Let’s start with a recent press leak: in a bid to win European Union approval of its Ansys acquisition, Synopsys has reportedly offered to sell its Optical Solutions Group to Keysight and also to divest Ansys PowerArtist.
Science meets AI at NeurIPS
Interestingly, artificial intelligence in its current form – which is based on neural networks – is probably the only example of a thriving industry built on a technology that does not have a clear, well defined scientific basis. Neural networks deliver amazing performance, spark the construction of gigantic datacenters, move enormous capitals – still, scientists don’t have a full grasp of what happens inside them. A workshop taking place at the NeurIPS conference – currently running in Vancouver – will address this topic. “While deep learning continues to achieve impressive results on an ever-growing range of tasks, our understanding of the principles underlying these successes remains largely limited,” the workshop organizers wrote in an abstract. “This problem is usually tackled from a mathematical point of view, aiming to prove rigorous theorems about optimization or generalization errors of standard algorithms, but so far they have been limited to overly-simplified settings.” According to these scientists, the “scientific method” in the study of neural networks “has been largely underexplored”. The scientific method, they explain, enables the “empirical analyses of deep networks that can validate or falsify existing theories and assumptions, or answer questions about the success or failure of these models.”
TSMC reportedly in talks for Nvidia Blackwell production in Arizona
TSMC is reportedly in discussions with Nvidia to produce the Blackwell AI chips at the foundry’s new plant in Arizona. Blackwell chips have so far been manufactured at TSMC’s facilities in Taiwan. However, even if produced in Arizona the chips will still need to be shipped to Taiwan for packaging, as the Arizona facility reportedly does not have CoWoS capacity.
