Month: May 2023

Lightmatter’s photonic AI hardware is ready to shine with 4M in new funding

Lightmatter’s photonic AI hardware is ready to shine with $154M in new funding

Photonic computing startup Lightmatter is taking its big shot at the rapidly growing AI computation market with a hardware-software combo it claims will help the industry level up — and save a lot of electricity to boot. Lightmatter’s chips basically use optical flow to solve computational processes like matrix vector products. This math is at the heart of a lot of AI work, and currently performed by GPUs and TPUs that specialize in it, but use traditional silicon gates and transistors. The issue with those is that we’re approaching the limits of density and therefore speed for a given wattage or size. Advances are still being made, but at great cost and pushing the edges of classical physics. The supercomputers that make training models like GPT-4 possible are enormous, consume huge amounts of power, and produce a lot of waste heat. “The biggest companies in the world are hitting an energy power wall and experiencing massive challenges with AI scalabilityTraditional chips push the boundaries of what’s possible to cool, and data centers produce increasingly large …

Montiel edges Sevilla to seventh Europa League triumph with win over Roma | Europa League

Sevilla’s empire just will not fall, not even to the Romans. After three long, exhausting hours, the match that seemed to never end, just like their extraordinary dominance of this competition, came down to a single kick. Or so it seemed: instead, at midnight in Budapest it came down to two of them. Gonzalo Montiel, the man who scored the penalty that won his country the World Cup was entrusted with taking the penalty that would win his club their seventh, yes seventh, Europa League. This time he did not score, his shot saved by Roma’s Rui Patrício. But Anthony Taylor, the referee who had given and taken away a penalty for Sevilla during the actual game, which had lasted 147 minutes, was advised by the VAR of an encroachment. And so he gave Montiel another chance, and this time the Argentinian found the net, supporters stream down the stands and onto the pitch. At long last, it was all over. At times it had felt like this would never, ever end. But it did, …

Amazon settles with FTC for M after ‘flouting’ kids’ privacy and deletion requests

Amazon settles with FTC for $25M after ‘flouting’ kids’ privacy and deletion requests

Amazon will pay the FTC a $25 million penalty as well as “overhaul its deletion practices and implement stringent privacy safeguards” to avoid charges of violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to spruce up its AI. Amazon’s voice interface Alexa has been in use in homes across the globe for years, and any parent who has one knows that kids love to play with it, make it tell jokes, even use it for its intended purpose, whatever that is. In fact it was so obviously useful to kids who can’t write or have disabilities that the FTC relaxed COPPA rules to accommodate reasonable usage: certain service-specific analysis of kids’ data, like transcription, was allowed as long as it is not retained any longer than reasonably necessary. It seems that Amazon may have taken a rather expansive view on the “reasonably necessary” timescale, keeping kids’ speech data more or less forever. As the FTC puts it: Amazon retained children’s recordings indefinitely—unless a parent requested that this information be deleted, according to the complaint. And even …

Danny Masterson, star of That ’70s Show, found guilty of rape | US television

Danny Masterson, the actor best known for his role in That ’70s Show, was found guilty of two counts of rape on Wednesday in a Los Angeles retrial in which the Church of Scientology played a central role. The jury of seven women and five men reached the verdict after deliberating for seven days spread over two weeks. They could not reach a verdict on the third count, that alleged Masterson raped a longtime girlfriend. They had voted 8-4 in favor of conviction. Masterson was led from the courtroom in handcuffs. The 47-year-old actor faces up to 30 years in prison. His wife, actor and model Bijou Phillips, wept as he was led away. Other family and friends sat stone-faced. Prosecutors, retrying Masterson after a deadlocked jury led to a mistrial in December, said he forcibly raped three women, including a longtime girlfriend, in his Hollywood Hills home between 2001 and 2003. They told jurors he drugged the women’s drinks so he could rape them. They said he used his prominence in the church – …

US announces $300m arms package for Ukraine – with a caveat | Ukraine

The United States has announced a new $300m arms package for Ukraine, including air defense systems and tens of millions of rounds of ammunition – but warned Kyiv that US weaponry should not be used to attack within Russia. “We have been very clear with the Ukrainians privately – we’ve certainly been clear publicly – that we do not support attacks inside Russia. We do not enable and we do not encourage attacks inside Russia,” said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby. The defense department said the latest shipments will bring the total value of US security assistance to Ukraine to $37.6bn since Russia’s February 2022 launch of the invasion. “The United States will continue to work with its allies and partners to provide Ukraine with capabilities to meet its immediate battlefield needs and longer-term security assistance requirements,” the Pentagon said in a statement. The United States has been leading an unprecedented effort by Nato and other allied countries to supply Ukraine with weaponry and other aid. The latest arms shipments come as Ukraine prepares …

The Gallows Pole review – Shane Meadows’s period drama is an absolute must-see | Television

Benjamin Myers’ 2017 novel The Gallows Pole told the true-life tale of the 18th-century gang of coin clippers led by “King” David Hartley, whose illegal work and attendant violence came to dominate Cragg Vale in West Yorkshire. It had formerly been the home of a thriving cottage textiles industry, but the advent of the industrial revolution and the rise of nearby Halifax as the centre for all that trade had left surrounding towns and villages concomitantly impoverished. In Myers’ hands, it is a powerful story of desperation, class warfare and the ability of money to corrupt – or further corrupt – anyone it touches. Though it must be said that it is so unrelentingly grim and humourless that at times you do feel you are moments away from hearing the voice of Jim Broadbent as the pretentious playwright in Victoria Wood’s Staying In crying “The north! My north!”. Shane Meadows’s take on the tale keeps all the energy, density and fortitude of the book, but adds the missing humour (and women – Myers’ book is, …

Toyota adds .1B to its US battery factory expansion plans

Toyota adds $2.1B to its US battery factory expansion plans

Toyota will spend an additional $2.1 billion to build a new battery plant in North Carolina, the latest sign that the automaker is attempting to catch up with an industry that has embraced the move to electric vehicles. The Japanese automaker also announced Wednesday it will build its first U.S.-made electric SUV at its Kentucky factory from 2025. The three-row car will use batteries supplied by Toyota’s North Carolina factory. At the outset, the news suggests that Toyota is strengthening its commitment to EVs. Historically, the company has lagged behind other automakers in announcing new EV models, instead supporting hydrogen-based vehicles. But earlier this year, Toyota said it plans to introduce 10 new battery-powered vehicles, with a target of 1.5 million EVs sold per year by 2026. The battery plant in North Carolina is part of the company’s renewed pledge towards electrification — albeit it’s not one committed to only all-electric vehicles. Of the six production lines slated to go live when production begins in 2025, only two will be dedicated to all-electric EVs. The other …

Popular Reddit app Apollo may go out of business over Reddit’s new, unaffordable API pricing

Popular Reddit app Apollo may go out of business over Reddit’s new, unaffordable API pricing

The maker of Apollo, one of the most popular third-party mobile apps for browsing Reddit, may have to close up shop due to Reddit’s recently announced new API pricing terms. App developer Christian Selig shared today that Reddit’s API pricing appears to be bad news for the future of third-party Reddit apps as it would now cost him $20 million per year to keep running Apollo’s business as is. Customer backlash over Reddit’s terms is already growing in light of the news, given Apollo’s long history of thoughtful app updates, iOS-friendly design, and general ease of use, which has made the app a popular alternative to Reddit’s official client. The news is unexpected, as Reddit had assured developers the API pricing changes wouldn’t impact those who were building apps to help people use Reddit. Instead, the move was positioned as a way to protect Reddit’s sizable internet forum site from becoming free fodder for companies training their AI systems on large swaths of the internet. Essentially, Reddit wanted to get paid for its “corpus of …

Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens to speak at TechCrunch Live’s Atlanta event

Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens to speak at TechCrunch Live’s Atlanta event

TechCrunch Live is excited to announce a fireside chat with Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens to kick off our virtual TechCrunch Live: Atlanta event on June 7. He will sit down with me, Dominic-Madori Davis, at 2:03 p.m. EDT to discuss the burgeoning Atlanta tech scene, touching on everything from creating a talent pipeline with the local Historically Black Colleges and Universities to how it is using the remote work trend to lure in big players from coastal cities. Since assuming office last year, Dickens has developed a reputation for his robust support of technology and even appointed a Senior Tech Advisor for the city — or, as some call the role, a Tech Czar. There is much to talk about with Dickens and his plans to grow and sustain the city as a tech hub. He himself attended Georgia Tech, majoring in chemical engineering; before serving as mayor, he was the Chief Development Officer for the nonprofit TechBridge, which sought to tackle poverty; he also co-founded the Technology Career Program to help those from disadvantaged …

Six tips for getting the most out of your SIEM investment

Six tips for getting the most out of your SIEM investment

Eric Thomas is vice president of security GTM at Logz.io, an open-source observability platform for DevOps teams. Security information and event management (SIEM) is one of the most well-established categories of security software, having first been introduced about 20 years ago. Nevertheless, very little has been written about SIEM vendor evaluation and management. To fill that gap, here are six top-line tips on procuring and implementing a SIEM solution for maximum value. Evaluating and purchasing a SIEM solution Size your spend SIEM software solutions are priced differently: either by the number of employees in the customer organization, by the rate of events per second, or based on the log volume ingested. It’s important to figure this out early to get a rough idea of what you will pay over time. You’ll also identify the various data sources meaningful to your Security Operations Center (SOC). Buying a SIEM is a massive commitment: you and your organization will need to live with your decision for years to come. If you already have a SIEM in place, give …