Google Inc on Thursday announced a partnership with artificial intelligence teams at Oxford University aimed at teaching machines to think like people.
Oxford professors behind spin-off startups Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory are set to work with DeepMind, a London-based startup that Google bought early this year.
Financial terms of the alliance were not disclosed, but DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, who also serves as Google vice president of engineering, said in a blog post that it involves a “substantial contribution” to set up a partnership that is to include student internships, joint lectures and workshops.
The artificial intelligence effort is to be aimed at getting machines to better understand what they hear and see, potentially powering services such as intuitive virtual assistants and online search tools.
Google earlier this week was among a group of investors that participated in a US$542 million funding of Magic Leap Inc, which produces software for augmented reality, calling the effort a new “visual computing platform.”
This month, the company signed office-lease agreements for a total commitment of about US$1 billion through 2028, according to the company’s quarterly report issued on Thursday.
“We expect to continue to hire aggressively for the remainder of 2014,” Google said in the report.
“Acquisitions are also to remain an important component of our strategy,” it added.
The company had 55,030 full-time employees as of Sept. 30, up almost 19 percent from a year earlier, the report shows.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to