Bits & Bytes
Amazon to design its own AI chips for Alexa, Echo devices.
- This announcement follows similar moves made by rivals Apple and Google, both of which have developed custom AI silicon. Amazon, which reportedly has nearly 450 people on staff with chip expertise, sees custom AI chips as a way to make it’s AI devices faster and more efficient.
Google’s Cloud TPU AI accelerators now available to the public.
- Cloud TPUs are custom chips optimized for accelerating ML workloads in Tensorflow. Each boasts up to 180 teraflops of computing power and 64 gigabytes of high-bandwidth memory. Last week Google announced their beta availability via the Google Cloud. Cloud TPUs are available in limited quantities today and cost $6.50 / TPU-hour. At this cost, users can train a ResNet-50 neural network on ImageNet in less than a day for under $200.
Finding pixie dust unavailable, Oracle sprinkles AI buzzword on cloud press release.
- The company applied “AI” to its Cloud Autonomous Services, including its Autonomous PaaS, and its Autonomous Database and Autonomous Data Warehouse products to make them “self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing” software. Oh boy! In other news, the company ran the same play for a suite of AI-powered finance applications.
LG to introduce new AI tech for its smartphones.
- Following the launch of its ThinQ and DeepThinQ platforms earlier this year, as previously noted in this newsletter, LG will introduce new Voice AI and Vision AI features for its flagship V30 smartphone at the gigantic Mobile World Congress event next week.
Applitools updates AI-powered visual software testing platform.
- I hadn’t heard of this company before, but it’s a pretty cool use case. The company released an update to its Applitools Eyes product, which is a tool for software development and test groups that allows them to ensure a visually consistent user experience as the application evolves. The company uses AI and computer vision techniques to detect changes to rendered web pages and applications, and report the ones that shouldn’t be there.
Dollars & Sense
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OWKIN, a company using transfer learning to accelerate drug discovery and development, closes $11m Series A financing.
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Ditto, a UK AI startup, raises £4 million to bring the expert system back via “software advisor” bots which aim to replicate human expertise and accountability.
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Palo Alto-based Uncomnon.co raises $18M in Series A funding for Uncommon IQ, its AI-powered talent marketplace.
