Lifeboat Foundation

Feeling like the typical four or eight (Extreme Edition) cores in your current Core i7 processor are holding you back? Well, you’re in luck. Intel is going to offer up their very first Core i7 with ten processing cores before the end of next summer.

While it’ll be the first desktop-class CPU with that many cores, it won’t actually be Intel’s first 10-core processor. They’ve been making Xeon chips with at least 10 cores since 2011, and some with as many as 15. They’re aimed primarily at servers and enterprise-class workstations, though. Next year, however, they’ll finally offer up a deca-core processor for the consumer market.

That chip will be the Core i7-6950X, a 10-core beast with Hyper-threading support that allows it to handle 20 independent instructions at any given time. It’s based on Intel’s new 14nm process, down from 22nm on Ivy Bridge and Haswell. The 6950X should be clocked at 3GHz, but it’s not yet known where Turbo Boost will top out.

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In the past couple of years, Google has been trying to improve more and more of its services with artificial intelligence. Google also happens to own a quantum computer — a system capable of performing certain computations faster than classical computers.

It would be reasonable to think that Google would try running AI workloads on the quantum computer it got from startup D-Wave, which is kept at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, right near Google headquarters.

Google is keen on advancing its capabilities in a type of AI called deep learning, which involves training artificial neural networks on a large supply of data and then getting them to make inferences about new data.

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Interesting…

According to Steve Jurvetson, venture capitalist and board member at pioneer quantum computing company D-WAVE (as well as others, such as Tesla and SpaceX), Google has what may be a “watershed” quantum computing announcement scheduled for early next month. This comes as D-WAVE, which notably also holds the Mountain View company as a customer, has just sold a 1000+ Qubit 2X quantum computer to national security research institution Los Alamos…

It’s not exactly clear what this announcement will be (besides important for the future of computing), but Jurvetson says to “stay tuned” for more information coming on December 8th. This is the first we’ve heard of a December 8th date for a Google announcement, and considering its purported potential to be a turning point in computing, this could perhaps mean an actual event is in the cards.

Continue reading “Google reportedly planning a ‘watershed’ quantum computing announcement for December 8” »

Oh Japan, how I love your beautiful insanity. wink

If you’re a fan of virtual musicians with computer-generated bodies and voices, and you live in North America, then do I have news for you.

Hatsune Miku, Japan’s “virtual pop star,” is coming to the US and Canada next year for a seven-city, synth-filled tour—her first tour in this neck of the woods. Miku herself may be a digital illusion, but her unique impact on the music industry is very real.

Continue reading “Hologram Pop Star Hatsune Miku ‘Announces’ 2016 US and Canada Tour” »

Yes, conceivably. And if/when we achieve the levels of technology necessary for simulation, the universe will become our playground. Eagleman’s latest book is “The Brain: The Story of You” (http://goo.gl/2IgDRb).

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Continue reading “David Eagleman: Can a Computer Simulate Consciousness?” »

Animals use blood for cooling and power delivery. Why can’t computers, too?

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“For those struggling to understand what Apple is up to, it might be best to imagine the Apple logo as a giant, rose gold-colored apple sculpture that’s being polished beyond perfection, to some sort of ideal, a level of quality that is so undeniable that no competitor dares forget it.”

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Posted by Jeff Dean, Senior Google Fellow, and Rajat Monga, Technical Lead.

Deep Learning has had a huge impact on computer science, making it possible to explore new frontiers of research and to develop amazingly useful products that millions of people use every day. Our internal deep learning infrastructure DistBelief, developed in 2011, has allowed Googlers to build ever larger neural networks and scale training to thousands of cores in our datacenters. We’ve used it to demonstrate that concepts like “cat” can be learned from unlabeled YouTube images, to improve speech recognition in the Google app by 25%, and to build image search in Google Photos. DistBelief also trained the Inception model that won Imagenet’s Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge in 2014, and drove our experiments in automated image captioning as well as DeepDream.

Continue reading “TensorFlow — Google’s latest machine learning system, open sourced for everyone” »

Major technological changes have a transformative effect on every aspect of human life. Increasingly intelligent programs are responsible to paradigm shifts at a steadily accelerating rate, a trend which acceleration theories suggest is all but guaranteed to continue.

We explore some of the most disruptive applications of artificial intelligence, examining in particular the impact of computer trading programs (algotraders) on stock markets. We explore some such imminent technologies (such as autonomous military robots) and their consequences (eg on job markets). We conclude with a discussion in the potentially irreversible consequences of this trend, including that of superintelligence.

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