Bill Gates, along with Eric Schmidt and Nvidia, just minted Another AI Unicorn

 More supercomputers staged for AI.

Bill Gates, along with Eric Schmidt and Nvidia, just minted another A.I. Unicorn in a Massive $1.3 Billion Funding Round

The maker of the Pi chatbot plans to build one of the world’s biggest A.I. supercomputers. Previous investors include Will.i.am.

By RACHEL SHIN  AND  JEREMY KAHN  in Fortune

San Francisco–based A.I. startup, Inflection AI, just raised $1.3 billion in a new round of funding from the likes of Microsoft, Nvidia, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—not to mention a certain Bill Gates. The funding will support further development of Inflection AI’s first product, a personal assistant and companion named Pi (Personal A.I.), which was launched in May.

The funding brings the total Inflection has raised to $1.5 billion. The company had previously raised $225 million in early 2022 from some of the same investors, as well as former Meta chief technology officer Mike “Schrep” Schroepfer plus Google DeepMind cofounder and CEO Demis Hassabis, and pop artist Will.i.am.   ... ' 

IBM Quantum Computer Beats Supercomputer in Benchmark

More advances, depends of course on the type of problem, link to details below.

An IBM Quantum Computer Beat a Supercomputer in a Benchmark Test

By Shelly Fan, June 20, 2023 in Singularity Hub

Quantum computers may soon tackle problems that stump today’s powerful supercomputers—even when riddled with errors.

Computation and accuracy go hand in hand. But a new collaboration between IBM and UC Berkeley showed that perfection isn’t necessarily required for solving challenging problems, from understanding the behavior of magnetic materials to modeling how neural networks behave or how information spreads across social networks.

The teams pitted IBM’s 127-qubit Eagle chip against supercomputers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Purdue University for increasingly complex tasks. With easier calculations, the Eagle matched the supercomputer’s results every time—suggesting that even with noise, the quantum computer could generate accurate responses. But where it shone was in its ability to tolerate scale, returning results that are—in theory—far more accurate than what’s possible today with state-of-the-art silicon computer chips.

At the heart is a post-processing technique that decreases noise. Similar to looking at a large painting, the method ignores each brush stroke. Rather, it focuses on small portions of the painting and captures the general “gist” of the artwork.   ... .' 

Exascale Supercomputer Can Do a Quintillion Calculations a Second

 Supercomputer advances as well

Exascale Supercomputer Can Do a Quintillion Calculations a Second

Scientific American, Sarah Scoles, , ORNL, February 9, 2023

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Frontier supercomputer, the world's first declared exascale computer, can perform one quintillion calculations per second and is 2.5 times faster than the world's second-fastest computer. Frontier, which came online last year, will soon be joined by exascale supercomputers El Capitan at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory. While the primary goal of these devices is to run calculations to help maintain the nuclear weapons stockpile overseen by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, they also will be used to solve intractable problems in pure science.Semantic Web For The Working Ontologist, Third Edition: Effective Modeling In RDFs And Owl  .... 

Andromeda Supercomputer

 New Advances

New Cerebras Wafer-Scale ‘Andromeda’ Supercomputer Has 13.5 Million Cores  By Jessica Hall on November 21, 2022 

Cerebras unveiled its new AI supercomputer Andromeda at SC22. With 13.5 million cores across 16 Cerebras CS-2 systems, Andromeda boasts an exaflop of AI compute and 120 petaflops of dense compute. Its computing workhorse is Cerebras’ wafer-scale, manycore processor, WSE-2.

Each WSE-2 wafer has three physical planes, which handle arithmetic, memory, and communications. By itself, the memory plane’s 40GB of onboard SRAM can hold an entire BERTLARGE. But the arithmetic plane also has some 850,000 independent cores and 3.4 million FPUs. Those cores have a collective 20 PB/s or so of internal bandwidth, across the communication plane’s cartesian mesh.

Each of Andromeda’s wafer-scale processors is the size of a salad plate, 8.5″ on a side. Image: Cerebras

Cerebras is emphasizing what it’s calling “near-perfect linear scaling,” which means that for a given job, two CS-2s will do that job twice as fast as one, three will take a third of the time, and so on. How? Andromeda’s SC-2 systems rely on parallelization, Cerebras said, from the cores on each wafer to the SwarmX fabric coordinating them all. But the supercomputer’s talents extend beyond its already impressive 16 nodes. Using the same data parallelization, researchers can yoke together up to 192 CS-2 systems for a single job.... ' 

Tuberculosis Vaccine

 An example of pharma design

Computational Models Move Researchers Closer to Tuberculosis Vaccine

UC San Diego News Center,  Kimberly Mann Bruch, January 13, 2022

The University of Michigan's Denise Kirschner and colleagues are using supercomputers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) to investigate tuberculosis (TB), as a means of informing vaccine design. Kirschner said the work has shed light on the role of neutrophil cells in the immune response to TB infection. Predictive models using UCSD's Expanse supercomputer enabled the researchers to use images of neutrophils within TB granuloma to produce high-resolution models showing cells reacting to the disease. Said Kirschner, "Our computational approach and results from our recent study have helped narrow this concerning 'vaccine design space'—getting us closer to a globally effective vaccine."

Antibiotic Resistance Outwitted by Supercomputers

 No mention of AI here, just computational speed.  Likely in the detail.

Antibiotic Resistance Outwitted by Supercomputers

By University of Portsmouth (U.K.)

November 5, 2021

An international team of scientists has used supercomputing to strengthen existing antibiotics' effectiveness against bacterial resistance.

The researchers crafted a strategy to model many aspects of a redesigned antibiotic simultaneously, including solubility, bacteria infiltration, and protein production inhibition.

A leading European supercomputer completed the model in weeks, but the team spent several years validating the approach experimentally.

"Using a computational approach makes the development of new antibiotic derivatives faster and cheaper, and predicting whether a chemical compound is going to be active before it is synthesized also avoids chemical waste," said Gerhard Koenig at the U.K.'s University of Portsmouth.

From University of Portsmouth (U.K.)

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