Alibaba debuts Cloud Computer, Delivery Robots
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technologies and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, unveiled a series of innovative products at its 12th annual Apsara Conference, highlighting the technology pioneer’s commitment in helping people adapt to the more digitized world and accelerate customers’ digital transformation during and after the pandemic......»»
Tech titan Amazon sees profit climb as cloud promises boon
Online retail colossus Amazon on Thursday said profit surged in the recently ended quarter on growing sales and more efficient deliveries, with its cloud business promising even better days ahead. The e-commerce colossus said it made a profit of $9.9 billion on sales that tallied $143.1 billion in the recently ended quarter, with more than half its operating income made from Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud unit. Google parent Alphabet and computing colossus Microsoft this week reported rising quarterly profits, playing up demand for cloud computing enhanced with artificial intelligence. Investors, though, had hoped for better performance from Google Cloud causing the company's shares to slip. While Amazon Web Services (AWS) grew 12 percent when compared to the same quarter a year earlier, the unit's growth lagged that of rival cloud businesses operated by Microsoft and Google. "I remain very optimistic about AWS," Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said on an earnings call. "There's a lot more there for us; then you look at the very substantial, gigantic new generative AI opportunity, which I believe will be tens of billions of dollars in revenue for AWS over the next several years." Amazon just weeks ago said it would invest up to $4 billion in AI firm Anthropic. The success of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a chatbot released last year that can generate poems, essays, and other works with just a short prompt, has led to billions being invested in the field. Anthropic agreed to use Amazon's chips to develop its next models and to use AWS for "mission-critical workloads." Amazon has already announced it aimed to soup up its Alexa voice assistant with generative AI, which the firm said would allow users to have smoother conversations. Retail rebound Amazon earnings "soared past expectations" in the quarter, according to Insider Intelligence analyst Zak Stambor. "We had a strong third quarter as our cost to serve and speed of delivery in our stores business took another step forward," Jassy said, adding its ad business grew "robustly" and AWS cloud computing business "continued to stabilize." "The retail giant's slowdown last year appears to be in the rearview mirror as it has embarked on significant cost-cutting throughout this year and sharpened its focus on key growth areas, such as its high-margin online marketplace and advertising," Stambor said. A top US antitrust regulator sued Amazon in September, accusing the online retail behemoth of running an illegal monopoly by strong-arming sellers and stifling potential rivals. "Our complaint lays out how Amazon has used a set of punitive and coercive tactics to unlawfully maintain its monopolies," said Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. Robots and drones Amazon said Thursday it will hire 250,000 full-time, part-time, and seasonal employees in the United States to handle shopping demand in the months ahead. Amazon said last week that it will expand drone delivery of certain purchases to a third US state as well as to Britain and Italy by the end of 2024. The US firm has installed a new robotics system in one of its Texas logistics centers, featuring technology like automated vehicles, mechanical arms, and computer vision technology. Amazon already uses 750,000 robots in its warehouses to speed up deliveries. "The better they get at delivery, the more it continues to grow the e-commerce market overall and Amazon's place within that market," said Insider Intelligence analyst Andrew Lipsman. But increased productivity via robots won't fix underlying Amazon worker issues, critics say. Amazon early this year eliminated some 27,000 jobs in a move it said at the time was necessary, after years of sustained hiring. Ads shine Advertising continues to be "a major bright spot" for Amazon and it has started using generative artificial intelligence to help sellers create "eye-catching" ads in its online marketplace, analyst Stambor said. Insider Intelligence expects Amazon's US advertising business to bring in nearly $34 billion this year a major leap from before the COVID-19 pandemic. The post Tech titan Amazon sees profit climb as cloud promises boon appeared first on Daily Tribune......»»
Alibaba announces surprise departure of ex-CEO
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has announced the surprise departure of former CEO Daniel Zhang, who had been set Monday to take charge of a key subsidiary as the firm undergoes a major restructuring. Hangzhou-based Alibaba is one of China's most prominent technology firms, with business operations spanning cloud computing, e-commerce, logistics, media and entertainment, and artificial intelligence. After years of turbulence in the Chinese tech sector, Alibaba in March announced the biggest restructuring in its history, dividing itself into six entities, with the goal of listing them on the stock exchange separately. CEO Daniel Zhang was due to take charge of the firm's new cloud computing branch, now a separate entity, on Monday. But two months after announcing his appointment, Alibaba said its ex-boss was no longer with the company. "The board of our Company expresses its deepest appreciation to Mr. Zhang for his contributions to Alibaba Group over the past 16 years," the company said in a statement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, where it is listed, late on Sunday. It gave no reason for his departure. Plans for a spin-off cloud computing firm would go ahead, Alibaba said, "under a separate management team to be appointed". The company announced in June that Zhang would be replaced by Joseph Tsai as chairman and Eddie Wu as CEO. The executive played a vital role in the company's success in the past decade, spearheading the now hugely popular Singles' Day shopping festival since its first edition in 2009. Shares in the firm sank nearly 3.5 percent Monday -- the first working day of its new reorganization into six distinct branches. In addition to e-commerce and cloud computing, Alibaba's reach stretches into everything from logistics to media, entertainment and artificial intelligence. But its vast size brought it into the crosshairs of Chinese regulators as Beijing sought to crack down on the tech sector. In 2020, Alibaba became the country's first tech giant to bear the brunt of increased oversight, when authorities called off what would have become one of the most valuable public listings in history -- valued at $34 billion -- for its former subsidiary Ant Group. Ant Group is the owner of Alipay, a mobile payment application widely used in China. One month after officials hit the brakes on its IPO, Alibaba was investigated for alleged anti-competitive practices, then issued a $2.8 billion fine. And in July authorities fined Ant Group nearly $1 billion for breaching banking regulations. The post Alibaba announces surprise departure of ex-CEO appeared first on Daily Tribune......»»
Tech’s carbon footprint: can AI revolutionize responsibly?
Across the globe, data servers are humming, consuming both megawatts and precious natural resources to bring life to our digital world. The planet's 8,000 or so data centers are the foundation of our online existence and will grow ever further with the advent of artificial intelligence -- so much so that research estimates that by 2025, the IT industry could use 20 percent of all electricity produced, and emit up to 5.5 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. This poses a real -- and to some, increasingly urgent -- question about the industry's carbon footprint as startups and companies fall behind Silicon Valley's latest forward march. "Pandora's box is open," said Arun Iyengar, CEO of Untether AI, a highly specialized chip-making company that strives to make AI more energy efficient. "We can utilize AI in ways that enhance the climate requirements or we can ignore the climate requirements and find ourselves facing the consequences in a decade or so in terms of the impact." The transformation of the world's data servers to AI readiness is already well underway, in what one Google executive called a "once-in-a-generation inflection point in computing." But the scope of the mission is huge. The creation of generative AI tools such as GPT-4, which powers ChatGPT, or Google's Palm2, behind the bot Bard, can be broken into two key stages, the actual "training" and then the execution (or "inference"). In 2019, University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers trained several large language models and found that training a single AI model can emit the CO2 emission equivalent of five cars over their lifetimes. A more recent study by Google and the University of California, Berkeley, reported that training GPT-3 resulted in 552 metric tons of carbon emissions, equivalent to driving a passenger vehicle 1.24 million miles (2 million kilometers). OpenAI's latest generation model, GPT-4, is trained on around 570 times more parameters -- or inputs -- than GPT-3, and the scale of these systems will only grow as AI becomes more powerful and ubiquitous. Nvidia, AI's chip giant, provides the processors that are indispensable for training, known as GPUs. And while they are more energy efficient than typical chips, they remain formidable consumers of power. The ChatGPT 'problem' The other side of generative AI is deployment, or inference: when the trained model is applied to identify objects, respond to text prompts or whatever the use case may be. Deployment doesn't necessarily need the computing heft of an Nvidia chip but taken cumulatively, the endless interactions in the real world far outweigh training in terms of workload. "Inference is going to be even more of a problem now with ChatGPT, which can be used by anyone and integrated into daily life through apps and web searches," said Lynn Kaack, assistant professor of computer science at the Hertie School in Berlin. The biggest cloud companies insist that they are committed to being as energy-efficient as possible. Amazon Web Services pledges to be carbon-neutral by 2040 while Microsoft has pledged to be carbon-negative by 2030. The latest evidence that the companies are serious about energy efficiency is reassuring. Between 2010 and 2018, global data center energy use rose by only 6 percent, despite a 550 percent increase in workloads and computing instances, according to the International Energy Agency. 'Backwards' thinking Silicon Valley's AI tycoons believe discussions of AI's current carbon footprint are beside the point, and underplay its revolutionary potential. The naysayers have it "backwards," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told reporters on a recent visit to his company's headquarters in California. The mass deployment of AI and faster computing will in the end diminish the need to go to the world's data clouds, he argued. AI's superpowers will turn your laptop, car, or device in your pocket into an energy-efficient supercomputer without the need to "retrieve" data from the cloud. "In the future, there'll be a little tiny model that sits on your phone and 90 percent of the pixels will be generated, 10 percent will be retrieved, instead of 100 percent retrieved -- and so you're going to save (energy)," he said. OpenAI's Sam Altman meanwhile believes that AI will soon enough be able to build humanity a completely new future. "I think once we have a really powerful super intelligence, addressing climate change will not be particularly difficult," Altman said recently. "This illustrates how big we should dream... Think about a system where you can say, 'Tell me how to make a lot of clean energy cheaply, tell me how to efficiently capture carbon, and tell me how to build a factory to do this at planetary scale.'" But some experts worry that the mad dash for AI has elbowed out fears about the planet, at least for now. "Large corporations are spending a lot of money right now deploying AI. I don't think they are thinking about the environmental impact yet," said Untether AI's Iyengar. But, he added: "I think that is coming." The post Tech’s carbon footprint: can AI revolutionize responsibly? appeared first on Daily Tribune......»»
Alibaba unveils own large language scale models
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has open sourced two new AI models, Qwen-VL and Qwen-VL-Chat. The models are large vision language models (LVLMs) that can comprehend images, texts, and bounding boxes in prompts and facilitate multi-round question answering in both English and Chinese. Qwen-VL is the multimodal version of Qwen-7B, Alibaba Cloud’s 7-billion-parameter model of its large language model Tongyi Qianwen (also available on ModelScope as open source). Capable of understanding both image inputs and text prompts in English and Chinese, Qwen-VL can perform various tasks, such as responding to open-ended queries related to different images and generating image captions. Qwen-VL-Chat caters to more complex interactions, such as comparing multiple image inputs and engaging in multi-round question answering. Leveraging alignment techniques, this AI assistant exhibits a range of creative capabilities, which include writing poetry and stories based on input images, summarizing the content of multiple pictures, and solving mathematical questions displayed in images. The introduction of these models, with their ability to extract meaning and information from images, holds the potential to revolutionize the interaction with visual content. For instance, leveraging their image comprehension and question-answering capabilities, the models could provide information assistance to visually impaired individuals during online shopping in the future. The Qwen-VL model was pre-trained on image and text datasets. Compared to other open-source large vision language models that can process and understand images in 224,224 resolution, Qwen-VL can handle image input at a resolution of 448,448, resulting in better image recognition and comprehension. Based on various benchmarks, Qwen-VL recorded outstanding performances on several visual language tasks, including zero-shot captioning, general visual question answering, text-oriented visual question answering, and object detection. Qwen-VL-Chat has also achieved leading results in both Chinese and English for text-image dialogue and alignment levels with humans, according to the benchmark test of Alibaba Cloud. This test involved over 300 images, 800 questions, and 27 categories. The two models have been made available to the open-source community via Alibaba’s AI model community ModelScope and the collaborative AI platform Hugging Face. For commercial uses, companies with over 100 million monthly active users can request a license from Alibaba Cloud. The post Alibaba unveils own large language scale models appeared first on Daily Tribune......»»
DoF: Rural banks should adopt tech
Rural banks must speed up the integration of digital services in their systems to allow more Filipinos to obtain various financial services, Finance Secretary Benjamin Diokno said. “The digital divide has continued to widen, leaving vulnerable sectors of the society on the margins of economic progress,” Diokno said in a statement shared Monday by the Rural Bankers Association of the Philippines. RBAP has at least 400 members and is celebrating their rural banking consciousness week until Saturday with the theme “Rural Banks: Ensuring that No Juan is Left Behind in the Age of Digitalization.” He stressed the digital gap in banking among Filipinos is evident despite the rise of digital technologies in banking, including mobile apps and the cloud system which is an online data-sharing tool and computer programs manager. A 2022 survey by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas showed 55 banks could adopt digital technologies efficiently. “With accelerated adoption of digital technologies in recent years, access to financial services and critical information has never been more readily available to the general public. DoF supports RBAP’s initiative to integrate financial technologies in their services to expand access to formal credit,” the finance chief said. Opportunity to expand services Citing the performance of ASA Philippines, a microfinance lender to rural entrepreneurs, the Asian Development Bank said rural banks could expand their loan portfolios by over 50 percent using cloud technology. To help modernize the systems of rural banks, global market analyst McKinsey & Company said foreign expertise and resources can be tapped to reach over 71 million Internet users in the Philippines and the projected growth in Filipinos with bank accounts from 50.3 million to 85 million by 2030. “The underserved rural sector is well suited to digital-first or hybrid offerings, and recent changes to onboarding requirements and agent-banking rules are designed to enable digital service providers to maximize the impact of the country’s limited rural banking infrastructure,” McKinsey analysts said. The post DoF: Rural banks should adopt tech appeared first on Daily Tribune......»»
Private partnership to upskill Phl education
Alibaba Cloud of the Alibaba Group and the Asia Pacific College will launch a state-of-the-art innovation lab to train and strengthen the cloud computing competencies of teachers and students as part of its efforts on local digital talent empowerment in the Philippines. A joint development by Alibaba and APC, the innovation lab will serve as an incubator that will foster the development of creative industry solutions and promote collaboration among students, faculty, and industry professionals. “Creating a digital future means being proactive and assisting people and institutions that will drive the future of digitalization. This also means investing in students and teachers. We admire APC’s initiative and commitment to its learners, educators, and IT team to provide them with the tools and skills they will need not just to survive but also to thrive in the digital future. We believe that by equipping them with relevant skills and knowledge, more opportunities will come their way,” shared Allen Guo, country manager for the Philippines, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. The partnership with Alibaba Cloud will enable APC educators, learners, and even its IT team to enhance their cloud knowledge through various cutting-edge technology workshops, online and offline training and certification courses. Alibaba Cloud Academic Empowerment Program will also open opportunities for students to get invited to local community events to meet and learn from professionals and industry leaders. To equip teachers to lead training and workshop sessions in the future, Alibaba Cloud also includes a dedicated knowledge transfer session and hands-on laboratory classes for educators. Through AAEP, students will get local and global internship and competition opportunities as well as invites to campus events through Alibaba Cloud’s well-connected global network, enabling them to learn from world-class professionals. The exposure and experience will help students and teachers develop a digital-forward mindset that can then guide them in pursuing a career or higher education in the future. Alibaba Cloud will also strengthen APC’s cloud infrastructure with the company’s cloud solutions for data backup, students’ management system, and online teaching platform. These will ensure the efficiency and security of the school’s remote access and overall online system. The post Private partnership to upskill Phl education appeared first on Daily Tribune......»»
Unveiling AI products, Nvidia chief says tech at ‘tipping point’
Nvidia chief Jensen Huang said the world was at "the tipping point of a new computer era" as he unveiled a raft of AI-related products Monday in his first public speech in four years at a Taiwan tech trade show. The US firm, which specializes in chips coveted in the artificial intelligence boom, saw its value surge to nearly $1 trillion last week, after the company's quarterly earnings report blew past expectations. Nvidia is known for creating graphics chips long coveted by gamers but which have become engines for the kind of complex processes involved in artificial intelligence, known as accelerated computing. Its chips are a central ingredient to the generative AI revolution, capable of delivering the computing heft needed to churn out complex content in just seconds from data centers around the world. In Taipei on Monday, the Taiwanese-American CEO expressed excitement to be back at the Computex forum, one of the largest trade shows for the sector. "Our first live event in almost four years! I haven't given a public speech in four years -- wish me luck!" he said. Huang's two-hour presentation introduced a dizzying host of new products -- including an AI supercomputer platform called DGX GH200, which he said is now "in full production". “We're so excited that Google Cloud, Meta and Microsoft will be the first companies in the world to have access," he added. "They will be doing be doing exploratory research on the pioneering front, the boundaries of artificial intelligence, with us." The new supercomputer will -- in theory -- help the tech industry as it seeks to create more AI-related products, which require more complex computing tasks. "This is really one of the first major times in history a new computing model has been developed and created," he said, referring to accelerated computing. "We have now reached the tipping point of a new computing era." Founded 30 years ago by Huang, Nvidia was initially a star in the video game world. The Silicon Valley-based company has since built its reputation on making graphics processing units, which ramp up image quality and vanquish response lag time for gamers. Its shares soared more than 25 percent Wednesday after an earnings report showed the AI trend is fueling demand for its sophisticated chips. The post Unveiling AI products, Nvidia chief says tech at ‘tipping point’ appeared first on Daily Tribune......»»
Pegasus spyware clone targets journos, pols
Some of the creators of the notorious Pegasus spyware that targeted journalists and opposition politicians in several countries have built a new version of the program for the same purpose. Canada-based digital technology watchdog Citizen Lab on Tuesday revealed that the little-known firm QuaDream Ltd. created the Pegasus clone. The said company was established by a former Israeli military official and veterans of NSO Group, the creator of Pegasus, it said. Citizen Lab claims it identified at least five people targeted by the QuaDream spyware and its exploits in North America, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. “Victims include journalists, political opposition figures, and an NGO (non-government organization) worker,” it said, saying it would not identify them at the moment. Pegasus has been widely used by governments and other actors to spy on opponents, media and activists. The programs can be placed on computers and cellphones by phishing communications and backdoor exploits and can survey and transmit information on the phone back to an operator without the user’s knowledge, according to AFP. Citizen Lab said that, once placed on a user’s phone or computer, QuaDream’s spyware can record audio from a phone call, record external sounds from a device’s microphone, take pictures from cameras, and search the device’s files, all without the user’s knowledge. The spyware can also generate its own two-factor authentication codes to enable continual access to the device owner’s cloud accounts. The spyware includes a self-destruct feature to hide its previous presence once it is no longer used, Citizen Lab said. Citizen Lab identified servers in 10 countries that received data from victims’ devices, including Israel, Singapore, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates and Bulgaria. QuaDream has marketed its spyware and services to government clients including Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Ghana, Indonesia and Morocco, Citizen Lab said. The post Pegasus spyware clone targets journos, pols appeared first on Daily Tribune......»»
Local fintechs to benefit from digital firm s mentorship program
MANILA - Local financial technology (fintech) firms are set to benefit from a mentorship program that aims to help start-up companies in their digitalization bid to expand their operations.In a virtual briefing on Tuesday, Alibaba Cloud country manager for the Philippines Al.....»»
Alibaba Cloud boosts online education platform
An online education platform of Dito CME Holdings Inc., the communications, media, and entertainment arm of Dennis Uy’s Udenna Group, and CloudSwyft is set to get a boost with the help of Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group......»»
Alibaba to build first data center in PH
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, announced plans to build its first data center in the Philippines by the end of 2021, forming part of the $1-billion expansion of the tech giant to Southeast Asia in the next three years......»»
Alibaba to put up data center in Manila
Alibaba Cloud of Chinese tech tycoon Jack Ma will put up its first data center in Manila to capture the growing demand for e-commerce and position itself as one of the leading digital firms in the Philippines......»»
Digital piracy must be stopped
Since the computer chip was invented, the pace of digital innovation has continued to accelerate. As access to fast broadband has become indispensable, the main source of information and entertainment has shifted from traditional media to the internet, from reading publications, listening to the radio and watching free television broadcasts, to subscription-based cloud services and virtually unlimited digitalized content......»»
Alibaba Cloud strengthens security for card-based transactions
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, announced it has secured the globally recognized Payment Card Industry Three-Domain Secure (PCI 3DS) compliance for all of its seven availability zones in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. The PCI 3DS standard was established by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council – a global forum that brings together payments industry stakeholders to develop and drive adoption of data security standards and resources for safe payments worldwide. This latest attestation further strengthens Alibaba Cloud’s support for the burgeoning fintech industry in Southeast Asia......»»
Philippine businesses increasingly rely on cloud-based IT solutions
A majority (94%) of Philippine businesses view cloud-based IT solutions as an important factor in mitigating the impact of the pandemic, according to a survey entitled “The Role of Cloud in Asia and Confidence in Asian Innovation”, commissioned by Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group......»»
Alibaba Cloud revamps hybrid cloud strategy to accelerate enterprise cloud adoption
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group revamped its hybrid cloud strategy to focus on bringing compatibility, security, compliance, scalability, and reliability with its newly upgraded product offerings and its Hybrid Cloud Partner Program......»»
Alibaba Cloud unveils & lsquo;magic& rsquo; behind world& rsquo;s largest online shopping festival
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, today revealed the cutting-edge technologies rolled out in support of the 2020 11.11 Global Shopping Festival......»»
Alibaba Cloud digitalizes sports with more AI solutions
During the Apsara Conference 2020, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, unveiled a series of artificial intelligence (AI) powered solutions which are set to transform and digitalize the way sports entertainment was traditionally organized, broadcast and consumed. The solutions are designed to bring spectators closer to the events’ center stage for more personalized and interactive engagement, while helping organizers and broadcasters operate more efficiently, effectively and securely......»»
Pandemic boosts Alibaba Cloud s Philippine ambitions
As the coronavirus pandemic drags on, Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is grabbing on a business opportunity that the health crisis had brought: offering to help in the digital transformation of Filipino businesses......»»
Jack Ma’s Alibaba joins Philippines fintech group
Jack Ma’s Alibaba Cloud has joined the alliance of financial technology companies in the Philippines to contribute to the growth of the local fintech industry......»»