The self-driving race between Elon Musk’s Tesla and Domino’s pizza robots

  • Tesla and Elon Musk are pressing ahead with full self-driving even amid blown deadlines, safety issues, and multi-billion-dollar efforts from Alphabet-backed Waymo and GM-backed Cruise continue.
  • But some autonomous vehicle start-ups are making big bets the future will be smaller, ‘zero-occupant’ vehicles including three-wheelers that deliver pizza.
  • Refraction AI and Nuro are among the delivery technology innovators working with local restaurants in Texas and corporations including Domino’s Pizza.

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#robotics

First-Generation Inference Accelerator Deployment at Facebook

In this paper, we provide a deep dive into the deployment of inference accelerators at Facebook. Many of our ML workloads have unique characteristics, such as sparse memory accesses, large model sizes, as well as high compute, memory and network bandwidth requirements. We co-designed a high-performance, energy-efficient inference accelerator platform based on these requirements. We describe the inference accelerator platform ecosystem we developed and deployed at Facebook: both hardware, through Open Compute Platform (OCP), and software framework and tooling, through Pytorch/Caffe2/Glow. A characteristic of this ecosystem from the start is its openness to enable a variety of AI accelerators from different vendors. This platform, with six low-power accelerator cards alongside a single socket host CPU, allows us to serve models of high complexity that cannot be easily or efficiently run on CPUs. We describe various performance optimizations, at both platform and accelerator level, which enables this platform to serve production traffic at Facebook. We also share deployment challenges, lessons learned during performance optimization, as well as provide guidance for future inference hardware co-design. Read More

#performance

AI voice actors sound more human than ever—and they’re ready to hire

A new wave of startups are using deep learning to build synthetic voice actors for digital assistants, video-game characters, and corporate videos.

The company blog post drips with the enthusiasm of a ’90s US infomercial. WellSaid Labs describes what clients can expect from its “eight new digital voice actors!” Tobin is “energetic and insightful.” Paige is “poised and expressive.” Ava is “polished, self-assured, and professional.”

Each one is based on a real voice actor, whose likeness (with consent) has been preserved using AI. Companies can now license these voices to say whatever they need. They simply feed some text into the voice engine, and out will spool a crisp audio clip of a natural-sounding performance. Read More

#nlp, #vfx