Weekly bulletin from AIport, issue #35

Hello and welcome to the 35th issue of the AI Bulletin! We hope you enjoy this week’s selection of the latest in machine learning and data science news. Have a pleasant weekend, and see you next Friday!

North America

• Advanced Micro Devices debuts a new AI chip in an effort to capture market share from Nvidia.

• The world’s largest company by revenue, supermarket chain Walmart, rolls out a retail-specific AI model accompanied by a customer care chatbot.

• Databricks introduces a new solution for native app development tailored to data scientists and ML engineers. The next day, Hugging Face unveils Gradio 5, the latest version of its open-source tool for building AI-backed web apps.

Asia

• In China, TikTok’s owner ByteDance launches AI earbuds. Meanwhile, TikTok is laying off hundreds of workers in Malaysia after switching to AI-powered content moderation.

• A similar situation is unfolding in the Philippines, where workers at a chip factory that produces AI chips are planning to strike in response to automation-related layoffs.

• In South Korea, Samsung, the world’s leading AI chipmaker, issues a rare apology to stakeholders for earning “only” $6.8 billion last quarter.

Europe

• In Sweden, this year’s Nobel Prize is awarded to AI pioneers in two different subjects: in physics, John Hopfield (USA) and Geoffrey Hinton (Canada) are recognized for the development of neural network methods; in chemistry, David Baker (USA), John Jumper, and Demis Hassabis (both from Google DeepMind, UK) for their work on computational protein design.

• In Belgium, the recently published State of Tech report reveals that AI companies accounted for over 70% of the total investment capital nationwide in the first half of the year.

Australia

• An AI retina scanner developed at the Lions Eye Institute, part of the University of Western Australia, wins an Australian-first invention prize. 

• A new study, co-led by Edward Holmes from the University of Sydney, discovers over 160,000 new species of RNA virus using AI: read the paper here.

Africa

• The Africa Centre of Competence for Digital and AI Skilling opens in Nairobi, Kenya.