Scale AI’s Market Valuation Reached $7 Billion After Its Latest Funding Round

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July 14, 2021

Scale AI’s Market Valuation Reached $7 Billion After Its Latest Funding Round

Scale AI has witnessed a massive increase in valuation of about 110% since December making it a $7 billion company. This hike indicates that industries across the globe are demanding more and better smart software.

Scale AI is a San Francisco-based startup that specializes in data labeling. The process of annotating raw data before feeding it to an artificial intelligence algorithm is known as data labeling.

In the latest funding round of the company held in April, Scale AI had reached a market valuation of $7 billion. The funding was led by Tiger Global, Greenoaks Capital, and Dragoneer. It is the fifth largest deal made for artificial intelligence startups in the year 2021.

The company’s unique software package, Nucleus, enables its clients to quickly recognize and correct mislabeled data. It also improves data labels in order to provide better artificial intelligence algorithm training.

Alex Wang, the co-founder and CEO of Scale AI, said, “We help customers unlock this data that gets them off the starting blocks.” Former Amazon employee Jeff Wilke has recently joined Scale AI as Wang’s special advisor.

iRobot, an autonomous vacuum cleaner manufacturing company, recently revealed that it had used Scale AI’s artificial intelligence platform to annotate more than two billion images to fine tune its data. The software company’s platform has helped iRobots to add many new features to its products.

iRobot’s Chief Technology Officer, Chris Jones, said, “The better the data you have, the better performance you get at the other end.”

Alex Wang clarified that they are keeping a keen eye on that market, and they don’t intend to go public at this moment. Scale AI has many industry-leading clients like NVIDIA, AirBnB, and Lyft, who use their platform for data labeling.

Finance Teams Are Using Artificial Intelligence To Outperform Peers

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Dipayan Mitra

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July 14, 2021

Finance Teams Are Using Artificial Intelligence To Outperform Peers

A global survey of finance professionals conducted by Unit4 found out that most finance teams are now using artificial intelligence-powered systems to outperform peers as demand for skills increases.

More than 1760 working professionals from various countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia, Belgium, Singapore, Netherlands, and Germany participated in the survey.

The survey undertaken by DJS Research indicated increased awareness of artificial intelligence among working professionals, especially for financial planning and analysis (FP&A). 47% of the companies that had adopted artificial intelligence said their productivity has increased, compared to 28% of non-adopters.

Chief Executive Officer of Unit4, Gordon Stuart, said, “Artificial intelligence should not just be seen as a way to automate processes. Finance professionals should also use it as an opportunity to move into a more strategic role, becoming storytellers and influencers, interpreting data through technology analysis, and translating the findings into meaningful insights relevant to their organizations.”

The finance sector does not entirely understand the importance of artificial intelligence and how it can help in making informed decisions. The companies which have adopted artificial intelligence services are performing better than their rivals, the study mentioned.

It was revealed that more than 33% of employees feel that artificial intelligence can be used to reduce operational time and improve data quality but are reluctant to believe that it can help them make quicker decisions.

86% of the finance leaders across the globe are now planning to undertake artificial intelligence training to improve the skills and productivity of their enterprises.

Chief Financial and Risk Officer of Nuclear Waste Management Organization Georgina Kossivas said, “Communications skills are also essential to articulate insights in terms that are relevant to senior decision-makers. Investments in artificial intelligence will only deliver on their true potential if finance professionals have developed these skills sufficiently.”

Broadcom Plans To Buy Software Company SAS

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Dipayan Mitra

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July 14, 2021

Broadcom Plans To Buy Software Company SAS

The US-based semiconductor manufacturer Broadcom recently announced its plan to buy an analytics software company SAS Institute. The deal is expected to have a valuation of $20 billion. According to sources, the deal might get closed in the coming week.

However, SAS’ official spokesperson Shannon Heath said that they do not comment on speculations and rumors. “SAS remains focused on furthering innovation to serve our customers best,” she added.

With this deal, Broadcom intends to diversify its product array from microchips to software. In the recent past, Broadcom had acquired several other IT companies, which has increased its market valuation to $200 billion.

A further hike in the company’s valuation can be seen after the acquisition of SAS Institute. SAS Institute is a US-based data management and analytics software developing company with a valuation of $3 billion, according to the company’s 2020 annual report.

Company officials claim that they have more than 8300 clients, including government agencies and Universities. SAS Institute was founded in 1976 by John Sall, James Goodnight, and Anthony James Barr.

Over the years, the company has grown and currently employs more than 1200 professionals and has made its presence in 143 countries. Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst of SAS Institute, Mike Gualtieri, said, “At first, Broadcom seems like an odd and unlikely suitor for an advanced analytics artificial intelligence company. However, it would immediately make Broadcom a player in enterprise AI.”

Venerated economist Dr. Mike Walden said that the dilemma is whether Broadcom would move SAS Institute’s employees and operations. “If a sizable part of SAS ultimately leaves the area – while not a devastating blow – it would be a setback to the region. SAS is home-grown, and it had a big impact on making the Triangle a national tech center,” he mentioned.

OPPO Revealed Its Artificial Intelligence-Powered 6G Strategy

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Dipayan Mitra

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July 14, 2021

OPPO Revealed Its Artificial Intelligence-Powered 6G Strategy

The smartphone manufacturing giant OPPO recently revealed its artificial intelligence-powered 6G strategy. The company is confident that it would be able to launch 6G services by the next decade.

This shows the company’s farsightedness as they plan to launch 6G network services while most parts of the world are yet to adopt 5G. OPPO officials said that artificial intelligence would play a vital role in developing next-generation communication networks. With the help of artificial intelligence, 6G networks will be able to self-optimize and dynamically administrate themselves.

OPPO’s Chief 5G Scientist, Henry Tang, said, “Looking towards 2035, OPPO expects the number of intelligent agents in the world to far exceed the number of humans. Therefore, the next generation of communication technology, 6G, should be able to serve the needs not only of people but of all forms of intelligence and their various interactions.”

The OPPO Research Institute mentioned in its white paper release that 6G technology would revolutionize the network communication industry as it would change the way artificial intelligence interacts, learns and is applied.

According to Henry Tang, standardization of the next generation communication network will begin from 2025 and start being implemented from 2035. OPPO’s research team is currently working on system features and new technologies that would support 6G communication services.

Officials mentioned that not only smartphones but the autonomous driving vehicle industry would also enjoy the benefits of 6G services as the networks will be able to assign the required, artificial intelligence algorithm and would serve as the perfect communication connection between the self-driving vehicle and the physical environment as they would be able to download artificial intelligence algorithms trained by other vehicles and devices in a jiffy.

The OPPO research team said, “Unlike 4G and 5G networks, the artificial intelligence used for inferring and decision making in 6G networks will be organically integrated on the device side and the network side, with the device assuming a more important role.”

Scientists Use Artificial Intelligence To Detect Gravitational Waves

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Dipayan Mitra

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July 13, 2021

Scientists Use Artificial Intelligence To Detect Gravitational Waves

Eliu Huerta, a researcher at the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, has developed a new artificial intelligence framework that allows scientists to detect gravitational waves.

The National Laboratory collaborated with NVIDIA, IBM, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois to develop this unique technology. Scientists can now detect accelerated, reproducible, and scalable gravitational waves using this framework. The artificial intelligence framework can run on low-end graphic processing units.

Argonne’s data science and learning division’s director, Ian Foster, said, “As a scientist, what’s exciting to me about this project is that it proves how, with the correct tools, artificial intelligence systems can be integrated naturally into the workflows of scientists, which would allow them to do their work faster and better.”

The artificial intelligence algorithm uses 64 NVIDIA GPUs to process vast amounts of high-quality data in less than seven minutes. Huerta said that in their research, they had combined artificial intelligence and supercomputing to carry out big-data experiments. They are further researching to find out whether artificial intelligence can be used to solve other relevant challenges.

Argonne National Laboratory’s research scientist, Ben Blaiszik, said, “This work highlights the significant value of data infrastructure to the scientific community. The long term investments that have been made by DOE, the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, National Science Foundation (NSF), and others have created a set of building blocks. We can bring these building blocks together in new ways to scale this analysis and to help deliver these capabilities to others in the future.”

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected gravitational waves for the first time in 2015, which was of prime importance as it confirmed Albert Einstein’s theory on gravitation.

IBM Open Sources Framework For AI Workflows On Multicloud

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Manisha Kalagara

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July 13, 2021

IBM announced the open-sourcing of a new serverless framework called CodeFlare on Wednesday. It will help integrate and simplify artificial intelligence workflows on multi-cloud and scaling of massive data.

The framework was built on an open-source distributed computing framework known as Ray while adding additional features for scaling and integration for developers and data workers. To simplify the training and optimization of machine learning models to perform tasks is an extremely human intrinsic process. To simplify this process and save some time, IBM released CodeFlare.

The simplification is carried out by creating pipelines to integrate, parallelize, and share data using a python-based interface. IBM had created pipelines earlier to deploy applications on IBM cloud called Continuous Delivery Tekton Pipelines, but they weren’t compatible with hybrid cloud platforms.

But, CodeFlare can unify these pipelines on IBM cloud and Red Hat OpenShift without learning a new workflow language for every infrastructure. IBM CodeFlare provides adapters for event triggers like the arrival of a new life for the pipelines to integrate and bridge with other cloud-native ecosystems. It also allows loading and portioning of data into data lakes, cloud storage, and distributed file systems.

With IBM CodeFlare, it’s easier for colleagues in the same team or organization to figure out what has been done in the past to run the pipelines. With robust tools and advanced APIs, the workload is more consistent, giving more room for actual research and development than understanding and deploying complexities.

The robust qualities of CodeFlare kicks in when its speed comes into play. According to the IBM blog, when CodeFlare was applied to optimize and analyze 100,000 machine learning training pipelines, it could execute each pipeline in 15 minutes instead of 4 hours. IBM is using the framework for its own artificial intelligence research and will be developing much more complex pipelines that are more consistent, reliable, and enhanced fault tolerance.

Tesla Rolls Out Its Self-Driving V9 Beta

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Dipayan Mitra

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July 13, 2021

Tesla RollS Out Its Self-Driving V9 Beta

Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk recently confirmed the much awaited launch of its fully self-driving V9 beta. Musk replied to various tweets stating that the beta version of V9 will start uploading on Friday at midnight.

It is a beta software update that is capable of controlling a car without the need for any human intervention. Elon Musk earlier said that software would launch in the month of June, but now he has confirmed that the self-driving car manufacturer has started rolling out the update from 10th July.

The software is expected to have a few flaws as it is still under the beta program, as Musk mentioned in his tweet, “bear in mind, it is still just a beta.”

The carmaker said that the new update will enable the Tesla cars to drive seamlessly in city traffic without any human expertise. Company officials suggest that this new update will considerably improve the current self-driving software used by Tesla.

The company has been doing extensive research for months to develop this enhanced software. It is expected that if the beta version lives up to the expectations, the company will then soon add the Full Self-driving (FSD) beta download button for the public.

As of now, nothing can be said regarding the claims of the company for the effectiveness of FSD beta version 9. The company has witnessed eleven deaths in several car crashes since it launched its first autonomous driving vehicle in 2015.

Facebook Researchers Are Teaching Artificial Intelligence-Powered Robot To Walk Like Humans

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Dipayan Mitra

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July 13, 2021

Facebook Researchers Are Teaching Artificial Intelligence-Powered Robot To Walk Like Humans

Facebook recently revealed that its researchers are teaching an artificial intelligence-powered robot to walk like humans. The research is being done on a four-legged dog-like robot, which is capable of walking on multiple surfaces by adjusting its strides according to its needs.

Facebook’s artificial intelligence researchers have tied up with scientists of Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer science department along with the University of California to conduct this study on an artificial intelligence-powered robot developed by a China-based tech startup Unitree.

The company claims that its new Rapid Motor Adaptation technology is a breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence as it enables robots to easily walk on sand, grass, pebbles, and climb stairs without failure in 80% of the conducted trials.

Advanced techniques like reinforcement learning and supervised learning were used to develop the robot. Facebook’s artificial intelligence researcher, Jitendra Malik, said they had used the trial and error method to train the robot. It analyzes the surface with its feet and then makes accurate decisions regarding precise body movements.

Malik said, “The challenges of robotics are that there is a lot of this real-world variability.” This technology can also operate with less powerful hardware, which will reduce its cost in the coming future. The coronavirus pandemic has changed the way of the research as most of the laboratories were closed for an extended period of time.

In general, robots are designed to move on surfaces where they will be delivering their services, but Facebook’s RMA technology will enable robots to comfortably walk on all surfaces by feeding them with different algorithms.

Earlier this year, Norway University also unveiled a similar kind of technology that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help robots adapt to different climate conditions.

YouTube’s Recommendations Push Harmful Videos Reveals A Mozilla Study

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Dipayan Mitra

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July 13, 2021

YouTube’s Recommendations Push Harmful Videos Reveals A Mozilla Study

A recent crowdsourced study by Mozilla found out that YouTube’s recommendations push harmful videos to the viewers. The algorithm used by the company displays videos that are against YouTube’s policies.

The research was conducted at the University of Exeter, where researchers appointed more than 37,000 volunteers to keep track of the recommendation section of YouTube through a browser extension.

After a ten month-long data gathering process, researchers scrutinized acquired data and found that YouTube is pushing fake news, violent, and sexual content to the viewers. The research team was led by Brandi Guerkink, senior manager of Advocacy at Mozilla.

While addressing, he mentioned that most of the recommendations were related to fake news, but certain videos contained sexualized parodies of cartoons and racist content. She said, “When it’s actively suggesting that people watch content that violates the company’s policies, the algorithm seems to be working at odds with the platform’s stated aims, their own community guidelines, and the goal of making the platform a safe place for people.”

Further research found out that non-English speaking countries are at a higher risk of receiving such recommendations accounting for more than 60% of the recommended videos. In the past, YouTube has been accused of the same, which forced the company to change its algorithm. But now, it is quite evident that YouTube’s efforts have not been successful.

The video streaming platform, in a statement, said, “We constantly work to improve the experience on YouTube, and over the past year alone, we’ve launched over 30 different changes to reduce recommendations of harmful content.”

Experts recommend that YouTube should introduce an option for viewers to disable personalized recommendations. Guerkink expressed her regents by saying, “We can’t just continue to have this paradigm where researchers raise issues, companies say ‘OK, it’s solved,’ and we go on with our lives.”

Shanghai Reveals Its 10 Year Artificial Intelligence Plan

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Dipayan Mitra

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July 12, 2021

Shanghai Reveals Its 10 Year Artificial Intelligence Plan

Shanghai recently announced its ten year long municipal artificial intelligence plan. The plan mainly focuses on changing current digital technologies, developing security mechanisms for risk monitoring, and also promoting the establishment of technical standards.

Shanghai made this announcement at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2021, stating that the plan will be implemented in several phases. The first phase will be accomplished in the next three years.

The project will be led by the Shanghai Municipal Artificial Intelligence Group and Shanghai Science and Technology Commission. Issues related to facial recognition, QR code scanning, and medical diagnosis will be analyzed, and probable solutions will be presented.

Wang Youqiang, executive director of the center, said, “There has been quite a lot of involvement by enterprises and industries in those realms, but our plan－with AI projects being implemented in those areas and interacting with people’s lives will be a systematic, scientific and neutral attempt to discover common problems and attempt to formulate rules to avoid risks.”

He also mentioned that throughout the field experiment plans, they will meticulously work to resolve common artificial intelligence-related problems faced by the public to digitally transform Shanghai and monitor people’s concerns about technology.

Shanghai AI also plans to provide artificial intelligence-powered services to the Chinese Government to construct management rules and systems. Wang believes that artificial intelligence governance rules will also be accepted in other parts of the country.

“And through the process, we may find model cases of digital transformation in the city with international demonstration effects to contribute Shanghai’s wisdom and solutions to the world’s AI development,” Wang said.

The World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2021 was organized in Zhangjiakou, Hubei province, China. The conference provides a platform for tech companies to unveil their products and plans regarding artificial intelligence systems, software, and hardware.