Eric David
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Facebook shuts down AI that made up its own stupid-sounding language
Facebook Inc. seems to know its stuff when it comes to artificial intelligence research, despite what Elon Musk might think, but not every AI project has gone as the social media giant planned. According to a report by Fast Co Design, Facebook recently pulled the plug on an AI that had started inventing its own language. ...
Broad growth helps Intel beat earnings target and raise guidance
Veteran chip maker Intel Corp. not only beat Wall Street estimates for its second quarter, it also raised its guidance for the rest of the year, as it expects to reach profitability in some segments much earlier than it originally predicted. Intel’s revenue rose 8 percent from a year ago, to $14.8 billion, beating analysts’ ...
AI startup Aiqudo raises $5.2M to make voice assistants better
Amazon.com Inc. has been trying to shove its Alexa voice assistant into anything with room for a speaker and microphone, from TVs and Bluetooth speakers to cars and whatever the heck the Dash Wand is, but Aiqudo Inc. says voice assistants such as Alexa or Google Assistant don’t have many voice commands that are actually ...
Judge orders Apple to pay university $506M in patent dispute
A judge has ruled that Apple Inc.’s A7, A8 and A8X processor chips infringe on patents held by the University of Wisconsin, and the court has ordered Apple to pay the university more than $506 million in damages. The specific patent in question is US Patent No. 5,781,752, which is titled “Table based data speculation circuit ...
Language learning app Duolingo raises $25M at a $700M valuation
Language learning platform Duolingo Inc. announced today that it has closed a $25 million late-stage funding round led by Drive Capital. According to the company, the Series E round brings its total funding to $108.3 million and sets its overall valuation at $700 million. Founded in 2011 by reCAPTCHA co-creator Luis von Ahn (pictured), Duolingo’s platform offers beginner and ...
Adobe will put Flash media player out of its misery in 2020
Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash media player helped usher in the multimedia revolution on the Internet, but the software platform has fallen onto hard times over the last few years. The proprietary nature of Flash and its long line of security problems have led to a mass exodus from the platform, and everyone from Google Inc. to Twitch to Pornhub have ...
Qualcomm opens up framework to bring deep learning to mobile devices
Qualcomm Technologies Inc. believes that mobile devices are the next frontier for deep learning, the artificial neural network technology behind recent advances in speech and image recognition. So today the company released its Neural Processing Engine software development kit on the Qualcomm Developer Network. Qualcomm, which is the world’s largest mobile chip maker, said the NPE software ...
Elon vs. Mark: Musk takes a shot at Zuckerberg’s ‘limited’ view of AI
Tesla Inc. co-founder and Chief Executive Elon Musk has made no secret of his worries about the dangers of unregulated artificial intelligence research, and today Musk criticized Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg for dismissing concerns about AI risks. Musk’s and Zuckerberg’s companies are both working on the bleeding edge of AI technology, and while both agree that AI ...
Your Roomba’s digital map of your house could be for sale
Robotic vacuums like the Roomba have made it easy for even the laziest people to keep their floors clean. Now, Roomba maker iRobot Corp. has found another use for the little robots: building maps for other smart home devices. Some of the smarter Roomba models build maps of your home to make their cleaning paths more ...
Asian ride-hailing service Grab gets $2B to take on Uber
Singapore-based ridesharing service Grab is looking to go head-to-head with Uber Technologies Inc. in Southeast Asia, and today the company got a major boost for that effort with $2 billion in financing from Didi Chuxing and SoftBank Group Corp. According to Grab, this is the largest funding round in the region’s history, and the company said in a statement that it ...