Graphcore today announced that the company has been acquired by SoftBank Group Corp. Under the deal, Graphcore becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank and will continue to operate under the Graphcore name.

"This is a tremendous endorsement of our team and their ability to build truly transformative AI technologies at scale, as well as a great outcome for our company," said Graphcore co-founder and CEO Nigel Toon. "Demand for AI compute is vast and continues to grow. There remains much to do to improve efficiency, resilience, and computational power to unlock the full potential of AI. In SoftBank, we have a partner that can enable the Graphcore team to redefine the landscape for AI technology."

After giving a vivid GTC talk, NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang took on a Q&A session with many interesting ideas for debate. One of them is addressing the pressing concerns surrounding AI hallucinations and the future of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With a tone of confidence, Huang reassured the tech community that the phenomenon of AI hallucinations—where AI systems generate plausible yet unfounded answers—is a solvable issue. His solution emphasizes the importance of well-researched and accurate data feeding into AI systems to mitigate these occurrences. "The AI shouldn't just answer; it should do research first to determine which of the answers are the best," noted Mr. Huang as he added that for every single question, there should be a rule that makes AI research the answer. This also refers to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), where LLMs fetch data from external sources, like additional databases, for fact-checking.

Another interesting comment made by the CEO is that the pinnacle of AI evolution—Artificial General Intelligence—is just five years away. Many people working in AI are divided between the AGI timeline. While Mr. Huang predicted five years, some leading researchers like Meta's Yann LeCunn think we are far from the AGI singularity threshold and will be stuck with dog/cat-level AI systems first. AGI has long been a topic of both fascination and apprehension, with debates often revolving around its potential to exceed human intelligence and the ethical implications of such a development. Critics worry about the unpredictability and uncontrollability of AGI once it reaches a certain level of autonomy, raising questions about aligning its objectives with human values and priorities. Timeline-wise, no one knows, and everyone makes their prediction, so time will tell who was right.