AI is helping mobile operators to cope with pandemic demand

Artificial intelligence is helping telecoms operators to boost the RAN capacity of their 4G networks by 15 percent.

More people than ever are relying on telecoms networks to work, play, and stay connected during the pandemic. Operators are doing all they can to ensure their existing networks have enough capacity to cope with demand.

Gorkem Yigit, Principal Analyst at Analysys Mason, said:

“Video streaming continues to experience high year on year growth and...

30 September 2020 | Adoption

What happens when Google’s chatty bot chats with a chatbot?

Google Duplex impressed and scared the world in equal parts when it was unveiled, and now we've seen how a conversation goes with another chatbot.

Duplex, for a quick primer, is Google's AI-powered voice bot which can call businesses on a person's behalf for things such as booking hair appointments. It's so realistic that everyone has decided that bots must declare themselves as such before chatting with a human.

A company known as PolyAI – which specialises in...

25 September 2020 | Bots

Microsoft is granted exclusive rights to use OpenAI’s GPT-3

Microsoft and OpenAI's close relationship has taken another leap forward with the former gaining exclusive GPT-3 access.

GPT-3 has been the talk of the AI town in recent months. OpenAI’s innovation can help to create convincing articles and the company once deemed it too dangerous to release in a world where misinformation and fake news is already problematic.

OpenAI never made GPT-3 publicly available but instead provided access to a limited number of trusted...

23 September 2020 | Microsoft

Researchers achieve 94% power reduction for on-device AI tasks

Researchers from Applied Brain Research (ABR) have achieved significantly reduced power consumption for a range of AI-powered devices.

ABR designed a new neural network called the Legendre Memory Unit (LMU). With LMU, on-device AI tasks – such as those on speech-enabled devices like wearables, smartphones, and smart speakers – can take up to 94 percent less power.

The reduction in power consumption achieved through LMU will be particularly beneficial to smaller...

17 September 2020 | Neural Network

A(I)hoy, mateys: IBM’s crewless ocean research ship to launch ‘very soon’

IBM’s crewless AI-powered ship is due to begin roaming the oceans this month, collecting vital data about something we still know incredibly little about.

Humans have travelled the sea in some form for tens of thousands of years—with the earliest crossings occurring around 53,000 to 65,000 years ago (when Australo-Melanesian populations migrated into the Sahul landmass – known today as Australia and New Guinea – from what used to be the Sundaland...

15 September 2020 | IBM

Nvidia and ARM will open ‘world-class’ AI centre in Cambridge

Nvidia is already putting its $40 billion ARM acquisition to good use by opening a “world-class” AI centre in Cambridge.

British chip designer ARM’s technology is at the heart of most mobile devices. Meanwhile, Nvidia’s GPUs are increasingly being used for AI computation in servers, desktops, and even things like self-driving vehicles.

However, Nvidia was most interested in ARM’s presence in edge devices—which it estimates to be in the region of 180...

14 September 2020 | Adoption

Expert calls out ‘misleading’ claim that OpenAI’s GPT-3 wrote a full article

AI expert Jarno Duursma has called out a misleading article in The Guardian which claims to have been written entirely by OpenAI’s GPT-3.

GPT-3 has made plenty of headlines in recent months. The coverage is warranted, GPT-3 is certainly impressive—but many of the claims of its current capabilities are greatly exaggerated.

The headline of the article which Duursma questions is: "A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?"

It's a headline...

10 September 2020 | OpenAI

The White House is set to boost AI funding by 30 percent

A budget proposal from the White House would boost funding for AI by around 30 percent as the US aims to retain its technological supremacy.

Countries around the world are vastly increasing their budgets for AI, and with good reason. Just look at Gartner’s Hype Cycle released yesterday to see how important the technology is expected to be over the next decade.

Russian president Vladimir Putin famously said back in 2017 that the nation which leads in AI “will become...

19 August 2020 | Adoption

AI dominates Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle for emerging technologies

Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle has a distinct AI flavour, highlighting the technology's importance over the next decade.

Of the 30 emerging technologies featured in Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle, nine are directly related to artificial intelligence:

Generative adversarial networksAdaptive machine learningComposite AIGenerative AIResponsible AIAI-augmented developmentEmbedded AITrusted AIAI-augmented design

Most of the AI technologies are currently in the initial...

18 August 2020 | Adoption

Microsoft: The UK must increase its AI skills, or risk falling behind

A report from Microsoft warns that the UK faces an AI skills gap which may harm its global competitiveness.

The research, titled AI Skills in the UK, shines a spotlight on some concerning issues.

For its UK report, Microsoft used data from a global AI skills study featuring more than 12,000 people in 20 countries to see how the UK is doing in comparison to the rest of the world.

Most notably, compared to the rest of the world, the UK is seeing a higher failure...

12 August 2020 | Adoption