Walmart said Monday it has started using fully driverless trucking in its online grocery business, aiming to increase capacity and reduce inefficiencies.
Walmart and Silicon Valley start-up Gatik said that, since August, they’ve operated two autonomous box trucks — without a safety driver — on a 7-mile loop daily for 12 hours. The Gatik trucks are loaded with online grocery orders from a Walmart fulfillment center called a “dark store.” The orders are then taken to a nearby Walmart Neighborhood Market grocery store in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Walmart is headquartered. Read More
Monthly Archives: November 2021
Using DeepSpeed and Megatron to Train Megatron-Turing NLG 530B, the World’s Largest and Most Powerful Generative Language Model
We are excited to introduce the DeepSpeed- and Megatron-powered Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation model (MT-NLG), the largest and the most powerful monolithic transformer language model trained to date, with 530 billion parameters. It is the result of a joint effort between Microsoft and NVIDIA to advance the state of the art in AI for natural language generation.
As the successor to Turing NLG 17B and Megatron-LM, MT-NLG has 3x the number of parameters compared to the existing largest model of this type and demonstrates unmatched accuracy in a broad set of natural language tasks such as:
- Completion prediction
- Reading comprehension
- Commonsense reasoning
- Natural language inferences
- Word sense disambiguation
#nlp
“A grim outlook”: How cyber surveillance is booming on a global scale
New data paints a detailed picture of the ways Western companies are selling cyber weapons and surveillance technology to NATO’s enemies.
The increasing overlap between the world’s arms trade and the secretive surveillance industry risks damaging US national security and will create the potential for even more abuse unless more accountability is introduced, according to a new study.
The research, from the American think tank the Atlantic Council, offers one of the most thorough accountings ever assembled of a booming, cross-continental surveillance industry that makes billions of dollars and yet mostly manages to stay out of the limelight. After years of rising demand for hacker-for-hire products and an increase in reported abuses by companies like NSO Group, countries around the world are now trying to deal with this largely hidden industry. Read More
Google Wants to Work With the Pentagon Again, Despite Employee Concerns
Three years ago, the company walked away from a Defense Department project after employees objected to it. Now the company is working on a new proposal for the Pentagon.
Three years after an employee revolt forced Google to abandon work on a Pentagon program that used artificial intelligence, the company is aggressively pursuing a major contract to provide its technology to the military.
The company’s plan to land the potentially lucrative contract, known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, could raise a furor among its outspoken work force and test the resolve of management to resist employee demands.
In 2018, thousands of Google employees signed a letter protesting the company’s involvement in Project Maven, a military program that uses artificial intelligence to interpret video images and could be used to refine the targeting of drone strikes. Google management caved and agreed to not renew the contract once it expired. Read More
Microsoft Editor receives new Context IQ to improve your workflow
Microsoft has this week announced it has implemented Context IQ into the popular Microsoft Editor to help improve your workflow, “whether you’re a seasoned author or drafting your second blog post ever.” Context IQ has been created to provide intelligent suggestions informed by your own writing taking the Microsoft Editor application to a new level by providing users automatic assistance :
– When you need to attach, insert, or share a file with colleagues, Editor suggests a relevant file or document based on similar subjects or because you have created or worked on them before.
– When tagging colleagues in a file using the @ symbol in a comment or email, Editor recommends potential people to tag based on colleagues you currently work with or stakeholders you have previously tagged for document reviews.
– When you may be collaborating on a sales opportunity, and need to pull in Dynamics data, Editor will suggest related Dynamics 365 information as a Loop component allowing you to update and take an action on it in the flow of your work.
– When entering data or objects as you write, Editor suggests information such as a frequent flyer number when booking a flight online or a sales message when collaborating in Teams. Read More
Why the iBuying algorithms failed Zillow, and what it says about the business world’s love affair with AI
Just because a business process can be automated, doesn’t necessarily mean it should be automated. And maybe — just maybe — there are components of business that are not better served with AI algorithms doing the job.
That’s a key takeaway after Zillow Group made the unexpected decision on Tuesday to shutter its home buying business — a painful move that will result in 2,000 employees losing their jobs, a $304 million third quarter write-down, a spiraling stock price (shares are down more than 18% today), and egg on the face of co-founder and CEO Rich Barton. Read More
How pricing algorithms learn to collude
Algorithms now determine how much things cost. It’s called dynamic pricing and it adjusts according to current market conditions in order to increase profits. The rise of e-commerce has propelled pricing algorithms into an everyday occurrence—whether you’re shopping on Amazon, booking a flight, hotel or ordering an Uber. In this continuation of our series on automation and your wallet, we explore what happens when a machine determines the price you pay. Read More
If Einstein Had The Internet: An Interview With Balaji Srinivasan
Technology as determinant of historical cycles in market and government influence, why culture has stagnated despite advances in the tools that make it, how wokism will lose, and more!
My first question for you is one I posed recently in a conversation with Marc Andreessen, which was inspired by the common sentiment from the activist-class that non-engagement in politics is the same as working against human progress: Almost all technological advances and improvements to quality of life seen over the last half-century have found their way to the public from the private sector. While the same ineffectual debates over equal opportunities in education, employment, and healthcare have happened in congress for decades, the private sector has made university-level learning accessible and free, employs over 70% of all Americans, and inches nearer every year to making death optional. I’m uncertain whether we need politics at all with a market so apt at solving problems and would even like to think issues like race in the United States may be amenable to a market solution. Is it reasonable for me to think so broadly about what the market can do?
Well, lots to talk about here.
Technology is the Driving Force of History Read More
New Azure OpenAI Service combines access to powerful GPT-3 language models with Azure’s enterprise capabilities
Since OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company, introduced its groundbreaking GPT-3 natural language model platform last year, users have discovered countless things that these AI models can do with their powerful and comprehensive understanding of language.
For instance, a sports franchise that’s developing a new app to engage with fans during games could use the models’ ability to quickly and abstractly summarize information to convert transcripts of live television commentary into game highlights that someone could choose to include within the app.
The marketing team could use GPT-3’s capability to generate original content and its understanding of what’s happening in the game to help the team brainstorm ideas for social media or blog posts and engage with fans more quickly.
At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced it will help its customers uncover these kinds of experiences with the new Azure OpenAI Service, which allows access to OpenAI’s API through the Azure platform and will initially be available by invite only. The new Azure Cognitive Service will give customers access to OpenAI’s powerful GPT-3 models, along with security, reliability, compliance, data privacy and other enterprise-grade capabilities that are built into Microsoft Azure. Read More
Cell Phone Tracking
Attorney General Garland yesterday mentioned ‘new’ forensic methods to catch Jan 6 terrorist insurrectionists that were not commonly used prior to 2003. One is cellphone tower data. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 