Month: August 2023

Enlarge (credit: IBM)

Large Language Models, the AI tech behind things like Chat GPT, are just what their name implies: big. They often have billions of individual computational nodes and huge numbers of connections among them. All of that means lots of trips back and forth to memory and a whole lot of power use to make that happen. And the problem is likely to get worse.

One way to potentially avoid this is to mix memory and processing. Both IBM and Intel have made chips that equip individual neurons with all the memory they need to perform their functions. An alternative is to perform operations in memory, an approach that has been demonstrated with phase-change memory.

Now, IBM has followed up on its earlier demonstration by building a phase-change chip that's much closer to a functional AI processor. In a paper released on Wednesday by Nature, the company shows that its hardware can perform speech recognition with reasonable accuracy and a much lower energy footprint.

Enlarge (credit: Amazon)

Amazon yesterday sued the alleged operators of websites that sell pirated DVD copies of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and other Amazon-made streaming series that haven't been officially released on discs. People who bought the show on DVD ended up receiving low-quality pirated copies, Amazon said.

Screenshot from Amazon's lawsuit shows a listing for pirated Rings of Power DVDs.

The lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Central District of California named the China-based individual Yangchun Zhang as a defendant. Other defendants include DVDShelf and Media Wholesale UK, which are referred to as "unknown business entities," and seven websites connected to the DVD sales.

"Defendants openly sell pirated and infringing DVDs containing unauthorized copies of the Amazon Series," the lawsuit said. "To date, Amazon has not released for sale or distribution the Amazon Series on DVD, and instead exclusively distributes such content via... Amazon Prime Video. In addition to illegally reproducing and distributing Amazon's copyrighted content, Defendants' scheme infringes numerous other aspects of Amazon's intellectual property, including the use of Amazon's registered trademarks and artwork on their pirated DVDs."

Enlarge / Archeologists Gianni Gallello (front) and Llorenç Alapont (back) measure a plaster cast of a Pompeii victim by pXRF. (credit: Alapont et al., 2023/CC-BY 4.0)

In the 1870s, archaeologists made plaster casts of those who died when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, pouring the plaster into the voids left by decomposed bodies. The casts can still be viewed today and have proven especially useful to scientists keen to learn more about the actual cause of death of these victims. Was it asphyxiation, choking on the thick clouds of ash? Body evaporation from the extreme heat? A slower form of dehydration? Or some combination of all three?

A new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE describes a multidisciplinary analysis of seven plaster casts from Pompeii and concludes that these victims, at least, likely survived the early eruption and died some 20 hours later from asphyxiation, although the authors are careful to emphasize that their findings are only applicable to these particular cases. "It is likely that the catastrophic eruption killed people in different ways," the authors wrote, concluding that "generalizing and supporting a sole hypothesis of death becomes overly reductive."

As previously reported, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius released thermal energy roughly equivalent to 100,000 times the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, spewing molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in particular. Like the seven victims of this latest study, archaeologists believe that the vast majority of the victims died of asphyxiation, choking to death on the thick clouds of noxious gas and ash.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft’s efforts to put new AI-powered features into Windows 11 will pick up steam this fall when Windows Copilot is officially released, but the company isn’t stopping there. According to a report from Windows Central, Microsoft is in the early stages of experimenting with new features for built-in Windows apps like Photos, Snipping Tool, and even Paint, which all fall under the broad heading of “AI.”

The report claims that Photos, Camera, and Snipping Tool—all apps that work with either photos or screenshots—could soon include optical character recognition (OCR) features that would allow users to copy and paste text from images into word processors and text editors. The Photos app could also gain the ability to recognize people and objects in photos and make it easier to separate them from their backgrounds.

The venerable MS Paint app, on the other hand, could gain some generative AI functions that would allow it to create images based on text prompts, similar to features currently supported by more high-end image editors like Adobe Photoshop. Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator already uses a DALL-E-based model to create AI-generated images.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft’s efforts to put new AI-powered features into Windows 11 will pick up steam this fall when Windows Copilot is officially released, but the company isn’t stopping there. According to a report from Windows Central, Microsoft is in the early stages of experimenting with new features for built-in Windows apps like Photos, Snipping Tool, and even Paint, which all fall under the broad heading of “AI.”

The report claims that Photos, Camera, and Snipping Tool—all apps that work with either photos or screenshots—could soon include optical character recognition (OCR) features that would allow users to copy and paste text from images into word processors and text editors. The Photos app could also gain the ability to recognize people and objects in photos and make it easier to separate them from their backgrounds.

The venerable MS Paint app, on the other hand, could gain some generative AI functions that would allow it to create images based on text prompts, similar to features currently supported by more high-end image editors like Adobe Photoshop. Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator already uses a DALL-E-based model to create AI-generated images.

Enlarge / The first view from the Moon's surface captured by Chandrayaan 3's Vikram lander, showing the shadow of one of the craft's landing legs. (credit: ISRO)

A robotic landing craft from India successfully touched down in the southern polar region of the Moon on Wednesday, making the rising space power the fourth nation to achieve a soft landing on the lunar surface.

The Vikram lander from India's Chandrayaan 3 mission landed at approximately 8:33 am EDT (12:33 UTC) after a nail-biting final descent broadcast to the world by India's space agency.

Confirmation of the successful landing triggered a celebration across India, both inside and outside the mission control center in Bangalore. Chandrayaan 3 ends a 47-year drought in successful lunar landings by any country outside China, which has placed three probes on the Moon's surface, including one on the lunar far side, since 2013.

Enlarge / COBOL 73, as seen (inside Windows) in the IRS's Austin, Texas, offices in 2022. (credit: Washington Post / Getty Images)

There are hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL code running on production systems worldwide. That's not ideal for a language over 60 years old and whose primary architects are mostly retired or dead.

IBM, eager to keep those legacy functions on its Z mainframe systems, wants that code rewritten in Java. It tried getting humans to do it a few years back, but now it has another idea. Yes, you guessed it: It's putting AI on the job.

The IBM watsonx Code Assistant, slated to be available in Q4 this year, intends to keep humans in the mix, but with a push from generative AI in analyzing, refactoring, and testing the new object-oriented code. It's not an all-or-nothing process, either, as IBM claims that watsonx-generated code should be interoperable with COBOL and certain Z mainframe functions.