13 August 2023

Amazon is racing to catch up in generative A.I. with custom AWS chips

Amazon is racing to catch up in generative A.I. with custom AWS chips

In an unmarked office building in Austin, Texas, two small rooms contain a handful of Amazon employees designing two types of microchips for training and accelerating generative AI. These custom chips, Inferentia and Trainium, offer AWS customers an alternative to training their large language models on Nvidia GPUs, which have been getting difficult and expensive to procure. 

“The entire world would like more chips for doing generative AI, whether that’s GPUs or whether that’s Amazon’s own chips that we’re designing,” Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky told CNBC in an interview in June. “I think that we’re in a better position than anybody else on Earth to supply the capacity that our customers collectively are going to want.”

Yet others have acted faster, and invested more, to capture business from the generative AI boom. When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November, Microsoft gained widespread attention for hosting the viral chatbot, and investing a reported $13 billion in OpenAI. It was quick to add the generative AI models to its own products, incorporating them into Bing in February. 

That same month, Google launched its own large language model, Bard, followed by a $300 million investment in OpenAI rival Anthropic. 

It wasn’t until April that Amazon announced its own family of large language models, called Titan, along with a service called Bedrock to help developers enhance software using generative AI.

“Amazon is not used to chasing markets. Amazon is used to creating markets. And I think for the first time in a long time, they are finding themselves on the back foot and they are working to play catch up,” said Chirag Dekate, VP analyst at Gartner.

Meta also recently released its own LLM, Llama 2. The open-source ChatGPT rival is now available for people to test on Microsoft‘s Azure public cloud.

Chips as ‘true differentiation’

In the long run, Dekate said, Amazon’s custom silicon could give it an edge in generative AI. 

“I think the true differentiation is the technical capabilities that they’re bringing to bear,” he said. “Because guess what? Microsoft does not have Trainium or Inferentia,” he said.

AWS quietly started production of custom silicon back in 2013 with a piece of specialized hardware called Nitro. It’s now the highest-volume AWS chip. Amazon told CNBC there is at least one in every AWS server, with a total of more than 20 million in use. 

AWS started production of custom silicon back in 2013 with this piece of specialized hardware called Nitro. Amazon told CNBC in August that Nitro is now the highest volume AWS chip, with at least one in every AWS server and a total of more than 20 million in use.

Courtesy Amazon

In 2015, Amazon bought Israeli chip startup Annapurna Labs. Then in 2018, Amazon launched its Arm-based server chip, Graviton, a rival to x86 CPUs from giants like AMD and Intel.

“Probably high single-digit to maybe 10% of total server sales are Arm, and a good chunk of those are going to be Amazon. So on the CPU side, they’ve done quite well,” said Stacy Rasgon, senior analyst at Bernstein Research.

Also in 2018, Amazon launched its AI-focused chips. That came two years after Google announced its first Tensor Processor Unit, or TPU. Microsoft has yet to announce the Athena AI chip it’s been working on, reportedly in partnership with AMD. 

CNBC got a behind-the-scenes tour of Amazon’s chip lab in Austin, Texas, where Trainium and Inferentia are developed and tested. VP of product Matt Wood explained what both chips are for.

“Machine learning breaks down into these two different stages. So you train the machine learning models and then you run inference against those trained models,” Wood said. “Trainium provides about 50% improvement in terms of price performance relative to any other way of training machine learning models on AWS.”

Trainium first came on the market in 2021, following the 2019 release of Inferentia, which is now on its second generation.

Inferentia allows customers “to deliver very, very low-cost, high-throughput, low-latency, machine learning inference, which is all the predictions of when you type in a prompt into your generative AI model, that’s where all that gets processed to give you the response, ” Wood said.

For now, however, Nvidia’s GPUs are still king when it comes to training models. In July, AWS launched new AI acceleration hardware powered by Nvidia H100s. 

“Nvidia chips have a massive software ecosystem that’s been built up around them over the last like 15 years that nobody else has,” Rasgon said. “The big winner from AI right now is Nvidia.”

Amazon’s custom chips, from left to right, Inferentia, Trainium and Graviton are shown at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters on July 13, 2023.

Joseph Huerta

Leveraging cloud dominance

AWS’ cloud dominance, however, is a big differentiator for Amazon.

“Amazon does not need to win headlines. Amazon already has a really strong cloud install base. All they need to do is to figure out how to enable their existing customers to expand into value creation motions using generative AI,” Dekate said.

When choosing between Amazon, Google, and Microsoft for generative AI, there are millions of AWS customers who may be drawn to Amazon because they’re already familiar with it, running other applications and storing their data there.

“It’s a question of velocity. How quickly can these companies move to develop these generative AI applications is driven by starting first on the data they have in AWS and using compute and machine learning tools that we provide,” explained Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, VP of technology at AWS.

AWS is the world’s biggest cloud computing provider, with 40% of the market share in 2022, according to technology industry researcher Gartner. Although operating income has been down year-over-year for three quarters in a row, AWS still accounted for 70% of Amazon’s overall $7.7 billion operating profit in the second quarter. AWS’ operating margins have historically been far wider than those at Google Cloud.

AWS also has a growing portfolio of developer tools focused on generative AI.

“Let’s rewind the clock even before ChatGPT. It’s not like after that happened, suddenly we hurried and came up with a plan because you can’t engineer a chip in that quick a time, let alone you can’t build a Bedrock service in a matter of 2 to 3 months,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS’ VP of database, analytics and machine learning.

Bedrock gives AWS customers access to large language models made by Anthropic, Stability AI, AI21 Labs and Amazon’s own Titan.

“We don’t believe that one model is going to rule the world, and we want our customers to have the state-of-the-art models from multiple providers because they are going to pick the right tool for the right job,” Sivasubramanian said.

An Amazon employee works on custom AI chips, in a jacket branded with AWS’ chip Inferentia, at the AWS chip lab in Austin, Texas, on July 25, 2023.

Katie Tarasov

One of Amazon’s newest AI offerings is AWS HealthScribe, a service unveiled in July to help doctors draft patient visit summaries using generative AI. Amazon also has SageMaker, a machine learning hub that offers algorithms, models and more. 

Another big tool is coding companion CodeWhisperer, which Amazon said has enabled developers to complete tasks 57% faster on average. Last year, Microsoft also reported productivity boosts from its coding companion, GitHub Copilot. 

In June, AWS announced a $100 million generative AI innovation “center.” 

“We have so many customers who are saying, ‘I want to do generative AI,’ but they don’t necessarily know what that means for them in the context of their own businesses. And so we’re going to bring in solutions architects and engineers and strategists and data scientists to work with them one on one,” AWS CEO Selipsky said.

Although so far AWS has focused largely on tools instead of building a competitor to ChatGPT, a recently leaked internal email shows Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is directly overseeing a new central team building out expansive large language models, too.

In the second-quarter earnings call, Jassy said a “very significant amount” of AWS business is now driven by AI and more than 20 machine learning services it offers. Some examples of customers include Philips, 3M, Old Mutual and HSBC. 

The explosive growth in AI has come with a flurry of security concerns from companies worried that employees are putting proprietary information into the training data used by public large language models.

“I can’t tell you how many Fortune 500 companies I’ve talked to who have banned ChatGPT. So with our approach to generative AI and our Bedrock service, anything you do, any model you use through Bedrock will be in your own isolated virtual private cloud environment. It’ll be encrypted, it’ll have the same AWS access controls,” Selipsky said.

For now, Amazon is only accelerating its push into generative AI, telling CNBC that “over 100,000” customers are using machine learning on AWS today. Although that’s a small percentage of AWS’s millions of customers, analysts say that could change.

“What we are not seeing is enterprises saying, ‘Oh, wait a minute, Microsoft is so ahead in generative AI, let’s just go out and let’s switch our infrastructure strategies, migrate everything to Microsoft.’ Dekate said. “If you’re already an Amazon customer, chances are you’re likely going to explore Amazon ecosystems quite extensively.”

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to reflect Inferentia as the chip used for machine learning inference.

, 2023-08-13 00:21:58, #Amazon #racing #catch #generative #A.I #custom #AWS #chips,

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09 August 2023

Mpox: China Mpox cases surge as virus spreads to more parts of country

Mpox: China Mpox cases surge as virus spreads to more parts of country

BEIJING: China’s confirmed cases of Mpox rose nearly five-fold in July to a new high as government efforts to contain the infectious disease’s spread ramp up.

Last month’s case count was 491, versus 106 in June, according to a statement from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Every patient was male and 96% of them had sexual activity with another man, the CDC said. There were no severe cases or deaths from mpox, the virus known as monkeypox until recently.
Though no longer a global health emergency after the World Health Organization lowered the global alert level for mpox in May, the WHO cautioned that more needed to be done to eradicate the sometimes-deadly virus. The CDC in late July asked its local branches to mobilize volunteers and social organizations to reach out to “priority groups,” including men who have sex with men, to educate them about mpox and improve access to tests and treatment.

Guangdong province and Beijing in July remained the two locales with the largest concentration of cases, but areas including Shanghai and western Sichuan province each confirmed at least 25 mpox patients during the month.

, 2023-08-09 19:08:47, #Mpox #China #Mpox #cases #surge #virus #spreads #parts #country,

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05 August 2023

01 August 2023

What’s at Stake in Biden’s Push toward Saudi-Israeli Normalization?

What’s at Stake in Biden’s Push toward Saudi-Israeli Normalization?

SUBSCRIBER+EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW — The Biden administration is reportedly taking serious steps to push forward with efforts to negotiate a deal that would see official diplomatic relations for the first time between Saudi Arabia and Israel. 

News of a potential deal comes at a time of rapidly shifting geopolitical dynamics in the middle east, including moves by Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates to officially recognize Israel in 2020, China’s assertiveness to expand its presence in the region and the reemergence of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad into the official circles of the Arab league. 

“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62

Access all of The Cipher Brief‘s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+Member.

, 2023-08-01 18:08:19, #Whats #Stake #Bidens #Push #SaudiIsraeli #Normalization,

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28 July 2023

Vulnerable Women Suffer the Worst Face of Discrimination in Argentina — Global Issues

Vulnerable Women Suffer the Worst Face of Discrimination in Argentina — Global Issues

“Migration is a right,” read the handkerchiefs held by two women at a demonstration in the Argentine capital for migrants’ rights. At left is Natividad Obeso, a Peruvian who came to Buenos Aires in 1994, fleeing political violence in her country. CREDIT: Camilo Flores / ACDH
  • by Daniel Gutman (buenos aires)
  • Inter Press Service

BUENOS AIRES, Jul 27 (IPS) – Remi Cáceres experienced gender-based violence firsthand. She struggled, got out and today helps other women in Argentina to find an escape valve. But because she is in a wheelchair and is a foreign national, she says the process was even more painful and arduous: “Being a migrant with a disability, it’s two or three times harder. You have to empower yourself and it’s very difficult.”

When she came to Buenos Aires from Paraguay, she was already married and had had her legs amputated due to a spinal tumor. She suffered violence for several years until she was able to report her aggressor, got the police to remove him from her home and raised her two daughters watching after parked cars for spare change in a suburb of the capital

On the streets she met militant members of the Central de Trabajadores Argentinos (CTA), one of the central unions in this South American country, who encouraged her to join forces with other workers, to create cooperatives and to strengthen herself in labor and political terms. Since then she has come a long way and today she is the CTA’s Secretary for Disability.

“The places where women victims of gender-based violence are given assistance are not accessible to people who are in wheelchairs or are bedridden. And the shelters don’t know what to do with disabled women. Recently, a woman told me that she was sent back home with her aggressor,” Remi told IPS.

From her position in the CTA, Remi is one of the leaders of a project aimed at seeking information and empowering migrant, transgender and disabled women victims of gender violence living in different parts of Argentina, for which 300 women were interviewed, 100 from each of these groups.

The data obtained are shocking, since eight out of 10 women stated that they had experienced or are currently experiencing situations of violence or discrimination and, in the case of the transgender population, the rate reached 98 percent.

Most of the situations, they said, occurred in public spaces. Almost 85 percent said they had experienced hostility in streets, squares, public transportation and shops or other commercial facilities. And more than a quarter (26 percent) mentioned hospitals or health centers as places where violence and discrimination were common.

One of the trainings held by the "Wonder Women Against Violence" project. On the left is Remi Cáceres, who escaped domestic violence and today is Secretary of Disability at the Central de Trabajadores Argentinos central trade union. CREDIT: María Fernández / ACDH
One of the trainings held by the “Wonder Women Against Violence” project. On the left is Remi Cáceres, who escaped domestic violence and today is Secretary of Disability at the Central de Trabajadores Argentinos central trade union. CREDIT: María Fernández / ACDH

Another interesting finding was that men are generally the aggressors in the home or other private settings, but in public settings and institutions, women are the aggressors in similar or even higher proportions.

The study was carried out by the Citizen Association for Human Rights (ACDH), an NGO that has been working to prevent violence in Argentina since 2002, with the participation of different organizations that represent disabled, trans and migrant women’s groups in this Southern Cone country.

It forms part of a larger initiative, dubbed Wonder Women Against Violence, which has received financial support for the period 2022-2025 from the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women. Since 1996, this fund has supported projects in 140 countries for a total of 215 million dollars.

The initiative includes trainings aimed at providing tools for access to justice to the most vulnerable groups, which began to be offered in 2022 by different organizations to more than 1,000 women so far.

Courses have also been held for officials and staff of national, provincial and municipal governments and the judiciary, with the aim of raising awareness on how to deal with cases of gender violence.

María José Lubertino, president of the Citizen Association for Human Rights, takes part in a feminist demonstration in Buenos Aires. Lubertino coordinates the project on violence against disabled, transgender and migrant women in Argentina that runs from 2022 to 2025. CREDIT: Camilo Flores / ACDH
María José Lubertino, president of the Citizen Association for Human Rights, takes part in a feminist demonstration in Buenos Aires. Lubertino coordinates the project on violence against disabled, transgender and migrant women in Argentina that runs from 2022 to 2025. CREDIT: Camilo Flores / ACDH

Fewer complaints

“Argentina has made great progress in recent years in terms of laws and public policies on violence against women, but despite this, one woman dies every day from femicide (gender-based murders),” ADCH president María José Lubertino told IPS.

“In this case, we decided to work with forgotten women. We were struck by the fact that there were very few migrant, trans and disabled women in the public registers of gender-violence complaints. We discovered that they do not suffer less violence, but that they report it less,” she added.

Lubertino, a lawyer who has chaired the governmental National Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism (INADI), argues that these are systematically oppressed and discriminated groups that, in her experience, face their own fears when it comes to reporting cases: “migrants are afraid of reprisals, trans women assume that no one will believe them and disabled women often want to protect their privacy.”

Indeed, the research showed that 70 percent of trans, migrant and disabled women who suffered violence or discrimination did not file a complaint.

Many spoke of wanting to avoid the feeling of “wasting their time,” as they felt that the complaint would not have any consequences.

Each group faces its own particular hurdles. Migrant women experience discrimination especially in hospitals. Transgender people, in addition to suffering the most aggression (sometimes by the police), suffer specifically from the fact that their chosen identity and name are not recognized. Disabled women say they are excluded from the labor market.

More than three million foreigners live in this country of 46 million people, according to last November’s data from the National Population Directorate. Almost 90 percent of them are from other South American countries, and more than half come from Paraguay and Bolivia. Peru is the third most common country of origin, accounting for about 10 percent.

Of the total number of immigrants, 1,568,350 are female and 1,465,430 are male.

As for people with disabilities, the official registry included more than 1.5 million people by 2022, although it is estimated that there are many more.

Since 2012, a Gender Identity Law recognizes the legal right to change gender identity in Argentina and by April 2022, 12,665 identification documents had been issued based on the individual’s self-perceived identity. Of these, 62 percent identified as female, 35 percent as male and three percent as non-binary.

Women participate in one of the trainings on gender-based violence in Buenos Aires. The project is carried out by the Citizen Association for Human Rights with financial support from the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women. CREDIT: Camilo Flores / ACDH
Women participate in one of the trainings on gender-based violence in Buenos Aires. The project is carried out by the Citizen Association for Human Rights with financial support from the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women. CREDIT: Camilo Flores / ACDH

Different forms of violence

Yuli Almirón has no mobility in her left leg as a result of polio. She is president of the Argentine Polio-Post Polio Association (APPA), which brings together some 800 polio survivors. Yuli is one of the leaders of the trainings.

“Through the trainings, those of us who participated found out about many things,” she told IPS. “We heard, for example, about many cases related to situations of power imbalances. Women with disabilities sometimes suffer violence at the hands of their caregivers.”

The most surprising aspect, however, has to do with the restrictions on access to public policies to help victims of gender-based violence.

The Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity runs the Acompañar Program, which aims to strengthen the economic independence of women and LGBTI+ women in situations of gender-based violence.

The women are provided the equivalent of one monthly minimum wage for six months, but anyone who receives a disability allowance is excluded.

“We didn’t know those were the rules. It’s a terrible injustice, because disabled victims of violence are the ones who most need to cut economic dependency in order to get out,” said Almirón.

Another of the project’s partner organizations is the Human Rights Civil Association of United Migrant and Refugee Women in Argentina (AMUMRA). Its founder is Natividad Obeso, a Peruvian woman who fled the violence in her country in 1994, during the civil war with the Shining Path guerrilla organization.

“Back then Argentina had no rights-based immigration policy. There was a lot of xenophobia. I was stopped by the police for no reason, when I was going into a supermarket, and they made me clean the whole police station before releasing me,” she said.

Natividad says that public hospitals are one of the main places where migrant women suffer discrimination. “When a migrant woman goes to give birth they always leave her for last,” she said.
“Migrant women suffer all kinds of violence. If they file a complaint, they are stigmatized. That’s why they don’t know how to defend themselves. Even the organizations themselves exclude us. That is why it is essential to support them,” she stressed.

© Inter Press Service (2023) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

, 2023-07-28 08:58:58, #Vulnerable #Women #Suffer #Worst #Face #Discrimination #Argentina #Global #Issues,

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24 July 2023

Woman dead after grizzly bear encounter near Yellowstone National Park

Woman dead after grizzly bear encounter near Yellowstone National Park

A woman was found dead in Montana on Saturday after coming into contact with a grizzly bear on a trail west of Yellowstone National Park.

The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks said in a statement on Sunday that the woman was found deceased on a trail near West Yellowstone, a Montana town nestled in the Custer Gallatin National Forest just west of Yellowstone National Park.

They said the woman was found deceased “following an apparent bear encounter” based on what investigators determined were grizzly bear tracks at the scene. The department said the investigation into the grizzly attack was ongoing.

Rangers issued an emergency closure of the area where the woman was found, which is popular with hikers.

WATCH | Tips for avoiding a bear attack: 

Tips for avoiding a bear attack

Although the department’s statement said the death appeared to have followed the woman’s interaction with the bear, it did not confirm her cause of death.

The attack comes amid a rise in Montana’s grizzly bear population and an increase in sightings.

The department put out a news release last week warning visitors that staff had confirmed grizzly bear sightings throughout the state, “particularly in areas between the Northern Continental Divide and the Great Yellowstone ecosystems.”

They implored those camping and visiting parks to carry bear spray, store their food while outside and tend to their garbage.

, 2023-07-24 19:05:13, #Woman #dead #grizzly #bear #encounter #Yellowstone #National #Park,

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20 July 2023

Wagner mercenaries face tough UK sanctions as they ‘target civilians’ in African nation | World | News

Wagner mercenaries face tough UK sanctions as they ‘target civilians’ in African nation | World | News

The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has updated its Sanctions List adding four people connected to the Russian mercenary Wagner Group‘s activities in the Central African Republic.

Alexander Alexandrovich Ivanov, Aleksandr Grigorievitch Maloletko, Vitalii Viktorovitch Perfilev and Dimitri Sytii, were all named by the Foreign Office as “persons associated with the Wagner Group”.

Perfilev is the head of the Wagner in the Central African Republic, while Pikalov is the Wagner Commander in Africa.

The move comes after the head of Britain’s MI6 agency, Sir Richard Moore, accused Russia of using Wagner as a tool of imperialism in Africa, offering leaders in the Central African Republic, Mali and other countries a “Faustian pact” of protection in return for handing over mineral wealth to Russia.

Speaking in Prague on Wednesday (July 19), Sir Richard said the government of President Vladimir Putin was beset by “venality, infighting and callous incompetence” and the mutiny by Wagner Group mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin had “exposed the inexorable decay of the unstable autocracy over which Putin presides.”

He said Putin was “under pressure” after the brief rebellion and the “humiliating” deal he struck with the help of Belarus to end it. The Kremlin says Prigozhin attended a military meeting in Moscow with Putin after the mutiny.

“He really didn’t fight back against Prigozhin. He cut a deal to save his skin,” Moore told the audience.

“Prigozhin started off as a traitor at breakfast, he had been pardoned by supper, and then two days later he was invited for tea,” Moore said.

“So there are some things that even the chief of MI6 finds a little bit difficult to interpret, in terms of who’s in and who’s out.”

, 2023-07-20 15:14:00, #Wagner #mercenaries #face #tough #sanctions #target #civilians #African #nation #World #News,

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