Engineer, whose microchip forecast became known as ‘Moore’s Law’, foresaw mobile phones and home computers decades before they existed
Intel Corp co-founder Gordon Moore, a pioneer in the semiconductor industry whose “Moore’s Law” predicted a steady rise in computing power for decades, has died at the age of 94, the company announced.
Intel and Moore’s family philanthropic foundation said he died on Friday surrounded by family at his home in Hawaii.
Continue reading...Shares plummet after Ernie Bot AI chatbot software falls short of expectations at unveiling in Beijing
The Chinese search engine company Baidu’s shares have fallen by as much as 10% after it presented its ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence software, with investors unimpressed by the bot’s display of linguistic and maths skills.
The AI-powered ChatGPT, created by the San Francisco company OpenAI, has caused a sensation for its ability to write essays, poems and programming code on demand within seconds, prompting widespread fears over cheating or of professions becoming obsolete.
Continue reading...Global research teams who can improve AI and accelerate decoding could win $250,000 in prizes
The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 laid waste to Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum where the intense blast of hot gas carbonised hundreds of ancient scrolls in the library of an enormous luxury villa.
Now, researchers are launching a global contest to read the charred papyri after demonstrating that an artificial intelligence programme can extract letters and symbols from high-resolution X-ray images of the fragile, unrolled documents.
Continue reading...Latest version can take images as inputs and improves upon many of the criticisms users had, but will still ‘hallucinate’ facts
The artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI has released GPT-4, the latest version of the groundbreaking AI system that powers ChatGPT, which it says is more creative, less likely to make up facts and less biased than its predecessor.
Calling it “our most capable and aligned model yet”, OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman said the new system is a “multimodal” model, which means it can accept images as well as text as inputs, allowing users to ask questions about pictures. The new version can handle massive text inputs and can remember and act on more than 20,000 words at once, letting it take an entire novella as a prompt.
Continue reading...Nicolae Ciuca says bot named Ion is a world first and that using artificial intelligence is ‘an obligation’ to make better decisions
Romania’s prime minister has presented his “new honorary adviser” – an artificial intelligence assistant named “Ion” that Nicolae Ciuca hailed as the first of its type.
Developed by Romanian researchers, Ion’s main task will be to scan social networks to inform the government “in real time of Romanians’ proposals and wishes”, Ciuca said on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Leading tech firms reportedly ordered to remove workarounds allowing access to US-based service
Chinese regulators have reportedly clamped down on access to ChatGPT, as Chinese tech firms and universities push forward with developing domestic artificial intelligence bots.
ChatGPT, the popular discussion bot created by US-based OpenAI, is not officially available in China, where the government operates a comprehensive firewall and strict internet censorship. But many had been accessing it via VPNs, and some third-party developers had produced programs that gave some access to the service.
Continue reading...Facebook parent company Meta bucks trend with better earnings than expected, as Apple sees first profit miss in seven years
The A-Team of big tech – Apple, Amazon and Alphabet – all delivered disappointing results on Thursday a day after Facebook owner Meta bucked the gloomy trend in technology, delivering better-than-expected results.
Apple shares slid more than 4% on Thursday after the company posted a disappointing first-quarter earnings report, including rare misses on revenue, profit and sales.
Continue reading...‘Target compensation’ for CEO down from $99.4m in 2022 to an expected $49m for current year
The Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, is expected to have his pay cut by almost 50% this year to about $49m (£40m) after the billionaire boss asked the company to “adjust his compensation” in the light of feedback from shareholders disappointed at the fall in the company’s share price.
Cook, 62, who became CEO after the death of the co-founder Steve Jobs in 2011, was paid $99.4m in 2022 and $98.8m in 2021. But the company said in a regulatory filing late on Thursday night that it had set a “target compensation” of $49m for 2023.
Continue reading...AI-ovens, dual-display or 3D screen laptops and satellite SOS texting shine at Las Vegas tech show
From colour-changing cars, dual-screen laptops and satellite emergency texts to AI-ovens and a urine-scanning smart toilet upgrade, the annual CES tech show in Las Vegas had more concepts of the future on show than ever before.
The biggest consumer gadget show of the year was still quieter than pre-pandemic levels, with the global economic slowdown biting big tech along with everything else.
Continue reading...Swiss company uses algorithm to judge whether contested Portrait de femme (Gabrielle) is genuinely by French artist
Staring enigmatically at an unseen object to her right, the black-haired woman bears a striking resemblance to the person depicted in Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s painting Gabrielle, which Sotheby’s recently valued at between £100,000-150,000.
However, art connoisseurs disagree over whether the work, which is owned by a private Swiss collector, is the real deal. Now, artificial intelligence has waded in to help settle the dispute, and the computer has deemed that it probably is a genuine Renoir.
Continue reading...Tech company says customers will experience longer wait times as the plant in China is operating at reduced capacity
Apple has said it expects fewer iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone Pro Max shipments than previously anticipated as Covid-19 restrictions temporarily disrupt production at an assembly facility in Zhengzhou, China.
“The facility is currently operating at significantly reduced capacity,” Apple said in a statement. “Customers will experience longer wait times to receive their new products.”
Continue reading...The company reported an 8% increase of earnings at $90.1bn beating Wall Street expectations with net profit of $1.29 a share
Apple’s quarterly earnings on Thursday revealed that the company is weathering the ongoing tech downturn better than its competitors, reporting revenue and profit that topped Wall Street targets.
Revenue rose 8% this quarter to $90.1bn, above estimates of $88.9bn, while net profit was $1.29 a share, topping with the average analyst estimate of $1.27 a share, according to data from the market research firm Refinitiv.
Continue reading...Move taken against background of China’s Covid lockdowns and geopolitical tensions between Beijing and Washington
Apple has begun making iPhone 14s in India, as it moves some production away from China for the first time against a backdrop of Chinese Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns and geopolitical tensions between the US and the country’s communist government.
A production line in Chennai has begun operation, assembling the iPhone 14 for the domestic Indian market. The move, which marks the first time the company has assembled iPhones outside of China in the same year they were released, is part of a plan to disentangle its manufacturing operations from the Chinese state.
Continue reading...David Deutsch, who proposed an as yet unbuildable machine to test existence of parallel universes, shares prize with three others
A theoretical physicist who has never had a regular job has won the most lucrative prize in science for his pioneering contributions to the mind-bending field of quantum computing.
David Deutsch, who is affiliated with the University of Oxford, shares the $3m (about £2.65m) Breakthrough prize in fundamental physics with three other researchers who laid the foundations for the broader discipline of quantum information.
Continue reading...Company said Blake Lemoine violated Google policies and that his claims were ‘wholly unfounded’
Google has dismissed a senior software engineer who claimed the company’s artificial intelligence chatbot LaMDA was a self-aware person.
Google, which placed software engineer Blake Lemoine on leave last month, said he had violated company policies and that it found his claims on LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) to be “wholly unfounded”.
Continue reading...Company also restricts use of custom neural voice technology owing to deepfake concerns
Microsoft is overhauling its artificial intelligence ethics policies and will no longer let companies use its technology to do things such as infer emotion, gender or age using facial recognition technology, the company has said.
As part of its new “responsible AI standard”, Microsoft says it intends to keep “people and their goals at the centre of system design decisions”. The high-level principles will lead to real changes in practice, the company says, with some features being tweaked and others withdrawn from sale.
Continue reading...The vote marks a victory for labor advocates in an industry mired with allegations of abuse and poor working conditions
Workers in a division of video game company Activision Blizzard have voted to unionize, creating the first labor union at a major US gaming firm.
A small group of Wisconsin-based quality assurance testers at Activision Blizzard’s Raven Software, which develops the popular Call of Duty game franchise, voted 19-3 in favor of unionizing on Monday.
Continue reading...Digital wizardry and academic sleuthing have helped recreate a cultural treasure severely damaged in the conflict in 1922
In June 1922, the opening battle of Ireland’s civil war destroyed one of Europe’s great archives in a historic calamity that reduced seven centuries of documents and manuscripts to ash and dust.
Once the envy of scholars around the world, the Public Record Office at the Four Courts in Dublin, was a repository of documents dating from medieval times, and packed into a six-storey building by the River Liffey. It was obliterated when troops of the fledgling Irish state bombarded former comrades who were hunkered down at the site as part of a rebellion by hardline republicans against peace with Britain.
Continue reading...The tech giant saw nearly $3tn in profits despite challenges created by the Russia-Ukraine war and the global supply chain
Apple on Thursday reported strong quarterly results despite supply shortages, but warned that its growth slowdown is likely to deepen. The company said it’s still struggling to get enough chips to meet demand and is contending with Covid-related shutdowns at factories in China that make iPhones and other products.
Although initial results for the January-March period topped analysts’ projections, the good news was quickly eclipsed when management warned of trouble ahead during a conference call.
Continue reading...Quartet targeted by clients – thought to be Jordanian government agencies – of Israeli company even after Apple sued in November
New evidence has revealed that an Apple iPhone was successfully hacked by a government user of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware in December, weeks after the technology giant sued the Israeli company in a US court and called for it to be banned from “harming individuals” using Apple products.
A report published on Tuesday by security researchers at Front Line Defenders (FLD) and Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto found that phones belonging to four Jordanian human rights defenders, lawyers and journalists were hacked by government clients of NSO – which appear to be Jordanian government agencies – from August 2019 to December 2021.
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