The CERN in Geneva has become a sink for public money.
At the same time there’s a lack of funding in other research areas, that would be much more urgent!
Continue reading “Particle Physicists Continue Empty Promises” »
Skeptical. But, wonder if will trigger major funding boost if true.
Any credible list of influential books about tech from the last decade would include AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee. Considered the world’s foremost authority on artificial intelligence, Taipei-born Lee got an early start, writing a pioneering speech-recognition program while a student at Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s. He later had a career in China and the U.S. at Apple, Microsoft, Silicon Graphics and Google, where he was president of Google China. Now based in Beijing, Lee runs a venture capital firm called Sinovation, which focuses on AI investments. The interview with Lee took place (virtually) in early October.
Forbes Asia: AI Superpowers made you a global business star. Why did you write the book?
Continue reading “China Has Caught Up To U.S. In AI, Says AI Expert Kai-Fu Lee” »
The quiet shift in strategy, which brings the Vision Fund’s approach closer to that of a traditional venture capital investor, may ease concerns over big, bold bets going sour, a factor that has left a major gap between SoftBank’s market capitalization and the sum of its investments.
TOKYO — SoftBank Group’s Vision Fund is turning to a new strategy as a global pandemic and government stimulus distort tech valuations: Invest smaller in hopes for bigger returns.
After raising nearly $100 billion and investing $85 billion in high-profile companies like Uber Technologies, WeWork and ByteDance over three years, the Vision Fund is now focusing on making smaller bets in early-stage startups.
Continue reading “SoftBank eyes smaller bets, bigger returns in Vision Fund rethink” »
“I mean, I suspect we could have an army of 120,000, of which 30,000 might be robots, who knows?” Carter said, although he stressed he was not setting any particular target in terms of future numbers.
Investment in robot warfare was to be at the heart of the planned integrated five-year defence review, whose future was thrown into doubt after the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, postponed the cross-government spending review to which it had been linked last month.
Carter said negotiations with Downing Street and the Treasury about salvaging the multi-year defence funding settlement were “going on in a very constructive way” – as he lobbied in public for a long-term financial deal.
The U.S. Air Force envisions placing laser weapon systems on fighter jets by the mid-2020s. The service is banking on a defense contractor’s SHiELD laser system, a pod-mounted laser that will protect fighters from incoming missiles.
✈ You love badass planes. So do we. Let’s nerd out over them together.
The year is coming to a close and it’s safe to say Elon Musk’s prediction that his company would field one million “robotaxis” by the end of 2020 isn’t going to come true. In fact, so far, Tesla’s managed to produce exactly zero self-driving vehicles. And we can probably call off the singularity too. GPT-3 has been impressive, but the closer machines get to aping human language the easier it is to see just how far away from us they really are.
So where does that leave us, ultimately, when it comes to the future of AI? That depends on your outlook. Media hype and big tech’s advertising machine has set us up for heartbreak when we compare the reality in 2020 to our 2016-era dreams of fully autonomous flying cars and hyper-personalized digital assistants capable of managing the workload of our lives.
Continue reading “Neural’s market outlook for artificial intelligence in 2021 and beyond” »
Intel, in its latest acquisition spree, has acquired Israel-based Cnvrg.io. The deal, like most of the deals in the past, is aimed at strengthening its machine learning and AI operations. The 2016-founded startup provides a platform for data scientists to build and run machine learning models that can be used to train, run comparisons and recommendations, among others. Co-founded by Yochay Ettun and Leah Forkosh Kolben, Cnvrg was valued at around $17 million in its last round.
According to a statement by Intel spokesperson, Cnvrg will be an independent Intel company and will continue to serve its existing and future customers after the acquisition. However, there is no information on the financial terms of the deal or who will join Intel from the startup.
The deal comes merely a week after Intel’s announcement of acquiring San Francisco-based software optimisation startup SigOpt, which it did to leverage SigOpt’s technologies across its products to accelerate, amplify and scale AI software tools. SigOpt’s software technologies combined with Intel hardware products could give it a major competitive advantage providing differentiated value for data scientists and developers.
Military observers said the disruptive technologies – those that fundamentally change the status quo – might include such things as sixth-generation fighters, high-energy weapons like laser and rail guns, quantum radar and communications systems, new stealth materials, autonomous combat robots, orbital spacecraft, and biological technologies such as prosthetics and powered exoskeletons.
Speeding up the development of ‘strategic forward-looking disruptive technologies’ is a focus of the country’s latest five-year plan.
Intel continues to snap up startups to build out its machine learning and AI operations. In the latest move, TechCrunch has learned that the chip giant has acquired Cnvrg.io, an Israeli company that has built and operates a platform for data scientists to build and run machine learning models, which can be used to train and track multiple models and run comparisons on them, build recommendations and more.
Intel confirmed the acquisition to us with a short note. “We can confirm that we have acquired Cnvrg,” a spokesperson said. “Cnvrg will be an independent Intel company and will continue to serve its existing and future customers.” Those customers include Lightricks, ST Unitas and Playtika.
Intel is not disclosing any financial terms of the deal, nor who from the startup will join Intel. Cnvrg, co-founded by Yochay Ettun (CEO) and Leah Forkosh Kolben, had raised $8 million from investors that include Hanaco Venture Capital and Jerusalem Venture Partners, and PitchBook estimates that it was valued at around $17 million in its last round.
Like its key allies, the UK is increasingly reliant on space-based assets for daily life in ordinary civil society and for the perfornance of its military forces. So, the Royal Air Force’s operating domain now extends from the ground to far beyond the atmosphere.
In a lockdown summer of downbeat aviation news, it is perhaps fitting that a highlight was a model aeroplane in a windtunnel. In turbulent times for aerospace, that aircraft is even named after a storm. But in showing some detail of the external shape of the Tempest future fighter, BAE Systems has also emphasised the UK’s determination to ride out the technological, financial and geopolitical hurricanes which are set to shape the national defence challenges of the next few decades.
Those late August images from BAE’s Warton, Lancashire test facility reveal an external profile designed for stealth at Mach 2, to carry a wide range of payloads and to cope with the internal heat from enough onboard electric power to anticipate exotic technologies like laser directed-energy weapons.
