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Lambda, an AI infrastructure company, this week announced it raised $15 million in a venture funding round from 1517, Gradient Ventures, Razer, Bloomberg Beta, Georges Harik, and others, plus a $9.5 million debt facility. The $24.5 million investment brings the company’s total raised to $28.5 million, following an earlier $4 million seed tranche.

In 2013, San Francisco, California-based Lambda controversially launched a facial recognition API for developers working on apps for Google Glass, Google’s ill-fated heads-up augmented reality display. The API — which soon expanded to other platforms — enabled apps to do things like “remember this face” and “find your friends in a crowd,” Lambda CEO Stephen Balaban told TechCrunch at the time. The API has been used by thousands of developers and was, at least at one point, seeing over 5 million API calls per month.

Since then, however, Lambda has pivoted to selling hardware systems designed for AI, machine learning, and deep learning applications. Among these are the TensorBook, a laptop with a dedicated GPU, and a workstation product with up to four desktop-class GPUs for AI training. Lambda also offers servers, including one designed to be shared between teams and a server cluster, called Echelon, that Balaban describes as “datacenter-scale.”

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The story of humanity is progress, from the origins of humanity with slow disjointed progress to the agricultural revolution with linear progress and furthermore to the industrial revolution with exponential almost unfathomable progress.

This accelerating rate of change of progress is due to the compounding effect of technology, in which it enables countless more from 3D printing, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, batteries, remote surgeries, virtual and augmented reality, robotics – the list can go on and on. These devices in turn will lead to mass changes in society from energy generation, monetary systems, space colonization, automation and much more!

Continue reading “The Technological Revolution (The 4th Industrial Revolution Explained)” | >

EcoTech Recycling’s patented thermodynamic process turns waste rubber into a nontoxic synthetic material for new tires, auto parts and insulation.

If you’ve ever seen a tire graveyard piled high with trashed rubber, you can easily understand that Israeli company EcoTech Recycling has a green gem of an idea.

EcoTech’s nontoxic process produces a unique material, Active Rubber (AR), from end-of-life tires. With1.6 billion tires manufactured annually, and 290 million tires discarded each year in the United States alone, tires are the world’s largest source of waste rubber.

“Rubber is a valuable commodity, and we are making it reusable,” says CEO and President Gideon Drori.

Continue reading “Here’s a cool green way to upcycle millions of old tires” | >

Deep-tech healthcare & energy investments for a sustainable future — dr. anil achyuta, investment director / founding member, TDK ventures.

Dr. Anil Achyuta is an Investment Director and a Founding Member at TDK Ventures, which is a deep-tech corporate venture fund of TDK Corporation, the Japanese multinational electronics company that manufactures electronic materials, electronic components, and recording and data-storage media.

Anil is passionate about energy and healthcare sectors as he believes these are the most impactful areas to building a sustainable future – a mission directly in line with TDK Ventures’ goal.

Continue reading “Dr. Anil Achyuta — TDK Ventures — Founding Member — Deep-Tech Healthcare And Energy Investments” | >

This article is part of our new series, Currents, which examines how rapid advances in technology are transforming our lives.

Imagine operating a computer by moving your hands in the air as Tony Stark does in “Iron Man.” Or using a smartphone to magnify an object as does the device that Harrison Ford’s character uses in “Blade Runner.” Or a next-generation video meeting where augmented reality glasses make it possible to view 3D avatars. Or a generation of autonomous vehicles capable of driving safely in city traffic.

These advances and a host of others on the horizon could happen because of metamaterials, making it possible to control beams of light with the same ease that computer chips control electricity.

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https://youtu.be/Jd2GK0qDtRg

Microsoft Mesh enables presence and shared experiences from anywhere – on any device – through mixed reality applications.

Mesh allows for connections with new depth and dimension. As digital intelligence comes to the real world, we’re now able to see, share, and collaborate on content that persists. This common understanding ignites ideas, sparks creativity, and forms powerful bonds.

Read the article: https://aka.ms/MicrosoftMesh.

Enjoy this video with Audio Description: https://youtu.be/uGpCB2YKmZs.

Continue reading “Introducing Microsoft Mesh” | >

AI plays an important role across our apps — from enabling AR effects, to helping keep bad content off our platforms and better supporting our communities through our COVID-19 Community Help hub. As AI-powered services become more present in everyday life, it’s becoming even more important to understand how AI systems may affect people around the world and how we can strive to ensure the best possible outcomes for everyone.

Several years ago, we created an interdisciplinary Responsible AI (RAI) team to help advance the emerging field of Responsible AI and spread the impact of such work throughout Facebook. The Fairness team is part of RAI, and works with product teams across the company to foster informed, context-specific decisions about how to measure and define fairness in AI-powered products.

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All of which would be nice and handy, but clearly, privacy and ethics are going to be a big issue for people — particularly when a company like Facebook is behind it. Few people in the past would ever have lived a life so thoroughly examined, catalogued and analyzed by a third party. The opportunities for tailored advertising will be total, and so will the opportunities for bad-faith actors to abuse this treasure trove of minute detail about your life.

But this tech is coming down the barrel. It’s still a few years off, according to the FRL team. But as far as it is concerned, the technology and the experience are proven. They work, they’ll be awesome, and now it’s a matter of working out how to build them into a foolproof product for the mass market. So, why is FRL telling us about it now? Well, this could be the greatest leap in human-machine interaction since the touchscreen, and frankly Facebook doesn’t want to be seen to be making decisions about this kind of thing behind closed doors.

“I want to address why we’re sharing this research,” said Sean Keller, FRL Director of Research. “Today, we want to open up an important discussion with the public about how to build these technologies responsibly. The reality is that we can’t anticipate or solve all the ethical issues associated with this technology on our own. What we can do is recognize when the technology has advanced beyond what people know is possible and make sure that the information is shared openly. We want to be transparent about what we’re working on, so people can tell us their concerns about this technology.””

Continue reading “Facebook’s upcoming AR wrist controllers will hijack your nerves” | >

TL;DR: Last week, we kicked off a three-part series on the future of human-computer interaction (HCI). In the first post, we shared our 10-year vision of a contextually-aware, AI-powered interface for augmented reality (AR) glasses that can use the information you choose to share, to infer what you want to do, when you want to […].

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