All these things are powered by artificial-intelligence (AI) models. Most rely on a neural network, trained on massive amounts of information—text, images and the like—relevant to how it will be used. Through much trial and error the weights of connections between simulated neurons are tuned on the basis of these data, akin to adjusting billions … Read more
When Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced its latest open-source large language model (LLM) on July 23rd, it claimed that the most powerful version of Llama 3.1 had “state-of-the-art capabilities that rival the best closed-source models” such as GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Meta’s announcement included a table, showing the scores achieved by these … Read more
In 2023 Apple released the iPhone 15 Pro, powered by the a17 bionic chip, with 19bn transistors. The density of transistors has doubled 34 times over 56 years. That exponential progress, loosely referred to as Moore’s law, has been one of the engines of the computing revolution. As transistors became smaller they got cheaper (more … Read more