SambaNova says its latest chips can best Nvidia's A100 silicon by a wide margin, at least when it comes to machine learning workloads. The Palo Alto-based AI startup this week revealed its DataScale systems and Cardinal SN30 accelerator, which the company claims is capable of delivering 688 TFLOPS of BF16 performance, twice that of Nvidia's A100. However, in machine learning training workloads, SambaNova says the gap is even larger. The company claims its SN30-based DataScale systems are six times faster when training a 13-billion parameter GPT model than Nvidia's DGX A100 servers, at least according to its internal benchmarks, so take them with a healthy dose of salt. The SN30 is manufactured on a 7nm TSMC process node, which packs 86 billion transistors into a single die.

OTP Bank has selected SambaNova Systems to help build Europe's fastest AI Supercomputer, positioning OTP Group and the Ministry for Innovation and Technology (MIT) of Hungary as European leaders in the modern day space race to a post AI business. The partnership and plan is to create the fastest AI supercomputer in Europe in the coming 100 days in an attempt to leapfrog both Wall Street and Western European competitors in the AI race. OTP Bank is looking to produce an AI system to be used for national research. This research will help to aid the private and public sectors, as well as higher education across all of Central and Eastern Europe in cooperation with the ITM of Hungary. When speaking to Co-founder and CEO of SambaNova Systems, Rodrigo Liang, alongside Marshall Choy, Senior Vice President and Head of Product at SambaNova Systems, it became easier to understand the scale of the project at hand.

If you have been considering getting into machine learning, now is the time to start. Demand for machine learning engineers (already in short supply) is high and only expected to grow as the complexity of, and access to, machine learning increases. Machine learning has changed rapidly over the past few years. Within the tech world, the bounds of machine learning are constantly being pushed. The complexity of machine learning models and systems engineering has increased as more applications demand real-time or near real-time inferences.

In what may be a first, an Eastern European bank is teaming up with the government of Hungary to field an AI supercomputer that will be used to create a large language model of the Hungarian language. OTP Bank, which was founded in Hungary and operates banks across the region, worked out an agreement under which the government provides about half the funding for the supercomputer developed under contract with SambaNova Systems. The government will have access to the system for public and academic research, said Péter Csányi, deputy CEO and head of the digital division at OTP. The contract with SambaNova Systems capitalizes on the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) for generating large language models that SambaNova announced in October, branding it as dataflow-as-a-service. "Building a system like this to run a GPT model is not something any bank has done before," said Marshall Choy, VP of product at SambaNova.

Central Saint Martins graduate Jann Choy has created an inflatable mask that reacts to your online behaviour. This one-minute video shows it in action. Named Liǎn, the mask is an experimental design piece that aims to explore the performance of our virtual selves and the relationship between our online and offline personas. The mask uses a form of artificial intelligence known as sentiment analysis to understand your online interactions. Depending on whether you choose to act positively or negatively, different corresponding areas of the mask swell, changing the structure of the mask.

All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. SambaNova Systems, winner of VentureBeat's 2021 Innovation in Edge award, is a significant contender in the global edge computing market. The startup raised $676 million in April 2021 and is moving from its origins as an AI-specific chip company to one that provides comprehensive dataflow-as-a-service to its clients. Research firm MarketsandMarkets forecasts an impressive 34% compounded annual growth rate for the market and anticipates its value reaching $15.7 billion by 2025. Traditional central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) are based on transactional processing, which needs accuracies to the nth degree for computations.