News, events, news from the world of technology, AI, robotics - November 2024
SoftBank Japan will become the first company to receive Blackwell AI chips from Nvidia.
SoftBank wants to use the chips to build two cutting-edge supercomputers that will support AI services for research and enterprise purposes.
The Blackwell-Architecture GPUs contain 208 billion transistors and are manufactured using TSMC’s specially designed 4NP process. All Blackwell products feature two limited-grid integrated circuits connected at 10 terabytes per second (TB/s) between chips in a single, unified GPU.
Nvidia plans to launch AI-enabled computers for robots in the first half of 2025. The manufacturer wants its Jetson Thor computers to serve as the foundational technology for humanoid robots, offering a sort of base operating system.
Baidu wants to compete with Ray-Ban’s AI Meta.
Baidu is launching smart glasses next year at a competitive price. Their AI-integrated smart glasses will use the company’s proprietary Ernie AI system for things like real-time translation and navigation assistance.
Tencent (Tencent Holdings Limited, a multinational technology and investment holding company based in Shenzhen and closely tied to the Chinese Communist Party) plans to invest $500 million in cloud infrastructure in Indonesia by 2030. The investment is mainly focused on building a third data center in partnership with Indonesian group GoTo Group and Alibaba.
The US Treasury’s FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) is warning financial institutions about the growing threat of deepfakes. It is urging them to secure their onboarding processes and implement tools to detect deepfakes.
Saudi Arabia to invest $100 billion in its own AI technology center. Project Transcendence will support domestic startups, data centers, and other solutions to boost its competitiveness. Google is expected to be a key partner, with funding expected to be between $5 billion and $10 billion.
Robotics startup Physical Intelligence, with OpenAI, Thrive Capital, Lux Capital, and Jeff Bezos backing it, is focused on developing the foundational software for robots. The startup has published a paper describing how the software could enable robots to perform tasks such as folding laundry or packing groceries.
LightOn, based in France, will be the first European generative LLM (large language model) specialist to launch an IPO on the continent. LightOn focuses on providing AI software to businesses and the French government.
The Chinese military and researchers have built an AI model on Meta’s open-source Llama platform, which is designed to gather and process intelligence. The U.S. responded quickly by ordering U.S. intelligence agencies to step up their efforts to spy on AI rivals.
KKR (investment firm) and Energy Capital Partners (the largest private owner of power plants in the US) plan to invest $50 billion in data center and power infrastructure to support AI development. The focus will be primarily on supporting cloud hyperscalers (Hyperscalers are large-scale data centers that specialize in providing massive amounts of computing power and storage capacity).
Next year, the European Union will invest €1.4 billion to support the technology sector, including primarily the development of artificial intelligence.
November 18, 2024