AI - Saturday, December 7, 2024: Commentary with Notable and Interesting News, Articles, and Papers
AI and the IT Crowd? Do I need a new binary classification for articles and papers?
Commentary and a selection of the most important recent news, articles, and papers about AI.
Today’s Brief Commentary
Some of you have asked how I build this newsletter with the links and categorization. During the days before publishing an edition, I collect links to articles, papers, newsletters, and web pages on AI and quantum technologies via Google Alerts, LinkedIn posts, direct searches, and content people send me. I curate the links with two criteria: I find this interesting and genuinely significant. Okay, there is a third: Do I find this amusing, and will others share that opinion?
I store this information in a JSON file and process it with some Python code I wrote and am continually evolving. The data for each entry combines manually entered information and text my code has scraped from the websites. Here is an example for the first entry below:
In this case, I only entered the link URL, my type categorization for the article, and some commentary. My code takes care of web scraping to get the other information. The “arts” type translates to the heading “Music and the Arts” below.
There are more details, but I hope you get the idea. My point for mentioning this is that I sometimes think I should only have two categorizations for AI: “Articles that Mention NVIDIA” and “Articles that Don’t Mention NVIDIA.” I won’t do this, but their current sheer dominance invokes constant comparisons. This behavior is typical in the history of computing: the frontrunner is succeeding, others want to succeed, and what are others doing to take market share or dominate the next generation of technology?
When we are in such a situation, government regulators take notice. See the last link, for example.
Music and the Arts
Cradle of Filth's Dani Filth Blasts 'Soulless' AI in Music
https://www.vice.com/en/article/cradle-of-filths-dani-filth-blasts-soulless-ai-in-music/
Author: Stephen Andrew Galiher
Commentary: I wonder what Richmond Avenal would think about this.
(Monday, December 2, 2024) “Cradle of Filth frontman Dani Filth is making it clear how he feels about the use of AI in music and its "dangerous" impact.”
Semiconductor Chipsets and Infrastructure
Bezos Backs AI Chipmaker Vying With Nvidia at $2.6 Billion Value | Financial Post
Authors: Jane Lanhee Lee and Vlad Savov
(Monday, December 2, 2024) “Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos joined Samsung in a $700 million bet on Tenstorrent, valuing the AI chip startup with ambitions of taking on Nvidia Corp. at about $2.6 billion.”
Photonic processor could enable ultrafast AI computations with extreme energy efficiency | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://news.mit.edu/2024/photonic-processor-could-enable-ultrafast-ai-computations-1202
Author: Adam Zewe
(Monday, December 2, 2024) “Researchers developed a fully integrated photonic processor that can perform all the key computations of a deep neural network on a photonic chip, using light. This advance could improve the speed and energy-efficiency of running intensive deep learning models for applications like lidar, astronomical research, and navigation.”
Amazon AWS unveils Trainium3 chip, Project Rainier | ZDNET
https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-aws-unveils-trainium3-chip-project-rainier/
Author: Tiernan Ray
(Tuesday, December 3, 2024) “The new Trainium3 chip, which will become available next year, will be up to twice as fast as the existing Trainium2 while being 40% more energy-efficient, said AWS CEO Matt Garman during his keynote on Tuesday.”
Schneider Electric working with Nvidia to design data center cooling systems | Reuters
Author: Stephen Nellis
(Wednesday, December 4, 2024) “Aparna Prabhakar, senior vice president of the secure power division at Schneider, said the company worked with Nvidia to design a range of cooling system options that can be scaled up or down, depending on how many Nvidia servers are being installed and how much power they consume.”
Games
PlayStation boss: AI will never replace 'human touch' | BBC
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gpz291z59o
Author: Tom Gerken
(Tuesday, December 3, 2024) ““I suspect there will be a dual demand in gaming: one for AI-driven innovative experiences and another for handcrafted, thoughtful content,” he told the BBC.
“Striking the right balance between leveraging AI and preserving the human touch will be crucial.””
Generative AI and Models
How to get a handle on generative AI governance | SiliconANGLE
https://siliconangle.com/2024/11/30/get-handle-generative-ai-governance/
Author: Jason Bloomberg
(Saturday, November 30, 2024) “The way out of this conundrum is straightforward: Implement AI governance – not to slow down innovation, but rather to remove roadblocks to adoption of gen AI in ways that are safe, legal and compliant with corporate policies.”
Why over 140,000 developers took our five-day generative AI course | Google
https://blog.google/technology/developers/google-kaggle-genai-intensive/
Authors: D. Sculley and Anant Nawalgaria
Commentary: This is still available and you can stream the lectures via the link.
(Monday, December 2, 2024) “The live course was carefully architected to deliver a balanced mix of theory, hands-on learning and community engagement. Each day, participants received assignments that included AI-generated podcasts (created using NotebookLM), informative whitepapers (written by experts across Google) and practical code labs for hands-on experience with Gemini and other services”
Google's generative AI video model is available in private preview | engadget
Author: Igor Bonifacic
(Wednesday, December 4, 2024) “Google has begun rolling out private access to its Veo and Imagen 3 generative AI models. Starting today, customers of the company’s Vertex AI Google Cloud package can begin using Veo to generate videos from text prompts and images. Then, as of next week, Google will make Imagen 3, its latest text-to-image framework, available to those same users.”
Government Policy, Legislation, and Regulation
Nvidia's business practices in EU antitrust spotlight, sources say | Reuters
Author: Foo Yun Chee
(Friday, December 6, 2024) “EU antitrust regulators are asking Nvidia (NVDA.O), rivals and customers if the U.S. artificial intelligence chipmaker bundles its products that may give it an unfair advantage, people with direct knowledge of the matter said, in a move that may lead to a formal investigation.”