Punchh, a startup leveraging machine learning and omnichannel integrations to create customer journeys, today revealed that it’s closed a $40 million series C round co-led by Adams Street Partners and Sapphire Ventures. AllianceBernstein also contributed to the tranche, which brings Punchh’s total raised to nearly $70 million following a $20 million series B in January 2018 and a $7.5 million…
Google AI can tell you how close your voice is to Freddie Mercury's
November 14, 2019
Bohemian Rhapsody is one of the most well-known rock songs in the western world, and has been watched more than a billion times on YouTube alone. It’s likely that pretty much everyone has had at least one crack at aping singer Freddie Mercury’s unique vocal delivery.
John Carmack takes a step back at Oculus to work on human-like AI
November 14, 2019
Six years ago John Carmack left the company he founded, iD Software, to join Oculus VR as its Chief Technology Officer and push forward the future of virtual reality tech. Today the engineer behind many developments in 3D gaming has announced that a new “consulting…
Google Cloud today announced the public launch of its Network Intelligence Center, a platform that uses AI to help manage the sprawling networks companies must wrangle as they move more of their critical operations online.
As cloud computing evolves, companies increasingly have several cloud services, and in some cases hybrid ones that blend premise-based services with virtual ones. While…
Cruise updates the AI brains behind its autonomous cars twice weekly
November 13, 2019
GM’s Cruise announced this past June that it would postpone plans for a driverless taxi service, which it previously said would debut in 2019. But the setback hasn’t discouraged its over 1,000 staffers from iterating toward a public launch. In fact, work on the…
Graphcore’s AI accelerator chips launch on Microsoft Azure
November 13, 2019
Graphcore, a U.K.-based company developing accelerators for AI workloads, this morning announced a milestone: Its Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) have launched on Azure. It marks the first time a large-scale cloud vendor — Microsoft — has made publicly available…
Intel unveils its first chips built for AI in the cloud
November 13, 2019
Intel is no stranger to AI-oriented chips, but now it’s turning its attention to those chips that might be thousands of miles away. The tech firm has introduced two new Nervana Neural Network Processors, the NNP-T1000 (below) and NNP-I1000 (above), that are Intel’s first ASICs designed explicitly for AI in the cloud. The NNT-T chip is meant for training AIs in a ‘balanced’ design that…
Intel launches DevCloud for edge AI prototyping with OpenVINO
November 12, 2019
Intel today announced the launch of the Edge AI DevCloud, a way to prototype and test AI with the OpenVINO toolkit for edge devices like drones and cameras. Developers can use existing tools and frameworks to test and optimize models in OpenVINO for Intel hardware like CPUs…
Before the marketing departments of the world got ahold of the term “artificial intelligence,” it used to bring to mind some sort of robot. Boston Dynamics is one of the best-known company in the robotics space, largely thanks to its viral videos of its robots in action.
Stradigi AI raises $40.3 million to develop business AI solutions
November 12, 2019
Stradigi AI, a Montréal-based AI solutions provider and research lab founded in 2014, today announced that it has raised $53 million CAD ($40.3 million) in a series A round led by Canadian institutional funds Investissement Québec and Fonds de solidarité FTQ, with participation from Holdun Family Office, Segovia Capital Ltd., Cossette. Inc., and company cofounders Basil Bouraropoulos and Curtis…
