After 50 years of SIGGRAPH, the conference has come full circle, from high-tech for PhDs to AI for everyone. That was Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s message in back-to-back keynote sessions, including a Q&A with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Huang touted Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD), discussing developments aiming to speed adoption of the universal 3D data interchange framework for use in everything from robotics to the creation of “highly accurate virtual worlds for the next evolution of AI.” As Zuckerberg’s interlocutor, he prompted the Facebook founder to share a vision of AI’s personalization of social media. Continue reading Nvidia Debuts New Products to Accelerate Adoption of GenAI

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the latest version of computer vision platform SAM 2, an update on the company’s Segment Anything Model that automates for video what the original SAM did for still images — identifying the edges of an object and isolating it in the frame. Zuckerberg demonstrated SAM 2 as part of a SIGGRAPH 2024 keynote session in which he was interviewed by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. “Being able to do this in video and have it be zero shot and tell it what you want, it’s pretty cool,” Zuckerberg said. Meta is sharing the code and model weights for SAM 2 with a permissive Apache 2.0 license. Continue reading Mark Zuckerberg Unveils SAM 2 AI Tech for Segmenting Video

Apple’s iOS 18 public beta 2 has arrived, with new wallpapers for CarPlay, a newly designed Hidden Apps folder in the Apps Library and the ability to use dark mode widgets in broad daylight, among other updates. Public beta 2 includes iPadOS 18, but does not include Apple Intelligence, which is expected this fall. However, a separate Apple Intelligence preview was introduced this week. In addition, a new Apple research paper leads some to believe its Apple Intelligence AI models were pre-trained in the cloud using Google Tensor Processing Units, leading to speculation that Big Tech be considering alternatives to Nvidia. But Apple has always been an AI outlier. Continue reading Apple Intelligence Preview and Updated iOS 18 Beta Released

The U.S. Commerce Department has issued a large package of material designed to help AI developers and those using the systems with an approach to identifying and mitigating risks stemming from generative AI and foundation models. Prepared by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the AI Safety Institute, the guidance includes the initial public draft of its guidelines on “Managing Misuse Risk for Dual-Use Foundation Models.” Dual-use refers to models that can be used for good or ill. The release also includes an open-source software test called Dioptra. Apple is the latest to join the government’s voluntary commitments to responsible AI innovation. Continue reading Apple Joins the Safe AI Initiative as NIST Amps Up Outreach

Adobe is bringing more Firefly AI features to its popular Photoshop and Illustrator design platforms. The upgrade is a significant step forward for Adobe since the 2023 debut of Firefly, and sees Photoshop finally getting in-app ability to generate AI images, and also a new Generative Shape Fill that is still in beta, allowing designers to quickly add detailed vectors to shapes by entering text prompts directly in the Contextual Taskbar. Improvements to Illustrator include the Dimension Tool, Retype, Style Reference, its own Contextual Taskbar, Retype and two new beta tools, Text to Pattern and Mockup. Continue reading Adobe Adds New Firefly AI Features to Illustrator, Photoshop

In April, Meta Platforms revealed that it was working on an open-source AI model that performed as well as proprietary models from top AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Now, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that model has arrived in the form of Llama 3.1 405B, “the first frontier-level open-source AI model.” The company is also releasing “new and improved” Llama 3.1 70B and 8B models. In addition to general cost and performance benefits, the fact that the Llama 3.1 405B model is open source “will make it the best choice for fine-tuning and distilling smaller models,” according to Meta. Continue reading Meta Calls New Llama the First Open-Source Frontier Model

Nvidia and French startup Mistral AI are jointly releasing a new language model called Mistral NeMo 12B that brings enterprise AI capabilities to the desktop without the need for major cloud resources. Developers can easily customize and deploy the new LLM for applications supporting chatbots, multilingual tasks, coding and summarization, according to Nvidia. “NeMo 12B offers a large context window of up to 128k tokens,” explains Mistral, adding that “its reasoning, world knowledge, and coding accuracy are state-of-the-art in its size category.” Available under the Apache 2.0 license, it is easy to implement as a drop-in replacement for Mistral 7B. Continue reading Mistral, Nvidia Bring Enterprise AI to Desktop with NeMo 12B

A consortium of top tech firms have joined forces to launch a security group focused on artificial intelligence applications. The cybersecurity-focused non-profit OASIS will oversee operational aspects of the Coalition for Secure AI, to be known as CoSAI, described as an “open-source community.” OASIS lists Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia and PayPal as founding Premier Sponsors of CoSAI, whose “additional founding sponsors” include Amazon, Anthropic, Cisco, Chainguard, Cohere, GenLab, OpenAI and Wiz. “CoSAI is an initiative to enhance trust and security in AI use and deployment,” OASIS announced at the Aspen Security Forum. Continue reading Google, OpenAI, Nvidia and Others Form AI Security Coalition

U.S. tech companies are fighting back against what they feel are overly oppressive European Union regulations by withholding products from that market. Meta Platforms will not release its next Llama multimodal AI model there, along with future products. Apple last month said certain Apple Intelligence AI features will not be released in the EU. Previously, tech companies would accommodate regional laws by adapting global strategies so they could do business everywhere with the same products. Given the restrictions of the Digital Markets Act and other EU rules, Big Tech is signaling that may no longer be possible. Continue reading Tough EU Laws Prompt Meta, Apple to Withhold New Products

Amazon is increasingly betting on artificial intelligence as the key to its future growth. The company plans to spend $100 billion on data centers over the next decade — significantly more than it will spend on e-commerce and warehouse infrastructure. This is largely due to market forces. Thirty-year-old Amazon rode the e-retail wave to maturity, and the company’s AWS cloud service is now the new growth engine, driving the firm past $2 trillion in market value last week. The fifth U.S. company to hit that milestone is said to be building a new chatbot it hopes will surpass ChatGPT. Amazon also announced it has hired David Luan, co-founder of AI firm Adept. Continue reading Data and AI Propel Amazon to $2 Trillion Market Capitalization

Synthesia, which uses AI to create business avatars for use in content such as training, presentation and customer service videos, has announced a major platform update. “Coming soon” with Synthesia 2.0 are full-body avatars that include hands capable of a wide range of motions. Users can animate motion using skeletal sequences on which the persona selected from the catalog can then be automatically mapped. Starting next month, the Nvidia-backed UK company will offer the ability to incorporate brand identity — including typography, colors and logos — into templated videos. A new translation tool automatically applies updates to all languages. Continue reading Lifelike AI Avatars to Get New Features with Synthesia Update

Nvidia is expanding its substantive influence in the AI sphere with Nemotron-4 340B, a family of open models designed to generate synthetic LLM training data for commercial applications across numerous fields. Through what Nvidia is calling a “uniquely permissive” free open model license, Nemotron-4 340B provides a scalable way for developers to build LLMs. Synthetic data is artificially generated data designed to mimic the characteristics and structure of data found in the real world. The offering is being called “groundbreaking” and an important step toward the democratization of artificial intelligence. Continue reading Nvidia’s Open Models to Provide Free Training Data for LLMs

Amazon has earmarked $230 million to invest in generative AI startups worldwide, providing funding in the form of “AWS credits, mentorship, and education to further their use of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.” The initiative will cast a global net, focusing on early-stage companies. About $80 million of that allocation will fund the second cohort of the AWS Generative AI Accelerator, which provides up to $1 million in credits “to each of the top 80 early-stage startups that are using generative AI to solve complex challenges.” Applications for the AWS Accelerator are open through July 19. Continue reading Amazon Commits $230M in AWS Credits for GenAI Startups

Rene Haas, CEO of UK chip designer Arm Holdings, thinks his company’s platform architecture could nab as much as 50 percent of the Windows PC market by 2030. That would essentially be a 400 percent leap from its current 11 percent share in a market dominated by Intel’s x86 design. Because Arm was developed for smartphones, it was driven by energy efficiency, an approach that is paying off in the era of power-hungry AI applications. Now the technology is being used for the first wave of Microsoft Copilot+ Windows laptops, and Arm has also set its sights on desktop PCs. Continue reading Arm CEO Says Company Aims to Capture Half of PC Market

Intel launched new Xeon 6 processors built for high-density AI work in data centers. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger emphasized performance and power efficiency as he introduced the next-gen Xeon, and said that the Gaudi 3 chips for AI model training and deployment that were released two months ago are less expensive than comparable silicon from Intel rivals. “Intel is one of the only companies in the world innovating across the full spectrum of the AI market opportunity — from semiconductor manufacturing to PC, network, edge and data center systems,” Gelsinger said, embracing open standards during his keynote at Computex. Continue reading Intel’s Xeon 6 Coming to Data Centers and Lunar Lake to PCs