Chrome for ARM64 is available for Windows devices using Snapdragon processors. According to Google, users planning to invest in the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processor PCs will enjoy even higher performance.

A Google blog post explains that the idea is to have Chrome fully optimized for ARM systems so that it runs faster and smoother.

Word around tech circles is that Qualcomm’s new ARM-based processor is a serious threat to Apple’s M3 chip and that it offers serious AI acceleration capabilities to outperform Intel’s Meteor Lake processors.

Although users can use Chrome on computers with ARM processors through emulation, native apps offer significantly better performance. The first version of Chrome Canary for ARM64 was released a few months ago, and now the browser is about to make its public debut.

Qualcomm says it will help establish Snapdragon X Elite’s role as the leading platform for Windows PCs. The first Snapdragon X Elite devices are expected to arrive later this summer.

Acad. Krasimir Atanasov

“IEEE’s mission includes recognizing the exceptional achievements of our members. Each year, the IEEE Fellow Committee conducts a thorough evaluation process and recommends a select group for elevation to IEEE Fellow status. This prestigious rank is awarded to less than 0.1% of our voting members annually,” stated the Institute.

IEEE stands as the world’s largest technical professional organization, committed to advancing technology for humanity’s benefit.
Academician Atanasov’s selection for this honor is in recognition of his significant contributions to the development and application of intuitionistic fuzzy sets. He plays a key role in the UNITE project at the Burgas University Center for Excellence, focusing on “Universities of Science, Informatics, and Technologies in the e-Society.” Additionally, he is a prominent member of the MIRACle project team, where the “Prof. Dr. Asen Zlatarov” University also holds a leading position.

This recognition marks the pinnacle of membership within IEEE, an organization globally trusted for its authoritative voice in the fields of engineering, computing, and technology information.

Born in Burgas in 1954, Academician Krasimir Atanasov is among the select few Bulgarian scientists who have earned two major doctoral degrees, one in technical sciences and the other in mathematical sciences.

Significance

This change marks the first major alteration to the Windows keyboard layout in 30 years. It represents a significant shift in hardware design, reflecting the growing integration of AI into everyday technology.

“We definitely think this is the year of the AI PC,” says Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s executive VP. Mehdi emphasizes the role of AI in fundamentally altering computer interaction, noting the vast potential for content creation across various domains.

The Copilot Key

Located to the right of the space bar, this new key will replace the traditional menu button. Pressing it activates Windows Copilot, an AI assistant facilitating tasks from setting adjustments to app launches. For users without Copilot enabled, the key defaults to Windows search.

The first PCs featuring this innovation will be announced at CES, with broader availability expected by spring. Microsoft and other PC brands aim to make the Copilot key a standard feature on new PCs by year’s end.

Beyond the Key

Mehdi highlights that while the hardware key is a notable change, it’s part of a larger reimagining of PCs for the AI era. This includes integrating specialized neural processing chips for AI tasks, enhancing the overall Windows experience.

This integration positions Microsoft and its partners favorably against competitors, notably Apple’s Mac line.

Microsoft joins other tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Meta in embedding AI into hardware. This trend spans various devices, including smart speakers, displays, and even wearables like Meta’s AI-assisted Ray-Ban Smart Glasses.

The Copilot key is a symbol of Microsoft’s vision for an AI-integrated future, promising a more intuitive, efficient, and creative computing experience for users worldwide.

The second-generation chip will train models four times faster than first-generation Trainium chips. The company plans to use the chips to train both base models and large language models – the latter include artificial intelligence chatbots such as Anthropic’s Claude.

“Silicon underpins every customer workload, making it a critical area of innovation for AWS. By focusing our chip designs on real workloads that matter to customers, we’re able to deliver the most advanced cloud infrastructure to them”, Vice President of Compute and Networking at AWS David Brown said.

Tranium2 made its debut in conjunction with Graviton4, a versatile chip built on ARM architecture specifically crafted for cloud computing.

In addition, Amazon introduced Amazon Q, a business-centric AI chatbot. This assistant is customizable to suit the unique needs of a customer’s business, offering capabilities such as answering questions, assisting in content generation, and more.

“The rapidly evolving need for verified computation is becoming critical in areas where risk exceeds the ability to trust, such as public APIs, regulated industries, and core financial controls. As demands on the enterprise to work more collaboratively with trading partners and customers increase, Web3 technology provides the transparent proof needed,” commented Dr. Jason Teutsch, founder of Truebit.

Truebit’s integration framework allows developers to read and write code to any API, deploy applications iteratively and quickly, optimize workflow, and improve security, data integrity, and process transparency.

Truebit Verify leverages decentralization to enable developers to create applications that interact with multiple data sources, including blockchains, and verifiably execute complex code.

By leveraging Truebit Verify, developers can secure the 99 percent of application logic that executes offchain. Developers can write code in familiar languages, deploy applications iteratively and quickly optimize their workflow.

Web3 Beyond Blockchains
While Web3 technology is often associated with cryptocurrencies and NFTs, it has the potential to revolutionize enterprise computing. A new generation of infrastructure is emerging which leverages consensus, verification, and transparency to address rapidly evolving challenges in computing. The factors driving a shift to hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructures are the same forces underlying Web3: security, reliability, risk mitigation, portability, interoperability, and cost control. According to IDC, within the next 5 years, 80 percent of enterprises will be part of industry ecosystems that rely on decentralized Web3 code.

“From creating a more secure and transparent digital environment to enhancing operational efficiency and user empowerment, Web3 offers vast potential in promoting transparency, trust, and data security. As more enterprise organizations keep critical data in private and protected places, stored in blockchain and other types of distributed ledgers, a rising share of applications will run using smart contracts that all stakeholders can transparently view, verify, and agree to”, said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst, Constellation Research.

Leading Innovation in Transparent Verification
Truebit has built the next generation of transparent verification to make Web3 development accessible, reliable, and possible for real world applications. The Truebit platform provides a secure way for developers to create interoperable Web3 applications that go beyond blockchains. Truebit Verify validates application data processed by external sources and provides portable certification. Features include:

• Web3 Microservices – Truebit secures critical offchain code. Truebit Tasks are always-on, accessible from a standard REST interface, and ready to support an applications’ event-driven architecture.
• Language Compatibility – Truebit Verify provides out-of-the box support for JavaScript, Rust, C++ and is extensible to any language supported by WebAssembly (Wasm).
• Secure, Fast Execution – Truebit Verify’s Wasm architecture provides a fully isolated sandbox for safe execution of off-ledger tasks. Wasm’s compact footprint provides immediate availability of code across any of Truebit’s Nodes, enabling instant response times.
  API Integration – Truebit Tasks can read and write data from public and private APIs while providing fully verified operations for any data transformations or calculations.
• Cross-Blockchain Operations – Copy data and transfer assets between ledgers with rules and validation specifically tailored to an application’s needs. Truebit Verify provides a safe, neutral environment for execution of cross-chain code.
• Continuous Verification – Multiple, independent Nodes automatically verify each task. Truebit verify ensures that the code written is the same as the code executed and that no one has altered the processing of task inputs.
• Audit Trail – Each portable transcript certifies permanent evidence of task execution. Transcripts can be easily linked to ledger transactions, or can be used entirely off ledger to provide transparent audit trails.

“With the re-architecting of cloud environments to accommodate the shift to hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure, Web3 naturally emerges as the next evolution of the compute we rely on today — from VMs to containers to serverless functions. The future of enterprise computing lies in harnessing the power of Web3 to build automated, distributed ecosystems beyond the confines of individual organizations”, said Blane Sims, head of product, Truebit.

Truebit in Action
Truebit’s mission is to provide a trustless solution for builders and data owners to certify truth so they can prove the integrity of data, systems and organizations to others. The company’s team of experts work together with customers and technologists to build innovative, real-world applications, including:

• The Quadrans Foundation provides blockchain technology to trace and digitally authenticate food and textile products, enabling a transparent, safe, and reliable supply chain ecosystem. As part of the TRICK Consortium, Quadrans leverages Truebit to achieve TRICK’s development goals by providing transparent and tamper-proof tracking to reduce fraud and enable interoperability across data systems, including multiple blockchains and accounting systems. Truebit creates a single source of transparent truth with an audit trail of transcripts certifying task execution.
• A financial services company needs to provide a full audit trail of KYC identity validation and AI-based fraud detection. Truebit provides a certified transcript of identity validation services provided by a third-party, verified integration with AI/ML-based algorithms that monitor transactions for suspicious activities, including independent verification to ensure smart contracts function as intended and trades settle accurately, and certifies data reported to investors and regulators (e.g. financial statements) are correct.
• A group of major recording artists are developing a platform that will transparently calculate and distribute royalties to downstream stakeholders that own a minority stake in songs, will use Truebit Verify to: source data from authentic origins (any streaming platform) for precise royalty calculations, calculate royalties based on verifiable metrics such as downloads, listens, and views, automatically pay royalties through payment services APIs and generate a certificate of correctness for every transaction.

During the online audio event, which was streamed live on the social media platform, Musk’s all-male team of mathematics, artificial intelligence and engineering specialists talked about creating an artificial intelligence that is smarter than humans in order to benefit society.

The focus on Musk and his team’s idea is not on a competitive note. They have no intentions of competing with OpenAI, but rather are focused on answering deep scientific questions.

Musk also said he sees xAI as an alternative to larger AI companies, but said it is still “in its infancy” and that it will take time to catch up to OpenAI and Google.

Questions about the nature of dark matter as well as unsolved aspects of the workings of gravity may be among the mysteries his company is trying to explain. Musk spoke at length about the “Fermi paradox,” a theoretical question that asks why humans have not yet discovered extraterrestrials and suggests that technological civilizations typically self-destruct or are destroyed by an outside force before heading to other solar systems.

Jimmy Ba, a University of Toronto professor and well-known AI researcher who joined Musk’s company, said the goal is to create an AI that can help with a range of problems facing humanity.

“How can we build a general purpose problem-solving machine to help all of us, humanity, overcome the most challenging and ambitious problems out there, and how can we use those tools to augment ourselves and empower,” said Jimmy Ba.

Musk said his company’s artificial intelligence could offend people because it would speak “the truth.”

During the Twitter event, Musk said his company will need computing power, but it won’t be as big as other companies and the team will be relatively small.

Microsoft isn’t the only tech company continuing with the LayOff Trend. Amazon, Google, and other tech giants have also reduced their headcount this year after rapidly increasing their headcount to meet rising demand during the Covid-19 pandemic. In recent months, Microsoft has justified reaching such decisions due to customers’ desire to save money on their cloud computing bills.

“Organizational and workforce adjustments are a necessary and regular part of managing our business. We will continue to prioritize and invest in strategic growth areas for our future and in support of our customers and partners”, the spokesperson said in an email.

In January, CEO Satya Nadella issued a memo indicating that the company would change its hardware lineup and consolidate leases.

Dealers and customer service representatives used social media to express their disappointment with the company’s decision.

The letter was sent in response to the FTC’s request for comment on potential anti-competitive actions in the cloud industry. An FTC spokesperson declined to give further comment to the BBC.

In the indictment, Google argues that through its dominant Windows Server and Microsoft Offices products, the company can make it difficult for its huge roster of customers to use anything other than its Azure cloud infrastructure. Google describes Microsoft’s licensing restrictions as a “complex web” that prevents enterprises from diversifying their enterprise software providers.

Furthermore, according to Google, such controls also pose significant national security and cybersecurity risks.

But these are not the only accusations directed at Microsoft. In its letter to the FTC, Google also alleged that Oracle’s practices are harmful to customers with overly complex agreements that aim to tie customers to their ecosystems. According to Google, companies like Microsoft and Oracle are limiting choice, increasing customer costs, and disrupting growing and thriving digital ecosystems in the U.S. and around the world.

What did Microsoft comment in its defense? Stay tuned for details.

The new modular platform allows teams to train computer vision models faster with less data, run those models with computing power found in most consumer-grade laptops, and deploy those models dramatically faster than industry standards. On the webAI platform, developers and enterprises can build models and prototype quickly at no cost before engaging in an enterprise license.

“Most AI platforms today are built around the assumption that Big Data is the answer to the world’s problems. webAI throws that assumption out the window. Our fundamentally different approach envisions a world where practically any developer, regardless of their budget or past experience with artificial intelligence, can train, deploy and iterate an AI model quickly and cost-effectively.”

said David Stout, co-CEO of Iris Technology, the creator of webAI.

webAI’s no-code/full-code development environment gives enterprises a single tool to collaborate and iterate from sandbox to full deployment quickly and cost-effectively.

“Enterprises are investing billions of dollars in artificial intelligence expertise, computing infrastructure and data acquisition/curation to fuel traditional AI experiments that have about a 13% chance of ever being deployed,”

said James Meeks, co-CEO of Iris.

“webAI’s novel architecture and simple interface enable rapid prototyping and iteration. Because it is free to train and affordable to deploy models on webAI, everyone from entrepreneurial developers to major enterprises now have the opportunity to create and deploy AI workflows that actually solve real-world problems.”

he continued.

webAI embodies a unique approach to intellectual property (IP) protection and data privacy. webAI customers do not need to cede ownership of their data in order to utilize the platform — they own their trained models, and their data is inaccessible by Iris.

Spatial computing is gaining momentum thanks to major investments from Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and others and is considered the new dominant platform for building and navigating the metaverse.

“We believe that spatial computing is where the internet was in the mid 1990’s and that it’s the next big advancement in computing technology. Today’s V2 SDK release is loaded with major technological advancements including Occlusion, Persistent localization, dynamic wayfinding and much more.”

Said Evan Gappelberg ARway CEO comments.

“I couldn’t be more excited about the work that our team is doing as we are pushing the limits of what’s possible in the metaverse with AR wayfinding in a no-code beaconless spatial computing platform”.

he continues.

The launch of the version V2.0 SDK marks the completion of the last major component of the AR wayfinding and spatial computing platform. The full ARway platform offering consists of the ARway app – for spatial mapping, The Creator Portal – for content management and analytics, and The ARwayKit SDK – for custom apps and integrations. The ARway SDK is being offered as a SaaS platform or can be used in limited ways for free with the ARway watermark.