| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 11/29/2016 12:48:04 PM | | | | | | Google, Facebook, and Microsoft Are Remaking Themselves Around AI
FEI-FEI LI IS a big deal in the world of AI. As the director of the Artificial Intelligence and Vision labs at Stanford University, she oversaw the creation of ImageNet, a vast database of images designed to accelerate the development of AI that can “see.” And, well, it worked, helping to drive the creation of deep learning systems that can recognize objects, animals, people, and even entire scenes in photos—technology that has become commonplace on the world’s biggest photo-sharing sites. Now, Fei-Fei will help run a brand new AI group inside Google, a move that reflects just how aggressively the world’s biggest tech companies are remaking themselves around this breed of artificial intelligence.
Alongside a former Stanford researcher—Jia Li, who more recently ran research for the social networking service Snapchat—the China-born Fei-Fei will lead a team inside Google’s cloud computing operation, building online services that any coder or company can use to build their own AI. This new Cloud Machine Learning Group is the latest example of AI not only re-shaping the technology that Google uses, but also changing how the company organizes and operates its business.
wired.com
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 11/29/2016 12:50:26 PM | | | | | | Giant Corporations Are Hoarding the World’s AI Talent
GENERAL ELECTRIC BUILDS jet engines and wind turbines and medical gear. But the 124-year-old industrial giant is also transforming itself for the digital age. It’s fashioning software that pulls data from all this hardware, hoping to gain an insight into industrial operations that was never possible in the past. The problem is that analyzing all this data is difficult, and the talent needed to make it happen is scarce. So GE is going shopping.
The company just paid an undisclosed amount to acquire a Berkeley-based machine learning startup called Wise.io. “There’s thirty of them,” GE CEO Jeff Immelt says gleefully of the Wise.io team, which is heavy with astrophysicists. “You match them with aviation data, and they’re killer.”
That’s great for GE and Immelt—and for their customers. But what if you’re a small software company trying to inject some AI into your operation? Wise.io was on a mission to “democratize AI”—to creating tools anyone could use to build machine learning services—but it’s now disappearing into GE. And at a time when machine learning is the prime way of staying competitive in the software world, that’s a notable thing. In the battle for scarce AI talent, companies like GE have an overwhelming advantage.
wired.com
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 11/29/2016 5:43:31 PM | | | | | | The Subtle Ways Your Digital Assistant Might Manipulate You
TODAY WE GOOGLE for information, but in the future, we might not need to. Instead we may rely on our butler, namely the intelligent, voice-activated digital assistant on our smart phones, smart watches, or devices like Amazon’s Echo and Alphabet’s Home. Rather than searching the web, we’ll be able to ask our digital assistant how to remove the stain from our shirt. It’ll perform other perfunctory tasks, like adding groceries to our shopping list, checking the weather, sending a text, or ordering an Uber.
Besides providing us with information, digital assistants can also anticipate and fulfill our needs and requests, based on what they know about us. Instead of worrying over life’s small details, we shall entrust our digital assistant to dim the lights and lower the thermostat when we leave the house. As our butler learns our preferences, we can rely on it for dinner or entertainment suggestions. As our butler surfs the web to seamlessly provide more of what interests us and less of what doesn’t, we will grow to like and trust it.
wired.com
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 11/29/2016 5:46:20 PM | | | | | | Google’s Hand-Fed AI Now Gives Answers, Not Just Search Results
ASK THE GOOGLE search app “What is the fastest bird on Earth?,” and it will tell you.
“Peregrine falcon,” the phone says. “According to YouTube, the peregrine falcon has a maximum recorded airspeed of 389 kilometers per hour.”
That’s the right answer, but it doesn’t come from some master database inside Google. When you ask the question, Google’s search engine pinpoints a YouTube video describing the five fastest birds on the planet and then extracts just the information you’re looking for. It doesn’t mention those other four birds. And it responds in similar fashion if you ask, say, “How many days are there in Hanukkah?” or “How long is Totem?” The search engine knows that Totem is a Cirque de Soleil show, and that it lasts two-and-a-half hours, including a thirty-minute intermission.
Google answers these questions with the help from deep neural networks, a form of artificial intelligence rapidly remaking not just Google’s search engine but the entire company and, well, the other giants of the internet, from Facebook to Microsoft. Deep neutral nets are pattern recognition systems that can learn to perform specific tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data. In this case, they’ve learned to take a long sentence or paragraph from a relevant page on the web and extract the upshot—the information you’re looking for.
wired.com
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 11/30/2016 3:13:48 PM | | | | | | Altice Plans Fiber Upgrade That Could Leave Rivals in the Dust
Altice USA, the fourth-largest U.S. cable operator, said it plans to convert its entire network into an ultrafast fiber-to-the-home network capable of 10 gigabits-per-second speeds within the next five years, a plan that takes aim at the company’s fierce rival, Verizon Communications Inc.’s Fios.
With a 1 gbps connection, a customer can download a high-definition movie in about 30 to 40 seconds. A 10 gbps connection would download the movie in just a few seconds. With a 50 megabits-per-second Verizon Fios connection, it would take about 14 minutes.
Altice’s announcement marks the most ambitious fiber-to-the-home rollout yet from a major U.S. cable operator. The European telecom group earlier this year closed a deal to buy Cablevision Systems Corp., a longtime New York cable operator, and last year bought Suddenlink Communications, which serves customers in more rural markets. Altice USA has 4.6 million home and business customers in 20 states.
wsj.com
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 11/30/2016 11:58:28 PM | | | | | | Subscriber Optimism About Economy and Tech Plunges
Our subscribers got a lot more worried about the economy in the past month, our latest subscriber survey showed, an apparent reaction to Donald Trump’s election as president. Optimism plunged in the biggest shift since we began measuring attitudes two years ago.
Sentiment toward tech also turned sharply negative, both toward the sector and many individual companies, noticeably Apple. That also likely reflected a reaction to the election of Mr. Trump, who campaigned on the need to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. He has called for tariffs on Chinese-made goods and called for Apple to make iPhones in the U.S., both of which would likely hurt sales of iPhones and other consumer electronics by raising prices. He has also spoken against immigration and net neutrality, both issues of concern to tech companies.
Sentiment toward the economy was solidly negative, at a score of minus 36.9%, compared with positive 1.1% in last month’s survey. Sentiment toward the tech sector was negative 9.8%, compared with positive 22.1% last month. The sentiment score is the percentage of subscribers who are more optimistic minus the percentage who are less optimistic. The survey was conducted between Nov. 18 and 29th.
theinformation.com
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 12/1/2016 3:07:33 PM | | | | | | Snapping up Snap Ahead of IPO Proves Tough
Much like the crowds lining up to buy Snap’s new Spectacles, investors are rushing to grab stock in the owner of Snapchat before it goes public next year. But they’re finding little to buy as they scout the typical sources of stock—employees and other investors.
Those existing shareholders are rebuffing offers to sell, even though buyers are willing to pay as much as 25% above Snap’s most recent fundraising valuation of about $18 billion, brokers say. That’s likely because shareholders are aware that the price could soar after the IPO, when a wider group of investors will be able to buy Snap stock. Snap, one of the most anticipated IPOs in tech in recent years, is reportedly expected to be valued well above $20 billion in the offering.
The shortage of available Snap stock will likely intensify demand for shares in the public offering, and could increase the chance that the stock pops afterwards. The shortage, coming several months before Snap’s expected IPO, is a stark contrast to the months before the public debuts of Facebook and Twitter, when shares traded hands in large amounts. How that pre-IPO trading affected demand in the IPOs is hard to say. Facebook’s IPO famously wasn’t well received, although that was likely more due to an increase in the selling price before the IPO. Twitter’s stock had a big first-day pop.
theinformation.com
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 12/2/2016 3:49:52 PM | | | | | | NVIDIA DGX SATURNV Ranked World’s Most Efficient Supercomputer by Wide Margin
Already speeding our efforts to build smarter cars and more powerful GPUs, NVIDIA’s new DGX SATURNV supercomputer is ranked the world’s most efficient — and 28th fastest overall — on the Top500 list of supercomputers released Monday.
Our SATURNV supercomputer, powered by new Tesla P100 GPUs, delivers 9.46 gigaflops/watt — a 42 percent improvement from the 6.67 gigaflops/watt delivered by the most efficient machine on the Top500 list released just last June. Compared with a supercomputer of similar performance, the Camphore 2 system, which is powered by Xeon Phi Knights Landing, SATURNV is 2.3x more energy efficient.
That efficiency is key to building machines capable of reaching exascale speeds — that’s 1 quintillion, or 1 billion billion, floating-point operations per second. Such a machine could help design efficient new combustion engines, model clean-burning fusion reactors, and achieve new breakthroughs in medical research.
GPUs — with their massively parallel architecture — have long powered some of the world’s fastest supercomputers. More recently, they’ve been key to an AI boom that’s given us machines that perceive the world as we do, understand our language and learn from examples in ways that exceed our own (see “ Accelerating AI with GPUs: A New Computing Model“)
blogs.nvidia.com |
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 12/3/2016 12:22:18 AM | | | | | | Why The Race To Wireless 5G? The Internet Of Things
Apple ( AAPL) and the iPhone ecosystem owe much of their torrid growth to the 3G and 4G wireless networks that whisked games, apps, photos and video to the computerlike smartphones.
Now the 5G, or fifth generation, wireless revolution is near, promising data speeds 50 to 100 times faster than 4G LTE networks. Sure it'll improve smartphones, but that's not the point. Analysts say 5G's biggest impact will be to drive the proliferation of the Internet of Things — billions of connected devices.
The business case for 5G is all about IoT, an evolution, or maybe revolution, that will take the internet era into new territories. Companies including chipmakers, network equipment makers and telecom service providers are investing heavily in the technology, with the first products to roll out in 2017.
investors.com |
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 12/7/2016 11:14:05 AM | | | | | | Silicon Valley Stumbles in a World Beyond Software
A Google drone lowered a box of dog treats and chocolate bars to a rancher in the Australian outback in August 2014, the payoff from two years’ work to show that a drone could make deliveries.
Google then scrapped the drone and started over.
One problem was how the wind often toppled the device on takeoff or landing. “It was a dumb thing about physics,” says Chris Anderson, chief executive of 3D Robotics Inc., which has made parts and software in Google’s drones.
Google parent Alphabet Inc. and others in Silicon Valley are broadening their sights from the digital to the physical world in a bid to expand their influence, and their bottom lines. They promise to reinvent everything from cars to thermostats to contact lenses. Yet in a sign of how innovation is stalling broadly in the American economy, they are finding their new terrain far harder to control than their familiar digital turf.
wsj.com
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