In January, the Spanish startup TravelPerk closed a funding round suited to today's austere times. It raised less than it did two years prior, landing on only a slightly higher valuation of 1.4 billion. The surprising part was that TravelPerk's lead backer was SoftBank, a Japanese investor whose Vision Fund was famous for giving startups outrageous price tags until it racked up immense losses in an investing spree under founder Masayoshi Son. A year later, the Vision Fund is back writing checks, but it's steering clear of the high-flying startups it was once known for championing, like WeWork and failed pizza delivery enterprise Zume. As other tech investors have heaped money into new artificial intelligence firms, Vision Fund has stayed out of the fray.

We present MLTCP, a technique to augment today's congestion control algorithms to accelerate DNN training jobs in shared GPU clusters. MLTCP enables the communication phases of jobs that compete for network bandwidth to interleave with each other, thereby utilizing the network efficiently. At the heart of MLTCP lies a very simple principle based on a key conceptual insight: DNN training flows should scale their congestion window size based on the number of bytes sent at each training iteration. We show that integrating this principle into today's congestion control protocols is straightforward: by adding 30-60 lines of code to Reno, CUBIC, or DCQCN, MLTCP stabilizes flows of different jobs into an interleaved state within a few training iterations, regardless of the number of competing flows or the start time of each flow. Our experiments with popular DNN training jobs demonstrate that enabling MLTCP accelerates the average and 99th percentile training iteration time by up to 2x and 4x, respectively.

SoftBank Group shares surged for a third day on Tuesday, following the explosive rally of its Arm Holdings, the chip designer that has almost doubled in value since making the case last week for how it will benefit from the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. SoftBank's stock climbed as much as 11% to the highest level since May 2021. SoftBank held onto a stake of about 90% in Arm as it took the company public last year. Arm's shares rose 29% on Monday, pushing its gains to more than 90% since it reported financial results on Feb. 7. The company is expanding beyond its traditional base in smartphone technology into new markets like artificial intelligence applications, lifting its outlook.

The fifth generation (5G) cellular network technology is mature and increasingly utilized in many industrial and robotics applications, while an important functionality is the advanced Quality of Service (QoS) features. Despite the prevalence of 5G QoS discussions in the related literature, there is a notable absence of real-life implementations and studies concerning their application in time-critical robotics scenarios. This article considers the operation of time-critical applications for 5G-enabled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and how their operation can be improved by the possibility to dynamically switch between QoS data flows with different priorities. As such, we introduce a robotics oriented analysis on the impact of the 5G QoS functionality on the performance of 5G-enabled UAVs. Furthermore, we introduce a novel framework for the dynamic selection of distinct 5G QoS data flows that is autonomously managed by the 5G-enabled UAV. This problem is addressed in a novel feedback loop fashion utilizing a probabilistic finite state machine (PFSM). Finally, the efficacy of the proposed scheme is experimentally validated with a 5G-enabled UAV in a real-world 5G stand-alone (SA) network.

The power requirements posed by the fifth-generation and beyond cellular networks are an important constraint in network deployment and require energy-efficient solutions. In this work, we propose a novel user load transfer approach using airborne base stations (BS) mounted on drones for reliable and secure power redistribution across the micro-grid network comprising green small cell BSs. Depending on the user density and the availability of an aerial BS, the energy requirement of a cell with an energy deficit is accommodated by migrating the aerial BS from a high-energy to a low-energy cell. The proposed hybrid drone-based framework integrates long short-term memory with unique cost functions using an evolutionary neural network for drones and BSs and efficiently manages energy and load redistribution. The proposed algorithm reduces power outages at BSs and maintains consistent throughput stability, thereby demonstrating its capability to boost the reliability and robustness of wireless communication systems.

FOX News' Eben Brown reports that with the use of AI, scammers are fleecing Americans in more sophisticated ways. The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday made AI-generated robocalls mimicking the voices of political candidates to fool voters illegal. With the unanimous adoption of a declaratory ruling that recognizes calls made with AI-generated voices are "artificial" under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), a 1991 law restricting junk calls that use artificial and prerecorded voice messages, the FCC said it was giving state attorneys general new tools to go after those responsible for voice cloning scams. The decision was announced days after New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella revealed earlier this week that nefarious robocalls with an AI-generated clone of President Biden's voice urging recipients not to participate in the Jan. 23 primaries – and instead save their votes for the November election – had been traced to two Texas companies. Formella vowed potential civil and criminal action at the state and federal level.

Scam and spam robocalls featuring lifelike AI-generated human voices are now officially illegal, in a unanimous ruling by the Federal Communications Commission. The new ruling, issued Thursday, promised to give'State Attorneys General across the country new tools to go after bad actors behind these nefarious robocalls.' 'Bad actors are using AI-generated voices in unsolicited robocalls to extort vulnerable family members, imitate celebrities, and misinform voters,' FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a press release. Following the new ruling, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel (above) said, 'We're putting the fraudsters behind these robocalls on notice.' 'State Attorneys General will now have new tools to crack down on these scams and ensure the public is protected from fraud and misinformation,' Rosenworcel said. The FCC ruling will expand what activities prosecutors can pursue under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which is currently the primary law allowing the authorities to help limit junk calls.

The US government on Thursday outlawed robocalls that use voices generated by artificial intelligence, a decision that sends a clear message that exploiting the technology to scam people and mislead voters won't be tolerated. The unanimous ruling by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) targets robocalls made with AI voice-cloning tools under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, a 1991 law restricting junk calls that use artificial and prerecorded voice messages. The announcement comes as New Hampshire authorities are advancing their investigation into AI-generated robocalls that mimicked President Joe Biden's voice to discourage people from voting in the state's first-in-the-nation primary last month. Effective immediately, the regulation empowers the FCC to fine companies that use AI voices in their calls or block the service providers that carry them. It also opens the door for call recipients to file lawsuits and gives state attorneys general a new mechanism to crack down on violators, according to the FCC.

It's now illegal in the US for robocallers to use AI-generated voices, thanks to a new ruling by the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday. In a unanimous decision, the FCC expands the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, or TCPA, to cover robocall scams that contain AI voice clones. The new rule goes into effect immediately, allowing the commission to fine companies and block providers for making these types of calls. "Bad actors are using AI-generated voices in unsolicited robocalls to extort vulnerable family members, imitate celebrities, and misinform voters," FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement on Thursday. The move comes a few days after the FCC and New Hampshire attorney general John Formella identified Life Corporation as the company behind the mysterious robocalls imitating President Joe Biden last month before the state's primary election.

The Federal Communication Commission is moving forward with its plan to ban AI robocalls. Commissioners voted unanimously on Wednesday in favor of a Declaratory Ruling that was proposed in late January. Under the measure, the FCC deems robocalls made using AI-generated voices to be "artificial" voices per the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). That makes the practice illegal. The ruling takes effect immediately.