Imagine a world where you can whisper your digital wishes into your device, and poof, it happens. That world may be coming sooner than you think. But if you're worried about AI doing your thinking for you, you might be waiting for a while. In a fireside chat Wednesday (March 20) at NVIDIA GTC, the global AI conference, Kanjun Qiu, CEO of Imbue, and Bryan Catanzaro, VP of applied deep learning research at NVIDIA, challenged many of the clichés that have long dominated conversations about AI. Launched in October 2022, Imbue made headlines with its Series B fundraiser last year, raising over $200 million at a $1 billion valuation.

The Future of Personal Computing
Qiu and Catanzaro discussed the role that virtual worlds will play in this, and how they could serve as interfaces for human-technology interaction. "I think it's pretty clear that AI is going to help build virtual worlds," said Catanzaro. "I think the maybe more controversial part is virtual worlds are going to be necessary for humans to interact with AI." People have an almost primal fear of being displaced, Catanzaro said, but what's much more likely is that our capabilities will be amplified as the technology fades into the background. Catanzaro compared it to the adoption of electricity. A century ago, people talked a lot about electricity. Now that it's ubiquitous, it's no longer the focus of broader conversations, even as it makes our day-to-day lives better.

Cerebras Systems, the pioneer in accelerating generative AI, and G42, the Abu Dhabi-based leading technology holding group, today announced the build of Condor Galaxy 3 (CG-3), the third cluster of their constellation of AI supercomputers, the Condor Galaxy. Featuring 64 of Cerebras' newly announced CS-3 systems - all powered by the industry's fastest AI chip, the Wafer-Scale Engine 3 (WSE-3) - Condor Galaxy 3 will deliver 8 exaFLOPs of AI with 58 million AI-optimized cores. The Cerebras and G42 strategic partnership already delivered 8 exaFLOPs of AI supercomputing performance via Condor Galaxy 1 and Condor Galaxy 2, each amongst the largest AI supercomputers in the world. Located in Dallas, Texas, Condor Galaxy 3 brings the current total of the Condor Galaxy network to 16 exaFLOPs.

"With Condor Galaxy 3, we continue to achieve our joint vision of transforming the worldwide inventory of AI compute through the development of the world's largest and fastest AI supercomputers," said Kiril Evtimov, Group CTO of G42. "The existing Condor Galaxy network has trained some of the leading open-source models in the industry, with tens of thousands of downloads. By doubling the capacity to 16exaFLOPs, we look forward to seeing the next wave of innovation Condor Galaxy supercomputers can enable." At the heart of Condor Galaxy 3 are 64 Cerebras CS-3 Systems. Each CS-3 is powered by the new 4 trillion transistor, 900,000 AI core WSE-3. Manufactured at TSMC at the 5-nanometer node, the WSE-3 delivers twice the performance at the same power and for the same price as the previous generation part. Purpose built for training the industry's largest AI models, WSE-3 delivers an astounding 125 petaflops of peak AI performance per chip.

The ecosystem around NVIDIA's technologies has always been verdant—but this is absurd. After a stunning premiere at the World Economic Forum in Davos, immersive artworks based on Refit Anadol Studio's Large Nature Model will come to the U.S. for the first time at NVIDIA GTC. Offering a deep dive into the synergy between AI and the natural world, Anadol's multisensory work, "Large Nature Model: A Living Archive," will be situated prominently on the main concourse of the San Jose Convention Center, where the global AI event is taking place, from March 18-21.

Fueled by NVIDIA's advanced AI technology, including powerful DGX A100 stations and high-performance GPUs, the exhibit offers a captivating journey through our planet's ecosystems with stunning visuals, sounds and scents. These scenes are rendered in breathtaking clarity across screens with a total output of 12.5 million pixels, immersing attendees in an unprecedented digital portrayal of Earth's ecosystems. Refik Anadol, recognized by The Economist as "the artist of the moment," has emerged as a key figure in AI art. His work, notable for its use of data and machine learning, places him at the forefront of a generation pushing the boundaries between technology, interdisciplinary research and aesthetics. Anadol's influence reflects a wider movement in the art world towards embracing digital innovation, setting new precedents in how art is created and experienced.

NVIDIA is offering a new professional certification in generative AI to enable developers to establish technical credibility in this important domain. Generative AI is revolutionizing industries worldwide, yet there's a critical skills gap and need to uplevel employees to more fully harness the technology. Available for the first time from NVIDIA, this new professional certification enables developers, career professionals, and others to validate and showcase their generative AI skills and expertise. Our new professional certification program introduces two associate-level generative AI certifications, focusing on proficiency in large language models and multimodal workflow skills.

"Generative AI has moved to center stage as governments, industries and organizations everywhere look to harness its transformative capabilities," NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang recently said. The certification will become available starting at GTC, where in-person attendees can also access recommended training to prepare for a certification exam. "Organizations in every industry need to increase their expertise in this transformative technology," said Greg Estes, VP of developer programs at NVIDIA. "Our goals are to assist in upskilling workforces, sharpen the skills of qualified professionals, and enable individuals to demonstrate their proficiency in order to gain a competitive advantage in the job market."

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. unveiled its latest advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) at Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona. From the new Qualcomm AI Hub, to cutting-edge research breakthroughs and a display of commercial AI-enabled devices, Qualcomm Technologies is empowering developers and revolutionizing user experiences across a wide range of devices powered by Snapdragon and Qualcomm platforms.

"With Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for smartphones and Snapdragon X Elite for PCs, we sparked commercialization of on-device AI at scale. Now with the Qualcomm AI Hub, we will empower developers to fully harness the potential of these cutting-edge technologies and create captivating AI-enabled apps," said Durga Malladi, senior vice president and general manager, technology planning and edge solutions, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. "The Qualcomm AI Hub provides developers with a comprehensive AI model library to quickly and easily integrate pre-optimized AI models into their applications, leading to faster, more reliable and private user experiences."

Hello Xbox community and other gaming platform populations! Today marks a monumental milestone - our medieval turn-based strategy game, Inkulinati, is leaving the Xbox Game Preview Program and you can now enjoy the full 1.0 release! To mark the occasion, we've got a brand-new shiny release trailer, voiced by famous bardcore musician Hildegard von Blingin'. Check it out below! Inkulinati 1.0 is OUT NOW on PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation!

So. what is Inkulinati, you might ask? Well, it is a turn-based strategy game, where a rabbit's bottom can be deadlier than a dog's sword (trust me, this is not a mistake!). It is inspired by real medieval art and is entirely played on the pages of medieval manuscripts. If you've ever seen old medieval books with funny drawings on the sides of the pages, or even medieval memes on the internet, these hilarious doodles (called "marginalia") were used as the basis for, well, everything in our game.

The U.S. Department of Commerce today announced $1.5 billion in planned direct funding for GlobalFoundries (Nasdaq: GFS) (GF) as part of the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act. This investment will enable GF to expand and create new manufacturing capacity and capabilities to securely produce more essential chips for automotive, IoT, aerospace, defense, and other vital markets.

New York-headquartered GF, celebrating its 15th year of operations, is the only U.S.-based pure play foundry with a global manufacturing footprint including facilities in the U.S., Europe, and Singapore. GF is the first semiconductor pure play foundry to receive a major award (over $1.5 billion) from the CHIPS and Science Act, designed to strengthen American semiconductor manufacturing, supply chains and national security. The proposed funding will support three GF projects:

Japanese tech billionaire and founder of the SoftBank Group, Masayoshi Son, is embarking on a hugely ambitious new project to build an AI chip company that aims to rival NVIDIA, the current leader in AI semiconductor solutions. Codenamed "Izanagi" after the Japanese god of creation, Son aims to raise up to $100 billion in funding for the new venture. With his company SoftBank having recently scaled back investments in startups, Son is now setting his sights on the red-hot AI chip sector. Izanagi would leverage SoftBank's existing chip design firm, Arm, to develop advanced semiconductors tailored for artificial intelligence computing. The startup would use Arm's instruction set for the chip's processing elements. This could pit Izanagi directly against NVIDIA's leadership position in AI chips. Son has a chest of $41 billion in cash at SoftBank that he can deploy for Izanagi.

Additionally, he is courting sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East to contribute up to $70 billion in additional capital. In total, Son may be seeking up to $100 billion to bankroll Izanagi into a chip powerhouse. AI chips are seeing surging demand as machine learning and neural networks require specialized semiconductors that can process massive datasets. NVIDIA and other names like Intel, AMD, and select startups have capitalized on this trend. However, Son believes the market has room for another major player. Izanagi would focus squarely on developing bleeding-edge AI chip architectures to power the next generation of artificial intelligence applications. It is still unclear if this would be an AI training or AI inference project, but given that the training market is currently bigger as we are in the early buildout phase of AI infrastructure, the consensus might settle on training. With his track record of bold bets, Son is aiming very high with Izanagi. It's a hugely ambitious goal, but Son has defied expectations before. Project Izanagi will test the limits of even his vision and financial firepower.

The World AI Cannes Festival (WAICF) is set to be the epicenter of artificial intelligence innovation, where the globe's top 200 decision-makers and AI innovators will converge for three days of intense discussions on groundbreaking AI strategies and use-cases. Against the backdrop of this premier event, GIGABYTE has strategically chosen to participate, unveiling its exponential growth in the AI and High-Performance Computing (HPC) market segments.

The AI industry has witnessed unprecedented growth, with Cloud Service Providers (CSP's) and data center operators spearheading supercomputing projects. GIGABYTE's decision to promote its GPU server portfolio with over 70+ models, at WAICF is a testament to the increasing demands from the French market for sovereign AI Cloud solutions. The spotlight will be on GIGABYTE's success stories on enabling GPU Cloud infrastructure, seamlessly powered by NVIDIA GPU technologies, as GIGABYTE aims to engage in meaningful conversations with end-users and firms dependent on GPU computing.

Chad Pralle, Principle Technical Program Manager at Microsoft's Windows AI NPU division has introduced the DirectML 1.13.1 and ONNX Runtime 1.17 APIs—this appears to be a collaborative effort—Samsung was roped in to some degree, according to Microsoft's announcement and a recent Team Blue blog entry. Pralle and his team are suitably proud of this joint effort that involved open source models: "we are excited to announce developer preview support for NPU acceleration in DirectML, the machine learning platform API for Windows. This developer preview enables support for a subset of models on new Windows 11 devices with Intel Core Ultra processors with Intel AI boost."

Further on in Microsoft's introductory piece, Samsung Electronics is announced as a key launch partner—Hwang-Yoon Shim, VP and Head of New Computing H/W R&D Group stated that: "NPUs are emerging as a critical resource for broadly delivering efficient machine learning experiences to users, and Windows DirectML is one of the most efficient ways for Samsung's developers to make those experiences for Windows." Microsoft notes that NPU support in DirectML is still "a work in progress," but Pralle and his colleagues are eager to receive user feedback from the testing community. It is currently "only compatible with a subset of machine learning models, some models may not run at all or may have high latency or low accuracy." They hope to implement improvements in the near future. The release is limited to modern Team Blue hardware, so NPU-onboard AMD devices are excluded at this point in time, naturally.

d-Matrix, the leader in high-efficiency generative AI compute for data centers, has closed $110 million in a Series-B funding round led by Singapore-based global investment firm Temasek. The goal of the fundraise is to enable d-Matrix to begin commercializing Corsair, the world's first Digital-In Memory Compute (DIMC), chiplet-based inference compute platform, after the successful launches of its prior Nighthawk, Jayhawk-I and Jayhawk II chiplets.

d-Matrix's recent silicon announcement, Jayhawk II, is the latest example of how the company is working to fundamentally change the physics of memory-bound compute workloads common in generative AI and large language model (LLM) applications. With the explosion of this revolutionary technology over the past nine months, there has never been a greater need to overcome the memory bottleneck and current technology approaches that limit performance and drive up AI compute costs.

IBM has formally introduced watsonx, the company's next generation enterprise-focused artificial intelligence and data platform. Global business leaders remain unclear about the real, transformative power of AI and how to leverage it. The campaign is designed to define and differentiate watsonx as a force multiplier that can accelerate impact for global business leaders as they look to apply AI solutions in new and innovative ways.

The two distinct spots feature a fast-paced, multi-media technique that aims to provide inspiration and guidance around the value proposition of watsonx, while underscoring the need to identify the right AI that will empower businesses to advance objectives and accelerate workloads. These concepts come to life through potential use cases that spotlight the importance of applying AI that is trusted, targeted, and built on the best open technology available.

This July, as part of Disability Pride Month, Team Xbox proudly celebrates players, creators, and community members with disabilities. More than 400 million video game players have disabilities worldwide, and we recognize the incredible contributions the gaming and disability community has made in making Team Xbox, and the broader gaming industry, more inclusive and welcoming for everyone.

Disability Pride holds a special place in my heart, as I am not only a Program Manager on our Gaming Accessibility Team, but also a person with disabilities. Most people wouldn't think of me as having a disability at first glance. In fact, I didn't know I had disabilities until I was in my 20's when I was diagnosed as being neurodiverse. Now I know that I have had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Sensory Processing Disorder since I was a young child. And, as the years have gone by, I've acquired new disabilities due to illness, injury, and trauma. Chronic pain is now part of my life, as is hearing loss, and anxiety and depression related to complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

AI and accelerated computing will help climate researchers achieve the miracles they need to achieve breakthroughs in climate research, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said during a keynote Monday at the Berlin Summit for the Earth Virtualization Engines initiative. "Richard Feynman once said that "what I can't create, I don't understand" and that's the reason why climate modeling is so important," Huang told 180 attendees at the Harnack House in Berlin, a storied gathering place for the region's scientific and research community. "And so the work that you do is vitally important to policymakers to researchers to the industry," he added.

To advance this work, the Berlin Summit brings together participants from around the globe to harness AI and high-performance computing for climate prediction. In his talk, Huang outlined three miracles that will have to happen for climate researchers to achieve their goals, and touched on NVIDIA's own efforts to collaborate with climate researchers and policymakers with its Earth-2 efforts. The first miracle required will be to simulate the climate fast enough, and with a high enough resolution - on the order of just a couple of square kilometers.

Natural disasters, like flooding, are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change, threatening people's safety and livelihood. It's estimated that flooding affects more than 250 million people globally each year and causes around $10 billion in economic damages.

As part of our work to use AI to address the climate crisis, today we're expanding our flood forecasting capabilities to 80 countries. With the addition of 60 new countries across Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, and South and Central America, our platform Flood Hub now includes some of the territories with the highest percentages of population exposed to flood risk and experiencing more extreme weather, covering 460 million people globally.

RIKEN and Intel Corporation (hereafter referred to as Intel) have signed a memorandum of understanding on collaboration and cooperation to accelerate joint research in next-generation computing fields such as AI (artificial intelligence), high-performance computing, and quantum computers. The signing ceremony was concluded on May 18, 2023. As part of this MOU, RIKEN will work with Intel Foundry Services (IFS) to prototype these new solutions.

Hackboard today announced the launch of Hackboard 2, an affordable single-board computer (SBC) about the size of a smartphone but with the power of a desktop computer and one of the lowest-priced Intel-powered and Windows-based single-board computers ever made. It's ideal for Makers and Hobbyists, IoT, Edge Computing, and Embedded Solutions with customizable Hackboards, contact Support@Hackboard.com for more info. Soon, Hackboard will ship Personal Computer Kits, ideal for work-from-home users, remote learners and the classroom.

The Hackboard 2 allows users to create their ideal computing environment at an affordable price, while taking advantage of the benefits of industry standard technology. With optional 4G or 5G modules, users can connect to the internet from almost anywhere. Users can plug the system into nearly any monitor with an HDMI input, including their TV.

SAN FRANCISCO, April 21, 2023 -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the launch of the TLA+ Foundation to promote the adoption and development of the TLA+ programming language and its community of TLA+ practitioners. Inaugural members include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle and Microsoft. TLA+ is a high-level language for modeling programs and systems, especially concurrent and distributed ones. TLA+ has been successfully used by companies to verify complex software systems, reducing errors and improving reliability. The language helps detect design flaws early in the development process, saving time and resources.

TLA+ and its tools are useful for eliminating fundamental design errors, which are hard to find and expensive to correct in code. The language is based on the idea that the best way to describe things precisely is with simple mathematics. The language was invented decades ago by the pioneering computer scientist Leslie Lamport, now a distinguished scientist with Microsoft Research. After years of Lamport's stewardship and Microsoft's support, TLA+ has found a new home at the Linux Foundation.

We've created GPT-4, the latest milestone in OpenAI's effort in scaling up deep learning. GPT-4 is a large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, emitting text outputs) that, while less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks. For example, it passes a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers; in contrast, GPT-3.5's score was around the bottom 10%. We've spent 6 months iteratively aligning GPT-4 using lessons from our adversarial testing program as well as ChatGPT, resulting in our best-ever results (though far from perfect) on factuality, steerability, and refusing to go outside of guardrails.

Over the past two years, we rebuilt our entire deep learning stack and, together with Azure, co-designed a supercomputer from the ground up for our workload. A year ago, we trained GPT-3.5 as a first "test run" of the system. We found and fixed some bugs and improved our theoretical foundations. As a result, our GPT-4 training run was (for us at least!) unprecedentedly stable, becoming our first large model whose training performance we were able to accurately predict ahead of time. As we continue to focus on reliable scaling, we aim to hone our methodology to help us predict and prepare for future capabilities increasingly far in advance—something we view as critical for safety.