The boom in interest in mainstream models and generative AI is driving a surge in demand for additional computing power, as well as interest in training ever larger models.

According to documents available to Insider, Microsoft is preparing to address this by doubling Azure capacity in the second half of this fiscal year, which runs through the end of June.

Microsoft will triple additional data center capacity in the first half of its fiscal year 2025.

According to the aforementioned documents, the company is deploying a “record number of GPUs” to handle AI workloads, and more than doubled its total installed base of accelerators in the second half of last year.

Recall that Microsoft had intended last year to spend “many billions of dollars” building additional capacity in anticipation of the rapid increase in the number of customers looking to run generative AI projects.

By the end of 2023, Synergy’s data shows that the US accounts for 51% of global capacity as measured by MW of critical IT workload, Europe 17%, and China close behind with 16%.

The companies with the largest footprints are actually the big three cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft and Google. They own 60% of all hyperscale data center capacity, followed by Meta, Alibaba, Tencent, Apple, ByteDance and other relatively small hyperscale operators.

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The Silicon Valley giant has released the first two models of the Llama 3 family – one with 8B parameters and one with 70B. According to Meta, these models are significantly better than the Llama 2 models, offering a much lower false rejection rate, improved alignment, and greater diversity in model responses. The specific capabilities of the models such as, code generation and instruction following have also been greatly improved.

Llama 3 was pre-trained on more than 15T tokens from publicly available sources, therefore the training dataset of Llama 3 is seven times larger than the training dataset of Llama 2 and contains four times more code.

According to Meta, in developing Llama 3, a new human evaluation set for benchmarking was also developed that contains 1,800 prompts across 12 use cases. These include asking for advice, classification, answering a closed question, writing code, creative writing, extraction, answering an open question, reasoning, rewriting, summarizing, and more.

The 70B parameter model beat Claude Sonnet, Mistral Medium, GPT 3.5, and Llama 2 using this new assessment set.

Llama 3 is available on AWS, Databricks, Google Cloud, Hugging Face, Kaggle, IBM WatsonX, Microsoft Azure, NVIDIA NIM and Snowflake. In addition, some hardware vendors will also offer support for it, including AMD, AWS, Dell, Intel, NVIDIA and Qualcomm.

Over the next few months, the company plans to update Llama 3 with new features, longer context windows, and larger model sizes.

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“Whether you’re a developer or you’re managing the entire team, GitLab Duo Chat can empower you to take advantage of AI exactly where you need it throughout the software development lifecycle — all while helping you maintain code quality and security guardrails,” the company wrote in post.

Organizations can control which data the AI gets read access to at the project, subgroup and group level. GitLab also said that customer data is not used to train the AI models.

Other new features in GitLab 16.11 include:

• Policy scoping, which allows compliance teams to assign policy enforcement to a specific group of projects;
• Product analytics, including key usage and user adoption data;
• Ability to disable personal access tokens by enterprise users;
• Autocomplete when inserting links to wikipedia pages;
• Sidebar containing project information;

In total, over 40 new features have been added to GitLab 16.11. It is available in GitLab and in IDEs such as VS Code and the JetBrainsIDE.

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Over the years, Rumen has been part of the national team of Bulgaria in informatics. He is seventh in the Hall of Fame of the IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics) – an outstanding achievement for the country. Rumen is a long-time participant in the international programming competition CodeIT, in 2012 he is a winner, and in the 2020/2021 season he gives a special lecture as an IT guru at the final of the competition.

Rumen Hristov was also elected in Forbes 30 Under 30 in the United States for his work on remote health monitoring.

Rumen tells DevStyleR more about the challenges he faces in the vast technological world. He also reveals what are the qualities needed for success not only in competitions and Olympiads, but also in life. He also shares with us his enjoyable experiences in one of the oldest competitions in the world – CodeIT and what it feels like to be part of the Forbes 30 under 30 in the US. You will read all this and many more interesting topics in our interview.

You are 7th in the Hall of Fame of the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). What are the qualities that make up a successful IT competitor?

Competitions in Informatics were an extremely important part for me and opened many doors in my life. Thanks to them, I was able to meet different people, learn new things, visit many countries, and they were the main reason I was accepted into MIT.

Although in the last 7-8 years I have not participated in any competitions, I can still distinguish many of the qualities I have learned from them. They made me a better programmer, taught me to think creatively and quickly. The Olympiads in Informatics developed my competitive spirit and taught me to motivate myself to always look for improvement in me.

In 2012 you are the winner at CodeIT, and in 2020/2021 you are again part of the competition, this time as an IT guru. Tell us about your experiences as a competitor and then as a guru.

Being an IT guru was an amazing experience. I was always happy when I had the opportunity to go back and be able to help the competitors, because I too had received a lot of help when I was on the other side of things.

The President of Bulgaria attended the award ceremony, as in most years and this fact always distinguishes CodeIT.

What is your message to CodeIT competitors?

Continue to look for every challenge and participate in as many competitions as possible, especially in school years. Then, unfortunately the race time decreases, so you should take advantage as much as possible when it’s time for that.

You complete your bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Together with prof. Dina Katabi you’re working on building an IoT system for a wireless sensor device. What inspired you to start working on such a project?

My goal was to work on an innovative project that is practical to become a community product. Professor Katabi’s group is working on wireless technologies and when I first appeared in the lab, it was in the initial steps on the project that became our company: Emerald Innovations.

The road was very difficult, and we had to solve many technical problems, as well as find the right business plan. After a few years at the university, we made sure that there was a business interest in what we do and for 3-4 years we have been working fully on our company.

You are part of the Forbes 30 under 30 list in the US for your work on remote health monitoring. How does it feel to prove yourself and be recognized in one of the most developed technological countries and what is the formula of success?

The formula of success is always focused on difficult problems. I knew that Professor Katabi’s group was one of those who worked the most hours at MIT and often spent late nights in the laboratory. This is what motivated me to work on this project and subsequently had its advantages and brought several awards.

What advice would you give to those who are just entering the tech world?

The technological world is a special field. Things change often, and people must adapt quickly. Success is often associated with spending many hours in front of a screen, so it is advisable to combine it with frequent hours without screens.

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Dusko Obradovic: A united IT Community in the Balkans – a Mission for Life
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The project is a collaboration of the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T).

“Vulnerabilities in software are a key risk in cybersecurity, with known exploits being a primary path for bad actors to inflict a range of harms. By leveraging SBOMs as key elements of software security, we can mitigate the risk to the software supply chain and respond to new risks faster, and more efficiently,” said Allan Friedman, senior advisor and strategist at CISA.

Protobom allows companies to read data from software specifications (SBOMs), create their own SBOMs, and translate SBOMs into a variety of standard formats.

According to OpenSSF, there are many SBOM formats and schemas, which can be challenging for companies. The goal of the new project is to provide “a format-neutral data layer on top of standards that allows applications to work seamlessly with any kind of SBOM.”

“Protobom is a step towards greater efficiency and interoperability by translating across the widely used formats so that tools and organizations can focus on what’s important. It is a positive solution that helps shape a more transparent software-driven world”, Allan Friedman added.

OpenSSF also explained that by integrating Protobom into applications that link SBOM and vulnerability information, organizations will be able to more quickly access the necessary patches and mitigations to keep their software supply chains safe.

According to Omhar Arasaratnam, General Manager of OpenSSF Protobom will enable organizations to proactively manage the risk of their open source dependencies.

The API now includes a file search tool that allows searching of up to 10,000 files per assistant and can allow developers to integrate knowledge extraction into their assistants. It works with OpenAI’s vector repository objects.

The company also introduced new controls for setting the maximum input and output token so that developers can more directly limit costs. They can also now choose how many last messages will be used for context shortening.

Other new features include the introduction of the Tool Choice option, which allows the selection of a relevant tool. Other updates in this release include more model configuration settings, new streaming and polling utilities, support for fine-tuned models, and more.

Here’s who they are:

Orcs Must Die! 3 (Cloud, Console, and PC) – April 17

Orcs Must Die! 3 ushers orc-slaying mayhem to a previously unimaginable scale. Solo, or 2-player co-op, arm yourself with a massive arsenal of traps and weapons. Slice, burn, toss, and zap hordes of repugnant orcs in this long-awaited successor to the award-winning tower defense series.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes (Cloud, Console, and PC) – April 23

Available on day one with Game Pass! Gather your allies for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, the grand JRPG adventure. Assemble your 6-party team from a cast of over a hundred heroes and shape your destiny in this lush, hand-crafted 2.5D world brimming with war, intrigue, and magic. Manage your town of vibrant characters, play delightful mini-games, and prepare for an unforgettable narrative of boundless charm.

Another Crab’s Treasure (Cloud, Console, and PC) – April 25

Available on day one with Game Pass! A soulslike adventure set in a crumbling underwater world. As Kril the hermit crab, you’ll need to wear the trash around you as shells to withstand attacks from enemies many times your size. Embark on an epic treasure hunt to buy back your repossessed shell and discover the dark secrets behind the polluted ocean.

Manor Lords (Game Preview) (PC) – April 26

Available on day one with Game Pass! Manor Lords is a medieval strategy game featuring in-depth city building, large-scale tactical battles and complex economic and social simulations. Rule your lands as a medieval lord — the seasons pass, the weather changes and cities rise and fall.

Have A Nice Death (Cloud, Console, and PC) – April 30

In this darkly charming 2D action roguelike, play as an overworked Death, whose employees have run rampant, completely throwing off the balance of souls – and his vacation plans. Grab your trusty scythe and show your employees who’s boss.

“While SAS Viya is the foundation of the SAS software ecosystem, the company is evolving its portfolio with innovative products to meet diverse user needs”, saidKathy Lange, Research Director for AI Software, IDC.

He adds that new offerings such as SAS Viya Workbench aim to boost productivity, improve efficiency and “build trust among AI developers”.

Viya Workbench allows developers and modellers to work in the language of their choice. Initially they will have a choice between SAS and Python, with R expected to be available by the end of 2024. Viya Workbench offers two development environment options – Jupyter Notebook/JupyterLab and Visual Studio Code.

The use of SAS analytic procedures (PROCs) and Python native APIs within Viya Workbench accelerates the development of high-performance AI models. Additionally, custom Python libraries can significantly improve speed and performance with minimal changes to a developer’s existing Python program.

Viya Workbench is a flexible, scalable, and efficient development environment that can be terminated with minimal IT support. The dedicated analytics environment features custom CPU/GPU compute power to meet project needs.

“The many challenges developers face aren’t just minor annoyances – they are obstacles that prevent questions from being answered and work from getting done”, said Jared Peterson, Senior Vice President of Engineering, SAS.

Viya Workbench will initially be available through the Amazon AWS Marketplace in the second quarter. Additional supported cloud service providers and a software-as-a-service deployment option are expected to be available in the future.

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Earlier this year, the company released its first feature update for Windows 11 – “Moment 5.” However, it failed to generate much interest.

The full list of new features in version 24H2 of Windows 11 is not yet complete, but some of the changes that will occur in the operating system are clear. Today we will present to you 5 of them, which according to Neowin are worth your attention. In addition to this, some of those listed will appear before version 24H2.

Use your phone as a webcam

Windows 11 will let you use your Android smartphone as a wireless webcam. Modern phones have great cameras, and even expensive webcams often can’t match their capabilities. Future Windows updates will make it possible to use different cameras in your smartphones to make video calls on a computer, apply additional effects (such as HDR), and more.

Windows 11 will offer a dedicated window with all controls and additional information such as connection status and battery level. Currently, the ability to use Android smartphones as webcams with Windows 11 PCs is available to all Windows Insiders with the Link to Windows app version 1.24012.

Deeper Copilot integration

Copilot in Windows still seems like a huge afterthought with a very limited set of actually useful Windows-related features. Fortunately, Microsoft is making its new AI assistant more capable in terms of interacting with the hardware. Copilot is expected to be able to scan for Wi-Fi networks, display device information, report battery level, toggle battery saving, clean some memory, take screenshots, interact with accessibility features, and more.

Built-in QR code generator

Although at first glance this seems like a not-so-important feature, it can make the operating system more convenient. This future Windows update will allow you to generate QR codes when sharing links, making transferring websites from computer to phone much easier. You won’t have to email links to yourself or wait for Microsoft Edge to sync your history.

Save energy

Microsoft is working on expanding the existing power-saving module to more devices, namely desktops, which traditionally don’t rely on rechargeable batteries. The new energy saver is expected to trade more performance for battery life and allow you to reduce power consumption as you reach a certain battery life.

More lock screen widgets

The lock screen in Windows 11 will soon show more useful information. As you know, the current version allows you to place the weather widget, and future updates will add more options such as stocks, traffic, sports games, and more. This part is optional and you will be able to use the traditional and clean lock screen on your PC.

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Oracle announced that it has updated this month’s Critical Patch Update (CPU), which addresses 372 vulnerabilities across multiple products, Cybersecurity news reported. The update fixes critical flaws that could allow remote code execution and unauthorized access to systems.

“Security is a top priority for Oracle, and we take great care to identify and resolve vulnerabilities in a timely manner. This latest CPU demonstrates our ongoing efforts to ensure our customers can confidently rely on our products to protect their most sensitive data and mission-critical systems”, said Ravi Kumar, Oracle’s Chief Security Officer.

The Critical Patch Update provides fixes for security flaws in widely used Oracle products, including Database Server, Fusion Middleware, Enterprise Manager, E-Business Suite, Supply Chain Products Suite, Siebel CRM, Oracle Sun Products, Java SE and more. It also includes fixes to several critical security flaws.

The vulnerabilities covered span a range of severity levels, with 34 of them classified as “critical,” meaning that malicious actors could exploit them to gain unauthorized access, execute arbitrary code, or disrupt system operation.

The update also resolves 159 vulnerabilities rated as “important” that can be exploited remotely to access sensitive data. The remaining issues are rated as moderate or low risk.

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