SANTA CLARA, CA, USA, Feb 15, 2022 – AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced the completion of its acquisition of Xilinx in an all-stock transaction. The acquisition, originally announced on October 27, 2020, creates the industry's high-performance and adaptive computing leader with significantly expanded scale and the strongest portfolio of leadership computing, graphics and adaptive SoC products. AMD expects the acquisition to be accretive to non-GAAP margins, non-GAAP EPS and free cash flow generation in the first year. "The acquisition of Xilinx brings together a highly complementary set of products, customers and markets combined with differentiated IP and world-class talent to create the industry's high-performance and adaptive computing leader," said AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "Xilinx offers industry-leading FPGAs, adaptive SoCs, AI engines and software expertise that enable AMD to offer the strongest portfolio of high-performance and adaptive computing solutions in the industry and capture a larger share of the approximately $135 billion market opportunity we see across cloud, edge and intelligent devices." Former Xilinx CEO Victor Peng will join AMD as president of the newly formed Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group (AECG).

Given the segment's solid growth prospects, we think it could be wise to bet on quantum computing stocks Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL), International Business Machines (IBM), and Hitachi (HTHIY). Given quantum computing's growth prospects, tech giants are investing significantly in the space to grab market share. Technology giant MSFT's broad product portfolio includes personal computers, tablets, gaming and entertainment consoles, and related accessories. On Jan. 25, 2022, Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO, MSFT, said, "As tech as a percentage of global GDP continues to increase, we are innovating and investing across diverse and growing markets, with a common underlying technology stack and an operating model that reinforces a common strategy, culture, and a sense of purpose." Mountain View, Calif.-based GOOGL provides online advertising services in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia-Pacific, Canada, and Latin America.

Tenstorrent, a hardware start-up developing next generation computers, announces the addition of Matthew Mattina as VP of Machine Learning. "Tenstorrent's mission is to advance the field of AI, which includes enabling entirely new categories of ML models which are larger and more intelligent than the industry uses today. Success requires mastery of the entire stack – from models, through compilers and runtime software, to the hardware it all relies on," said Ljubisa Bajic, Tenstorrent's CEO. "Matt is one of very few people in the world with deep expertise in all layers of the stack and his addition to the team is a significant step towards achieving our goals and moving AI forward." As Vice President of Machine Learning, Mattina will lead Tenstorrent's efforts to enable industry-leading performance and scalability of modern neural networks and Software 2.0.

Professor of Business Informatics Wolfgang Maaß (photo) and his teams at Saarland University and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence are using self-learning computer systems to make it faster and simpler to uncover doping violations. Maaß and his team have been collaborating with the World Anti-Doping Agency WADA on research projects that use AI systems the team had previously developed for Industry 4.0 applications. By feeding these systems with data from doping tests, the systems become increasingly efficient at detecting sporting fraud. Artificial intelligence may help to make sporting competitions cleaner and fairer in the future. Professor of Business Informatics Wolfgang Maaß and his teams at Saarland University and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence are using self-learning computer systems to make it faster and simpler to uncover doping violations.

SINGAPORE, February 3rd, 2022 – Businesses and public sector organizations will need to accelerate the modernization of their IT infrastructure and operations to be able to build a sustainable competitive advantage in the next 2 to 3 years. The ability to align to the digital paradigm is not only contingent upon investing in next-generation cloud-native IT infrastructure technologies, platforms, and solutions, but also how CIOs will help transform to autonomous IT operations using AI / ML technologies, delivering business resilience, agility, flexibility, and adaptability. The rapid proliferation of data-driven edge workloads, growing number of ransomware and malware attacks, and blistering growth in the volume of structured and unstructured data are creating significant challenges, as a result of which by 2023, most C-Suite will implement business-critical KPIs tied to data availability, recovery, and stewardship. IDC believes this will help to sustain data-driven innovation. "The CIO and IT decision-makers will need to do some serious thinking beyond modernizing the technology building blocks and platforms if they truly intend to align to digital business outcomes, SLAs, and KPIs. Cultural and mindset change is going to be one of the keystones of digital infrastructure paradigm, which goes far and beyond just embracing cloud as the defacto delivery platform or using OPEX based as-a-service IT consumption models. Digital Infrastructure represents the dawn of a new era for IT decision-makers to make an inedible mark in helping their organization lead into the future," says Rajnish Arora, Vice President Enterprise Infrastructure Research at IDC Asia/Pacific.

AI agents have bested humans at many games, from chess to Go to poker. Now, the machines can claim a new high score on the classic racing video game series Gran Turismo. Sony announced today that its researchers have developed an AI driver named GT Sophy that is "reliably superhuman" -- able to beat top human drivers in Gran Turismo Sport in back-to-back laps. You might think this an easy challenge. After all, isn't racing simply a matter of speed and reaction time and therefore simple for a machine to master?

Up to £23 million in government funding will create more AI and data conversion courses, helping young people from underrepresented groups including women, black people and people with disabilities join the UK's world-leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry. Up to two thousand scholarships for masters AI conversion courses, which enable graduates to do further study courses in the field even if their undergraduate course is not directly related, will create a new generation of experts in data science and AI. The UK has a long and exceptional history in AI, from codebreaker Alan Turing's early work through to London-based powerhouse DeepMind's pioneering research which will enable quicker and more advanced drug discovery. AI underpins the apps which help us navigate around cities, stop online banking fraud and communicate with smart speakers. The UK is ranked third in the world for private venture capital investment into AI companies (2019 investment into the UK reached almost £2.5 billion) and is home to a third of Europe's total AI companies.

The European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), the leading European Artificial Intelligence (AI) association with a focus on scientific excellence, is developing an ambitious project to create a multicentric European AI lighthouse. It has presented such a vision to members of the European Parliament and relevant stakeholders, asking for their support. In an official statement, ELLIS argues in favour of this decentralised model for several key reasons, such as the flexibility and versatility arising from having a network of research units; the promotion of one of Europe's key assets, its diversity; an increased ability to attract and retain talent; and the support of the adoption of AI advances and the subsequent wealth generation in several European regional ecosystems. These advantages would not exist if there were a single research centre or AI lighthouse for all of Europe. Nuria Oliver, Scientific Director and co-founder of the Alicante ELLIS Unit Foundation and Vice-President of ELLIS Europe, has emphasised the importance of this vision to "turn Europe into an AI world power through the development of strong regional ecosystems". From ELLIS Alicante, a foundation promoted by the Generalitat Valenciana (Regional Government of Valencia), Oliver says that "instead of working as independent bodies, the cross-cutting nature of AI emphasises the importance of working with such a multi-centric approach.

Sony Corp. announced today that it has created an artificial intelligence that can get the better of humans when playing the simulation game "Gran Turismo," which could have implications in the future for self-driving technology. AI has already mastered such games as "Go" and chess, and according to Sony, it took just two days of training for the technology Gran Turismo Sophy or GT Sophy to leave human players in the dust. At the two-day mark it was beating 95% of the best human players, and in the following days kept shaving time from its previous results. Sony said the AI mastered a number of tracks, not only by figuring out when to slow down or accelerate but using tactics such as when the time is right to get in behind a car and use the slipstream. When it became obvious that the car wasn't using a good racing line, it would change to another line.

Sony Group Corp. said on Wednesday it had created an artificial intelligence agent called Gran Turismo Sophy (GT Sophy) that was able to beat world's best drivers of the PlayStation racing simulation game Gran Turismo. To get GT Sophy ready for the game, different units of Sony brought in fundamental AI research, a hyper-realistic real world racing simulator, and infrastructure for massive scale AI training, the company said in a statement. The AI first raced against four top Gran Turismo drivers in July, learned from the race and outperformed the human drivers in another race in October. "It took about 20 PlayStations running simultaneously for about 10 to 12 days to train GT Sophy to race from scratch to superhuman level," said Peter Wurman, director of Sony AI America and the leader of the team who designed the AI. While AI had been used to defeat humans in the games of chess, mahjong and go, Sony said the difficulty in mastering race car driving was the many decisions that need to be made in real time.