8th Dec.' 17 - Headlines

Nvidia doesn’t support sparse matrix networks, so OpenAI created “Block sparse GPU kernels”

AI research firm OpenAI launches software to speed up GPU-powered neural networks

OpenAI announced it has developed a library of tools that can help researchers build faster, more efficient neural networks that take up less memory on GPUs. Because Nvidia (the biggest manufacturer of GPUs for neural networks) doesn’t support sparse matrix networks in its hardware, OpenAI has created what it calls “block sparse GPU kernels” to create these sparse networks on Nvidia’s chips. OpenAI said it used its enhanced neural networks to perform sentiment analysis on user reviews on websites including Amazon and IMDB and reported some impressive performance gains. “The sparse model outperforms the dense model on all sentiment datasets,” OpenAI’s researchers wrote in a blog post. “Our sparse model improves the state of the art on the document level IMDB dataset from 5.91 per cent error to 5.01 per cent. This is a promising improvement over our previous results which performed best only on shorter sentence level datasets.”

The kernels are written in Nvidia’s CUDA programming language, and are currently only compatible with the TensorFlow deep learning framework. They also only support Nvidia GPUs, but can be expanded to support other frameworks and hardware. OpenAI said it wants to “freely collaborate” with other institutions and researchers so that its block sparse GPU kernels can be used for other projects. The code is available on GitHub.

Nvidia’s “most powerful PC GPU ever created”

Nvidia announces $2,999 PC GPU “Titan V”— the Volta-powered GPU delivers 110 Teraflops of Deep Learning Horsepower, 9x its predecessor

Nvidia has just announced its new flagship graphics card, the TITAN V, based on the architecture of its "Volta" GV100 graphics processor. It marks a new era, as Titan V is NVIDIA's first HBM2-equipped prosumer graphics card available for the masses. It comes with 12 GB of HBM2 memory across a 3072-bit wide memory interface. The GPU is based on 5120 shader processors, 640 Tensor cores and gets 320 Texture units. It has a base clock of 1200 Mhz and a 1455 MHz boost clock. The 12 GB memory runs at 1.7 Gbps (three HBM2 4GB stacks), and the card has 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors. The display outputs show three DP and one HDMI connectors. Having the regular vapor chamber cooler with a copper heatsink, the card has 16 power phases with 250W TDP. Notably, there are no SLI fingers, and instead, Nvidia seems to be using NVLink connections at the top of the PCB. Priced at a staggering $2,999, the GPU is available only through the NVIDIA store. More info will follow soon, Nvidia said.

The insane Bitcoin bubble that is underway..

Coinbase becomes No. 1 iPhone app in US, crashes on demand

With the bitcoin surging at an unprecedented pace over the last few days, Coinbase has suddenly become the most downloaded app in the U.S. The popular bitcoin wallet ranked around 400th on the free chart in the App Store less than a month ago, but has spiked to the top slot, beating out the likes of YouTube, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. Coinbase’s rise to the top of the APP store is attributed to the ongoing crazy ride of bitcoins as the cryptocurrency has skyrocketed from just under $10,000 at the start of the week to over $18,000 in no time. So much so that Coinbase is now unable to handle the demand load. For large portions of the day, its service was unavailable and the app was hanging quite often. Coinbase later tweeted that its site was “down for maintenance” as they were experiencing a record high traffic.

"The Blockchain to Fix All Blockchains"

Overledger: Quant Network creates cross-blockchain data interoperability technology

London-based Quant Network has launched Overledger, a technology for data interoperability across different blockchains. The idea is to do something similar to TCP/IP, which enabled the internet. "The uniqueness of our operating system is that Overledger is not another blockchain,” Quant Network Chief Strategist Paolo Tasca said. “We do not impose new consensus mechanisms, new gateways, adapters or special validating nodes on top of existing blockchains. Overledger is a virtual blockchain that links existing blockchains and allows developers to build multi-chain applications (or in other terms blockchain-agnostic applications)." Gilbert Verdian, CEO and co-founder of Quant Network, confirmed that a patent for Overledger technology was filed in the first week of December. According to Verdian, Quant Network is focussing on three goals: developing an API to connect the world’s networks to multiple blockchains; bridging existing networks (e.g financial services) to new blockchains; and developing a new Blockchain Operating System with a protocol and a platform to create next-generation, multi-chain applications.

Machine learning in fashion searches..

Syte.ai unveils new API “Visual Search for All” for online fashion retailers

Syte.ai, a visual search startup just for fashion, has launched a new API that makes adding visual search accessible to more e-commerce sites. Called Visual Search for All, the white-label feature can be integrated into retail websites or apps within 24 hours and lets shoppers upload photos saved on their phones, like screenshots from Instagram, to find similar products on sale. It is based on the same technology as Syte.ai’s search tools for large fashion brands and publishers, which shows shoppers relevant items when they hover a cursor over part of an image. “Once it indexes a brand’s product feed, Visual Search for All can be added to a site’s search bar in less than a day by adding a line of HTML,” Co-founder Lihi Pinto Fryman said, noting that clients pay a monthly license fee based on the number of image-matches likely to be used.

Facebook Messenger and Line users can try out Syte.ai’s technology by sending images to its chatbot, Syte Inspire. The Israeli fashion tech startup had raised $8 million from investors including top Asian tech firms NHN, Line Corp. and Naver, earlier this year.

Honda’s Self-driving Cars project

Honda teams up with China’s SenseTime on AI tech for self-driving cars

Honda has signed a 5-year joint research and development agreement with China’s SenseTime, an IT firm specializing in artificial intelligence, for self-driving cars technology. As part of its 2030 Vision strategy announced in June, Honda aims to have a car with Level 4 self-driving capability on sale by the year 2025. According to Honda, SenseTime excels in image recognition technologies, especially recognition of moving objects, powered by deep learning technology. In their new partnership, Honda will join its AI algorithms for environment understanding, risk prediction and action planning with SenseTime’s moving object recognition technologies. The goal is to develop a reliable self-driving system that will be able to handle both highways and complex urban environments, the automaker said.