionals’ website ServeTheHome recently had a chance to see a H100 SXM5 module demonstrated. Consuming up to 700W in an effort to deliver 60 FP64 Tensor teraflops, the module — which features 80 billion transistors and has 8448/16896 FP64/FP32 cores in addition to 538 Tensor cores — is described as “monstrous” in the best way. Continue reading Nvidia Touts New H100 GPU and Grace CPU Superchip for AI

Streaming is booming, accounting for 53.7 percent of Internet bandwidth traffic, up by 4.8 percent for the year according to Google, which anticipates continued growth as gaming, social networks, AR and VR experiences take hold. To service those needs, the Alphabet unit is officially launching Media CDN, an extensible Google Cloud platform for the distribution of streaming content. At the 2022 NAB Show Streaming Summit this week, Google touted Media CDN as a more affordable and efficient way for media and entertainment companies to deliver immersive streaming experiences globally and at scale. Continue reading Google’s Media CDN Provides Content Streaming Automation

Zoom has added features including gesture recognition and a virtual whiteboard. The new Zoom IQ for Sales uses AI to analyze calls. Zoom Events has added Backstage to simulate the look and feel of an in-person event with “a persistent space for event panelists and staff to communicate behind the scenes before, during, and after a Zoom Events webinar session.” Management can now view “breakout rooms” from a main session to assess how participants are engaging, and a Central Library of Polls lets organizers more efficiently manage polling data, both in preparation and to share results. Continue reading Zoom Debuts Gesture Recognition, Virtual Whiteboard, More

Cloud computing costs are expected to rise by 20 percent to an estimated $494.7 billion this year, according to a new report from Gartner. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is earmarked for the most significant growth, up 30.6 percent to $119.7 billion this year. Desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) is the second most robust sector, at 26.6 projected growth, followed by platform-as-a-service (PaaS), at 26.1 percent. “Cloud-native capabilities such as containerization, database platform-as-a-service (dbPaaS) and artificial intelligence/machine learning contain richer features than commoditized compute such as IaaS or network-as-a-service,” which makes them more expensive, said Sid Nag, research VP at Gartner. Continue reading Led by SaaS, 2022 Cloud Spending to Approach $500 Billion

TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) is reporting first quarter 2022 revenue between $17.6 billion and $18.2 billion, a 35.5 percent increase year-over-year. Compared to Q4 2021, the first quarter results represent a 12.1 percent revenue uptick and 22 percent growth in net income. This, despite ongoing fallout from supply chain shortages that company CEO C.C. Wei says he expects will continue triggering production constraints. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai, where the company has a plant, were cited as the most significant stressors to the company’s semiconductor output. Continue reading TSMC Posts Record Q1 Profits Despite Continuing Shortages

With the federal government still in the early phase of regulating artificial intelligence, cities and states are stepping in as they begin to actively deploy AI. While managing traffic patterns is straightforward, when it comes to policing and hiring practices, precautions must be taken to guard against algorithmic bias inherited from training data. The challenges are formidable. As with human reasoning, it is often difficult to trace the logic behind a machine’s decisions, making it challenging to identify a fix. Municipalities are evaluating different solutions, the goal being to prevent programmatic marginalization. Continue reading AI Laws Becoming Decentralized with Cities First to Regulate

The competition for global computer chip dominance depends largely on who can create the smallest components with the most advanced capabilities. So far, Taiwan-based TSMC leads, and the nation accounts for more than 90 percent of global production of advanced chips. By comparison, the U.S. claims about a 12 percent share, prompting the government to cite reliance on foreign-made processors as a cause of inflation and a national security threat. California-based Intel is heeding the challenge, spending billions on initiatives for AI computing, a high-end microprocessor plant expansion in Arizona and new plant in Ohio. Continue reading Intel Vies for Lead in an Increasingly Complex Chip Business

OpenAI has created a new technology that creates and edits images based on written descriptions of the desired result. DALL-E 2, an homage to the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí and the Pixar film “Wall-E,” is still in development but is already producing impressive results with simple instructions like “kittens playing chess” and “astronaut riding a horse.” OpenAI says the tech, “isn’t being directly released to the public” and the hope is “to later make it available for use in third-party apps. “Already some are expressing worry that such a tool has potential to exponentially increase the use of deepfakes. Continue reading DALL-E 2 by OpenAI Creates Images Based on Descriptions

The European Union’s pending Artificial Intelligence Act — the world’s first comprehensive effort to regulate AI — is coming under scrutiny as it moves to law. The Act proposes unplugging AI deemed a risk to society. Critics say it draws too heavily on general consumer product safety rules, overlooking unique aspects of AI, and is too closely tied to EU market law. This could limit its applicability as a template for other regions evaluating AI legislation, contravening the EU’s desired first-movers status in the digital sphere. Continue reading EU’s Sweeping AI Act Takes Tough Stance on High Risk Use

A Pew Research study finds the public has a cautionary attitude toward artificial intelligence and human enhancements, with concerns about potentially unintended consequences of autonomous machines, and fear of what accelerated change in these areas might mean for society. The survey of more than 10,250 U.S. adults in November 2021 examined opinions of six technologies broken down into two categories: AI and bioengineering, with crossover in the area of AI-enhanced exoskeletons. Across all categories, a majority believe that federal government and “end users” should be involved — along with the creators or inventors — in setting standards. Continue reading Pew Research Finds Americans Suspicious of AI and Biotech

Nvidia Air is a cloud-based platform to build, simulate and work the bugs out of a state-of-the-art data center powered by a modern network using digital twins. Geared toward medium to enterprise scale environments, the platform is the company’s latest Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) product, letting users create a virtual double of a data center’s physical and logical layout and employ continuous integration and deployment testing and validation techniques before moving to a production environment. The idea is to go live with the same set of simulation, visualization and AI tools. Continue reading Nvidia Air Helps Users Create Virtual Doubles of Data Centers