Lifeboat Foundation

Google’s company-defining effort to catch up to ChatGPT creator OpenAI is turning out to be harder than expected.

Google representatives earlier this year told some cloud customers and business partners they would get access to the company’s new conversational AI, a large language model known as Gemini, by November. But the company recently told them not to expect it until the first quarter of next year, according to two people with direct knowledge. The delay comes at a bad time for Google, whose cloud sales growth has slowed while that of its bigger rival, Microsoft, has accelerated. Part of Microsoft’s success has come from selling OpenAI’s technology to its customers.

As boosters say AI is primed to conquer entire sectors, from military to medicine, a significant portion of the tech world is surprisingly unconvinced by its utility, according to a new survey from software development business Retool.

In the survey of 1,500 people working in tech, Retool found that a startling 51.6 percent of people think AI is overrated, while 25.1 percent think it’s underrated, and another 23.4 percent think it’s fairly rated. The people surveyed include executives, software engineers, designers, and other positions in different industries.

Particularly striking was that workers in executive roles had a more favorable view of AI while people in the technical side “skewed a little more toward overrated” — perhaps not a surprise, since many business leaders have been crowing about the potential cost savings of AI and how it could generate more revenue.

Just weeks before the management shakeup at OpenAI rocked Silicon Valley and made international news, the company’s cofounder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever explored the transformative potential of artificial general intelligence (AGI), highlighting how it could surpass human intelligence and profoundly transform every aspect of life. Hear his take on the promises and perils of AGI — and his optimistic case for how unprecedented collaboration will ensure its safe and beneficial development. (Recorded October 17, 2023)

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Continue reading “The Exciting, Perilous Journey Toward AGI | Ilya Sutskever | TED” »

Europe has become known as a second-place destination for business, and more recently, innovation.

Disruptive technologies like AI have hailed from the United States for decades with no European challenger in sight.

However, when a four-week-old French AI startup secured €105 million for its seed round, it demonstrated that Europe isn’t as disadvantaged as people think. While AI is a saturated market, quantum computing can allow Europe to survive in a century ruled by China and the US.

Why it matters: While AI algorithms are seemingly everywhere, processing on the most popular platforms require powerful server GPUs to provide customers with their generative services. Arm is introducing a new dedicated chip design, set to provide AI acceleration even in the most affordable IoT devices starting next year.

The Arm Cortex-M52 is the smallest and most cost-efficient processor designed for AI acceleration applications, according to the company. This latest design from the UK-based fabless firm promises to deliver “enhanced” AI capabilities to Internet of Things (IoT) devices, as Arm states, without the need for a separate computing unit.

Paul Williamson, Arm’s SVP and general manager for the company’s IoT business, emphasized the need to bring machine learning optimized processing to “even the smallest and lowest-power” endpoint devices to fully realize the potential of AI in IoT. Despite AI’s ubiquity, Williamson noted, harnessing the “intelligence” from the vast amounts of data flowing through digital devices requires IoT appliances that are smarter and more capable.

YouTube has had it with you blocking the ads on its platform — and it’s willing to make the experience as miserable as possible until you give up.

As Business Insider reports, the company is encouraging viewers to turn off their ad blockers in their browsers or subscribe to YouTube Premium, which costs a whopping $13.99 a month, by degrading the experience of using the site.

“Ads are a vital lifeline for our creators that helps them run and grow their businesses,” a spokesperson told Insider. “That’s why the use of ad blockers violates YouTube’s Terms of Service.”

As organizations grow, they begin to prioritize process over product. That impedes real innovation. When organizations realize this, they typically respond in three ways: By hiring consultants to do a reorg (that’s “organizational theater”), adopt new processes such as hackathons to spur innovation (that’s “innovation theater”), or take steps to try to reform their bureaucratic behaviors (that’s “process theater”). Instead, what organizations need is an Innovation Doctrine that addresses culture, mindset, and process and guides the organization’s efforts to achieve real innovations.

Page-utils class=” article-utils—vertical hide-for-print” data-js-target=” page-utils” data-id=” tag: blogs.harvardbusiness.org, 2007/03/31:999.242633” data-title=” Why Companies Do “Innovation Theater” Instead of Actual Innovation” data-url=”/2019/10/why-companies-do-innovation-theater-instead-of-actual-innovation” data-topic=” Innovation” data-authors=” Steve Blank” data-content-type=” Digital Article” data-content-image=”/resources/images/article_assets/2019/10/Oct19_07_-513439309-383x215.jpg” data-summary=”

They put too much focus on process and not enough on product.

At this point, Nvidia is widely regarded as the 800 pound gorilla, when it comes to silicon and software for artificial intelligence.

Beyond AI, as I mentioned previously, all of Nvidia’s BUs realized quarterly growth. Though its Automotive group rose a modest 3% to $261M, the company’s automotive design win pipeline is projected at $14 billion in new business (numbers soon to be updated). Automotive design wins have a longer gestation period, and the company has noted that this revenue impact opportunity will begin materializing in 2024 and beyond. Shifting to Nvidia’s Professional Visualization business unit, sequential growth of 9.8% to $416 million was achieved, while the company’s OEM And Other business grew 10.6% to $73 million. Finally, Nvidia’s Gaming group delivered $2.856 billion for the quarter, compared to $2.49 billion in its previous Q2 quarter (up about 15%), and $2.24 billion quarter on quarter from a year ago. Here again, the company’s gaming GPUs and software are widely respected as the performance and feature leaders currently in the PC Gaming industry, though its chief rival AMD is beginning to execute better with its Radeon product line, along with its potent Ryzen CPUs as a 1–2 punch platform solution.

Moving forward, the company guided for a nice round $20 billion for its Q4 FY24 number, representing a projected 11% sequential gain. There will be a bit of headwind of course, from competitors like AMD that is expected to deliver its MI300 GPU AI accelerators in December at its Advancing AI event. That said, it’s going to be a tough slog for all competitors, due to Nvidia’s long-building inertia as the clear leader and incumbent in AI. Another component of the company’s data center silicon portfolio is just coming online now as well, with its Grace-Hopper combined CPU-GPU Superchip, competing for host processor AI data center sockets, which Huang noted is “on a very, very fast ramp with our first data center CPU to a multi-billion dollar product line.”

Continue reading “Nvidia Q3 Earnings Explode On Surging Data Center AI And Gaming Demand” »

As OpenAI employees threaten a mass exodus in the wake of CEO Sam Altman’s ouster by the board of directors, some OpenAI customers are beginning to look for the exits.

Startups built on OpenAI’s technology are looking for new options after the boardroom coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman.