A new forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC) shows that enterprises will invest nearly $16 billion worldwide on GenAI solutions in 2023. This spending, which includes GenAI software as well as related infrastructure hardware and IT/business services, is expected to reach $143 billion in 2027 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 73.3% over the 2023-2027 forecast period. This is more than twice the rate of growth in overall AI spending and almost 13 times greater than the CAGR for worldwide IT spending over the same period.

"Generative AI is more than a fleeting trend or mere hype. It is a transformative technology with far-reaching implications and business impact," says Ritu Jyoti, group vice president, Worldwide Artificial Intelligence and Automation market research and advisory services at IDC. "With ethical and responsible implementation, GenAI is poised to reshape industries, changing the way we work, play, and interact with the world."

AMD today announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Nod.ai to expand the company's open AI software capabilities. The addition of Nod.ai will bring an experienced team that has developed an industry-leading software technology that accelerates the deployment of AI solutions optimized for AMD Instinct data center accelerators, Ryzen AI processors, EPYC processors, Versal SoCs and Radeon GPUs to AMD. The agreement strongly aligns with the AMD AI growth strategy centered on an open software ecosystem that lowers the barriers of entry for customers through developer tools, libraries and models.

"The acquisition of Nod.ai is expected to significantly enhance our ability to provide AI customers with open software that allows them to easily deploy highly performant AI models tuned for AMD hardware," said Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president, Artificial Intelligence Group at AMD. "The addition of the talented Nod.ai team accelerates our ability to advance open-source compiler technology and enable portable, high-performance AI solutions across the AMD product portfolio. Nod.ai's technologies are already widely deployed in the cloud, at the edge and across a broad range of end point devices today."

In an event at the White House today, NVIDIA announced support for voluntary commitments that the Biden Administration developed to ensure advanced AI systems are safe, secure and trustworthy. The news came the same day NVIDIA's chief scientist, Bill Dally, testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee seeking input on potential legislation covering generative AI. Separately, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang will join other industry leaders in a closed-door meeting on AI Wednesday with the full Senate.

Seven companies including Adobe, IBM, Palantir and Salesforce joined NVIDIA in supporting the eight agreements the Biden-Harris administration released in July with support from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI.

d-Matrix, the leader in high-efficiency generative AI compute for data centers, has closed $110 million in a Series-B funding round led by Singapore-based global investment firm Temasek. The goal of the fundraise is to enable d-Matrix to begin commercializing Corsair, the world's first Digital-In Memory Compute (DIMC), chiplet-based inference compute platform, after the successful launches of its prior Nighthawk, Jayhawk-I and Jayhawk II chiplets.

d-Matrix's recent silicon announcement, Jayhawk II, is the latest example of how the company is working to fundamentally change the physics of memory-bound compute workloads common in generative AI and large language model (LLM) applications. With the explosion of this revolutionary technology over the past nine months, there has never been a greater need to overcome the memory bottleneck and current technology approaches that limit performance and drive up AI compute costs.

IBM has formally introduced watsonx, the company's next generation enterprise-focused artificial intelligence and data platform. Global business leaders remain unclear about the real, transformative power of AI and how to leverage it. The campaign is designed to define and differentiate watsonx as a force multiplier that can accelerate impact for global business leaders as they look to apply AI solutions in new and innovative ways.

The two distinct spots feature a fast-paced, multi-media technique that aims to provide inspiration and guidance around the value proposition of watsonx, while underscoring the need to identify the right AI that will empower businesses to advance objectives and accelerate workloads. These concepts come to life through potential use cases that spotlight the importance of applying AI that is trusted, targeted, and built on the best open technology available.

collaboration with diverse industries and support various applications
Samsung Electronics, a world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has developed the industry's first and highest-capacity 32-gigabit (Gb) DDR5 DRAM using 12 nanometer (nm)-class process technology. This achievement comes after Samsung began mass production of its 12 nm-class 16Gb DDR5 DRAM in May 2023. It solidifies Samsung's leadership in next-generation DRAM technology and signals the next chapter of high-capacity memory.

"With our 12 nm-class 32Gb DRAM, we have secured a solution that will enable DRAM modules of up to 1-terabyte (TB), allowing us to be ideally positioned to serve the growing need for high-capacity DRAM in the era of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and big data," said SangJoon Hwang, Executive Vice President of DRAM Product & Technology at Samsung Electronics. "We will continue to develop DRAM solutions through differentiated process and design technologies to break the boundaries of memory technology."

NVIDIA has been raking in lots of cash this year and hit a major milestone back in late May, with a trillion dollar valuation—its stock price doubled thanks to upward trends in the artificial intelligence market, with growing global demand for AI-hardware. Business Insider believes that Team Green will continue to do very well for itself over the next couple of years: "Mizuho analyst Vijay Rakesh has given NVIDIA's stock price another 20% upside to run—and even this new target of $530 is "conservative," according to a Sunday client note seen by Insider. Rakesh's previous price target for NVIDIA was $400. NVIDIA shares closed 0.7% higher at $446.12 apiece on Monday. The stock has surged 205% so far this year."

Despite the emergence of competing hardware from the likes of AMD and Intel, Rakesh predicts that NVIDIA will maintain a dominant position in the AI chip market until at least 2027: "With demand for generative AI accelerating, we see significant opportunities for hardware suppliers powering the higher compute needs for large-language models, particularly AI powerhouse NVIDIA. Insider reports that the company: "could generate around $300 billion in AI-specific revenue by 2027 with a 75% market share of AI server units...That's 10 times his projection of $25 billion to $30 billion in AI revenues this year." Rakesh has reportedly stuck with a $140 buy rating and price target for AMD shares.

Cerebras Systems, the pioneer in accelerating generative AI, and G42, the UAE-based technology holding group, today announced Condor Galaxy, a network of nine interconnected supercomputers, offering a new approach to AI compute that promises to significantly reduce AI model training time. The first AI supercomputer on this network, Condor Galaxy 1 (CG-1), has 4 exaFLOPs and 54 million cores. Cerebras and G42 are planning to deploy two more such supercomputers, CG-2 and CG-3, in the U.S. in early 2024. With a planned capacity of 36 exaFLOPs in total, this unprecedented supercomputing network will revolutionize the advancement of AI globally.

"Collaborating with Cerebras to rapidly deliver the world's fastest AI training supercomputer and laying the foundation for interconnecting a constellation of these supercomputers across the world has been enormously exciting. This partnership brings together Cerebras' extraordinary compute capabilities, together with G42's multi-industry AI expertise. G42 and Cerebras' shared vision is that Condor Galaxy will be used to address society's most pressing challenges across healthcare, energy, climate action and more," said Talal Alkaissi, CEO of G42 Cloud, a subsidiary of G42.

Mark Papermaster, AMD's Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Technology and Engineering announced: "Over the past 50 years, Ethernet has grown to dominate general networking. One of its key strengths is flexibility - the ability to adapt to different workloads, scale and computing environments. One of the places that it hasn't been well-known, though, is in high-performance networking environments.

Now, the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) was formed by leading technology companies to focus on tuning the Ethernet foundation for high-performance Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and High-Performance Computing (AI/ML/HPC) workloads. This includes work at the Physical, Link, Transport, and Software layers with robust security and congestion protections.

Announced today, Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) is bringing together leading companies for industry-wide cooperation to build a complete Ethernet-based communication stack architecture for high-performance networking. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads are rapidly evolving and require best-in-class functionality, performance, interoperability and total cost of ownership, without sacrificing developer and end-user friendliness. The Ultra Ethernet solution stack will capitalize on Ethernet's ubiquity and flexibility for handling a wide variety of workloads while being scalable and cost-effective.

Ultra Ethernet Consortium is founded by companies with long-standing history and experience in high-performance solutions. Each member is contributing significantly to the broader ecosystem of high-performance in an egalitarian manner. The founding members include AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Eviden (an Atos Business), HPE, Intel, Meta and Microsoft, who collectively have decades of networking, AI, cloud and high-performance computing-at-scale deployments.

Google has notified the world about its AI chatbot, Bard, getting a wider release and new features—with a rollout across Europe (27 territories), plus the addition of Brazil: "Today we're announcing Bard's biggest expansion to date. It's now available in most of the world, and in the most widely spoken languages. And we're launching new features to help you better customize your experience, boost your creativity and get more done." Their updated system is available now, so users "can collaborate with Bard in over 40 languages." A spoken response function has been implemented which is advertised as being very "helpful if you want to hear the correct pronunciation of a word or listen to a poem or script. Simply enter a prompt and select the sound icon to hear Bard's answers."

Jack Krawczyk, Bard Product Lead, and Amarnag Subramanya, Bard's VP of Engineering made sure to mention that Google is covering its bases, since privacy issues have delayed Bard's ability to reach new places (now mostly in the past): "As part of our bold and responsible approach to AI, we've proactively engaged with experts, policymakers and privacy regulators on this expansion. And as we bring Bard to more regions and languages over time, we'll continue to use our AI Principles as a guide, incorporate user feedback, and take steps to protect people's privacy and data." The initial "trial" period was restricted to the USA and UK, when Google launched Bard back in March.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force in chip design, with recent examples from China and the United States showcasing its potential. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, believes that AI can empower individuals to become programmers, while Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, predicts an era where AI dominates chip design. During the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, Su emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration for the next generation of chip designers. To excel in this field, engineers must possess a holistic understanding of hardware, software, and algorithms, enabling them to create superior chip designs that meet system usage, customer deployment, and application requirements.

The integration of AI into chip design processes has gained momentum, fueled by the AI revolution catalyzed by large language models (LLMs). Both Huang and Mark Papermaster, CTO of AMD, acknowledge the benefits of AI in accelerating computation and facilitating chip design. AMD has already started leveraging AI in semiconductor design, testing, and verification, with plans to expand its use of generative AI in chip design applications. Companies are now actively exploring the fusion of AI technology with Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools to streamline complex tasks and minimize manual intervention in chip design. Despite limited data and accuracy challenges, the "EDA+AI" approach holds great promise. For instance, Synopsys has invested significantly in AI tool research and recently launched Synopsys.ai, the industry's first end-to-end AI-driven EDA solution. This comprehensive solution empowers developers to harness AI at every stage of chip development, from system architecture and design to manufacturing, marking a significant leap forward in AI's integration into chip design workflows.

A new global study by the IBM Institute for Business Value found that nearly half of CEOs surveyed identify productivity as their highest business priority—up from sixth place in 2022. They recognize technology modernization is key to achieving their productivity goals, ranking it as second highest priority. Yet, CEOs can face key barriers as they race to modernize and adopt new technologies like generative AI.

The annual CEO study, CEO decision-making in the age of AI, Act with intention, found three-quarters of CEO respondents believe that competitive advantage will depend on who has the most advanced generative AI. However, executives are also weighing potential risks or barriers of the technology such as bias, ethics and security. More than half (57%) of CEOs surveyed are concerned about data security and 48% worry about bias or data accuracy.

The European parliament has voted today on a proposed set of rules that aim to govern artificial intelligence development in the region. The main branch has approved the text of draft of this legislation—a final tally showed participant counts of 499 in favor, and 28 against, and 93 abstentions at the Strasbourg HQ-based meeting. The so called "AI Act" could be a world first as well as a global standard for regulation over AI technology—members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are expected to work on more detailed specifics with all involved countries before new legislation is set in stone.

Thierry Breton, the European commissioner for the internal market stated today: "AI raises a lot of questions socially, ethically, economically. But now is not the time to hit any 'pause button'. On the contrary, it is about acting fast and taking responsibility." The council is aiming to gain control of several fields of AI applications including drone operation, automated medical diagnostic equipment, "high risk" large language models and deepfake production methods. Critics of AI have reasoned that uncontrolled technological advancements could enable computers to perform tasks faster than humans—thus creating the potential for large portions of the working population to become redundant.

OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, is currently exploring the UK and Europe on a PR-related "mini" world tour, and protesters have been following these proceedings with much interest. UK news outlets have reported that a demonstration took place outside of a university building in London yesterday, where the UCL Events organization hosted Altman as part of a fireside discussion about the benefits and problems relating to advanced AI systems. Attendees noted that Altman expressed optimism about AI's potential for the creation of more jobs and reduction in inequality - despite calls for a major pause on development. He also visited 10 Downing Street during the British leg of his PR journey - alongside other AI company leaders - to talk about potential risks (originating from his industry) with the UK's prime minister. Discussed topics were reported to include national security, existential threats and disinformation.

At the UCL event, Altman touched upon his recent meetings with European regulators, who are developing plans for advanced legislation that could lead to targeted laws (applicable to AI industries). He says that his company is "gonna try to comply" with these potential new rules and agrees that some form of regulation is necessary: "something between the traditional European approach and the traditional US approach" would be preferred. He took issue with the potential branding of large AI models (such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4 applications) as "high risk" ventures via the European Union's AI Act provisions: "Either we'll be able to solve those requirements or not...If we can comply, we will, and if we can't, we'll cease operating… We will try. But there are technical limits to what's possible."

We wouldn't be where we are today without the developer community. Together, we've been on a journey to reimagine an open app store and provide a better experience for Windows customers. It's because of this partnership that the Microsoft Store on Windows is now used by over one billion customers with more than 50% of new Windows 11 customers engaging with the Microsoft Store in the first 30 days. The momentum of Windows customers is a testament to the growth in quality content from our passionate community of developers, who have more than doubled the number of Win32 and PWA apps since last year.

Engaging PWAs like Snapchat and ESPN, sophisticated native apps like Spark Mail, Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, Capture One, Bilibili and WhatsApp, along with Android apps like Epic Seven, Best Fiends, and Blink, are truly what makes the Microsoft Store the best place to find the right content, whether for productivity, entertainment or creativity. There are many more apps to recognize, including the winners of the Microsoft Store Awards 2023 which can be found here. We are proud to share the next phase of our journey for the Microsoft Store on Windows and announce new experiences, features and tools. We are focused on building an open store that is ready for the new AI era, and to provide developers with new tools like Microsoft Store Ads to reach even more customers.

Dell Technologies and NVIDIA announce a joint initiative to make it easier for businesses to build and use generative AI models on-premises to quickly and securely deliver better customer service, market intelligence, enterprise search and a range of other capabilities. Project Helix will deliver a series of full-stack solutions with technical expertise and pre-built tools based on Dell and NVIDIA infrastructure and software. It includes a complete blueprint to help enterprises use their proprietary data and more easily deploy generative AI responsibly and accurately.

"Project Helix gives enterprises purpose-built AI models to more quickly and securely gain value from the immense amounts of data underused today," said Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and co-chief operating officer, Dell Technologies. "With highly scalable and efficient infrastructure, enterprises can create a new wave of generative AI solutions that can reinvent their industries."

"We are at a historic moment, when incredible advances in generative AI are intersecting with enterprise demand to do more with less," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO, NVIDIA. "With Dell Technologies, we've designed extremely scalable, highly efficient infrastructure that enables enterprises to transform their business by securely using their own data to build and operate generative AI applications."

Panos Panay, Chief Product Officer, Windows and Devices: "The team and I are pumped to be back at Build with the developer community this year. Over the last year, Windows has continued to see incredible growth fueled by Windows 11 adoption. In fact, one of the most exciting areas driving that growth for Windows has been developers themselves, with a 24% YoY increase in monthly devices used for development."

"AI is the defining technology of our time and developers are at the forefront of this transformation. With the right tools we can empower developers and our shared customers to shape the future and leave their mark on the world. We are just starting to see the incredible impact AI is having across industries and in our own daily lives. Today, the team and I are excited to share the next steps we are taking on our journey with Windows 11, to meet this new age of AI."

We are pleased to announce that we have raised $450 million in Series C funding led by Spark Capital with participation from Google, Salesforce Ventures, Sound Ventures, Zoom Ventures, and others. The funding will support our continued work developing helpful, harmless, and honest AI systems—including Claude, an AI assistant that can perform a wide variety of conversational and text processing tasks.

Anthropic was founded to build AI products that people can rely on and generate research about the opportunities and risks of AI. Our CEO, Dario Amodei, says, "We are thrilled that these leading investors and technology companies are supporting Anthropic's mission: AI research and products that put safety at the frontier. The systems we are building are being designed to provide reliable AI services that can positively impact businesses and consumers now and in the future."

Natural disasters, like flooding, are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change, threatening people's safety and livelihood. It's estimated that flooding affects more than 250 million people globally each year and causes around $10 billion in economic damages.

As part of our work to use AI to address the climate crisis, today we're expanding our flood forecasting capabilities to 80 countries. With the addition of 60 new countries across Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, and South and Central America, our platform Flood Hub now includes some of the territories with the highest percentages of population exposed to flood risk and experiencing more extreme weather, covering 460 million people globally.

System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition was created with the goal of reverse engineering the original code to port SS2 (1999) to the KEX Engine and made available on next-generation consoles for the first time. Nightdive Studios has also partnered with the systemshock.org community to integrate all the best mods and updates. All cinematics, textures, characters and weapon models have been updated, and the Co-Op Multiplayer has been overhauled to create a seamless experience.

"Remember, it is my will that guided you here. It is my will that gave you your cybernetic implants, the only beauty in that meat you call a body. If you value that meat... you will do as I tell you." The cult classic sci-fi horror FPS-RPG has returned...

In its recent Second Quarter of the Fiscal Year 2023 conference, Synopsys issued interesting information about the recent moves of chip developers and their usage of artificial intelligence. As the call notes, over 200+ chips have been taped out using Synopsys DSO.ai place-and-route (PnR) tool, making it a successful commercially proven AI chip design tool. The DSO.ai uses AI to optimize the placement and routing of the chip's transistors so that the layout is compact and efficient with regard to the strict timing constraints of the modern chip. According to Aart J. de Geus, CEO of Synopsys, "By the end of 2022, adoption, including 9 of the top 10 semiconductor vendors have moved forward at great speed with 100 AI-driven commercial tape-outs. Today, the tally is well over 200 and continues to increase at a very fast clip as the industry broadly adopts AI for design from Synopsys."

This is an interesting fact that means that customers are seeing the benefits of AI-assisted tools like DSO.ai. However, the company is not stopping there, and a whole suite of tools is getting an AI makeover. "We unveiled the industry's first full-stack AI-driven EDA suite, sydnopsys.ai," noted the CEO, adding that "Specifically, in parallel to second-generation advances in DSO.ai we announced VSO.ai, which stands for verification space optimization; and TSO.ai, test space optimization. In addition, we are extending AI across the design stack to include analog design and manufacturing." Synopsys' partners in this include NVIDIA, TSMC, MediaTek, Renesas, and IBM Research, all of which used AI-assisted tools for chip design efforts. A much wider range of industry players is expected to adopt these tools as chip design costs continue to soar as we scale the nodes down. With future 3 nm GPU costing an estimated $1.5 billion, 40% of that will account for software, and Synopsys plans to take a cut in that percentage.

Geoffrey Hinton, British-Canadian psychologist, computer scientist, and 2018 Turing Award winner in deep learning, has departed the Google Brain team after a decade-long tenure. His research on AI and neural networks dating back to the 1980s has helped shape the current landscape of deep learning, neural processing, and artificial intelligence algorithms with direct and indirect contributions over the years. 2012's AlexNet, designed and developed in collaboration with his students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, formed the modern backbone of computer vision and AI image recognition used today in Generative AI. Hinton joined Google when the company won the bid for the tiny startup he and his two students formed in the months following the reveal of AlexNet. Ilya Sutskever left their cohort at Google in 2015 to become co-founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI; creators of ChatGPT and one of Google's most prominent competitors.

In an interview with the New York Times Hinton says that he quit his position at Google so that he may speak freely about the risks of AI, and that a part of him regrets his life's work in the field. He said that during his time there Google has acted as a "proper steward" of AI development, and was careful about releasing anything that might be harmful. His viewpoint on the industry shifted within the last year as Microsoft's Bing Chat took shots at Google's core business, the web browser, leading to Google being more reactionary than deliberate in response with Bard. The concern arises that as these companies battle it out for AI supremacy they won't take proper precautions against bad-faith actors using the technologies to flood the internet with false photos, text, and even videos. That the average person would no longer be able to tell what was real, and what was manufactured by AI prompt.

Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova is a 4X turn-based strategy game set in the 24th century where you take on the role of leading a spacefaring civilization that has just developed faster-than-light (FTL) travel. You begin the game with only your home planet and must research new technologies, explore the known galaxy, and colonize new worlds while keeping your people at home happy. At the same time, you will engage in trade, diplomacy, intrigue and war with other alien civilizations. Thanks to the invention of hyperdrive, your people are now ready to discover new worlds, encounter alien civilizations, and learn about the dark history that encompasses them all.

Stardock has released the latest sequel of its award-winning space strategy game series today into early access. Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova sees the player as the ruler of a united home world that has just discovered faster-than-light travel. Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova continues a 30-year trend of innovation in the series. This latest sequel introduces AI-generated content OpenAI's ChatGPT technology allowing players to create their own civilizations that uses AI to create the lore, conversation dialogs, quests and more. The game also uses AI, trained on decades of Stardock's alien art to deliver custom graphics for their custom civilization.

NVIDIA's H100 has recently become available to use via Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), and it was only a matter of time before someone decided to benchmark its performance and compare it to the previous generation's A100 GPU. Today, thanks to the benchmarks of MosaicML, a startup company led by the ex-CEO of Nervana and GM of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Intel, Naveen Rao, we have some comparison between these two GPUs with a fascinating insight about the cost factor. Firstly, MosaicML has taken Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models of various sizes and trained them using bfloat16 and FP8 Floating Point precision formats. All training occurred on CoreWeave cloud GPU instances.

Regarding performance, the NVIDIA H100 GPU achieved anywhere from 2.2x to 3.3x speedup. However, an interesting finding emerges when comparing the cost of running these GPUs in the cloud. CoreWeave prices the H100 SXM GPUs at $4.76/hr/GPU, while the A100 80 GB SXM gets $2.21/hr/GPU pricing. While the H100 is 2.2x more expensive, the performance makes it up, resulting in less time to train a model and a lower price for the training process. This inherently makes H100 more attractive for researchers and companies wanting to train Large Language Models (LLMs) and makes choosing the newer GPU more viable, despite the increased cost. Below, you can see tables of comparison between two GPUs in training time, speedup, and cost of training.