Microsoft's gone and designed its own CPU and AI chip for Azure. The Cobalt CPU is a "128-core chip that's built on an Arm Neoverse CSS design" that'll be used to power "general cloud service" on Azure, which right now are being tested with Teams and SQL servers. Azure customers will be able to run VMs on the Cobalt CPUs "next year". This is pretty similar to Amazon's Graviton Arm-based CPUs. The Maia AI accelerator was made in collaboration with OpenAI and is a similar chip to AMD's MI300X or Nvidia's H100, albeit probably not as powerful as either of those. It looks like the main reason Microsoft bothered to do this is so they actually have access to this type of hardware, as it's so hard to compete with everyone else over a limited supply of chips. SemiAnalysis has way more info, but it's paywalled so I couldn't read it all. Maybe this increase in compute capacity will allow OpenAI to resume new subscriptions for ChatGPT Plus, as they've "paused" signups today after "surge in post devday" activity "exceeded our capacity".
Here's two stories that show the dichotomy of AI at the moment. YouTube will "require creators to disclose when they've created altered or synthetic content that is realistic, including using AI tools". Particularly important for "sensitive topics, such as elections, ongoing conflicts and public health crises, or public officials". Very bad, do not like this, please make it stop. On the other hand, Google DeepMind has a new AI meteorology model called GraphCast that "demonstrated superior performance over the world's leading conventional system, operated by the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts. In a comprehensive evaluation, GraphCast outperformed ECMWF's system in 90% of 1,380 metrics". Which is great, but even DeepMind says that "our approach should not be regarded as a replacement for traditional weather forecasting methods", "which have been developed for decades, rigorously tested in many real-world contexts, and offer many features we have not yet explored".
Today seems to be webcam news day, with Logitech announcing a crowdfunding campaign (???) for the Reach - a 1080p/60fps webcam on a stand that's similar to a solid desk lamp, designed for broadcasting stuff on a table, kinda like an overhead projector. It's selling for $398 if you're one of the first 500, going up to $614 once those are sold and will ship in mid-2024. The other interesting webcam is Opal's Tadpole, featuring a pixel-binned 48MP Sony IMX582 sensor. The Verge's side-by-side pics with a MacBook Air webcam and the Tadpole are pretty dramatic. It's kinda expensive too at A$297 shipped, but it's cheaper and easier than a full mirrorless camera setup.
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - National Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) and IBM have celebrated the first anniversary of the creation of the "Supercomputing Technology Center", whose main aim is the execution of research projects related to hardware and software technologies in high-performance computing. In this photo, the Marenostum supercomputer. (IBM Research / Flickr)
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