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Nutanix CEO: Not All AI Projects Going To Public Cloud - Investor's Business Daily
Read More..'AI' and'AI PC'are, of course, two big buzzwords these days and not only in the U.S. and Europe, but also in China, where openKylin just released what it's calling an operating system for AI PCs. OpenKylin is an open source OS based on Linux and maintained by the OpenKylin community, which is backed by a number of Chinese companies including Hygon and Phytium. Clearly, Chinese PC makers are interested in getting in on the AI PC craze but Windows remains China's most-used OS.
The new version of openKylin launched Sunday, and is "deeply" integrated with AI, featuring support for on-device large language models (LLMs), an AI-assistant, and text-to-image generation, according to a report by theSouth China Morning Post.
OpenKylin wants to get in on the AI PC trend, which has been driven by hope that AI applications will reinvigorate demand for PCs. The company says that AI integration is designed to boost "productivity and user experience" for those using domestic operating systems. AI PCs are generally equipped with advanced processors capable of running generative AI tasks locally instead of having to rely on cloud processing. It's unclear how the OS is supposed to accelerate AI workloads, and also whether it can take advantage of a CPU's built-in AI capabilities.
Also, while Microsoft'sCopilot+-badged PCsrequire neural processing units capable of handling at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS), it's not clear whether openKylin has any performance requirements for CPUs or NPUs.
PC maker Lenovo sees China as a unique market for AI PCs due to its data-localization requirements, so openKylin might be correct in assuming it can get big in China with AI capabilities. On Monday, China's state-run newspaper, Science and Technology Daily, described the AI-enhanced version of openKylin as "secure, stable, and controllable." This is because, unlike Windows, openKylin is developed entirely in China by 3,876 developers from 271 different companies.
OpenKylin resembles Microsoft Windows, and is part of China's effort to decrease its dependence on foreign operating systems (and American technology in general). This initiative has been ongoing for a while, and was given an extra boost by the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China.
Despite these efforts, home-grown operating systems have struggled to gain significant traction and Windows remains the dominant operating system in China with nearly 80% of the market as of June 2024, according to StatCounter.
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Read More..People in tech often say that data is the new oil. That phrase, coined by British mathematician Clive Humby, of course implies that data is valuable.
Data about a persons health can also provide meaningful insights and improve outcomes, but only 3% of patient data is currently used by physicians, according to the World Economic Forum. Although doctors know they can glean useful information from patient data, they dont have the time to review every detail in the medical record.
Regard, a digital health startup founded in 2017, wants to help physicians save time and increase the accuracy of diagnosis by analyzing patients health data using AI.
Regard announced on Thursday that it raised a $61 million Series B round led by Oak HC/FT, with participation from Cedars-Sinai Health Ventures and existing investors TenOneTen, Calibrate Ventures and Techstars. The company is now valued at $350 million, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The companys software mines thousands of data points in a medical chart and presents data in a way that allows doctors to detect health conditions more easily.
Doctors use our product because we help them make sure that nothing important is missed in the data, Eli Ben-Joseph, Regards co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch. Every single doctor we work with has a story about: I used your product and I found something that changed the way I treat this patient.
Ben-Joseph said that Regard has helped one general physician catch atrial fibrillation (irregular heartbeat) that the cardiologist did not notice. She now feels its irresponsible not to use our product, he said.
But doctors are not the only ones who find Regard valuable. Hospital financial administrators are also big fans, according to Ben-Joseph. Regards ability to identify new conditions creates new billing opportunities for medical systems.
The company grew its revenue by 4.5 times in 2023 and is on a path to do a similar amount of growth this year, Ben-Joseph said. The company expects to reach profitability within the next two years.
Such fast growth has investors excited.
We absolutely fell in love with [Regard] because it has a direct impact on physician productivity, burnout, proper coding and clinical outcomes, said Nancy Brown, general partner at Oak HC/FT.
Brown, who has over 30 years of experience as an operator and investor in healthcare technology, has always dreamt that a computer would provide insights from patient information. That dream has been foiled [over the years] by the lack of tech, she said. Thats why when she met Ben-Joseph at a healthcare conference earlier this year, she instantly recognized that Regard is the technology she has been dreaming about.
Since launching its product in 2021, Regard has signed up a number of large healthcare systems, including Banner Health (one of Arizonas largest health providers), Virginia-based Sentara Healthcare, New Yorks Montefiore Medical Center and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Some details of its latest funding round were previously reported by Business Insider.
The companys competitors include Engage One, a product developed by multinational conglomerate 3M, and startup Pieces, according to Ben-Joseph.
Brown has no doubts that Regard is the leader in the space. They are a beautiful scaling company with great margins, and they are delivering a solid ROI for their clients, Brown said.
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AI-powered Regard nabs $61M to find missed illness, boost hospital revenue - TechCrunch
Read More..AI leaders are increasingly optimistic about the technologys potential in the health sector, especially when it comes to personalized bots that can comprehend and address individual health concerns.
OpenAI and Arianna Huffington are now jointly funding the development of an AI health coach through Thrive AI Health. In a Time magazine op-ed, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Huffington stated that the bot will be trained on the best peer-reviewed science alongside the personal biometric, lab, and other medical data youve chosen to share with it.
The company tapped DeCarlos Love, a formerGoogleexecutive who previously worked on Fitbit and other wearables, to be CEO. Thrive AI Health also established research partnerships with several academic institutions and medical centers likeStanford Medicine, the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute atWest Virginia University, and the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine. (The Alice L. Walton Foundation is also a strategic investor in Thrive AI Health.)
AI-powered health coaches have become a popular fad: Fitbit is working on an AI chatbot coach, and Whoop added a ChatGPT-powered coach to give users more insight into their health metrics. In San Francisco, health data obsession is a staple. You wont go far without seeing someone wearing an Oura Ring or bragging about their sleep data from their Eight Sleep mattress.
Thrive AI Healths goal is to provide powerful insights to those who otherwise wouldnt have access like a single mother looking for quick meal ideas for her gluten-free child or an immunocompromised person in need of instant advice in between doctors appointments. Personally, Id use it to ask about every unusual headache, rather than relying on WebMDs often alarming diagnoses.
But one doesnt have to think hard to come up with reasons to be cautious: sharing your health data with anyone other than a primary care doctor could result in a leak of that information. Then theres the potential for the bot to provide dangerous or even fatal misinformation as well as the risk that quality care could be reduced to quick and flawed responses without human oversight.
The bot is still in its early stages, adopting an Atomic Habits approach. Its goal is to gently encourage small changes in five key areas of your life: sleep, nutrition, fitness, stress management, and social connection. By making minor adjustments, such as suggesting a 10-minute walk after picking up your child from school, Thrive AI Health aims to positively impact people with chronic conditions like heart disease. It doesnt claim to be ready to provide real diagnosis like a doctor would but instead aims to guide users into a healthier lifestyle.
AI is already greatly accelerating the rate of scientific progress in medicine offering breakthroughs in drug development, diagnoses, and increasing the rate of scientific progress around diseases like cancer, the op-ed read.
Advancing the medical system with AI could be tremendously beneficial for society, provided it actually works. While a bot that tells you to get more sleep isnt exactly on par with AI miracle cures, there has been some promising AI progress in the health sector, such as a study suggesting that a radiologist supported by a specialized AI tool can detect breast cancer from mammogram images as accurately as two radiologists. There are also AI-designed drugs currently in clinical trials, like one to treat fibrosis, and a team of M.I.T researchers used AI in 2020 to discover an antibiotic capable of killingE. coli.
For Altman and Huffington, the challenge will be building trust for a product that handles some of your most private information while navigating the limits of AIs power.
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OpenAI and Arianna Huffington are working together on an AI health coach - The Verge
Read More..Enlarge / Whatever you do, don't ask the AI how many horizontal lines are in this image.
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In the provocatively titled pre-print paper "Vision language models are blind" (which has a PDF version that includes a dark sunglasses emoji in the title), researchers from Auburn University and the University of Alberta create eight simple visual acuity tests with objectively correct answers. These range from identifying how often two colored lines intersect to identifying which letter in a long word has been circled to counting how many nested shapes exist in an image (representative examples and results can be viewed on the research team's webpage).
If you can solve these kinds of puzzles, you may have better visual reasoning than state-of-the-art AIs.
The puzzles on the right are like something out of Highlights magazine.
A representative sample shows AI models failing at a task that most human children would find trivial.
Crucially, these tests are generated by custom code and don't rely on pre-existing images or tests that could be found on the public Internet, thereby "minimiz[ing] the chance that VLMs can solve by memorization," according to the researchers. The tests also "require minimal to zero world knowledge" beyond basic 2D shapes, making it difficult for the answer to be inferred from "textual question and choices alone" (which has been identified as an issue for some other visual AI benchmarks).
After running multiple tests across four different visual modelsGPT-4o, Gemini-1.5 Pro, Sonnet-3, and Sonnet-3.5the researchers found all four fell well short of the 100 percent accuracy you might expect for such simple visual analysis tasks (and which most sighted humans would have little trouble achieving). But the size of the AI underperformance varied greatly depending on the specific task. When asked to count the number of rows and columns in a blank grid, for instance, the best-performing model only gave an accurate answer less than 60 percent of the time. On the other hand, Gemini-1.5 Pro hit nearly 93 percent accuracy in identifying circled letters, approaching human-level performance.
For some reason, the models tend to incorrectly guess the "o" is circled a lot more often than all the other letters in this test.
The models performed perfectly in counting five interlocking circles, a pattern they might be familiar with from common images of the Olympic rings.
Do you have an easier time counting columns than rows in a grid? If so, you probably aren't an AI.
Even small changes to the tasks could also lead to huge changes in results. While all four tested models were able to correctly identify five overlapping hollow circles, the accuracy across all models dropped to well below 50 percent when six to nine circles were involved. The researchers hypothesize that this "suggests that VLMs are biased towards the well-known Olympic logo, which has 5 circles." In other cases, models occasionally hallucinated nonsensical answers, such as guessing "9," "n", or "" as the circled letter in the word "Subdermatoglyphic."
These gaps in VLM capabilities could come down to the inability of these systems to generalize beyond the kinds of content they are explicitly trained on. Yet when the researchers tried fine-tuning a model using specific images drawn from one of their tasks (the "are two circles touching?" test), that model showed only modest improvement, from 17 percent accuracy up to around 37 percent. "The loss values for all these experiments were very close to zero, indicating that the model overfits the training set but fails to generalize," the researchers write.
The researchers propose that the VLM capability gap may be related to the so-called "late fusion" of vision encoders onto pre-trained large language models. An "early fusion" training approach that integrates visual encoding alongside language training could lead to better results on these low-level tasks, the researchers suggest (without providing any sort of analysis of this question).
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Can you do better than top-level AI models on these basic vision tests? - Ars Technica
Read More..Microsoft has relinquished its seat on the board of OpenAI, saying its participation is no longer needed because the ChatGPT maker has improved its governance since being roiled by boardroom chaos last year.
In a Tuesday letter, Microsoft confirmed it was resigning, effective immediately, from its role as an observer on the artificial intelligence company's board.
We appreciate the support shown by OpenAI leadership and the OpenAI board as we made this decision," the letter said.
The surprise departure comes amid intensifying scrutiny from antitrust regulators of the powerful AI partnership. Microsoft has reportedly invested $13 billion in OpenAI.
European Union regulators said last month that they would take a fresh look at the partnership under the 27-nation bloc's antitrust rules while British competition watchdogs have also been looking into the deal.
Microsoft took the board seat following a power struggle in which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was fired, then quickly reinstated, while the board members behind the ouster were pushed out.
"Over the past eight months we have witnessed significant progress by the newly formed board and are confident in the companys direction," Microsoft said in its letter. Given all of this we no longer believe our limited role as an observer is necessary.
With Microsoft's departure, OpenAI will no longer have observer seats on its board.
We are grateful to Microsoft for voicing confidence in the Board and the direction of the company, and we look forward to continuing our successful partnership," OpenAI said in a statement.
It's not hard to conclude that Microsoft's decision to ditch the board seat was heavily influenced by rising scrutiny of big technology companies and their links with AI startups, said Alex Haffner, a competition partner at U.K. law firm Fladgate.
It is clear that regulators are very much focused on the complex web of inter-relationships that Big Tech has created with AI providers, hence the need for Microsoft and others to carefully consider how they structure these arrangements going forward, he said.
OpenAI said it would take a new approach to informing and engaging key strategic partners" such as Microsoft and Apple and investors such as Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures, with regular meetings to update stakeholders on progress and ensure stronger collaboration on safety and security.
OpenAI and TIME have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI to access TIME's archives.
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Microsoft Quits OpenAI Board Amid AI Partnerships Scrutiny - TIME
Read More..The United States and several allies said Tuesday that they had seized control of a sophisticated Russian propaganda mill that used artificial intelligence to drive nearly a thousand covert accounts on the social network X.
Though governments have increasingly turned to AI in the past year to spread messages more widely and credibly, the takedown is unusual because the Western intelligence agencies traced it to an officer of the Russian FSB intelligence force and to a former senior editor at state-controlled publication RT, formerly called Russia Today, as explained in court filings.
In a strikingly detailed joint advisory, agencies in the United States, the Netherlands and Canada identified various software programs used to manage the network, including one named Meliorator, which created fictitious users known as souls in various countries. The FBI won a court order allowing it to seize two web domains that the operation had used to register the email addresses behind the accounts.
Todays actions represent a first in disrupting a Russian-sponsored Generative AI-enhanced social media bot farm, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said in a statement. Russia intended to use this bot farm to disseminate AI-generated foreign disinformation, scaling their work with the assistance of AI to undermine our partners in Ukraine and influence geopolitical narratives favorable to the Russian government.
Automated accounts with more detailed biographies posted original content, while a supporting cast of more generic accounts liked and reshared those posts. Officials did not respond to questions about how many real users saw the posts and whether any spread the messages further, so it is unclear how effective the campaign was.
Stories to keep you informed
The system evaded one of Xs techniques for verifying the authenticity of users by automatically copying one-time passcodes sent to the registered email addresses. References to Facebook and Instagram in the program code indicated that the operation intended to expand to those platforms, officials said.
The agencies recommended that social media companies improve their methods for catching covertly automated behavior.
X complied with a court order to furnish information on the accounts to the FBI, then deleted them. The company did not respond to questions from The Washington Post.
The Justice Department thanked X for its cooperation during the investigation, a sign of better communications between the government and the big social media companies after the Supreme Court upheld the right of officials to point out foreign influence operations.
John Scott-Railton, a researcher at the Canadian nonprofit the Citizen Lab, said the countries provided such detailed information about the inner workings of the botnet to help other investigators and companies know what to look for.
They dont think this problem is going anywhere, so they are sharing widely, Scott-Railton said.
The documents show that AIs large language models have helped Russian propagandists scale their operation and help with translation, he said. It also helps them avoid detection software that looks for repeated use of the same internet protocol addresses and other identifiers.
But many other systems are operating already, and they will get better as they adapt for what is getting detected and what is getting by, Scott-Railton said. This isnt even the tip of the iceberg, he said. This is the drip of the iceberg.
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U.S. and allies take down Russian bot farm powered by AI - The Washington Post
Read More..Were now entering the age of the AI smartphone, with Google and Apple, in particular, having rolled out or announced a wealth of AI features in recent months. Samsung offers quite a few AI tools too, but so far its own digital assistant Bixby hasnt received an AI upgrade.
That looks set to change soon, though, as CNBC reports that this year Samsung will launch an upgraded version of Bixby based on its own AI models. The site heard this tip directly from TM Roh (the head of Samsungs mobile division), so you can take it as confirmed.
Sadly, Roh didnt get more specific about exactly when this AI upgrade to Bixby will roll out, but with less than half the year left, we shouldnt be waiting too long.
Roh also didnt say exactly what improvements this Bixby-focused AI overhaul will bring, but based on what were seeing in other AI-powered assistants, we have a good idea of what to expect.
For one thing, this update will probably make Bixby more conversational, so it can keep track of extended interactions with multiple questions and follow-ups. This upgrade may also allow Bixby to carry out more complex tasks, such as those which require it to interact with multiple apps.
So, this upgrade should be appreciated by fans of Bixby, though Samsung also told CNBC that it will continue allowing alternative options on its phones, such as Google Assistant, so if youre not a Bixby fan youll still have options.
Mind you, even in its current form, it might be worth giving Bixby a second chance. In a recent test, we found that Bixby outperformed both Siri and Gemini, and thats before this AI overhaul, which with any luck will make it even better.
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Samsung is bringing AI to Bixby this year - TechRadar
Read More..Microsoft has developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) speech generator that is apparently so convincing it cannot be released to the public.
VALL-E 2 is a text-to-speech (TTS) generator that can reproduce the voice of a human speaker using just a few seconds of audio.
Microsoft researchers said VALL-E 2 was capable of generating "accurate, natural speech in the exact voice of the original speaker, comparable to human performance," in a paper that appeared June 17 on the pre-print server arXiv. In other words, the new AI voice generator is convincing enough to be mistaken for a real person at least, according to its creators.
"VALL-E 2 is the latest advancement in neural codec language models that marks a milestone in zero-shot text-to-speech synthesis (TTS), achieving human parity for the first time," the researchers wrote in the paper. "Moreover, VALL-E 2 consistently synthesizes high-quality speech, even for sentences that are traditionally challenging due to their complexity or repetitive phrases."
Related: New AI algorithm flags deepfakes with 98% accuracy better than any other tool out there right now
Human parity in this context means that speech generated by VALL-E 2 matched or exceeded the quality of human speech in benchmarks used by Microsoft.
The AI engine is capable of this given the inclusion of two key features: "Repetition Aware Sampling" and "Grouped Code Modeling."
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Repetition Aware Sampling improves the way the AI converts text into speech by addressing repetitions of "tokens" small units of language, like words or parts of words preventing infinite loops of sounds or phrases during the decoding process. In other words, this feature helps vary VALL-E 2's pattern of speech, making it sound more fluid and natural.
Grouped Code Modeling, meanwhile, improves efficiency by reducing the sequence length or the number of individual tokens that the model processes in a single input sequence. This speeds up how quickly VALL-E 2 generates speech and helps manage difficulties that come with processing long strings of sounds.
The researchers used audio samples from speech libraries LibriSpeech and VCTK to assess how well VALL-E 2 matched recordings of human speakers. They also used ELLA-V an evaluation framework designed to measure the accuracy and quality of generated speech to determine how effectively VALL-E 2 handled more complex speech generation tasks.
"Our experiments, conducted on the LibriSpeech and VCTK datasets, have shown that VALL-E 2 surpasses previous zero-shot TTS systems in speech robustness, naturalness, and speaker similarity," the researchers wrote. "It is the first of its kind to reach human parity on these benchmarks."
The researchers pointed out in the paper that the quality of VALL-E 2s output depended on the length and quality of speech prompts as well as environmental factors like background noise.
Despite its capabilities, Microsoft will not release VALL-E 2 to the public due to potential misuse risks. This coincides with increasing concerns around voice cloning and deepfake technology. Other AI companies like OpenAI have placed similar restrictions on their voice tech.
"VALL-E 2 is purely a research project. Currently, we have no plans to incorporate VALL-E 2 into a product or expand access to the public," the researchers wrote in a blog post. "It may carry potential risks in the misuse of the model, such as spoofing voice identification or impersonating a specific speaker."
That said, they did suggest AI speech tech could see practical applications in the future. "VALL-E 2 could synthesize speech that maintains speaker identity and could be used for educational learning, entertainment, journalistic, self-authored content, accessibility features, interactive voice response systems, translation, chatbot, and so on," the researchers added.
They continued: "If the model is generalized to unseen speakers in the real world, it should include a protocol to ensure that the speaker approves the use of their voice and a synthesized speech detection model."
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Read More..Intel could be giving its burgeoning foundry ambitions a much-needed shot in the arm, as the chip giants venture capital arm today revealed that its making a strategic investment in an Israel- and U.K.-based AI construction startup.
Intel Capital is leading a $15 million investment into Buildots, a company that uses AI and computer vision to create a digital twin of construction sites. The six-year-old company works with construction giants such as Pomerleau, NCC and Ledcor, serving them with 360-degree cameras to regularly capture on-site data to track project progress, identify bottlenecks and optimize workflows.
Buildots had previously raised around $106 million, with its most recent $60 million tranche coming two years ago.
While Intel Capital has plowed billions into AI startups through the years, its decision to buy a stake in Buildots is particularly notable right now, coming as its parent company doubles down on efforts to increase its own manufacturing capacity while trying to keep costs in check.
A few years back, Intel revealed plans to invest$20 billion in two new fabrication facilities (or fabs) at its Ocotillo campus in Arizona. At the same time, Intel also launched a new foundry business recently rebranded as Intel Foundry with a view toward manufacturing chips designed by other companies.
These two new Arizona factories, dubbed Fab 52 and Fab 62, are expected to hit completion by early 2025. But they are among a number of massive construction projects Intel has on the go around the world right now, including plans for two new plants in Ohio that could cost up to $28 billion. These were originally expected to start bearing fruit in 2025, though the company recently announced it would have to delay these plans by a year, citing market challenges.
So Intel is something of a construction powerhouse, with its current spend across four U.S. states alone pegged at around $100 billion spanning new builds and refurbs. Pressure is mounting, though, as its recent earnings showed that its Foundry business losses widened last year, while the company faced another setback when regulatory hurdles forced it to pull the plug on a $5.4 billion merger with contract chipmaker Tower Semiconductor. (The pair instead struck a commercial partnership that will see Intel provide foundry services to Tower as part of a $300 million investment.)
To help with these various manufacturing endeavors, Intel is also set to receive $8.5 billion in government funding as part of U.S. plans to bring more chip manufacturing in-house, as it were.
However, one of the best ways to cut costs is to improve efficiencies, which is where Buildots could help. Just recently, the company launched a new AI-powered delay forecast feature that claims to predict when delays might occur to help project managers take preemptive action.
Buildots said at the time of the launch that during beta testing on major construction sites, the delay forecast feature was able to reduce delay times by up to 50% in some scenarios.
Historically, the construction industry was always deemed to have been slower than most to embrace digitization. This is in part due to the complexity and unique nature of each project, as well as the multi-stakeholder coordination required, spanning architects, contractors, engineers, suppliers, regulators and more. But there are signs that this is changing, particularly with the advent of AI, which while unable to build a tower block is showing some promise in terms of helping to reduce timelines on the operational side.
Neither Intel nor Buildots would directly confirm whether they are already working together, though Buildots has alluded to this on social media in the past with references to collaborations with industry giants like Intel.
In a statement issued to TechCrunch, Intel Capitals investment director Lisa Cohen said that Intels own experiences in the construction realm have helped it understand the need to drive efficiencies through technology.
Intels first-hand experience building some of the largest and most complex construction projects in the world has certainly played a role in leading us to appreciate the tremendous potential AI technology in general, and Buildots specifically, holds in terms of revolutionizing construction process management and driving efficiency to new levels, Cohen said.
As a result of the investment, Cohen will now be joining Buildots board of directors. Other investors in the round include Israels OG Tech Partners among other unnamed previous investors.
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