Descartes Labs raises $30 million Series B for its brand of geospatial analytics
Descartes Labs is announcing a $30 million Series B this morning in a large round led by March Capital. This comes just three months after one of Descartes’ largest competitors, Orbital Insight, closed its own $50 million Series C with Sequoia. Both Descartes and Orbital are playing in the emerging market of geospatial analytics. These companies use machine learning to produce insights… Read More Continue reading Descartes Labs raises $30 million Series B for its brand of geospatial analytics
This afternoon Microsoft announced Brainwave, an FPGA-based system for ultra-low latency deep learning in the cloud. Early benchmarking indicates that when using Intel Stratix 10 FPGAs, Brainwave can sustain 39.5 Teraflops on a large gated recurrent unit without any batching. Microsoft has been pouring resources into FPGAs for a while now, deploying large clusters of the field-programmable… 
Despite countless attempts and millions in venture capital, the calendar, one of the most ubiquitous work tools, has remained largely unchanged for as long as I can remember. Rather than overwrite the calendar in an effort to make it obsolete, Ahryun Moon and Jasper Sone, co-founders of GoodTime, are putting the calendar front and center — embracing it as a means of understanding… 
U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis is concluding his tech tour of the West Coast today with a visit to Google’s Mountain View campus. Mattis spent time at Amazon and the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, earlier in the week. His key takeaway from all the socializing with tech leaders is that the Department of Defense needs to embrace technology coming out of the private sector… 
There are a million and one services for voice transcription on the market. But even with just one job to do, I’ve never seen a service that can handle the long tail of vocabulary used in the real world. This is particularly challenging if you’re a startup trying to sell your service to enterprises that rely on accurate transcription for their operations. 
Two months ago, Facebook’s AI Research Lab (FAIR) published some impressive training times for massively distributed visual recognition models. Today IBM is firing back with some numbers of its own. IBM’s research groups says it was able to train ResNet-50 for 1k classes in 50 minutes across 256 GPUs — which is effectively just the polite way of saying “my model… 
Facebook announced this morning that it had completed its move to neural machine translation — a complicated way of saying that Facebook is now using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to automatically translate content across Facebook. 
Facebook has gone ahead and purchased Charles Jolley’s conversational AI startup Ozlo. Jolley, formerly Head of Platform for Android at Facebook, will not be returning to the company. The Ozlo team is expected to join Facebook to work on natural language processing challenges. Ozlo launched with a consumer facing app back in October 2016. Jolley told me at the time that the… 
Intel declared $14.8 billion in revenue this afternoon and earnings per share of 72 cents. This represents a solid beat as analysts had expected revenues of $14.41 billion and EPS of 68 cents. Intel stock finished up 22 cents and 0.63 percent to $34.97 per share in regular trading. In the moments after the company released its earnings, Intel’s stock shot up 3.43 percent. It is… 
Clara Labs, creator of the Clara AI assistant, is announcing a $7 million Series A this morning led by Basis Set Ventures. Slack Fund also joined in the round alongside existing investors Sequoia and First Round. The startup will be looking to further differentiate within the crowded field of email-centric personal assistants by building in features and integrations to address the needs of…