Tech

South Korea aims to join AI race as startup Rebellions launches new chip

Published

10 months ago

February 13, 2023

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South Korean startup Rebellions Inc launches an artificial intelligence (AI) chip on Monday, racing to win government contracts as Seoul seeks a place for local companies in the exploding AI industry.

The company’s ATOM chip is the latest Korean attempt to challenge global leader Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) in the hardware that powers the potentially revolutionary AI technology.

AI is the talk of the tech world, as ChatGPT – a chatbot from Microsoft-backed (MSFT.O) OpenAI that generates articles, essays, jokes and even poetry – has become the fastest-growing consumer app in history just two months after launch, according to UBS.

Nvidia, a US chip designer, has a commanding share of high-end AI chips, making up about 86% of the computing power of the world’s six biggest cloud services as of December, according to Jefferies chip analyst Mark Lipacis.

The South Korean government wants to foster a domestic industry, investing more than $800 million over the next five years for research and development in a bid to lift the market share of Korean AI chips in domestic data centres from essentially zero to 80% by 2030.

“It’s hard to catch up to Nvidia, which is so far ahead in general-purpose AI chips,” said Kim Yang-Paeng, senior researcher at the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade. “But it’s not set in stone because AI chips can carry out different functions and there aren’t set boundaries or metrics.”

Rebellions’ ATOM is designed to excel at running computer vision and chatbot AI applications. Because it targets specific tasks rather than doing a wide range, the chip consumes only about 20% of the power of an Nvidia A100 chip on those tasks, said Rebellions co-founder and chief executive Park Sunghyun.

A100 is the most popular chip for AI workloads, powerful enough to create – in industry lingo, “train” – the AI models. ATOM, designed by Rebellions and manufactured by Korean giant Samsung Electronics Co (005930.KS), does not do training.

While countries such as Taiwan, China, France, Germany and the United States have extensive plans to support their semiconductor companies, the South Korean government is rare in singling out AI chips for a concentrated push.

Seoul will put out a notice this month for two data centres, called neural processing unit farms, with only domestic chipmakers allowed to bid, an official at the Ministry of Science and ICT told Reuters.

‘TWISTING ARMS’

In a country whose firms supply half the world’s memory chips, the authorities want to create a market that can be a test bed for AI chipmakers, aiming to foster global competitors.

“The government is twisting the arm of the data centres and telling them, ‘Hey, use these chips’,” Rebellions’ Park, a former Morgan Stanley engineer, told Reuters.

Without such support, he said, data centres and their customers would likely stick with Nvidia chips.

Sapeon Korea Inc also plans to participate in the project, the SK Telecom Co (017670.KS) subsidiary said.

FuriosaAI, backed by South Korea’s top search engine Naver Corp (035420.KS) and state-run Korea Development Bank (KDB.UL), told Reuters it will also bid.

“There’s a lot of momentum behind Nvidia’s developments. These startups have got to build momentum, so that will take time,” said Alan Priestley, an analyst at IT research firm Gartner. “But government incentives such as what’s happening in Korea could well affect the market share within Korea.”

Rebellions will seek to participate in the government project in a consortium with KT Corp (030200.KS), a big Korean telecom, cloud and data centre operator, in the hopes of weaning Nvidia customers off the U.S. supplier.

“Amid high dependence on foreign GPUs (graphics processing units) globally, the cooperation between KT and Rebellions will allow us to have an ‘AI full stack’ that encompasses software and hardware based on domestic technology,” said KT vice president Bae Han-chul.

Rebellions declined to give a forecast for its AI chip venture. It has raised 122 billion won ($96 million), including 30 billion won from KT in a funding round joined by Singapore’s Temasek Pavilion Capital and 10 billion won grant from the South Korean government.

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Tech

Amazon’s AWS appeals to corporate customers with new chatbot, AI safety measures

Published

20 hours ago

November 29, 2023

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Amazon's AWS appeals to corporate customers with new chatbot, AI safety measures

Amazon (AMZN.O) is trying to lure big corporate customers to it AWS cloud computing service with a new chatbot for businesses, and by offering to guard them against legal and reputational damage that can come from the output of artificial intelligence.

The new chatbot, called Q, is designed to help with productivity by helping workers summarize important documents and support tickets and chat via communication apps such as Slack, the company announced at its annual cloud computing conference Tuesday in Las Vegas. The software can also automatically make changes to businesses source code, speeding development, the company said.

The new software arrives roughly a year after OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst onto the scene, setting off a frenzy of investment in generative AI startups. Alphabet (GOOGL.O) and others have announced their own chatbots, which can have human-like conversations with users to help with daily tasks.

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky, at Amazon’s annual cloud computing conference in Las Vegas, announced a new safeguard against objectionable content on generative AI applications, called Guardrails for Bedrock. The service allows users to filter out harmful content, he said.

Because generative AI is trained on publicly available content, offensive words or other objectionable content can slip through into results from users’ prompts. That is particularly problematic for younger users, in times of global conflict or during elections when generative AI’s output in search results can influence opinion.

Safety advocates have cautioned that generative AI could operate out of the control of its human creators and pump out increasingly dangerous content or operate entire systems without oversight. In particular, they worry about the software putting influential – and convincing – content on social media sites like X and Facebook (META.O).

Selipsky said the new service was important for customers to put limits they see fit on the generative AI they use.

“For example, a bank could configure an online assistant to refrain from providing investment advice,” said Selipsky. “Or, to prevent inappropriate content, an e-commerce site could ensure that its online assistant doesn’t use hate speech or insults.”

As part of its appeal to corporations, Amazon said the Q chatbot will offer businesses limits so that it can keep sensitive data from employees who should not have access to it. Pricing will start at $20 per user, per year.

Also at the conference, Amazon announced it would indemnify its customers against lawsuits based on the misuse of copyrighted materials. Stock photography company Getty Images, for instance, sued Stability AI earlier this year, alleging it scraped its website for images without permission.

Guardrails for Bedrock is in limited preview today, Amazon said. The Seattle company did not provide additional details about its indemnification policy.

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Tech

TikTok obtaining Indonesia e-commerce permit

Published

20 hours ago

November 29, 2023

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TikTok obtaining Indonesia e-commerce permit

Short video app TikTok is in the process of obtaining an e-commerce permit from Indonesia’s government, state news agency Antara reported, citing the deputy trade minister.

In September, Indonesia banned e-commerce transactions on social media, a major blow for TikTok, which had pledged to invest billions of dollars in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, the region’s biggest economy.

“Before, they (TikTok) were not compliant, they didn’t have the permit. Now they are taking care of it,” deputy trade minister Jerry Sambuaga was quoted saying by Antara on Tuesday.

He said a partnership with a local firm could be done providing it was in accordance with regulations.

TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, has 125 million active monthly users in Indonesia, a country of more than 270 million people. It has been looking to translate the large user base into a major e-commerce revenue source.

TikTok did not immediately respond to request for comment regarding the deputy minister’s remarks.

Reuters reported earlier this month that TikTok was in talks on possible partnerships with several Indonesian e-commerce companies, including GoTo’s e-commerce unit (GOTO.JK) Tokopedia, Bukalapak.com (BUKA.JK) and Blibli (BELI.JK).

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Tech

Japan space agency hit with cyberattack, rocket and satellite info not accessed

Published

20 hours ago

November 29, 2023

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Japan space agency hit with cyberattack, rocket and satellite info not accessed

Japan’s space agency was hit with a cyberattack but the information the hackers accessed did not include anything important for rocket and satellite operations, a spokesperson said on Wednesday.

“There was a possibility of unauthorised access by exploiting the vulnerability of network equipment,” the spokesperson at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said, declining to elaborate on details such as when the attack took place.

The space agency learned of the possibility of the unauthorised access after receiving information from an external organisation and conducting an internal investigation, the spokesperson said, declining to identify the organisation’s name.

The investigation is ongoing, the spokesperson said.

Japanese media reported Wednesday that the cyberattack occurred during the summer and the police became aware of the attack and notified JAXA this autumn. The Yomiuri newspaper first reported the incident.

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