IBM says it is rolling out its natural language processing software to a greater number of McDonalds' drive-thrus months after buying the automated order technology unit from the fast food chain, along with the team that developed it. IBM already added extra NLP features to its Watson Discovery enterprise AI service last year, and now the burger-flinger's AI chatbot will feel the benefit, it said. In October last year, Big Blue wolfed down the McD Tech Labs, which was itself created after McDonald's bought and renamed AI voice recognition startup Apprente in 2019. Automated ordering had been piloted at 10 Mcshacks in Chicago in June 2021, with humans reportedly not required to intervene in circa four out of every five orders made with the AI drive-thru bots. Talking at JP Morgan's 50th Annual Global Technology, Media and Communications conference, Rob Thomas, senior veep of Global Markets at IBM, said Big Blue was "taking on a business that they'd [McDonalds] kind of struggled with around ordering."

Big Blue has taken a bite out of McDonald's, acquiring the burger chain's automated order taking (AOT) tech – and the "McD Tech Labs" that built it, for an undisclosed consideration that may or may not include an upsold serve of fries. The labs were created after Mickey Dee's 2019 acquisition of AI voice recognition startup Apprente – a deal touted as giving the burger-slinger the special sauce needed to build voice recognition tech into mobile ordering services or McKiosks. McDonald's told investors its efforts to cook Apprente's tech into something tasty have "shown substantial benefits to customers and restaurant crew experience". Once Big Blue bites into Big Mac's AI, McDonald's thinks the tech will really start to sizzle. "Moving forward, IBM's expertise in building customer care solutions with AI and natural language processing will help scale the AOT technology across markets and tackle integrations including additional languages, dialects and menu variations," reads the joint IBM/McDonald's McStatement.

Big Blue has unveiled Telum, its first chip with AI inferencing acceleration that will allow it to conduct tasks such as fraud detection while a transaction is occurring. "The chip contains 8 processor cores with a deep super-scalar out-of-order instruction pipeline, running with more than 5GHz clock frequency, optimised for the demands of heterogenous enterprise-class workloads," IBM said. The increasing scale of AI is raising the stakes for major ethical questions. "The completely redesigned cache and chip-interconnection infrastructure provides 32MB cache per core, and can scale to 32 Telum chips. The dual-chip module design contains 22 billion transistors and 19 miles of wire on 17 metal layers."

The spring COMMON NAViGATE conference has not yet started, the IBM Think 2021 conference has just ended and so has Google I/O 2021, and only a month ago we participated in Nvidia's GPU Technical Conference 2021. A whole lotta things are rattling around in our brains, and we are still thinking about some of the things people have been saying about artificial intelligence, the instantiation of which based on machine learning techniques seems to work quite well but no one really knows, in the same way a COBOL or RPG program is absolutely deterministic, why it works. This is what happens when you let software write software – algorithms, really, for categorizing and transforming media formats that describe reality. This is just the first phase of AI, the one that IBM and its peers are still talking about. But there is a next-phase, an evolutionary jump that is coming, we think, and it will be an interesting one that will impact all IBM i shops and all of us on planet Earth as we live our lives. More than the relational database or the spreadsheet or the word processor or the Web browser or the iPhone ever did.

BERLIN (Reuters) - IBM is rolling out innovations in artificial intelligence, hybrid cloud operations and quantum computing as the company that created the personal computer follows through on a roadmap it set out a year ago. The U.S. company made the announcements to coincide with its annual Think Conference on Tuesday as it builds momentum following its $34 billion takeover of open-source software company Red Hat two years ago. IBM, which last month reported its strongest quarterly sales growth in two years, has been restructuring since Arvind Krishna became chief executive a year ago to focus on cloud computing and AI. Last October, IBM announced its legacy IT infrastructure business would shift into a separate firm. "This year, we are going to talk about progress - and we have made a lot of progress," President Jim Whitehurst told reporters ahead of its Think Conference.

Artificial Intelligence is a topic that has been around the science fiction community since possible the inception of science fiction. However, it has only been really taken seriously since machine learning as a concept started taking off and algorithms were able to actually follow the vision of what was once thought as an impossibility. Machine Learning (ML) is actually a subset of the greater Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology and it also includes deep learning (I may go further into this technology in a future article), which is itself a subset of machine learning. Machine learning is a huge topic right now due to so many technologies from autonomous vehicles to translation software using it. It is a very hot and growing industry for aspiring software developers to learn about and businesses to start implementing to stay ahead of competition.

IBM has launched a repository of datasets for training which data scientists can pick and mix to train their deep learning and machine learning models. The IBM Data Asset eXchange (DAX) is designed to complement the Model Asset eXchange it launched earlier this year, which offers researchers and developers models to deploy or train with their own data. In a blog announcing the data exchange, a quartet of IBM luminaries, wrote "Developers adopting ML models need open data that they can use confidently under clearly defined open data licenses." The data sets in question will be covered by the Linux Foundation's Community Data License Agreement (CDLA) open data licensing framework to enable data sharing and collaboration – "where possible". DAX will also provide "unique access to various IBM and IBM Research datasets."

IBM has launched a unit designed for human resources to better find talent and recruit using artificial intelligence. The company is wrapping its latest HR effort, dubbed IBM Talent & Transformation, which includes select Watson services. According to IBM, its suite of AI tools can help HR become a growth engine to enable digital transformation. AI can be used to revamp workflow, employee engagement, recruitment and retention while providing a more diverse workforce. Also: Red Hat: It's in IBM's best interest to keep us as'Switzerland' Big Blue's Talent & Transformation suite includes a Watson Talent Suite that rolls up behavioral science, AI and psychology and applies it to HR.

Under CEO Ginni Rometty's leadership, IBM has been undergoing its riskiest transformation since the Gerstner era. With massive bets on artificial intelligence, blockchain, and quantum computing, Big Blue is essentially using its massive inertia and deep pockets as the bluest chip in tech to drive innovation forward. After a few years questioning IBM's ability to execute on this world-changing vision, I trekked to the IBM Think 2018 conference – the company's largest conference ever, now that it has rolled its InterConnect, Edge, World of Watson, and PartnerWorld conferences into one massive Las Vegas shindig. The central lesson of the show: while IBM's bets are both massive and risky, it has chosen its bets wisely – hoping to get into the ground floor of world-changing trends that each promise to follow Moore's Law patterns of exponential growth. True, IBM still carries the baggage of legacy products and business models, and the Big Blue battleship is slow to turn, but if any of its bets pay off, IBM will once again be at the top of its game.

International Business Machines Corp. was once again awarded the largest number of U.S. patents in 2017, as the company pushes into blockchain and artificial intelligence technologies. IBM, No. 11 in the B2B E-Commerce 300, received 9,043 patents in 2017, breaking the record it set in 2016, the company said Tuesday. A lot of the research that IBM conducts may not translate to immediate business gains, and it could take years before patents turn into a product that pays off. The company also invests in exploratory research unrelated to business lines and goals. Despite winning the most patents for the 25th straight year, IBM is struggling to turn itself around.