Leading AI firms spanning Europe, Asia, North America and the Middle East have signed a new voluntary commitment to AI safety. The 16 signatory companies — including Amazon, Google DeepMind, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, OpenAI, xAI and China’s Zhipu AI — will publish outlines indicating how they will measure the risks posed by their frontier models. “In the extreme, leading AI tech companies including from China and the UAE have committed to not develop or deploy AI models if the risks cannot be sufficiently mitigated,” according to UK Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan. Continue reading Global Technology Companies Sign Pledge to Foster AI Safety

Microsoft is implementing a series of upgrades to its AI stack, including Azure AI Studio and Copilot Studio, developer platforms for building apps that leverage generative AI. At its Build 2024 conference, the company also announced it is going into preview with its Azure virtual machines (VMs), the first platform to use the powerful Arm-based Cobalt 100 cloud processors developed by Microsoft, which shared that plan at its November Ignite conference. Other Build highlights include the general availability of OpenAI’s new GPT-4o flagship model across the Azure OpenAI Service and the new multimodal Phi-3-vision SLM. Continue reading Microsoft Upgrades Azure AI Stack, Previews Cobalt 100 VMs

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s ongoing effort to fund a new initiative to produce chips to power artificial intelligence has graduated from a billion-dollar venture to a trillion dollar undertaking that aims at nothing less than “to reshape the business of chips and AI,” per recent reports. The United Arab Emirates has joined the list of sources of potential funding for the global project, which seeks to remedy the tight supply of AI chips that Altman is said to view as an obstacle to OpenAI’s effort to develop artificial general intelligence, which he defines as “systems that are generally smarter than humans.” Continue reading Sam Altman Is Reportedly Seeking ‘Trillions’ to Fund AI Chips

Further insights into OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s global fundraising effort for a multi-billion dollar computer chip venture now appears to be toward a goal establishing a network of semiconductor plants to manufacture AI chips, according to media reports. The plan would see the 38-year-old entering a hotly competitive yet underserved field, dominated by Nvidia and increasingly Intel, AMD and Qualcomm. Apparently, he feels the existing players aren’t set up to produce the amount of chips required to meet the goals of OpenAI and others through 2030, now that many businesses incorporate AI into workflows and consumer products. Continue reading Altman Is Seeking Billions in Global Funding for AI Chip Plants

Microsoft has expanded its Models as a Service (MaaS) catalog for Azure AI Studio, building beyond the 40 models announced at the Microsoft Ignite event last month with the addition of the Llama 2 code generation model from Meta Platforms in public preview. In addition, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision has been added to accelerate generative AI and multimodal application development. Similar to things like Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), MaaS lets customers use AI models on-demand over the web with easy setup and technical support. Continue reading Microsoft Brings Meta’s Llama 2 to Azure Models as a Service

Cerebras Systems has unveiled the Condor Galaxy 1, powered by nine networked supercomputers designed for a total of 4 exaflops of AI compute via 54 million cores. Cerebras says the CG-1 greatly accelerates AI model training, completing its first run on a large language AI trained for Abu Dhabi-based G42 in only 10 days. Cerebras and G42 have partnered to offer the Santa Clara, California-based CG-1 as a cloud service, positioning it as an alternative to Nvidia’s DGX GH200 cloud supercomputer. The companies plan to release CG-2 and CG-3 in early 2024. Continue reading Cerebras, G42 Partner on a Supercomputer for Generative AI