Nvidia is tempting fate with its generous use of the term “super” to describe new products—the latest is a “supermodel” that uses innovative techniques to create fine-looking AI models. The company this week announced support for Meta’s Llama 3.1 AI model with 405-billion parameters on its GPUs. When used alongside its homegrown model called Nemotron, voila, it produces a “supermodel.” This supermodel term relates to creating highly customized models using multiple LLMs, fine-tuning, guardrails, and adapters to create an AI application that suits customer requirements. (Source: Nvidia) The “su ..read more

With the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games in Paris only days away, the entire planet is preparing to watch their home teams square off in the greatest competition in the world. And while the Olympians focus on bringing home the gold, Intel is working hard to bring 8K video resolution into your home. Intel is the Official Worldwide AI Platform Partner of the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris this year, and the company has quite a lot planned for the games. Perhaps the biggest news to come out of this is Intel’s partnership with the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) to use AI to prov ..read more

As we've seen, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in various aspects of our lives is both inevitable and necessary. Among the many domains where AI can have a profound impact, child safety stands out as one of the most crucial. The fusion of AI and human oversight offers a promising pathway to create robust, trustworthy safety solutions for kids, addressing concerns from cyberbullying to online predators, and beyond. The Promise of AI in Child Safety AI technology, with its capacity for vast data processing, pattern recognition, and real-time response, is uniquely positioned to en ..read more

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced a major investment to build a new Leadership-Class Computing Facility (LCCF) facility at The University of Texas at Austin. The project is set to revolutionize computational research and development.  Encompassing large-scale automation and artificial intelligence applications, high-end computation has emerged as a transformative force driving innovation and efficiency across various industries. Set to operate under UT Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), the LCCF will provide the computational resources required to address s ..read more

New Mac developer tools will leverage Apple’s homegrown chips, limiting HPC users’ ability to use parallel programming frameworks from Intel or Nvidia. Apple’s latest programming framework, Xcode 16, was introduced at the recent WWDC conference and has a host of new features that use AI to make programming and application integration easier. However, it also adds new capabilities to its Swift programming language with features like Code Complete, which can predict and complete code. Another feature called SwiftAssist answers coding questions and helps with APIs. Apple’s PCs ..read more

Google has an ambitious goal to reduce its carbon emissions to net zero by the year 2030. This would require cutting its carbon emissions in half compared to its 2019 baseline. However, the energy demands of artificial intelligence pose a significant threat to this goal. In its 2024 Environmental Report, the search engine giant admitted that it produced 13% more carbon emissions in 2023 compared to the prior year. This translates to 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution. Google attributes the rise in emissions to its supply chain operations and higher energy consumption of its d ..read more

The US Justice Department has announced the disruption of a Russian-government-backed bot farm that used AI tools in a massive propaganda campaign. Using AI to create fake social media accounts that often claimed to be US citizens, the malicious actors involved in this bot farm hoped to promote messages in support of Russian government objectives. The seizure of two website domain names and the shutdown of 968 social media accounts marks one of the largest disruptions of a state-sponsored disinformation campaign in the digital era. “Today’s actions represent a first in disrupting a Russian-spo ..read more

In today's data-driven world, the ability to conduct complex statistical analyses on tabular data is crucial for deriving meaningful insights from raw data. However, the complexity and vast amounts of data make it increasingly difficult for individuals and organizations to process and interpret information efficiently.  A breakthrough has now emerged, revolutionizing the way we interact with data. MIT researchers have introduced GenSQL, a probabilistic programming system designed to simplify the analysis of complex tabular data for database users.  With GenSQL, users can predict and ..read more

Australia has officially added another supercomputer to the TOP500 list with the implementation of Virga. Officially coming online in June 2024, Virga is the newest HPC system to come out of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO.) As of the June 2024 TOP500 rankings, Virga has achieved the 72nd position on the list. Built on Dell PowerEdge XE9640 servers and featuring Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU accelerators with 94GB of high-bandwidth memory as well as 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Virga was designed and built to optimize AI workflows. Ad ..read more

Generative AI will take on a larger chunk of the world’s power consumption to keep up with the hefty hardware requirements to run applications. “AI chips represent 1.5% of electricity use over the next five years, a substantial part of the world’s energy,” said semiconductor research firm TechInsights in a research note last month. TechInsights took a baseline measurement of global power consumption totaling 153,000 TWh between 2025 and 2029, sourced from the US Energy Information Administration. The research firm estimated that AI accelerators will consume 2318 TWh of global po ..read more