Author: GloFiish

Neuromorphic computing is still relatively new outside of the research facilities in California and Zurich. No grandiose product introductions. There are no throngs of people waiting outside electronics shops. Just quiet labs with engineers staring at wafer samples and oscilloscopes, attempting to make silicon behave a bit more like biology. However, researchers are beginning to suspect that something strange is going on. Artificial intelligence has become more potent—sometimes in a startling way—but it is also growing hungry. GPU-filled data centers run nonstop, consuming electricity at a rate that is, to be honest, unsustainable. As this develops, it’s difficult to ignore…

An elderly man is sitting on a recliner in a suburban living room on a calm afternoon. He is holding a smartphone a little further away from his face than most people would. After a brief moment of squinting at the screen, he taps twice with two fingers. Abruptly, the phone starts talking, reading the words that had just appeared on the screen in a composed manner. That may seem odd to a lot of younger users. For him, it makes the difference between continuing to use a smartphone and completely giving it up. This brief exchange raises the possibility…

The language on some private Facebook groups and Telegram channels becomes strangely technical late at night. Sellers promote “verified labeling accounts,” picture archives, and occasionally even whole datasets that were gathered years ago and then forgotten. The posts may appear to be ordinary internet spam to someone who is not involved in the artificial intelligence sector. However, they allude to something more peculiar within the AI economy. A quiet marketplace for training data. Similar to how factories used to run on coal, the current AI boom is powered by information. Massive amounts of examples are needed for voice assistants, large…

If you observe the space in silence for a few minutes on a weekday afternoon in a San Francisco café, an interesting thing happens. There are still laptops with glowing Apple logos strewn across tables, but just as many people are crouched over phones, tapping quickly, flipping between spreadsheets, documents, and messages. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that some of them seem to be functional. Technology companies have been hinting at a straightforward concept for years: your smartphone may eventually serve as your only computer. More than most, Google appears to think that possibility is approaching. Key InformationDetailsTechnology FocusSmartphone-as-Computer…

One winter evening, almost everyone on a packed tram in Munich appeared to be wearing headphones, staring at phones, or peering through dark sunglasses that looked more like tech than eyewear. It’s a minor observation, but those glasses have started to include cameras lately. This is where the tale of Nearby Glasses, a tiny Android app, starts. Yves Jeanrenaud, the developer of the app, is neither a venture-backed startup founder nor an engineer from Silicon Valley. In his free time, he codes. He is a sociologist by training, teaching, and studying social behavior. In the midst of his late-night programming…

A strange thing can now occur on a peaceful hillside far from any city lights. Suddenly, a phone without bars—the kind where calls fail instantly and maps won’t load—manages to send a text message. The message ends up in an unexpected place. Not to a nearby cell tower. Not via underground fiber wires. Instead, it goes upward. Straight into space. Direct-to-cellular satellite technology is still new enough that even engineers sometimes describe it with a kind of cautious excitement. The basic idea is surprisingly simple: satellites acting as temporary cell towers, floating hundreds of kilometers above Earth, catching signals from…

The commuter train through Silicon Valley fills up fast on a weekday morning. As the hills outside fade into the distance, laptop screens shine in the silent carriage. The majority of passengers hardly glance up. They are modifying models, writing code, and resolving bugs. It becomes evident that these riders are not merely traveling to work somewhere between San Francisco and Mountain View. They are engaged in a technological race that has the potential to change the world. Many of them are headed toward artificial superintelligence, a concept that used to sound like science fiction but is now firmly rooted…

A group of graduate students spend their afternoon gazing at lines of code that appear nearly unintelligible to outsiders on a peaceful university campus in the Central Valley of California. Their lab is located in a small engineering building at the University of California, Merced, a long way from the glass skyscrapers in Seattle that house Amazon executives. The pupils here, however, are a part of something much bigger—a developing endeavor to address one of the most challenging issues facing artificial intelligence. AI is now extremely powerful. In addition, it has become extremely costly. CategoryDetailsTopicEfficient Artificial Intelligence ResearchLeading CompanyAmazonResearch ProgramAmazon…

Traders inside the New York Stock Exchange continue to watch screens flicker with numbers on a gloomy morning in lower Manhattan. Nonetheless, the room’s rhythm has subtly changed. Phones are ringing less. Fewer commands were yelled. Nowadays, a large portion of the activity is carried out by silent algorithms that execute trades more quickly than human reflexes could ever handle. Quiet calculations taking place deep within data centers are gradually replacing the loud drama that was once associated with global finance. Gradually, almost courteously, artificial intelligence has been making its way into the financial system. It seldom comes with the…

A small group of people gathered around a demonstration table full of common-looking glasses at a technology summit earlier this year. There were no futuristic helmets or glowing screens, just frames that might have been purchased at an airport store. However, the glasses would respond with a translation, instructions, or a brief AI-generated response every few minutes when someone spoke softly into them. There was a faint sense as the scene developed that something familiar was occurring once more, similar to how early smartphones subtly suggested a change was about to happen. CategoryDetailsTechnologyAI Smart GlassesMajor CompaniesMeta, Google, Samsung, Amazon, AlibabaSupporting…