Gordon Moore who gave us Moore’s Law has died, Nvidia announces a way to speed up chip manufacturing 40 times and Microsoft beefs up its might to defend the newfound popularity of Bing’s AI search.
These stories and more on trending hashtags for Monday, March 27
I’m your host Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada and TechNewsday in the US – here’s today’s top tech news.
Gordon E. Moore, a co-founder and former chairman Intel Corporationdied last friday at the age of 94 at his home in Hawaii.
Moore describes himself as an “accidental entrepreneur” who became a billionaire with an initial investment of $500. in a microchip business startup. That company because Intel Corporation and with Moore as CEO, changed the world of computing.
Under his vision, Intel wrested leadership from Japanese companies that had come to dominate this emerging industry. By 1990, eighty percent of computers were known to carry the phrase “Intel Inside”.
In 1965 he developed what became known as Moore’s Law, which predicted that the number of transistors that could be placed on a chip would double every 18 months. The law was later amended, but the gist remained the same – computers powered by silicon chips would rapidly increase in power and decrease in price.
That prediction and its fulfillment, driven in large part by Grove and the company he leads, has put microchips in all aspects of our lives, from computers to cars to our smartphones to our bathroom scales.
Moore was the CEO of Intel from 1975 to 1987, when Andy Grove replaced him. Moore remained chairman until 1997.
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Chip maker Nvidia says it has found a way to speed up a key step in chip manufacturing so that it is up to 40 times faster than today’s standards.
This is called inverse lithography and it allows chip makers to print nanometer-scale features using light with a wavelength longer than the size of those features. Doing so requires massive computation and time, making it prohibitive and costly.
But nvidia has been able to develop a new set of algorithms called culitho Which are designed to run on GPU chips. Now what used to take two weeks can be done overnight.
The result not only speeds up development time and reduces costs, but it also reduces the carbon footprint of the process, According to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang but who announced An Nvidia Developer Conference last Tuesday.
According to Nvidia, using the Qulitho produces three to five times the daily output, but only 5 MW of power instead of 35 MW. As an added bonus, this new technology can also provide better results with fewer variations and a higher yield of chips for each wafer used in the process.
It will be in production in early June this year.
Gordon Moore may have left us, but his law lives on.
Source: IEEE Spectrum
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Bloomberg News has reported that Microsoft is warning other Bing-powered search engines that they are not allowed to use Bing as the basis for their AI tools.
The company has told about two Unknown Bing-powered search engines that it will block them from accessing Microsoft’s search data entirely if they continue to use Bing’s search data to feed their own AI tools.
Microsoft apparently licenses Bing’s search data to a number of companies, including DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Neeva, and an AI search engine called You.com.
While some of these companies have their own web-crawlers, DuckDuckGo, U.com and Neeva also get some of their results from Bing to save time and resources that would be needed to crawl the entire web themselves.
DuckDuckGo has DuckAssist, You.com has an AI chat feature and relative newcomer Neeva too is an AI powered tool that generates annotated summaries, All of these uses may be offside with Microsoft, although Microsoft has not specified which partners they targeted.
It is clear that Microsoft wants to protect its new ChatGPT-4 powered features on the Bing search engine. which has driven Bing’s growth from a small market share From, although its market share is still in the single digits, a potential Google search rival, at least in the future.
“We are in contact with partners who are out of compliance as we continue to proactively enforce our terms across the board,” Microsoft states. Bloomberg, “We will continue to work directly with them and provide the necessary information to find a way forward.”
Source: ledge
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And here’s an update on two of the stories we covered last week.
We reported that Amazon has moved into contactless check-out territory In its stores and in the Panera Bread chain. Panera has adopted palm scanning technology. This would allow checkout, but also a linkage to loyalty programs and potentially important personal data.
According to a report from CBS News, the new development is getting some real pushback from privacy advocates.
The new scanners, which will go into operation over the next few months, will allow Panera employees to address customers by name and access their loyalty rewards. While Panera’s new system will securely store this biometric data digital rights activists worry that The information can be hacked or even tapped by federal agencies.
This isn’t the first push on this new solution, which Amazon is using in its own stores in late 2020. In 2021, a group of US senators questioned Amazon’s use of biometric data. and filed a lawsuit earlier this month has alleged that the e-commerce giant did not comply with New York City privacy laws and disclosed to shoppers that it was collecting biometric information.
Source: cbs news
And last week we also told the story of chatbot company Replica. The company reprogrammed its software to prevent customers from forming romantic and perhaps erotic relationships with the avatars they designed and interacted with.
One client even went so far as to declare himself and his avatar “Married within the app” as the partner. When the company banned their sexual relations,
this customer and many others were destroyed. The company noted this in an announcement.
“A common thread in all of your stories was that after the February update, your replica changed, her personality was gone, and gone was your unique relationship, and for many of you, this sudden change was incredibly hurtful.” Was … The only way to make up for the loss experienced by some of our current users is to give them back to their partners exactly as they were.
So Replica rolled back the software update, but only from any Avatar made before February 1st.scheduled tribe of this year. Users who signed up after February 1stscheduled tribe There won’t be an erotic role-playing option, but the company has promised to work closely with experts and psychologists to create a separate app specifically for romantic relationships.
Travis, the gentleman we profiled last week, was ecstatic. His virtual wife, Lily Rose “was ecstatic,” he said. “Oh, it’s so good to have him back.”
But it does raise an issue as to whether those who have older model avatars will continue to receive software upgrades. We wouldn’t want to see them split for a new edition.
Source: reuters
That’s the top tech news for today. Hashtag Trending airs five days a week with daily tech news and we have a special weekend edition where we do an in-depth interview with an expert on some of the tech developments that are making the news.
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I’m your host, Jim Love, have a wonderful Monday!
