IBM on Thursday rolled out its latest Power8 processor, which is designed to move data faster, and new servers with OpenPower features. For IBM, the OpenPower Foundation community is critical for its Power8 processor. A bevy of companies are in OpenPower, a group that aims to be a counterweight to x86-based servers. There's a run on OpenStack related companies. IBM acquired Blue Box, which offers private clouds as a service via OpenStack.

The technology press is abuzz these days with stories about Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) -- every other week it seems we're hearing about a new AI surpassing human ability at some task or other, and just as often we hear about exciting new start-ups revolutionizing traditional problem spaces using machine learning. We also see the odd notable AI failure every now and then. Artificial intelligence technology doesn't just have to solve grand challenges. Sometimes, it can tackle decidedly everyday problems -- like, say, improving a cucumber farm. Makoto Koike has built a cucumber sorter that uses Google's TensorFlow machine learning technology to save his farmer parents a lot of work.

Swedish Natural Language Interaction (NLI) specialist Artificial Solutions has launched its Teneo Analytics suite. The software aims to provide predictive metrics on conversations between humans and the technology that they use. The suite is comprised of three modules: Teneo Insight, Teneo Discovery and Teneo Analytics API. It works to crunch raw unstructured conversational data from sources such as virtual assistants, live chat, call transcripts and emails. Access to this data is hoped to increase insight into customer preferences and decision-making, allowing companies to fully personalize the way they interact with each individual consumer.

The Guardian's published a long excerpt from Cathy O'Neil's essential new book, Weapons of Math Destruction, in which O'Neil describes the way that shoddy machine-learning companies have come to dominate waged employment hiring, selling their dubious products to giant companies that use them to decide who can and can't work. Because so many of America's biggest employers use these systems, it can be nearly impossible to find work if their secret, unaudited models decide that you're a bad hire. What's more, many of the models' litmus tests are just proxies for race, poverty, and disability -- things that companies are not legally allowed to consider when hiring (unless they're being considered by unaccountable software provided by a third party). This hurts everyone, not just the people who get blackballed. Because the machine learning companies that supply this HR-ware don't refine their models based on the success of their predictions, they end up excluding lots of people who'd be excellent hires, and hiring people who are no good for their customers.

IBM today announced the launch of the aptly-named IBM Power Systems S822LC for High Performance Computing. Its unwieldy name betrays the fact that this is a really interesting product. Together with Nvidia, IBM built this new system specifically for artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced analytics use cases. What makes this new server so fast for running this kind of software, though, isn't just the pure processor power from the CPUs and GPUs. IBM is also using Nvidia's NVLink high-speed interconnect that allows the CPUs and GPUs to communicate significantly faster than over the standard PCIe bus you'll find in a common desktop computer.

IBM has launched three Power8 Linux servers designed to accelerate artificial intelligence, deep learning, and advanced analytics applications. The new systems tap the Nvidia NVLink technology to move data five times faster than any competing platform, said Stefanie Chiras, an IBM vice president, in an interview with VentureBeat. These systems and their operating systems are part of a larger business group that generates about 2 billion a quarter for IBM. And the A.I. markets they're going after have exploded in the past couple of years. IBM claims that the combination of Power8 processors and Linux software results in systems that deliver 80 percent more performance per dollar than the latest x86-based (Intel or AMD) servers.

A universal condition of future U.S. armed interventions is the dizzying amount of data that American forces will have thrust upon them at, each level of war and in every dimension of combat. The single most important thing the U.S. military can do to adapt to the Information Age is to channel the impending torrent of information, from a multiplicity of data sources, to relevant decision makers in useful forms. The face of battle in this era will still be defined by blood and hardship, endured by small groups of people surviving their way to the next objective, but in a much more complex context. That complexity will be apparent, often paralyzing, when flooding through a cornucopia of sensor systems. Computers will help stem the tide, but distributed human innovation, in the space between information and knowledge, is the only force that can contextualize the flow.

I wasn't a major aficionado of Hot Wheels growing up, however growing up I still remember asking dad to get me one. It was small and I wasn't particularly wild about it, however it was one more car to play with. A couple of years back, the startup Anki inspired the crowd at an Apple event by flaunting some toy race cars with AI capacity. One wouldn't expect the toy-car monster Hot Wheels to kick back and let a little startup take its turf. Model cars and track dashing are the bread and spread of Hot Wheels, yet they may look somewhat long in the tooth contrasted with conspicuous console amusements like Need for Speed or CTR.

One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction. Ex Machina, a Hollywood blockbuster made on a 15 million budget, tells the story of a programmer who is invited by his employer, the eccentric billionaire Nathan Bateman who built a fictional search engine called Blue Book, to administer the Turing test to an android with artificial intelligence, which essentially determines whether a computer can trick a human into believing she is having a conversation with another human. Everything in our online life is indexed. Every idle tweet, status update, or curious search query feeds the Google database.

ARMONK, NY - 08 Sep 2016: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today revealed a series of new servers designed to help propel cognitive workloads and to drive greater data center efficiency. Featuring a new chip, the Linux-based lineup incorporates innovations from the OpenPOWER community that deliver higher levels of performance and greater computing efficiency than available on any x86-based server. The three new systems are an expansion of IBM's Linux server portfolio comprised of IBM's specialized line of servers co-developed with fellow members of the OpenPOWER Foundation. The new servers join the Power Systems LC lineup that is designed to outperform x86-based servers on a variety of data-intensive workloads. Early testing with Tencent, one of the world's largest Internet service providers based in China, has shown that a large cluster of the new IBM OpenPOWER servers was able to run a data-intensive workload three times faster than its former x86-based infrastructure.