AI

Research in the field of machine learning and AI, now a key technology in practically every industry and company, is far too voluminous for anyone to read it all. This column, Perceptron, aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in, but not limited t

Amazon wants Alexa owners to buy more things. That’s the clear impetus behind the new Alexa feature announced today at Amazon’s Accelerate conference, called Customers Ask Alexa, which lets brands submit answers to common questions like “How can I remove pet hair from my carpet?&#

In pursuit of faster and more efficient AI system development, Intel, Arm and Nvidia today published a draft specification for what they refer to as a common interchange format for AI. While voluntary, the proposed “8-bit floating point (FP8)” standard, they say, has the potential to ac

There’s a ghost in the machine. Machine learning, that is. We are all regularly amazed by AI’s capabilities in writing and creation, but who knew it had such a capacity for instilling horror? A chilling discovery by an AI researcher finds that the “latent space” comprising a

Greetings from Cupertino, California, where the temperature has cooled down to a far more reasonable 101 degrees. It's a nice change from the 109 degrees we hit here on Tuesday. I'm out here this week for the big Apple event. There was no robotics news to speak of, but that's why we'

Monday is Labor Day here in the States. In most households, it's come to mean one final three-day weekend to mark the end of the summer. It's a bittersweet feeling that stirs up all sorts of back-to-school excitement/dread buried deep down inside my lizard brain. It's neither surprising

To get a roundup of technewss's biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Midweek? More like mid-weak! Okay, terrible pun, but we're a little low energy in this heat wave today, so it kinda made sense. Oh! And good n

I admit to having my doubts when Boston Dynamics announced it was getting into the already crowded warehouse/logistics field. One could certainly make the case that Stretch is a bit over-engineered and ultimately a bit of overkill for most situations. Keep in mind, the company's Spot robot runs

One of the trickiest parts of this gig is setting realistic expectations. The job of writing about robots for a living is a bit of a balancing act between excited optimism and pragmatic realism. How do you temper the excitement of some of the world's most fascinating technologies with reality&#

If you have great lighting, a good photographer can take decent photos even with the crappiest camera imaginable. In low light, though, all bets are off. Sure, some cameras can shoot haunting video lit only by the light of the moon, but for stills — and especially stills shot on a smartphone

Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia disclosed 15 early-stage startups it has selected for the seventh cohort of its accelerator program Surge, pushing ahead with new investments even as the deal activity has considerably slowed in the region. Since its launch in March 2019, the accelerator has

Allow me to borrow a phrase from baseball for a moment. If you follow the sport, you're likely aware of the concept of the “three true outcomes.” They are, specifically, a home run, a strikeout, and a walk. The throughline between the three is that, in most instances, they're not determ

Sofy, a startup developing a testing platform for mobile app devs it claims is used by Microsoft, today closed a $7.75 million seed round that brings its total capital raised to $9.5 million. Voyager Capital led the tranche with participation from PSL Ventures, GTMFund and Revolution, providing cas

In a sign that the market for logistics and transportation tech isn’t cooling (economic downturn be damned), HyperTrack, a startup offering APIs for freight order planning, assignment and tracking, today closed a $25 million Series A funding round. Led by Westbridge Capital with participation