AI Top-of-Mind for Dec 18
Leading off with hardware, Intel raises the ante with its new Core Ultra Processors with AI acceleration. From the ‘CNET’ article:
· While the new chips have a small, two-core neural processing unit, or NPU, for AI acceleration, Intel’s AI Boost uses the CPU and GPU as well, depending upon the type of workload: The CPU is used when speed is needed and the GPU for help with generative AI workloads.
· That’s why you’ll hear Intel and AMD talk about AI performance metrics — TOPS, sometimes referred to as TeraOPS, or trillion operations per second — for the combined system rather than just the NPU. For the Ultra 7 165H chip, you get roughly up to 34 TOPS with 11 TOPS for the NPU, 18 TOPS for the GPU and the rest for the CPU.
And on a different side of hardware, more talk of smart glasses as an entry point of AI to wearables. The article from ‘The Information’ looks at Meta, OpenAI, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Multimodal AI and SLMs (Small Language Models) should pave the way for on-device or tethered intelligence. Last week I covered the latest on Meta’s Ray Ban glasses.
And from Instagram, as we move further from the real to the imaginary, a new AI-driven tool to alter background images. From the article:
When users tap on the background editor icon on an image they will get ready prompts like “On a red carpet,” “Being chased by dinosaurs” and “Surrounded by puppies.” Users can write their own prompts to change the background as well.
Also on the creative front, the fusion of Van Gogh and AI, as covered by ‘The New York Times.’ From the article:
· But one of the boldest attempts at championing van Gogh’s legacy yet is at the Musée D’Orsay in Paris, where a lifelike doppelgänger of the Dutch artist chats with visitors, offering insights into his own life and death (replete with machine-learning flubs).
· “Bonjour Vincent,” intended to represent the painter’s humanity, was assembled by engineers using artificial intelligence to parse through some 900 letters that the artist wrote during the 1800s, as well as early biographies written about him.
Finally, McKinsey on the application of Gen AI for consumer marketing. A good read. From the report:
