Education on technology

Artificial intelligence could pose a "more urgent" threat to humanity than climate change, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton told Reuters in an interview on Friday. Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as one of the "godfathers of AI", recently announced he had quit Alphabet after a decade at the firm, saying he wanted to speak out on the risks of the technology without it affecting his former employer. Hinton's work is considered essential to the development of contemporary AI systems. In 1986, he co-authored the seminal paper "Learning representations by back-propagating errors", a milestone in the development of the neural networks undergirding AI technology. In 2018, he was awarded the Turing Award in recognition of his research breakthroughs. But he is now among a growing number of tech leaders publicly espousing concern about the possible threat posed by AI if machines were to achieve greater intelligence than humans and take control of the planet. "...

Meta Platforms  has hired an Oslo-based team that until late last year was building artificial-intelligence networking technology at British chip unicorn Graphcore. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the hirings in response to a request for comment, after Reuters identified 10 people whose LinkedIn profiles said they worked at Graphcore until December 2022 or January 2023 and subsequently joined Meta in February or March of this year. "We recently welcomed a number of highly-specialized engineers in Oslo to our infrastructure team at Meta. They bring deep expertise in the design and development of supercomputing systems to support AI and machine learning at scale in Meta's data centers," said Jon Carvill, the Meta spokesperson. The move brings additional muscle to the social media giant's bid to improve how its data centers handle AI work, as it races to cope with demand for AI-oriented infrastructure from teams across the company looking to build new features. Meta, ...

US chipmaker Broadcom 's Chief Executive Hock Tan on Friday will try to convince EU antitrust enforcers that his proposed $61 billion (nearly Rs. 4,98,300 crore) bid for cloud computing firm VMware , which has triggered scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic, is pro-competitive. Tan, flanked by his executives and lawyers, arrived early Friday morning in Brussels for a closed hearing on one of the biggest tie-ups in the history of the technology sector. He declined to comment as he headed into the hearing. Tan will present his arguments to senior European Commission officials, including its deputy director general for mergers Guillaume Loriot, and their counterparts from national competition agencies as well as lawyers from the EU executive. VMware President Sumit Dhawan will appear remotely at the hearing. There are no other third parties at the hearing. Broadcom's request for the hearing came after the Commission last month warned the deal may restrict competition in the ...

CES 2023 in Las Vegas once again brought 3D technology into the spotlight. However, this time the focus was on a more advanced 3D application – glassless 3D displays. While 3D technology has always generated interest among both tech enthusiasts and the general public, it has struggled to gain mainstream acceptance due to various reasons. In the early 2000s, 3D movies were a trend, but the requirement to wear glasses put many people off and limited the potential applications of 3D displays and holograms. Later, in the 2010s, glassless 3D monitors and televisions gained popularity, but low-resolution panels and a lack of use cases hindered their widespread acceptance. Several companies have already integrated glassless 3D into their products, leveraging advanced optical, display, real-time rendering, and AI technologies as well as the newest shaders and drivers. This integration of glassless 3D has the potential to revolutionise gaming, delivering an intuitive, interactive, and immersiv...

Since mind reading has only existed in the realms of fantasy and fiction, it seems fair to apply the phrase to a system that uses brain scan data to decipher stories that a person has read, heard, or even just imagined. It's the latest in a series of spooky linguistic feats fueled by artificial intelligence , and it's left people wondering what kinds of nefarious uses humanity will find for such advances. Even the lead researcher on the project, computational neuroscientist Alexander Huth, called his team's sudden success with using noninvasive functional magnetic resonance imaging to decode thoughts “kind of terrifying” in the pages of Science. But what's also terrifying is the fact that any of us could come to suffer the horrific condition the technology was developed to address — paralysis so profound that it robs people of the ability even to speak. That can happen gradually through neurological diseases such as ALS or suddenly, as with a stroke that rips away all...