AI & Robotics

Hugging Face has announced the close of a $15 million series A funding round led by Lux Capital, with participation from Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher and OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman, as well as Betaworks and A.Capital. New-York based Hugging Face started as a chatbot company, but then began to use Transformers, an approach to conversational AI that’s become a foundation for…

Anyscale, a company promising to let application developers more easily build so-called “distributed” applications that are behind most AI and machine learning efforts, has raised $20.6 million from investors in a first round of funding. The company has some credibility off the bat because it’s cofounded by Ion Stoica, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley…

(Reuters) – SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said on Tuesday Japan should make artificial intelligence (AI) a mandatory subject for college entrance exams, to counter the yawning gap with the United States and China in the nascent field. Japanese students “don’t study if they are not asked… let’s put it as mandatory, then Japanese students will catch up,” Son told a government…

Intel just spent approximately $2 billion to acquire Israel-based AI firm Habana Labs. The partnership will “turbo-charge” Intel’s AI offerings for data centers, Intel said in a press release. Habana Labs makes programmable deep learning accelerators. Its Gaudi AI Training Processor, for instance, is expected to deliver up to four-times the throughput of systems built with the…