Nvidia President and CEO Jensen Huang said the company will be upgrading its AI accelerators annually, with the Blackwell Ultra processor coming in 2025 and a next-generation platform called Rubin that is still in development planned for 2026. Rubin AI will utilize a type of high-bandwidth memory called HBM4 that addresses a bottleneck that has stifled the production of AI accelerators. Huang shared the news from Taiwan, where he delivered a keynote at the Computex trade show. Nvidia Inference Microservices were another focus, allowing AI applications to be deployed in minutes instead of weeks, Huang said. Continue reading Nvidia Teases Next-Gen AI Platform Rubin at Computex 2024

At Computex Taipei this week, AMD revealed its AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series third generation of AI-enabled mobile processors for next-generation laptops. It joins Intel’s upcoming Lunar Lake and the Snapdragon X platform from Qualcomm among the chips vying for a place in the exploding market for artificial intelligence processing, an area dominated by Nvidia. However, with AI PCs and laptops just hitting the market that field is somewhat in play. The Ryzen AI 300s are among those that will be used to power laptops equipped with Microsoft Copilot+ AI. At Computex, AMD also unveiled its Ryzen 9000 Series processors for desktop PCs. Continue reading AMD Unveils Its Next-Gen AI Chips in Battle for Market Share

Big Tech players have joined forces to develop a new industry standard to advance high-speed and low latency communication among data centers by coordinating component development. AMD, Broadcom, Cisco, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Intel, Meta Platforms and Microsoft are backing the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) promoter group. The group plans to define and establish an open industry standard that will enable AI accelerators to communicate more effectively. The UALink aims to create a pathway for system OEMs, IT professionals and system integrators to connect and scale their AI-connected data centers. Continue reading Big Tech Forms a Group to Develop AI Connectivity Standard

Elon Musk’s xAI has secured $6 billion in Series B funding. While the company says the funds will be “used to take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development,” some outlets are reporting a significant portion is earmarked to build an AI supercomputer to power the next generation of its foundation model Grok. The company publicly released the open-source Grok-1 as a chatbot on X social in November, and recently debuted Grok-1.5 and 1.5V iterations with long-context capability and image understanding. Continue reading Musk Said to Envision Supercomputer as xAI Raises $6 Billion

Nvidia just wrapped a record quarter, with no sign of interest cooling for the GPUs that have become essential to powering the AI boom. Revenue for the company’s most recent quarter was a record $26 billion, up 262 percent year-over-year. Profit also hit a new high, up nearly sevenfold to $14.88 billion compared to the same period a year earlier. The performance drove the already buoyant stock price above $1,000 a share. Company founder and CEO Jensen Huang proclaimed, “the next industrial revolution has begun,” with Nvidia playing a pivotal role in transforming data centers into “AI factories.” Continue reading Nvidia Reports Record Revenue, Profits as AI Demand Surges

Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japan’s SoftBank, wants to transform the tech conglomerate’s Arm subsidiary into an AI powerhouse, and he is investing $64 billion (10 trillion yen) to implement the plan, which includes turning the UK-based unit into an AI chip supplier. Son announced that by spring 2025 Arm is expected to have its first prototype, followed by mass production by contract suppliers and commercial sales in the fall. Arm designs but does not manufacture circuitry, supplying what it calls “chip architecture” to customers including Nvidia and Qualcomm. Continue reading SoftBank’s Arm Plans to Supply AI Chips, Open Data Centers

Samsung Electronics grew net profit by more than 400 percent in Q1, to $4.91 billion, on revenue of about $52.3 billion, a nearly 13 percent increase year-over-year. The results were credited mainly to higher memory chip prices resulting from AI demand buoying the company’s semiconductor business. Solid performance in smartphones — with the launch of its Galaxy S24 series, the first to pack AI-optimized chips — supported the stellar performance. It was a dramatic rebound from 2023, when post-COVID economic fallout drove Samsung to a 15-year profit low and semiconductor losses of almost $11 billion. Continue reading Samsung Chip Rebound Sends Q1 Net Profit Up 400 Percent

Microsoft revenue was $61.9 billion in the quarter ending March 31, up 17 percent compared to the same period a year ago. Profit was up 20 percent, to $21.9 billion, despite an increase in capital expenditure to purchase Nvidia GPUs for training and running AI models. The performance smashed analyst predictions, sending the stock up 5 percent in after-hours trading. Revenue for the Microsoft Cloud division overall was $35.1 billion, up 23 percent year-over-year, fueled largely by customers using it to host resource intensive AI services. Revenue in the Intelligent Cloud sector was $26.7 billion, a 21 percent uptick. Continue reading Microsoft Cloud Buoys Quarterly Revenue to Nearly $62 Billion

Google is implementing an internal reorganization that combines its Android and hardware teams. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced a new Platforms & Devices team headed by Rick Osterloh, which includes Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, Photos and all Pixel products. Pichai says the move will help speed development. Osterloh’s mandate is full-stack platform development that smoothly incorporates AI across all Google platforms, including smartphones, TVs and anything with Android OS. Hiroshi Lockheimer, who previously ran ops for Android, Chrome and ChromeOS, moves on to other projects at Google and Alphabet. Continue reading Google Merges Android and Hardware Units for AI Efficiency

Microsoft has developed VASA, a framework for generating lifelike virtual characters with vocal capabilities including speaking and singing. The premiere model, VASA-1, can perform the feat in real time from a single static image and a vocalization clip. The research demo showcases realistic audio-enhanced faces that can be fine-tuned to look in different directions or change expression in video clips of up to one minute at 512 x 512 pixels and up to 40fps “with negligible starting latency,” according to Microsoft, which says “it paves the way for real-time engagements with lifelike avatars that emulate human conversational behaviors.” Continue reading Microsoft’s VASA-1 Can Generate Talking Faces in Real Time

Meta’s next generation AI silicon is a 5nm chip designed to power the models that provide recommendations to those who use its social network platforms. The new MTIA inference accelerator is part of a “broader full-stack development program for custom, domain-specific silicon that addresses our unique workloads and systems,” Meta says. The next-gen MTIA more than doubles the compute and memory bandwidth of its predecessor, the 7nm MTIA v1 chip introduced in May 2023, resulting in 3x the performance, according to Meta, which says the new silicon is already live in 16 data centers. Continue reading Meta Deploys Gen 2 MTIA AI Accelerator Chip in Data Centers

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Adobe have unveiled a new AI acceleration tool that makes generative apps like DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion up to 30x faster by reducing the process to a single step. The new approach, called distribution matching distillation, or DMD, maintains or enhances image quality while greatly streamlining the process. Theoretically, the technique “marries the principles of generative adversarial networks (GANs) with those of diffusion models,” consolidating “the hundred steps of iterative refinement required by current diffusion models” into one step, MIT PhD student and project lead Tianwei Yin says. Continue reading New Tech from MIT, Adobe Advances Generative AI Imaging

Nvidia unveiled what it is calling the world’s most powerful AI processing system, the Blackwell GPU, purpose built to power real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models at what the company says will be up to 25x less cost and energy consumption than its predecessors. Blackwell’s capabilities will usher in what the company promises will be a new era in generative AI computing. News from Nvidia’s GTC 2024 developer conference included the NIM software platform, purpose built to streamline the setup of custom and pre-trained AI models in a production environment, and the DGX SuperPOD server, powered by Blackwell. Continue reading GTC: Nvidia Unveils Blackwell GPU for Trillion-Parameter LLMs

Robotics firm Figure AI is getting a lot of attention for its humanoid robot, Figure 01, which the company unveiled along with news that it has raised $675 million, for a $2.6 billion valuation, from investors including OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Pronounced “Figure One,” the general purpose robot looks and moves like a human, and can perform mundane tasks like serving food as well as undesirable jobs like picking up trash. It “sees” using “onboard cameras that feed into a large vision-language model (VLM) trained by OpenAI,” according to Figure co-founder and CEO Brett Adcock. Continue reading Figure Unveils Humanoid Robot, Draws Notable Investments

Perplexity is a year-old AI startup whose conversational “answer engine” has gained attention as a potential challenger to conventional search. Two months ago the venture raised $73.6 million in Series B funding from investors including Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos via his Bezos Expeditions, resulting in a valuation of about $520 million. Now the company is said to be finalizing another cash infusion that is predicted to double its valuation to roughly $1 billion. The current financing round is reportedly being led by former Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross through his own investment fund. Continue reading AI Startup Perplexity Targets $1B Valuation with New Funding