SAN FRANCISCO – SoftBank Group Corp. is sending tremors through the tech world with a massive new venture capital fund for investing in startups that is expected to dominate the industry so thoroughly it's playfully referred to as a "gorilla." The Vision Fund's $100 billion coffers nearly equals the total amount pumped into venture capital-backed companies last year, according to market intelligence firm CB Insights, and some say it could be a game-changer for Silicon Valley. "SoftBank shows a remarkable amount of bravery, confidence and optimism to look to apply this much money in technology," said Bill Maris, who started Google Ventures nearly a decade ago and runs his own California-based investment firm Section 32. "I can't say it's a wrong bet, if you think the trends in tech will continue in the future. I would be much more worried if SoftBank was saying tech is dead."

In September 2010, a three-person AI startup called DeepMind Technologies launched in London, with the goal of "solving intelligence." Four years later, Google acquired the company for $500 million. And by 2016, it had achieved a major victory in AI: Mastering the complex game of Go. This story represents the fantasy of many AI researchers, eager to launch their own ventures in the AI startup space. But the field has become saturated, and the terms "AI," "deep learning," and "machine learning" are often overhyped and misunderstood.

Let's face it: The AI hype train isn't going away and soon all our devices will be run by artificial intelligence. While Apple's answer to the AI takeover is to just call its new A11 processor "Bionic", Huawei has taken a more concrete approach. The company embedded a neural processing unit (NPU) on its Kirin 970 chip, which it claims can run AI tasks faster and with less power than others. The newly launched Mate 10 Pro is the first phone to use the Kirin 970, and it's meant to demonstrate the wonders of deeply embedded AI. So far though, it's a capable, well-designed phone that has yet to fully explore what a dedicated NPU can do. When Huawei asked a group of reviewers what we wanted from AI, I didn't have a real answer, though my peers pointed out things like natural linguistics and battery management.

Deutsche Telekom executive Axel Clauberg says his employer and other telecom companies are eager to tap artificial-intelligence techniques that are revolutionizing other industries. "It's not as easy as it sounds for telcos to attract top talent," Clauberg says. "That was different in the '80s and early '90s when the initial mobile networks were built, the smart creators of the world were joining telcos. But today telcos and [telecommunications] vendors are not attractive to top talent." When it comes to AI, Facebook, Google and a handful of other tech companies have practically cornered the market on experts.

The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) launched three new project groups at its second annual TIP summit. The groups will tackle network slicing, artificial intelligence (AI), and open radio access networks (RAN). Facebook co-founded TIP in 2016, along with Intel, Nokia, Deutsche Telekom, and SK Telecom. Its mission is similar to that of the Open Compute Project (OCP) in terms of disaggregating software and hardware. TIP's focus, however, is telecom specific in its work to develop and deploy new networking technologies.

The FCC granted Alphabet's Project Loon, which delivers internet via balloons, an experimental license last month to help get Puerto Ricans online after Hurricane Maria decimated the island's infrastructure. While the team cautiously tweeted that it would'explore of it was possible to help,' Project Loon announced today that it has worked with AT&T and T-Mobile to successfully deliver basic internet to over 100,000 Puerto Ricans to the internet. Since turning on service, #ProjectLoon has delivered basic internet connectivity to more than 100K people in Puerto Rico. It's not a total success, which isn't to be expected after Puerto Ricans' communications infrastructure suffered so much damage. But the team was able to work with AT&T and T-Mobile to get "communication and internet activities like sending text messages and accessing information online for some people with LTE enabled phones," head of Project Loon Alastair Westgarth wrote in a blog post.

From the data-center perspective, flapping events are those that occur when a service or host starts changing its state too frequently. This results in a large number of alarms, which can indicate either transient or real network problems. Some of the reasons for flapping events to occur are hardware/software errors, storage issues, unreliable connections and broken communication links. Event flapping causes resource wastage, decreased performance, and diminished customer experience. We estimate that 50% of the tickets raised during monitoring are "flapping events."

NEW DELHI: As telecom companies are adopting technologies like virtualization, SDN-NFV, orchestration; Artificial Intelligence is going to play a big role in smooth integration of these technologies and automating the networks. As explained by Counterpoint Research, AI application in mobile networks circles around three applications – Self Optimizing networks (SONs), Software defined networks (SDN) & Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and enablement of neural networks. Among these, we may see SONs at the earliest. SONs enable operators automatically to optimize the network quality based on traffic information by region and time zone based on various machine learning algorithms. IDC on the other hand has predicted that 31.5% of the telecommunication organizations are primarily focusing to leverage existing investments/infrastructure and rest 63.5% are making new technology investments for AI systems.

The Huawei Mate 10 is making its way to market internationally and includes some features consumers may not find standard on other 2017 smartphones. The device features the Kirin 970 chip, which includes a dedicated NPU (Neural Network Processing Chip). The Kirin 970 powers AI capabilities, which are primarily centered around the Huawei Mate 10 camera. The device features a dual camera setup that includes a 20-megapixel monochrome lens and a 12-megapixel RGB lens with f/1.6 aperture on both lenses and optical image stabilization on the RGB lens. Other features include BSI CMOS, Dual-LED flash PDAF, CAF, Laser, Depth autofocus, 2x Hybrid Zoom and 4K video recording.

NEW DELHI: As telecom companies are adopting technologies like virtualization, SDN-NFV, orchestration; Artificial Intelligence is going to play a big role in smooth integration of these technologies and automating the networks. As explained by Counterpoint Research, AI application in mobile networks circles around three applications – Self Optimizing networks (SONs), Software defined networks (SDN) & Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and enablement of neural networks. Among these, we may see SONs at the earliest. SONs enable operators automatically to optimize the network quality based on traffic information by region and time zone based on various machine learning algorithms. IDC on the other hand has predicted that 31.5% of the telecommunication organizations are primarily focusing to leverage existing investments/infrastructure and rest 63.5% are making new technology investments for AI systems.