📝 Editorial 

In the last few years, NVIDIA has ranked among the top companies advancing AI research and development. With its unique approach that encompasses both hardware and software, NVIDIA has been at the forefront of several major milestones in the AI industry. NVIDIA conferences are among the most followed events by the data science community, and they rarely disappoint. During its latest GTC conference, NVIDIA announced major releases in both AI software and hardware technologies.  

The AI announcements at GTC show NVIDIA’s depth across every area of AI. On the software side, NVIDIA announced new cloud services such as NeMo for large-scale language models, Omniverse ACE for intelligent avatars, and BioNeMo computational biology. On the hardware end, NVIDIA introduced its new ADA architecture, which includes an improved streaming multiprocessor as well as new Tensor Core with the Hopper FP8 Transformer Engine and 1.4 petaflops of Tensor processor power. NVIDIA also announced a number of architectures based on ADA, such as chips optimized for virtual worlds, computational inference, recommendation models, and many others. Continuing its innovation in areas such as self-driving vehicles and robotics, NVIDIA announced Thor, a new 2,000 teraflops of performance and will become the hardware of choice for many applications in those domains.  

GTC provided another window to witness NVIDIA’s astonishing reach in the AI space. Many of the innovations uncovered during GTC are already powering mission-critical applications across many industries. These days, we can safely say that NVIDIA is synonymous with large-scale AI.  

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🗓 Next week in TheSequence Edge:

Edge#229: we introduce VQGAN + CLIP architecture; discuss the original VQGAN+CLIP paper; explore the VQGAN+CLIP implementations. 

Edge#230: we deep dive into how Amazon scaled Alexa to 1000 languages

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Now, let’s review the most important developments in the AI industry this week

🔎 ML Research

Whisper 

OpenAI published a paper detailing Whisper, a neural network that achieved human-level accuracy in speech recognition →read more

Sparrow 

DeepMind published a paper introducing Sparrow, a reinforcement learning model used to build safer conversational agents →read more

View Synthesis with Transformers 

Google Research published a paper discussing a transformer-based model for view synthesis or the ability to recreate a scene from several images →read more

Sounding More Human 

IBM Research published a paper detailing a technique that combines speech recognition and storytelling to make conversational agents sound more human →read more

🤖 Cool AI Tech Releases

NeMo LLM Service 

NVIDIA announced NeMo LLM Service, a cloud service for building and training mega large language models →read more

Omniverse ACE  

NVIDIA announced Omniverse ACE and AI microservices, a platform that enables the development of AI-powered avatars →read more

Other NVIDIA Announcements 

There were too many NVIDIA AI announcements this week to cover individually →read the summary of the announcements

TensorStore 

Google Research open-sourced TensorStore, a C++ and Python library designed for high dimensional array storage and manipulations →read more

LAVIS 

Salesforce Research open-sourced LAVIS, a deep learning library to streamline language-vision model research and implementation →read more

🛠 Real World ML 

Vehicle Routing at Walmart 

Walmart Global Technology group discusses the ML architecture for vehicle and container routing for grocery delivery →read more

💸 Money in AI

ML&AI

• Data-centric ML company Voxel51 raised a $12.5 million Series A funding round from Drive Capital, Top Harvest Capital, Shasta Ventures, and others. Hiring remote.

• Synthetic speech startup Murf raised $10 million Series A funding led by Matrix Partners. Hiring in Bengaluru/India.

• Federated learning platform DynamoFL raised a $4.15 million seed round. The startup is a part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 batch.

• ML developer platform TrueFoundry raised a $2.3 million seed funding round led by Sequoia India and Southeast Asia’s Surge. Hiring remote in the US and India.

AI-powered

• Disaster preparedness company Pano AI raised $20 million in a Series A funding led by Initialized Capital. Hiring.

• Tourism intelligence startup Zartico raised $20 million in Series A funding round led by Arthur Ventures. Hiring remote/US.

• Generative autonomy platform PassiveLogic secured an additional $15 million in an “off-round” strategic investment from Nvidia’s venture arm, nVentures. To date, the company has raised more than $80 million. Hiring in Salt Lake City/US.

• Financial intelligence platform Brightflow AI raised a $15 million Series A led by Haymaker Ventures. Hiring in San Francisco/US.

• Task planing automation platform Motion raised $13 million in a Series A round led by SignalFire. Hiring in San Francisco, remote/US.