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Love Has No Algorithm

Featured, Opinion

By David Benjamin

“You’d be surprised how much time I spend explaining to my colleagues that the chief dangers of AI will not come from evil robots with red lasers coming out of their eyes.”
—Congressman (with a Master’s degree in AI) Jay Obernoite

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, the question that haunted the conventioneers, from engineers and marketing flacks to a seedy and asocial army of “influencers,” was “How do I talk to my washing machine?”

Automation in Cars: Promises & Fallacies

Bulletin, Featured, Partner Content

Panelists will speak on the growing confusion over different SAE levels, regulatory and legal challenges, and consumer protection.

The Man Who Put Renesas Back on The Global IC Map

Conversation, Featured

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
The founders of Renesas Electronics in 2010 had high hopes to make their company Japan’s flagship semiconductor supplier. Instead, Renesas lost its way. The life-or-death question for almost a decade has been, who could save Renesas and how he could pull it off. Has Renesas found its guy?

It has taken a generational change, an intrepid global view and exceptional financial savvy to breathe a new life into Renesas, Japan’s ailing chip company. In the most recent financial call, Hidetoshi Shibata, Renesas CEO, declared, “I believe Renesas is finally joining the ranks with global peers in the semiconductor industry.”

Renesas Aims High but Industry Cycle May Take a Toll

Featured, News & Analysis

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake:
Renesas is aiming for much higher sales and market value by 2030. CEO Shibata believes the goals are achievable but becoming a $20 billion revenue enterprise with six times the capitalization may not depend solely on the company. The cyclical market will also have to play ball.

Prophesee’s Big Three: Sony, Qualcomm and Smartphones

Featured, News & Analysis

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
The successful rollout of breakthrough technologies is often the raison d’être of startups. Yet, the more unfamiliar the technology, the tougher for a fledgling startup to get the world on board. So it has gone for Prophesee. Prophesee, nonetheless, is on the cusp of turning its event-based image sensor into mainstream image-capture features for smartphone cameras. The startup owes this progress to its two big partners. Sony put Prophesee through the wringer, forcing it to meet its stringent milestone schedule for event-based CMOS image sensor development. A new alliance with Qualcomm provides its Snapdragon platform to run Prophesee’s fusion software.

By teaming with Sony, the world’s largest CMOS image sensor company, and Qualcomm, which commands a 50-percent share of the mobile SoC market, Prophesee, a Paris-based startup, is finally finding a massive volume market for its unique event-based cameras in smartphones.

Is That an AI in My Chip Design?

Featured, News & Analysis

By Ron Wilson

What’s at Stake:
Advances in AI could change the way chips are designed, potentially slashing design time, engineering staffing, and risk. Or they could be a huge, expensive distraction. Either way, AI is attracting attention and investment in the chip-design community.

Ever since the explosive debut of ChatGPT, a cascade of punditry — with varying degrees of information and understanding — has told us that this changes everything about creative human activities. Given the enormous investment and risk going into chip design in the semiconductor industry, we need to ask just how advances in AI will affect electronic design automation (EDA) — the engine that makes chip design possible.

Created with DALL·E, an AI system by OpenAI

Gauging ‘Reasonable Risk’ in ChatGPT

Conversation, Featured

By Junko Yoshida

Since Open AI opened the door for anyone to play with ChatGPT last November, it seems as though the whole world can’t stop talking about it.

At the Ojo-Yoshida Report, Peter Clarke wrote a ChatGPT primer and declared it—despite its current idiosyncrasies — “an AI ‘babe in arms,’ destined to become far more capable and sophisticated.”

In contrast, Girish Mhatre, who penned “ChatGPT Will Eat Our Brains” for the Ojo-Yoshida Report, isn’t so sanguine. “The genie,” he cautioned, “is out of the bottle. Nothing will be the same again.” He suggests that OpenAI’s only responsible option is “to pull back, to restrict ChatGPT access to a trusted cadre of ‘tire kickers’ charged with probing every aspect of the product from a user point of view, for a year.”

Like everyone else, we’re probing both the intended and unintended consequences of generative AI.

Amidst this controversy, we recently had Missy Cummings as our podcast guest. Cummings is director of George Mason University’s Center for Robotics, Autonomous Systems and Translational AI. She was one of the Navy’s first female “top gun” fighter pilots, flying an F/A-18 Hornet from 1988-1999.

Below is our conversation with Cummings on ChatGPT and generative AI, excerpted from our podcast.

ChatGPT & AI: Stop Panicking and Look at the Potentials

Featured, Opinion

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake?
ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence variants will be massively disruptive but that is no reason to react with the kind of apprehension that could stunt their use and deprive society of the benefits. Moreover, AI is here to stay, and its financial potentials are enormous.

The recent controversy over the fast adoption of ChatGPT and generative AI borders on hysteria. Having just broken into widespread use, the apprehension about how artificial intelligence will impact all aspects of economic and social lives is understandable. However, just like in the early days of the internet, we have not even begun to plumb the depths of how the technology will be applied in years to come.

Open Letter to Pete Buttigieg

Featured, Truth & Consequences

By Colin Barnden

What’s at stake:
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg says human drivers aren’t just problematic, “they are murderous.” So why are European roads much safer?

The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government. It is headed by Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who reports directly to President Biden.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is part of USDOT and describes its mission as “Save lives, prevent injuries, reduce vehicle-related crashes” related to transportation safety in the U.S.

As Secretary of Transportation, it is Buttigieg that is ultimately responsible for transport safety and for addressing the rising death toll on U.S. roads. We wrote him a letter.

ChatGPT is Turbocharging Fraudsters

Featured, Truth & Consequences

By George Leopold

Amid the hype, the various downsides of the ChatGPT artificial intelligence engine are emerging as bad actors once again seize upon a technology innovation for nefarious purposes.

Most notable, according to cybersecurity analysts, is using OpenAI’s algorithmic wonder to increase the lethality of malware code and Internet scams, or phishing exploits. For instance, reports have surfaced—presumably compiled and written by humans—that cybercriminals are bypassing guard rails installed by OpenAI on its chatty bot to upgrade malicious content and advance phishing exploits well beyond emails from Nigerian princes seeking business partners.