Lifeboat Foundation

On Meta’s Wednesday earnings call, CFO Susan Li reiterated to investors that financial returns from its recent AI investments will “come in over a longer period of time.” Zuckerberg was direct about why Meta is spending billions on Nvidia hardware and the other infrastructure ahead of these future returns: “It’s hard to predict how this will trend multiple generations into the future, but at this point, I’d rather risk building capacity before it is needed rather than too late.”

He again telegraphed that the Meta AI assistant is on track to be the most used in the world before the end of the year. While he touted that generative AI features “are things that I think will increase engagement in our products,” he said the real revenue will come from business use cases, like AI creating ads from scratch and letting businesses operate their own AI agents in WhatsApp for customer service.

TSMC making semiconductor fabs in the US has Intel Foundry grabbing as much TSMC senior engineer talent it can for its own foundry business.

Australian businesses are paying untold amounts of ransom to hackers, but the government is hoping to claw back some visibility with a landmark cybersecurity law.

While major ransomware attacks on companies such as MediSecure, Optus and Latitude have grabbed headlines for breaching the privacy of millions, the practice of quietly paying off cybercriminals has flourished in the dark.

The situation has deteriorated to the point that the government’s original ambition for an outright ban on ransom payments has been nixed, for now, and the focus has shifted to mapping the scale of the problem.

Nvidia, the world’s largest company by value, is reportedly developing a new artificial intelligence (AI) chip based on its flagship product B200 for the China market.

The mass production of the new chip, which may be called B20, will commence later this year while shipments will start in the second quarter of next year, Reuters reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

The report said Nvidia will work with Inspur, one of its distributors in mainland China. However, Inspur said it has not started any business and cooperation related to B20 as of now. It said the Reuters report is not true.

Computer security company CrowdStrike is linked to a major IT outage affecting banks, airports, supermarkets and businesses across Australia and the world.

Airport check-in systems across the globe have been disrupted and businesses have reported the “blue screen of death” and IT outages.

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Airlines, banks and broadcasters were among the companies around the world reporting disruptions, citing technical issues.

Raytheon, an RTX (NYSE: RTX) business, has been awarded a contract from the U.S. Army Futures Command (AFC) Futures and Concepts Center (FCC) to conduct theater level concept experimentation and mission analysis to support agile learning of the future battlefield. Under the contract, a Raytheon team will use its Rapid Campaign Analysis and Demonstration Environment, known as RCADE, to develop large-scale theater scenarios to help FCC leaders assess concepts of operations in a multi-domain conflict. Quantitative data and findings from the scenarios will help identify capabilities needed to succeed in future conflicts.

RCADE is part of Raytheon’s integrated ecosystem of modeling and simulation capabilities that are fed by real-world analytics, models, and data. It creates an experimentation environment where customers can explore battlefield scenarios, assess how different variables impact mission outcomes and quickly iterate their options with greater speed. In tandem with RCADE, the technical expertise provided by Raytheon engineers will complement the U.S. Army’s analysis enterprise. They will work together to meet the challenge of the future and solve complex evolving threats.

“RCADE helps our customers look at some of the most difficult missions and evaluate how to change the outcome for the positive. Our team of highly trained experts power this groundbreaking capability, enabling it to deliver credible, unbiased solutions,” said Colin Whelan, president of Advanced Technology at Raytheon.

The range of threats, they say, include “attackers exploit[ing] this vulnerability to gain unauthorized access, execute arbitrary code, and cause substantial damage without any user interaction. The absence of authentication requirements makes it particularly dangerous, as it opens the door to widespread exploitation.”

The repeated reference to “trusted senders” in this warning is important. This vulnerability only carries a zero click threat when an email is received from a trusted source. If the sender is unknown, then the user would need to click to execute. That said, if the problem for an attacker is now spoofing emails from trusted sources that’s a very low bar in today’s world of industrial scale business email compromise.

How will AI improve our lives in the years to come? From its inception six decades ago to its recent exponential growth, futurist Ray Kurzweil highlights AI’s transformative impact on various fields and explains his prediction for the singularity: the point at which human intelligence merges with machine intelligence.

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Continue reading “The Last 6 Decades of AI — and What Comes Next | Ray Kurzweil | TED” »