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Nvidia won the AI training race, but inference is still anyone's game

2 months 1 week ago
When it's all abstracted by an API endpoint, do you even care what's behind the curtain?

Comment  With the exception of custom cloud silicon, like Google's TPUs or Amazon's Trainium ASICs, the vast majority of AI training clusters being built today are powered by Nvidia GPUs. But while Nvidia may have won the AI training battle, the inference fight is far from decided.…

Tobias Mann

The Curious Surge of Productivity in US Restaurants

2 months 1 week ago
The abstract of a paper published on National Bureau of Economic Research: We document that, after remaining almost constant for almost 30 years, real labor productivity at U.S. restaurants surged over 15% during the COVID pandemic. This surge has persisted even as many conditions have returned to pre-pandemic levels. Using mobile phone data tracking visits and spending at more than 100,000 individual limited service restaurants across the country, we explore the potential sources of the surge. It cannot be explained by economies of scale, expanding market power, or a direct result of COVID-sourced demand fluctuations. The restaurants' productivity growth rates are strongly correlated, however, with reductions in the amount of time their customers spend in the establishments, particularly with a rising share of customers spending 10 minutes or less. The frequency of such 'take-out' customers rose considerably during COVID, even at fast food restaurants, and never went back down. The magnitude of the restaurant-level relationship between productivity and customer dwell time, if applied to the aggregate decrease in dwell time, can explain almost all of the aggregate productivity increase in our sample.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

msmash

iRobot may be iDead in iYear

2 months 1 week ago
We're doomba, say Roomba goombas, unless...

Troubled robot vacuum-cleaner maker iRobot, abandoned by Amazon after regulators effectively doomed the web giant's takeover offer, has warned investors it may not survive the next 12 months.…

Brandon Vigliarolo

D-Wave Claims 'Quantum Supremacy,' Beating Traditional Computers

2 months 1 week ago
D-Wave researchers have published findings in Science demonstrating what they call "quantum supremacy" by showing their quantum annealers can solve problems beyond the reach of classical computers. The team, led by Andrew D. King, demonstrated area-law scaling of entanglement in model quench dynamics of two-, three- and infinite-dimensional spin glasses. The research shows quantum annealers rapidly generating samples that closely match solutions to the Schrodinger equation, supporting observed stretched-exponential scaling in matrix-product-state approaches. According to the paper, D-Wave's processors completed these magnetic materials simulations in under 20 minutes, while the same calculations would require nearly a million years on Oak Ridge National Laboratory's supercomputers. The claim hasn't gone unchallenged. Miles Stoudenmire from the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Quantum Physics argues that classical computers can achieve comparable results using methods developed since D-Wave's initial findings. "We're just saying, 'Look, this one problem at this one time didn't beat classical computers. Try again,'" Stoudenmire noted. The quantum computing community has increasingly shifted terminology from "supremacy" to "advantage" or "utility," focusing on solving practical business or scientific problems faster, more accurately, or more economically than classical alternatives.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

msmash