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In today’s AI news, a new $500 billion, private sector investment to build artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US, with Oracle, ChatGPT creator OpenAI, and Japanese conglomerate SoftBank among those committing to the project. The joint venture, called Stargate, is expected to begin with a data center project in Texas.

In other advancements, Perplexity has launched an aggressive bid to capture the enterprise AI search market, unveiling Sonar, an API service that outperforms offerings from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic on key benchmarks while also undercutting their prices. Perplexity — now valued at $9 billion — directly challenges larger competitors.

And, Santee Cooper, the big power provider in South Carolina, has tapped financial advisers to look for buyers that can restart construction on a pair of nuclear reactors that were mothballed years ago. The state-owned utility is betting interest will be strong, with tech giants such as Amazon and Microsoft in need of clean energy to fuel AI.

Then, Google is making a fresh investment of more than $1 billion into AI startup Anthropic, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. This comes after Reuters and other media reported earlier in January that Anthropic was nearing a $2 billion fundraise in a round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, valuing the firm at about $60 billion.

In videos, Indeed CEO Chris Hyams, and Stanford Digital Economy Lab Director Erik Brynjolfsson, join Bloomberg’s Work for a discussion on the key trends impacting employees and employers in 2025 and beyond.

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The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately. This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world. This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.

The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.

Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners. The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements.

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Reservoir computing (RC) is a powerful machine learning module designed to handle tasks involving time-based or sequential data, such as tracking patterns over time or analyzing sequences. It is widely used in areas such as finance, robotics, speech recognition, weather forecasting, natural language processing, and predicting complex nonlinear dynamical systems. What sets RC apart is its efficiency―it delivers powerful results with much lower training costs compared to other methods.

RC uses a fixed, randomly connected network layer, known as the reservoir, to turn input data into a more complex representation. A readout layer then analyzes this representation to find patterns and connections in the data. Unlike traditional neural networks, which require extensive training across multiple network layers, RC only trains the readout layer, typically through a simple linear regression process. This drastically reduces the amount of computation needed, making RC fast and computationally efficient.

Inspired by how the brain works, RC uses a fixed network structure but learns the outputs in an adaptable way. It is especially good at predicting and can even be used on physical devices (called physical RC) for energy-efficient, high-performance computing. Nevertheless, can it be optimized further?

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“By compromising developer accounts, attackers not only exfiltrate intellectual property but also gain access to cryptocurrency wallets, enabling direct financial theft,” the company said. “The targeted theft of private and secret keys could lead to millions in stolen digital assets, furthering the Lazarus Group’s financial goals.”

The malware architecture adopts a modular design and is flexible, and capable of working across Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. It also serves to highlight the ever-evolving and adaptable nature of nation-state cyber threats.

“For North Korea, hacking is a revenue generating lifeline,” Sherstobitoff said. “The Lazarus Group has consistently funneled stolen cryptocurrency to fuel the regime’s ambitions, amassing staggering sums. With Web3 and cryptocurrency industries booming, Operation 99 zeroes in on these high-growth sectors.”

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It’s expected that the technology will tackle myriad problems that were once deemed impractical or even impossible to solve. Quantum computing promises huge leaps forward for fields spanning drug discovery and materials development to financial forecasting.

But just as exciting as quantum computing’s future are the breakthroughs already being made today in quantum hardware, error correction and algorithms.

NVIDIA is celebrating and exploring this remarkable progress in quantum computing by announcing its first Quantum Day at GTC 2025 on Thursday, March 20. This new focus area brings together leading experts for a comprehensive and balanced perspective on what businesses should expect from quantum computing in the coming decades — mapping the path toward useful quantum applications.

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Increasingly, AI systems are interconnected, which is generating new complexities and risks. Managing these ecosystems effectively requires comprehensive training, designing technological infrastructures and processes so they foster collaboration, and robust governance frameworks. Examples from healthcare, financial services, and legal profession illustrate the challenges and ways to overcome them.

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The risks and complexities of these ecosystems require specific training, infrastructure, and governance.

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Quantum computers may soon dramatically enhance our ability to solve problems modeled by nonreversible Markov chains, according to a study published on the pre-print server arXiv.

The researchers from Qubit Pharmaceuticals and Sorbonne University, demonstrated that quantum algorithms could achieve exponential speedups in sampling from such chains, with the potential to surpass the capabilities of classical methods. These advances — if fully realized — have a range of implications for fields like drug discovery, machine learning and financial modeling.

Markov chains are mathematical frameworks used to model systems that transition between various states, such as stock prices or molecules in motion. Each transition is governed by a set of probabilities, which defines how likely the system is to move from one state to another. Reversible Markov chains — where the probability of moving from, let’s call them, state A to state B equals the probability of moving from B to A — have traditionally been the focus of computational techniques. However, many real-world systems are nonreversible, meaning their transitions are biased in one direction, as seen in certain biological and chemical processes.

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The past year, 2024, witnessed an array of groundbreaking technological advancements that fundamentally reshaped industries and influenced the global economy. Technology trends like the development of Industry LLMs, Sustainable Computing, and the Augmented Workforce drove innovation, fostered efficiency, and accelerated the pace of Digital Transformation across sectors such as Healthcare, Finance, and Manufacturing. These developments set the stage for even more disruptive Technology Trends in 2025.

This year is set to bring transformative changes to the business landscape, driven by emerging trends that require enterprises to adopt the right technologies, reskill their workforce, and prioritize sustainability. By embracing these Technology Trends, businesses can shape their objectives, remain competitive, and build resilience. However, Success in this rapidly evolving landscape depends not just on adopting these technologies but also on strategically leveraging them to drive innovation and growth.

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Modern AI systems have fulfilled Turing’s vision of machines that learn and converse like humans, but challenges remain. A new paper highlights concerns about energy consumption and societal inequality while calling for more robust AI testing to ensure ethical and sustainable progress.

A perspective published on November 13 in Intelligent Computing, a Science Partner Journal, argues that modern artificial intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science focused on creating systems that can perform tasks typically requiring human intelligence. These tasks include understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, solving problems, and learning from experience. AI technologies use algorithms and massive amounts of data to train models that can make decisions, automate processes, and improve over time through machine learning. The applications of AI are diverse, impacting fields such as healthcare, finance, automotive, and entertainment, fundamentally changing the way we interact with technology.

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Blockchain technology offers a solution to this issue by storing all your documents and identification records on a network. The tech can theoretically ensure such documents are securely stored, easily accessible, and protected from unauthorized alterations.

Blockchain has already been used for identification in real-world scenarios. For example, during the Syrian refugee crisis, blockchain technology was used to record the identities of refugees securely. It also facilitated the management of financial aid and grocery purchases, enabling refugees to access necessary resources without any hurdles.

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