Featured: AI News’ list of innovative companies to watch in 2021

Companies around the world have ramped up their AI deployments over the past year. As with any emerging technology, AI has brought significant opportunities but also its fair share of challenges.

In this feature, AI News takes a look at some of the most innovative companies leading the way in maximising the opportunities while minimising the challenges of artificial intelligence deployments. In alphabetical order:

Affectiva

Affectiva is an MIT Media Lab spin-off...

3 March 2021 | Big Data

AWS announces nine major updates for its ML platform SageMaker

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced nine major new updates for its cloud-based machine learning platform, SageMaker.

SageMaker aims to provide a machine learning service which can be used to build, train, and deploy ML models for virtually any use case.

During this year’s re:Invent conference, AWS made several announcements to further improve SageMaker’s capabilities.

Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Amazon Machine Learning at AWS,...

9 December 2020 | Amazon

TensorFlow is now available for those shiny new ARM-based Macs

A new version of machine learning library TensorFlow has been released with optimisations for Apple’s new ARM-based Macs.

While still technically in pre-release, the Mac-optimised TensorFlow fork supports native hardware acceleration on Mac devices with M1 or Intel chips through Apple’s ML Compute framework.

The new TensorFlow release boasts of an over 10x speed improvement for common training tasks. While impressive, it has to be taken in the context that the GPU...

19 November 2020 | Apple

NVIDIA chucks its MLPerf-leading A100 GPU into Amazon’s cloud

NVIDIA’s A100 set a new record in the MLPerf benchmark last month and now it’s accessible through Amazon’s cloud.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) first launched a GPU instance 10 years ago with the NVIDIA M2050. It’s rather poetic that, a decade on, NVIDIA is now providing AWS with the hardware to power the next generation of groundbreaking innovations.

The A100 outperformed CPUs in this year’s MLPerf by up to 237x in data centre inference. A single NVIDIA DGX A100...

3 November 2020 | Amazon

Eggplant launches AI-powered software testing in the cloud

Automation specialists Eggplant have launched a new AI-powered software testing platform.

The cloud-based solution aims to help accelerate the delivery of software in a rapidly-changing world while maintaining a high bar of quality.

Gareth Smith, CTO of Eggplant, said:

“The launch of our cloud platform is a significant milestone in our mission to rid the world of bad software. In our new normal, delivering speed and agility at scale has never been more...

6 October 2020 | Cloud

Full-stack AI solution SingularityNET switches Ethereum for Cardano

Full-stack AI solution SingularityNET is switching the Ethereum blockchain for peer-reviewed rival Cardano.

SingularityNET is a decentralised AI marketplace which has the ultimate goal of forming the basis for the emergence of the world’s first true Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

One of the brightest and most respected minds in AI leads the SingularityNET project, Dr Ben Goertzel.

“Current speed and cost issues with the Ethereum blockchain have...

1 October 2020 | AGI

Nvidia and ARM will open ‘world-class’ AI centre in Cambridge

Nvidia is already putting its $40 billion ARM acquisition to good use by opening a “world-class” AI centre in Cambridge.

British chip designer ARM’s technology is at the heart of most mobile devices. Meanwhile, Nvidia’s GPUs are increasingly being used for AI computation in servers, desktops, and even things like self-driving vehicles.

However, Nvidia was most interested in ARM’s presence in edge devices—which it estimates to be in the region of 180...

14 September 2020 | Adoption

Microsoft: The UK must increase its AI skills, or risk falling behind

A report from Microsoft warns that the UK faces an AI skills gap which may harm its global competitiveness.

The research, titled AI Skills in the UK, shines a spotlight on some concerning issues.

For its UK report, Microsoft used data from a global AI skills study featuring more than 12,000 people in 20 countries to see how the UK is doing in comparison to the rest of the world.

Most notably, compared to the rest of the world, the UK is seeing a higher failure...

12 August 2020 | Adoption

Google’s Model Card Toolkit aims to bring transparency to AI

Google has released a toolkit which it hopes will bring some transparency to AI models.

People are wary of big tech companies like Google. People are also concerned about AI. Combine the two and you've got a general distrust which can hinder important advancements.

Model Card Toolkit aims to step in and facilitate AI model transparency reporting for developers, regulators, and downstream...

30 July 2020 | Adoption

DeepCode provides AI code reviews for over four million developers

AI-powered code reviewer DeepCode has announced it’s checked the code of over four million developers.

DeepCode’s machine learning-based bot is fluent in JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, C/C++, and Python.

“Our data shows that over 50% of repositories have critical issues and every second pull-request has warnings about issues that need to be fixed,” said Boris Paskalev, CEO and co-founder of DeepCode.

“By using DeepCode, these issues are automatically...

21 July 2020 | Applications