TSMC's AI Hardware Earnings Have Now Eclipsed Smartphone Chip Revenue
The company's balance sheet highlights the industry's shift from mobile to AI.
By Josh Norem July 18, 2024 https://www.extremetech.com/computing/t ... ip-revenue
TSMC has released its second-quarter earnings for 2024, and they sure seem like a bellwether for the tech industry. The company announced that its revenue from chips related to AI surpassed its earnings from smartphone chips for the first time—marking what could be a sizable shift in the company's business priorities.
Bloomberg is reporting that for Q2 2024, TSMC reported sales from AI-related, high-performance computing (HPC) hardware now account for 52% of its revenue, a first for the company. Smartphone chips are now in a distant second place among its top-earning categories at just 33%, with the remaining 15% coming from IoT, automotive, and "etc."
The chips that comprise the bulk of its HPC division are AI accelerators from Nvidia and AMD, Apple's M-series SoCs, and AMD and Qualcomm's newest AI-enabled mobile chips, which are currently powering Microsoft-branded Copilot+ PCs.
This nifty little quadruped robot has been trained to seek and eliminate litter by researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology, using a vacuum cleaner backpack with nozzles strapped to its ankles.
It's built on the AlienGo robo-dog from Chinese company Unitree – a relatively expensive and athletic research-grade robot, which we last encountered learning to open doors with the aid of a top-mounted manipulator arm. When we say expensive, we're talking around US$50,000 – but you may well be able to replicate this using a specced-up version of the highly impressive (and also surprisingly athletic) US$1,600 Unitree Go 2.
The VERO (Vacuum-cleaner Equipped RObot), is targeted at cigarette butts, one of the most common forms of litter. Using a pair of depth cameras and a convolutional neural network, it's able to spot butts on the ground, and plan its path such that it walks over them, switches the vacuum on, sucks them up and continues without stopping. Check it out:
Millions of Teslabots in 2026 ?
July 22, 2024 by Brian Wang
Elon Musk said Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for Tesla internal use next year and, hopefully, high production for other companies in 2026.
This should mean hundreds and perhaps thousands of Teslabots in Tesla factories next year.
There are handful Teslabots in use in Tesla factories now.
There should then be hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of Teslabots in Tesla factories in 2026 along with hundreds of thousands and millions being sold in 2026 and 2027.
Apple's research paper, released earlier today, covers its training infrastructure and other details for the AI models that will power features announced at the WWDC earlier this year. Apple announced both on device AI processing and cloud processing, and at the heart of these AI features is the Apple Foundation Model dubbed AFM.
For AFM on server, or the model that will power the cloud AI features called Apple Cloud Compute, Apple shared that it trains a 6.3 trillion token AI model "from scratch" on "8192 TPUv4 chips." Google's TPUv4 chips are available in pods made of 4096 chips each.
Apple added that the AFM models (both on device and cloud) are trained on TPUv4 chips and v5p Cloud TPU clusters. v5p is part of Google's Cloud AI 'Hypercomputer,' and it was announced in December last year.
Each v5p pod is made of 8,960 chips each, and according to Google, it offers twice the floating point operations per second (FLOPS) and three times the memory over TPU v4 to train models nearly three times faster.
Video: Humanoid housebot gets stuck into domestic chores
By Paul Ridden
August 01, 2024
We're already seeing humanoid robots entering the workplace in limited trials, but when will we be able to kick back and let the service droid take care of household chores? A new video from Germany's Neura Robotics shows this dream is inching ever closer to reality.
Neura Robotics was founded in 2019 near Stuttgart in Germany, and has since launched industrial robot arms and manipulators, a roving mobile platform and a multi-purpose helper.
The company has also been working on a general purpose humanoid named 4NE-1 for the last couple of years, and has now shown off a few of its capabilities in a promo video – which has been released to highlight Neura joining forces with NVIDIA to accelerate humanoid development.
The new Labour government has shelved £1.3bn of funding promised by the Conservatives for tech and Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects, the BBC has learned.
It includes £800m for the creation of an exascale supercomputer at Edinburgh University and a further £500m for AI Research Resource, which funds computing power for AI.
Both funds were unveiled less than 12 months ago.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said the money was promised by the previous administration but was never allocated in its budget.
The Conservatives said that under its leadership, the department had underspent.
It also goes on to say, the future of the Edinburgh exascale supercomputer is currently unclear. I hope they find these funds for this supercomputer because it would be great to see the final result of it.
“In the quantum multiverse, every choice, every decision you've ever and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes.”
Time_Traveller wrote: ↑Fri Aug 02, 2024 4:36 amGovernment shelves £1.3bn UK tech and AI plans
5 hours ago
The new Labour government has shelved £1.3bn of funding promised by the Conservatives for tech and Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects, the BBC has learned.
It includes £800m for the creation of an exascale supercomputer at Edinburgh University and a further £500m for AI Research Resource, which funds computing power for AI.
Both funds were unveiled less than 12 months ago.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said the money was promised by the previous administration but was never allocated in its budget.
The Conservatives said that under its leadership, the department had underspent.
It also goes on to say, the future of the Edinburgh exascale supercomputer is currently unclear. I hope they find these funds for this supercomputer because it would be great to see the final result of it.
So, am I correct that the takeaway is that the conservatives promised checks that their ass couldn't cash to use an old saying?
Taco Bell to Expand AI Ordering at Drive-Thrus
Delegating drive-thru duties to AI frees Taco Bell's human employees to 'focus on front-of-house hospitality,' executives say.
By Adrianna Nine August 2, 2024
After testing its artificial intelligence-powered ordering system at a small selection of drive-thrus around the United States, Taco Bell is electing to roll out the technology on a wider scale. A release published Wednesday says the fast food chain will introduce AI ordering at its drive-thrus in "hundreds" of locations by the end of the year.
Yum! Brands (the company behind Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and The Habit) has been fairly secretive about the "Voice AI" platform that drives its new drive-thru ordering system. We know from a low-yield Bloomberg inquiry that a third-party company developed the platform, and that, based on its name, it uses customers' voices as inputs. Yum! Brands has declined to share publicly how many orders the platform can take without requiring assistance from human employees. Instead, it's emphasized that its AI is "designed to enhance back-of-house operations for team members and elevate the order experience for consumers" by easing human task load and reducing wait times.
California-based robotics outfit Figure has today announced its second-generation humanoid robot, which is initially being aimed at production lines in commercial settings, but the company is promising a bipedal butler in our homes in the near future.
Figure was founded in 2022 by entrepreneur Brett Adcock – of Vettery and Archer Aviation – with the aim of bringing a "commercially viable general purpose humanoid robot" to market. We caught up with Adcock last year, publishing a series of three interview pieces, and have followed the progress of its first robot from first steps to learning and performing tasks to joining BMW's workforce, and then gaining OpenAI chattiness.
A team of AI researchers at Tsinghua University, working with a colleague from Zhipu AI, has developed a large language model (LLM) called LongWriter that they claim is capable of generating text output of up to 10,000 words. The group has written a paper describing their efforts and new LLM, which is available on the arXiv preprint server.
As LLMs have become mainstream, many have noticed that they are not capable of generating very long answers, such as full books or manuscripts—the current limit appears to be approximately 2,000 words. The researchers suggest this is because they are all trained on short documents. In their new effort, they have found that if LLMs are changed slightly and then trained using much longer documents, they are able to produce longer documents.
To test their idea, the research teams first trained a 9-billion parameter LLM using a conventional dataset, which included documents that were mostly less than 2,000 words long. As expected, when queried, it was not able to create texts longer than 2,000 words long.
Unitree G1 humanoid robot ready to leap into mass production
By Paul Ridden
August 19, 2024
China's Unitree Robotics is a relatively recent entry in the general-purpose humanoid robot space, but its $16,000 G1 model is already proving itself to be quite the performer. So much so that the company has now revealed a version that's ready for mass production.
Until December last year, robot development at Unitree was pretty much focused on producing four-legged robo-beasts like the Go2 and B2. And by the time the first biped humanoid made its video debut, there was already stiff competition from the likes of Tesla, Figure, Boston Dynamics and Sanctuary AI.
Humanoid homebot tackles impressive array of household chores
By Paul Ridden
August 22, 2024
A few short months after Chinese startup Astribot released jaw-dropping video footage of its humanoid helper, the company has now unveiled a launch video for the S1 – which shows the bot making waffles, feeding the cat, serving tea and shooting hoops.
When the S1 was first revealed in April, we did wonder why all of the promo footage showed the top half of the bot only. Now we know why, as the newly-refined S1 has been wheeled into the spotlight for its official launch.
Where much humanoid development is focused on getting bipeds into factories and manufacturing facilities, it very much looks like Astribot is taking aim at domestic duties, as you can see in the launch video below (be sure to watch to the end).
