Graphcore was the UK’s leader in the field of artificial intelligence

Apple’s Pixel 8 Launch was a Parade of Artificial Intelligence: How Apple is putting artificial intelligence at the centre of its audience?

As early as last year, the concept of Artificial Intelligence was being used as a selling point. The company has seen presentations that show it is a leader in the space. Critics said it had been caught off guard by the success of Openai’s technology and how quickly Microsoft had integrated it into its products. For its part, the internet powerhouse risks emphasizing the AI-ness of the technology at the expense of useful features that it will actually use.

This is not an issue for owners of thePixel or would-be buyers of the hardware. But while Google can call itself an AI company all it likes, people ultimately just want phones filled with useful features. At a certain point, it risks putting the AI technology cart in front of the feature horse.

Apple doesn’t mention the two magic letters in its presentations, compared to other companies that do. As my colleague James Vincent pointed out earlier this year, Apple still makes reference to technology that many other companies would call AI, but it does it much more sparingly and uses the “sedate and technically accurate” phrase “machine learning”:

I don’t think this is a big problem for the most part. Who cares how the Pixel Watch 2’s heart rate algorithm works so long as it’s accurate? And ultimately, the results of the Pixel 8’s photography pipeline will have to speak for itself, regardless of how much “AI” was involved along the way.

Source: Google’s Pixel 8 launch was a parade of AI

The Brunel AI Project: Graphcore is Tap-Danced in the Presence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Evidence from a Case Study)

As a tech demo for generative AI, it makes sense. AI is increasingly good at recognizing and describing images, and one of generative AI’s greatest strengths is writing in a particular style (particularly one as laden with cliches as peppy social media image captions).

This is a single feature of a mobile phone and I think it’s utterly baffling. How on Earth have we reached the point of having a mobile device draft our social media posts for us? What’s the point? If you’re asking a machine to draft an image caption for a photo, then why are you publishing the caption in the first place? What are we doing here?

I have a theory, that in the absence of a killer app for generative artificial intelligence, the search engine is throwing features at a wall and looking at what sticks. It feels like the search giant has a hammer labeled “generative AI,” and its search for nails is taking the company to weird places. And that’s before we get into the messy implications of building generative AI directly into Google Photos.

It seems that it’s due to an anxiety at the search giant to avoid being left behind in the hype. When Microsoft announced its intentions to integrate generative AI into Bing, CEO Satya Nadella intended it to be a shot at the company’s larger rival, Google. “I hope that, with our innovation, they will definitely want to come out and show that they can dance,” Nadella said. I want people to know that we made them dance. Since then, Google has enthusiastically tap-danced through every one of its presentations.

The Brunel AI project should have been a big moment for another Bristolian export—Graphcore, one of the UK’s only large-scale chipmakers specializing in designing hardware for AI. After raising over 2.5 billion dollars from investors, the company is trying to compete against the US giant of the market. With AI fast becoming an issue of geopolitical as well as commercial importance, and countries—including the UK—spending hundreds of millions of dollars on building strategic reserves of chips and investing in massive supercomputers, companies like Graphcore should be poised to benefit. In May, Graphcore’s CEO Nigel Toon wrote to the government, asking that some of the exascale project’s funding be allocated to British chipmakers—i.e., to his company.

A founder and CEO of a research company says a lot of business is about having the ability to sustain capital intensive development for long enough until acquisition. I think Graphcore has been squeezed in that game.

After Graphcore’s co-founding partners sold their previous company, Toon and Simon made a vow to build the next generation of chips. Graphcore does not use the graphics processing units which are the current standard for artificial intelligence applications. Graphcore claims its IPUs are better suited to the specific requirements of AI than GPUs, which are multipurpose chips originally designed for image processing. Early investors included Microsoft—now one of the giants in the vanguard of AI, and a big backer of OpenAI, developer of the ChatGPT chatbot. In 2020, Microsoft stopped using Graphcore chips in its cloud computing centers.

Zavrel says that Graphcore may have struggled because its technology is significantly different from the Nvidia GPUs that users are familiar with. He believes that Graphcore can’t take them in a smooth way from the Nvidia-dominated community into their own thing.