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Amazon Is Designing Custom AI Chips For Alexa (theverge.com)
According to a report (paywalled) from The Information, Amazon is designing a custom artificial intelligence chip that would power future Echo devices and improve the quality and response time of its Alexa voice assistant. "The move closely followers rivals Apple and Google, both of which have already developed and deployed custom AI hardware at various scales," reports The Verge. From the report: While Amazon is unlikely to physically produce the chips, given its lack of both fabrication experience and a manufacturing presence in China, the news does pose a risk to the businesses of companies like Nvidia and Intel. Both companies have shifted large portions of their chipmaking expertise to AI and the future of the burgeoning field, and both make money by designing and manufacturing chips for companies like Apple, Amazon, and others. Amazon, which seeks to stay competitive in the smart home hardware market and in the realm of consumer-facing AI products, has nearly 450 people with chip expertise on staff, reports The Information, thanks to key hires and acquisitions the e-commerce giant has made in the last few years. The plan is for Amazon to develop its own AI chips so Alexa-powered products in its ever-expanding Echo line can do more on-device processing, instead of having to communicate with the cloud, a process that increases response rate times.
... around $100 million?
Wow.
... recognition in a standalone device with current hardware. Did amazon skimp on alexas spec?
Also smartphones have more than enough power to do it too (look at the realtime video image recognition they can do for example) and so I can only assume the reason Siri (and whatever android has) send the speech to be processed in the cloud is for data capture purposes, not because the devices themselves are not up to it.
Seriosly.. who wants this Alexa shite?
Does this mean Alexa will finally understand what I mean when I say "fuck off you gimmicky spy platform"?
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
It's a normal chip, with the usual requirements of speed and low energy use, to be used in products marketed as "AI".
I accidentally called Siri "Alexa", and now neither one of them is speaking to me.
We buy Alexa, we put it in our office and home, we hook it up, it's always on
Without AI, it's always listening
With AI, it's constantly listening, monitoring, guessing, thinking ...
From the mundane, it knows when you need to buy cereals
For the not-so mundane, it knows when your fridge gonna break down, what's the wear and tear on your car
For the scary part - it'll tell Amazon about who your friends are, what you guys talk about, when you meet,, what you guys are up to
In other words, Amazon will know what you will do, before you know what you want to do
Woot will have tons of "old" Echo devices available soon.
If you are stupid enough (or have a valid use case) to want an Echo, you may want to wait until the new devices are available.
does alexa answer all the questions ???
http://triksulap-indonesia.blogspot.com
Anyone buying this Shiate and connecting to your own network must be totally retarded and with mashed potatoes instead of brain.
Are these poisonous, dangerous facilities? Is the revenue margin dependent on have dirt-poor, expendable workers? Instead the west outsources all this to sneaky, dirtbag nations like China, India, Israel, etc. which is a terrible, long-term strategic mistake.
... saying "Alexa, design and manufacture your next upgrade" is a viable instruction.
Check your premises.
Everybody carries a smartphone. A device that has microphones, cameras, and positioning sensors. A device that is a black box in which they have no control over the software (mostly) and firmware. We know that the echo only records and sends audio when it has been activated by the wake word. If you are concerned that the microphone might be activated nefariously without the wake word why do you carry a smartphone? Your phone has even more data about you (video, location, audio, emails, browser history, etc) and you carry it everywhere with you. If you are concerned about devices spying you should be more concerned about your phone.
It might be optimized for specific types of code, similar to how graphics processors are optimized, but there is no such thing as an 'artificial intelligence chip'. Miscategorization and misreporting of facts by marketing people and the media are just fuelling an ever-growing problem of people thinking this crap they keep trotting out and calling 'AI' is better than it actually is.
for this & also the Apple, Google and probably yet-to-be-announced Microsoft chips ? They could be useful/fun to hack with. However: I suspect that they will be part of a black box that they will take efforts to keep us out of :-(
We found this cool robotic arm...
So, because someone is disabled (differently-abled, etc.) it is OK to violate their basic human rights by putting a spy and surveillance device in their living environment?
Wow, you are a special kind of bigoted.
What the disabled need is assistive technology that is designed to help them and only HELP them, not abuse them further.
I was inspired by TV program showing the "Perceptron". A neural net. It could reasonably identify male vs female faces. This was invented in the 1970. I couldn't find anyone doing anything with it back in '94 and I was baffled as to why not. Why weren't there chips with neural networks...
Capturing the data is a good reason for Amazon, but another one is to prevent competitors from looking at the code. Hard to reverse engineer or copy software that you donâ(TM)t have access to.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
If Amazon does something it always ends up with destroyed markets and more and more amazon in your life, wether you want it or not.
Will the chip include the equivalent of Intel's back door Management Engine ?
You live and learn, or you don't learn much.