The Hanguang 800 is being implemented across many application scenarios within Aliyun, ranging from video classification to smart city applications. For example, the company's popular Pailitao platform applies visual image search to e-commerce, allowing customers to search for items by taking a photo of the query object. Using AI-based image recognition & indexing powered by the new Hanguang 800, Aliyun can increase image processing efficiency by 12 times compared to GPUs. With regard to smart city tech, Aliyun says it previously used 40 traditional GPUs to process videos of central Hangzhou with a latency of 300ms. Now the task requires only four Hanguang 800 with a lower latency of 150ms.

Alibaba is well aware of the growing demand for dedicated compute to power today's AI applications. Last year, the Hangzhou-based tech giant launched its semiconductor subsidiary Pingtouge ("Honey Badger" in Chinese) to develop embedded chip and neural network accelerators. At the time, Alibaba CTO Jeff Zhang pledged Pingtouge would produce the world's most advanced neural network chip by the middle of this year. Today, Alibaba kept its promise. At the Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) Apsara Conference 2019, Pingtouge unveiled its first AI dedicated processor for cloud-based large-scale AI inferencing.

Alibaba Group has introduced its first AI inference chip called'Hanguang 800' which performs machine-learning tasks efficiently and quickly. The neural processing unit is already being used to power features on Alibaba's e-commerce sites, including product search and personalised recommendations. The Hanguang 800 will be made available to Alibaba Cloud customers at a later stage. According to Alibaba, its ecommerce website Taobao previously took an hour to categorise one billion product images that are uploaded to the site each day by merchants and prepare them for search and personalised recommendations. However, with the Hanguang 800, Taobao was able to finish the task in just five minutes.

Boston Dynamics' Robot Dog Is Now Available for Select Customers Boston Dynamics has begun commercialization of its robodog Spot. The company released a video on Tuesday that shows Spot navigating challenging terrain, picking up construction objects, moving through bad weather, and picking itself up after a fall. Boston Dynamics' Atlas Can Now Do An Impressive Gymnastics Routine Alongside the news that Boston Dynamics is letting robot dog Spot out of its laboratory for the first time, the company has released a new video of Atlas, a spectacular bipedal robot that's previously been seen doing everything from parkour to backflips. Contributing Data to Deepfake Detection Research In collaboration with Jigsaw, Google has announced the release of a large dataset of visual deepfakes they have produced. The data has been incorporated into the Technical University of Munich and the University Federico II of Naples' new FaceForensics benchmark, an effort that Google co-sponsors.