According to Ion Stoica, co-founder of Databricks and Anyscale, and also a senior professor of computer science at Berkeley, 2023 will be the year of "distributed AI frameworks." Needless to say, he has already had a hand in creating such a tool, in the form of Anyscale's open source Ray platform. Among other uses, Ray helps power OpenAI's groundbreaking ChatGPT. I interviewed Stoica to find out what Ray does exactly and, more generally, what is needed to scale AI software in this new era of generative AI. We also discuss the latest in "sky computing," a term Stoica and his Berkeley team introduced in 2021, in a paper that proposed a new form of cloud computing based around interoperability and distributed computing.

We are currently seeking a Penetration Tester to join our Security & Compliance team. The ideal candidate will possess a deep understanding of attack surfaces in modern compiled applications and operating systems. The position will manage all phases of vulnerability management including both internally identified issues as well as externally discovered ones. Candidates must demonstrate the ability to analyze closed source applications using several off-the-shelf or custom developed tools. What You'll Be Doing… • Discovers and exploits vulnerabilities affecting corporate infrastructure • Develops and maintains tools to assist in vulnerability research and exploit development • Communicates information security vulnerabilities to the business • Interface and coordinate with engineering and support teams to analyze and review mitigation strategies; provide guidance and assist when strategies need to be enhanced • Analyze and prioritize scan results report, discovered vulnerabilities and assist with mitigation strategies for vulnerabilities that cannot be corrected • Perform Independent Verification and Validation activities • Create and maintain a strategic reporting mechanism to ensure stakeholders understand Key Risk Indicators • Escalates issues to IT, security team, and engineering through standard escalation processes • Provides technical expertise and advice on all areas of security technology, including: network security, platform security, authentication/authorization systems, application security, security architecture, policy enforcement, and security frameworks • Integrates information security controls into an environment to identify risks and reduce impact • Deliver high quality actionable advice.

Earlier this month, attacks that took place within minutes of each other in different parts of Nigeria, and the apparent failure of the security forces to respond to them efficiently and in a timely manner, exposed how big of a threat lawlessness and impunity currently poses to the country and its people. Late on July 5, heavily armed men on motorcycles raided the Kuje Medium Security Custodial Centre on the outskirts of Abuja and released more than 900 inmates, including more than 60 Boko Haram members in detention. The Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) – an offshoot of Boko Haram now allied with the ISIL (ISIS) group – claimed responsibility for the attack. Just hours before the Kuje incident, another group of heavily armed men had attacked a convoy carrying an advance security team for President Muhammadu Buhari in his home state of Katsina. A presidential spokesperson said the convoy carrying a team of security guards, as well as protocol and media officers, was on its way to Daura, Buhari's hometown, to prepare for a visit by him when the attack took place.

The future of AI is distributed, said Ion Stoica, co-founder, executive chairman and president of Anyscale on the first day of VB Transform. And that's because model complexity shows no signs of slowing down. "For the past couple of years, the compute requirements to train a state-of-the-art model, depending on the data set, grow between 10 times and 35 times every 18 months," he said. Just five years ago the largest models were fitting on a single GPU; fast forward to today and just to fit the parameters of the most advanced models, it takes hundreds or even thousands of GPUs. PaLM, or the Pathway Language Model from Google, has 530 billion parameters -- and that's only about half of the largest, at more than 1 trillion parameters.

The story is about the birth of Machine Learning architecture and how each of the three architects developed their own AI style. We tried to figure out how to teach AI to make architecture without mimicking existing styles.

In this experiment, I used the results of the market research of my thesis made with real people to alter the kernel of a CNN. The idea was to add human rationality to solve the MNIST task using a…

Babak Hodjat is the CTO for AI at Cognizant where he leads a team of developers and researchers bringing advanced AI solutions to businesses. Babak is the former co-founder and CEO of Sentient, responsible for the core technology behind the world's largest distributed artificial intelligence system. Babak was also the founder of the world's first AI-driven hedge-fund, Sentient Investment Management. Babak is a serial entrepreneur, having started a number of Silicon Valley companies as main inventor and technologist. Prior to co-founding Sentient, Babak was senior director of engineering at Sybase iAnywhere, where he led mobile solutions engineering.

Today we're joined by friend of the show Timnit Gebru, the founder and executive director of DAIR, the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. In our conversation with Timnit, we discuss her journey to create DAIR, their goals and some of the challenges shes faced along the way. We start is the obvious place, Timnit being "resignated" from Google after writing and publishing a paper detailing the dangers of large language models, the fallout from that paper and her firing, and the eventual founding of DAIR. We discuss the importance of the "distributed" nature of the institute, how they're going about figuring out what is in scope and out of scope for the institute's research charter, and what building an institution means to her. We also explore the importance of independent alternatives to traditional research structures, if we should be pessimistic about the impact of internal ethics and responsible AI teams in industry due to the overwhelming power they wield, examples she looks to of what not to do when building out the institute, and much much more!

From the previous article, we know that arrays help us to store large amounts of data very compactly. But have you ever wondered whether storing large amounts of data could affect the memory of the system?

Imagine that while you are enjoying your morning bowl of Cheerios, a spider drops from the ceiling and plops into the milk. Years later, you still can't get near a bowl of cereal without feeling overcome with disgust. Researchers have now directly observed what happens inside a brain learning that kind of emotionally charged response. In a new study published in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team at the University of Southern California was able to visualize memories forming in the brains of laboratory fish, imaging them under the microscope as they bloomed in beautiful fluorescent greens. From earlier work, they had expected the brain to encode the memory by slightly tweaking its neural architecture. Instead, the researchers were surprised to find a major overhaul in the connections.