A US startup has emerged from stealth mode with a programmable AI chip architecture and software for artificial intelligence and machine learning. Blaize, formerly called Thinci, has backing from automotive companies such as Toyota and Denso, and currently has 325 staff around the world, including two design teams in the UK. The AI chip technology, called a Graph Streaming Processor (GSP), uses a multicore architecture controlled by a state machine. The flow of the machine learning data is determined in the compiler beforehand. This means the compiler and the software development kit (SDK) is a vital part of the development, and the company claims that the architecture can process data ten to a hundred times faster than other AI chips with lower power consumption. The company has developed prototype chips on a multiproject wafer that is being used with the software by fifteen early adopters around the world.

Such is computing's future--to each of our voices. Voice assistants hang on every word we say, when prompted. Their genesis has created an entire family named Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Pepper, Watson, and, most recently, Duplex. One wonders when smart speakers will replace what you're looking at now--this screen. The promise of voice interfaces was demonstrated again in May when Google rolled out Duplex, an AI-driven voice assistant so lifelike and sophisticated that some found it astounding but others deemed it unsettling and wondered if a new era of robocall abuse just dawned.

Singapore has unveiled an ambitious plan to drive the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) across the city-state and position it as a global platform on which to develop and testbed AI applications. With the launch of a national AI strategy, the government is aiming to leverage the technology to create economic value, enhance citizen lives, and arm its workforce with the necessary skillsets. Stressing the integral role of AI in Singapore's smart nation efforts, the government said its national AI strategy was necessary to identify and allocate resources to key focus areas on a national level. It also detailed how government agencies, organisations, and researchers could collaborate to ensure a positive impact from AI, as well as direct attention to areas where change needed to be managed or potential new risks needed to be addressed as AI becomes more pervasive. The key goal here is to pave the way for Singapore, by 2030, to be a leader in developing and deploying "scalable, impactful AI solutions" in key verticals, according to the Smart Nation Digital Government Office (SNDGO), which developed the national AI strategy. Singaporeans also would trust the use of AI in their lives, which need to be nurtured from a clear awareness of the benefits and implications of the technology.

If it seems like every week there's a new scandal about ethics and the tech industry, it's not your imagination. Even as the tech industry is trying to establish concrete practices and institutions around tech ethics, hard lessons are being learned about the wide gap between the practices of "doing ethics" and what people think of as "ethical". This helps explain, in part, why it raises eyebrows when Google dissolves its short-lived AI ethics advisory board, in the face of public outcry about including a controversial alumnus of the Heritage Foundation on it, or when organized pressure from Google's engineering staff results in the cancellation of military contracts. This gap is important, because alongside these decidedly bad calls by those leading the charge for ethics in industry, we are also seeing the tech sector begin investing meaningful resources in the organizational capacity to identify, track, and mitigate the consequences of algorithmic technologies. We are at a point where it would seem that the academics and critics who had exhorted the industry to make such considerations for decades should be declaring a small victory.

According to a new analysis from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, around 800 million jobs could disappear worldwide by the year 2035. The report explains that part of the reason for this is the cost of automating jobs has been declining. There was a 27 percent decrease in the cost of automation between 2005 to 2014, and the cost is expected to decrease by roughly 22 percent by 2025. The analysts claim that robots are getting much better at being able to complete certain tasks, so the kind of jobs that can be automated is growing. They claim "office and service sector tasks" are going to increasingly be automated.

CHINA is selling deadly'Blowfish' drones which can decide who lives and who dies to armies in the war-torn Middle East, say reports. The unmanned war machines are capable of launching autonomous strikes with their arsenal of mortar shells, grenade launchers and machine guns. They are said to be "impossible to defend" against and the Pentagon has already made it clear it fears they will end up in the wrong hands. Some military experts fear the proposed sale of the AI mini-choppers will spark even more bloodshed in the troubled region, reports news.com. "They would be impossible to defend yourself against," warns University of New South Wales Professor of Artificial Intelligence Toby Walsh.

AI and related technologies, such as robots, drones and autonomous vehicles, could provide a net boost to employment in China of around 12% over the next two decades, equating to around 90 million additional jobs and more than offsetting displacement of existing jobs. This new analysis for China, launched today at the World Economic Forum meeting in Tianjin, contrasts with PwC's earlier research1 suggesting a broadly neutral net impact of AI on jobs in the UK. In that analysis, PwC found that these technologies could displace around 20% of existing UK jobs by 2037, but could create a similar number of additional jobs by boosting economic growth2. Based on previous research, PwC judges that results for the UK are likely to be broadly similar to the average across OECD countries. Relative to the UK estimates, China is projected to see a higher level of job displacement (26% vs. 20%) due to the greater scope for further automation in manufacturing and agriculture.

Elon Musk believes his neural technology company Neuralink will be able to "solve" schizophrenia and autism. Speaking on the Artificial Intelligence podcast with Lex Fridman, published Tuesday, Musk was asked what he thinks are the most exciting impacts he foresees for his company Neuralink. Neuralink's goal is to develop an AI-enabled chip that could be implanted in a person's brain, where it would be able to both record brain activity and potentially stimulate it. "So Neuralink, I think at first will solve a lot of brain-related diseases. So could be anything from like autism, schizophrenia, memory loss -- like everyone experiences memory loss at certain points in age. Parents can't remember their kids' names and that kind of thing," replied Musk.

At Microsoft's X019 event in London on Thursday, the company revealed a range of major new titles for the Xbox and PC. But in an industry which has often struggled with representation and diversity of lead characters, one announcement stood out. The latest narrative adventure game from the acclaimed French studio Dontnod will have a transgender man as its lead character – a first for a major game release. Named Tell Me Why, and launching in spring 2020, the game follows identical twins Alyson and Tyler Ronan, who grew up in a small community in Alaska and are reunited after a key event drove them apart 10 years ago. Through the game, the player has to understand what drove the characters from each other, investigating their shared memories while exploring the town and talking to local inhabitants.

GitHub today launched GitHub Security Lab, an ongoing effort to protect open source projects. The GitHub Security Lab aims to bring together security researchers from partner organizations such as Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Oracle, Uber and HackerOne. To boost the GitHub Security Lab, GitHub is CodeQL, an open source variant analysis software from Semmle, a company that it acquired in September to help GitHub better detect vulnerabilities in the code. Semmle security software is used by companies such as Google, Microsoft and NASA. GitHub says it has used the CodeQL semantic code analysis engine to find more than 100 vulnerabilities in popular open source projects with custom queries.