Not to be outdone in the generative artificial intelligence (AI) race, China-based tech giant Alibaba has recently unveiled a number of its own tools and models. Its flagship is its ChatGPT challenging large language model (LLM) called Tongyi Qianwen — cited as one of the largest and most powerful generative chatbots produced so far.
Alibaba is best known in the West as an e-commerce titan, in many ways analogous to Amazon. Like that US company, it’s also a global leader in cloud services provided through its subsidiary Alibaba Cloud.
Its dominance across retail and web services means it is well-positioned to create apps enabling its business customers to launch their own generative AI… More.
There’s no shortage of stories about young, hyper-successful entrepreneurs. From the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 lists to films like “The Social Network”, these stories offer an alluring blueprint for early success: dream huge, work hard, and soon enough you too can get filthy, tech-titan rich.
You’re less likely to hear the more common story: a young entrepreneur starts a new business, accrues debt, runs out of luck, gets demoralized and then, reluctantly, takes on a regular job. What explains the frequency of these crash-and-burn stories? It seems the problem doesn’t lie in the pursuit of entrepreneurism, but rather in the age at which entrepreneurs start launching businesses.
That’s the takeaway of a recent study that found the mean age for the 1-in-1,000 fastest growing new ventures to be 45 years. This finding held true across “high-technology sectors, entrepreneurial hubs, and successful firm exits.” So, although conventional thinking tends to paint the young generation as uniquely creative innovators and (sorry in advance) Big Thinkers, it seems that older generations are more likely to possess traits that facilitate entrepreneurial success.
It’s been a busy week for IonQ, the quantum computing start-up focused on developing trapped-ion-based systems. At the Quantum World Congress today, the company announced two new systems (Forte Enterprise and Tempo) intended to be rack-mountable and deployable in a traditional data center. Yesterday, speaking at Tabor Communications (HPCwire parent organization) HPC and AI on Wall Street conference, the company made a strong pitch for reaching quantum advantage in 2–3 years, using the new systems.
If you’ve been following quantum computing, you probably know that deploying quantum computers in the datacenter is a rare occurrence. Access to the vast majority NISQ era computers has been through web portals. The latest announcement from IonQ, along with somewhat similar announcement from neutral atom specialist QuEra in August, and increased IBM efforts (Cleveland Clinic and PINQ2) to selectively place on-premise quantum systems suggest change is coming to the market.
IonQ’s two rack-mounted solutions are designed for businesses and governments wanting to integrate quantum capabilities within their existing infrastructure. “Businesses will be able to harness the power of quantum directly from their own data centers, making the technology significantly more accessible and easy to apply to key workflows and business processes,” reported the company. IonQ is calling the new systems enterprise-grade. (see the official announcement.)
Sure, you could just stick a ChatGPT sidebar in your browser. But what do we really want AI to do for us as we use the web? That’s the much harder question.
At some point, if you’re a company doing pretty much anything in the year 2023, you have to have an AI strategy. It’s just business. You can make a ChatGPT plug-in. You can do a sidebar. You can bet your entire trillion-dollar company on AI being the future of how everyone does everything. But you have to do something.
The last one of these was crypto and the blockchain a couple of years ago, and Josh Miller, the CEO of The Browser Company, which makes the popular new Arc browser, says he’s… More.
Helsinki’s Callboats pioneers autonomous water taxis, aiming to cut costs, improve island access, and reduce captain shortages.
Autonomous electric water transport could be the answer to improving accessibility, achieving carbon neutrality, and addressing a shortage of skippers in the Helsinki archipelago. However, current legislation is a barrier to the operation of remotely controlled boats, according to a Helsinki Times.
Over the years, Forum Virium Helsinki, the innovation agency of the City of Helsinki, has accelerated various business ideas through its rapid innovation experiments. Successful innovations in smart mobility include autonomous transportation solutions like robot buses, drones delivering first aid supplies, and sweeping robot machines.
“New devices can read and manipulate our mental states to help us relax, learn and reduce pain. As they do this, they harvest data. Can businesses be trusted with this private information? How can we make use of this technology while protecting the last fortress of our humanity — our thoughts and emotions?”
As neurotechnology becomes widely accessible, do we need to legally protect our thoughts?
You cannot read any newspaper, media report, or publication these days without a mention of AI and its impact to disrupting business in shaping new ways or working, augmenting human intelligence, or raising genuine fears of what have we unleashed in our societal structures.
IBM’s survey in 2022 predicted that the AI global adoption is already over 35 percent in using AI to modernize business practices and processes.
It’s already over a decade now since Oxford researchers, Carl Frey and Michael Osborne in their seminal research, declared that over 47 percent of jobs would disappear by 2030.
The instrumental title track “I Robot”, together with the successful single “I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You”, form the opening of “I Robot”, a progressive rock album recorded by The Alan Parsons Project and engineered by Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson in 1977. It was released by Arista Records in 1977 and re-released on CD in 1984 and 2007. It was intended to be based on the “I, Robot” stories written by Isaac Asimov, and actually Woolfson spoke with Asimov, who was enthusiastic about the concept. However, as the rights had already been granted to a TV/movie company, the album’s title was altered slightly by removing the comma, and the theme and lyrics were made to be more generically about robots rather than specific to the Asimov universe. The cover inlay reads: “I ROBOT… HE STORY OF THE RISE OF THE MACHINE AND THE DECLINE OF MAN, WHICH PARADOXICALLY COINCIDED WITH HIS DISCOVERY OF THE WHEEL… ND A WARNING THAT HIS BRIEF DOMINANCE OF THIS PLANET WILL PROBABLY END, BECAUSE MAN TRIED TO CREATE ROBOT IN HIS OWN IMAGE.” The Alan Parsons Project were a British progressive rock band, active between 1975 and 1990, founded by Eric Woolfson and Alan Parsons. Englishman Alan Parsons (born 20 December 1948) met Scotsman Eric Norman Woolfson (18 March 1945 — 2 December 2009) in the canteen of Abbey Road Studios in the summer of 1974. Parsons had already acted as assistant engineer on The Beatles’ “Abbey Road” and “Let It Be”, had recently engineered Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side Of The Moon”, and had produced several acts for EMI Records. Woolfson, a songwriter and composer, was working as a session pianist, and he had also composed material for a concept album idea based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Parsons asked Woolfson to become his manager and Woolfson managed Parsons’ career as a producer and engineer through a string of successes including Pilot, Steve Harley, Cockney Rebel, John Miles, Al Stewart, Ambrosia and The Hollies. Parsons commented at the time that he felt frustrated in having to accommodate the views of some of the musicians, which he felt interfered with his production. Woolfson came up with the idea of making an album based on developments in the film industry, where directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick were the focal point of the film’s promotion, rather than individual film stars. If the film industry was becoming a director’s medium, Woolfson felt the music business might well become a producer’s medium. Recalling his earlier Edgar Allan Poe material, Woolfson saw a way to combine his and Parsons’ respective talents. Parsons would produce and engineer songs written by the two, and The Alan Parsons Project was born. This channel is dedicated to the classic rock hits that have become part of the history of our culture. The incredible AOR tracks that define music from the late 60s, the 70s and the early 80s… lassic Rock is here!
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