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[32]Close binspamdupenotthebestofftopicslownewsdaystalestupid freshfunnyinsightfulinterestingmaybe offtopicflamebaittrollredundantoverrated insightfulinterestinginformativefunnyunderrated descriptive typodupeerror [33]Sign up for the Slashdot newsletter! OR [34]check out the new Slashdot job board to browse remote jobs or jobs in your area Do you develop on GitHub? You can keep using GitHub but automatically [35]sync your GitHub releases to SourceForge quickly and easily with [36]this tool so your projects have a backup location, and get your project in front of SourceForge's nearly 30 million monthly users. It takes less than a minute. Get new users downloading your project releases today! [37]× 172269951 story [38]AI [39]Can AI Be Used to Fine-Tune Linux Kernel Performance? [40](zdnet.com) Posted by EditorDavid on Monday November 20, 2023 @07:34AM from the poking-parameters dept. An anonymous reader shared [41]this report from ZDNet: At the Linux Plumbers Conference, the invite-only meeting for the top Linux kernel developers, ByteDance Linux Kernel Engineer Cong Wang, proposed that we [42]use AI and machine learning to tune the Linux kernel for the maximum results for specific workloads... There are thousands of parameters. Even for a Linux expert, tuning them for optimal performance is a long, hard job. And, of course, different workloads require different tunings for different sets of Linux kernel parameters... What ByteDance is working on is a first attempt to automate the entire Linux kernel parameter tuning process with minimal engineering efforts. Specifically, ByteDance is working on tuning Linux memory management. ByteDance has found that with machine learning algorithms, such as [43]Bayesian optimization, automated tuning could even beat most Linux kernel engineers. Why? Well, the idea, as Wang wryly put it, "is not to put Linux kernel engineers out of business." No, the goal is "to liberate human engineers from tuning performance for each individual workload. While making better decisions with historical data, which humans often struggle with. And, last, but never least, find better solutions than those we come up with using our current trial and error, heuristic methods. In short, ByteDance's system optimizes resource usage by making real-time adjustments to things like CPU frequency scaling and memory management. apply tags__________ 172272093 story [44]Microsoft [45]Microsoft Hires Ex-OpenAI Leaders Altman and Brockman To Lead New AI Group [46](techcrunch.com) [47]7 Posted by msmash on Monday November 20, 2023 @06:41AM from the how-about-that dept. Microsoft has hired OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman to [48]head up a "new advanced AI research team," the software conglomerate's chief Satya Nadella said Monday, [49]capping three days of intense discussions following the unexpected decision by OpenAI's board to dismiss Altman. From a report: Many OpenAI members, including the co-founder Brockman, left the firm in protest last week. Altman will serve as the chief executive of the new AI group at Microsoft, Nadella said. "We've learned a lot over the years about how to give founders and innovators space to build independent identities and cultures within Microsoft, including GitHub, Mojang Studios, and LinkedIn, and I'm looking forward to having you do the same." Nadella said Altman and Brockman will be joined by "colleagues." Former OpenAI top talent Szymon Sidor, Jakub Pachocki, Aleksander Madry are joining Microsoft with "more" to follow suit, Brockman said in a post on X. apply tags__________ 172270259 story [50]United States [51]US Autoworkers End Strike with Pay Raises and a Chance to Unionize EV Battery Plants [52](apnews.com) [53]19 Posted by EditorDavid on Monday November 20, 2023 @03:34AM from the picket-and-grinning dept. There's been predictions that a transition to electric vehicles would hurt autoworkers. But this week U.S. autoworkers ended their strike after winning "significant gains in pay and benefits," [54]reports the Associated Press: The United Auto Workers union overwhelmingly ratified new contracts with Ford and Stellantis, that along with a similar deal with General Motors will raise pay across the industry, force automakers to absorb higher costs and help reshape the auto business as it shifts away from gasoline-fueled vehicles... The companies agreed to dramatically raise pay for top-scale assembly plant workers, with increases and cost-of-living adjustments that would translate into 33% wage gains. Top assembly plant workers are to receive immediate 11% raises and will earn roughly $42 an hour when the contracts expire in April of 2028. Under the agreements, the automakers also ended many of the multiple tiers of wages they had used to pay different workers. They also agreed in principle to bring new electric-vehicle battery plants into the national union contract. This provision will give the UAW an opportunity to unionize the EV battery plants plants, which will represent a rising share of industry jobs in the years ahead. In October the union's president [55]criticized what had been the original trajectory of the auto industry. "The plan was to draw down engine and transmission plants, and permanently replace them with low-wage battery jobs. We had a different plan. And our plan is winning." And this week the union's president [56]said they had not only "raised wages dramatically for over a hundred thousand workers" — and improved their retirement security. "We took a major step towards ensuring a just transition to electric vehicles." In Belvidere, Illinois, the union "won a commitment from Stellantis to reopen a shuttered factory and even add an EV battery plant," the Associated Press notes. "The new contract agreements were widely seen as a victory for the UAW," their article adds — and perhaps even for other autoworkers. After the UAW's president announced plans to try unionizing other plants, three foreign automakers in the U.S. — Honda, Toyota and Hyundai — "quickly responded to the UAW contract by raising wages for their factory workers." apply tags__________ 172271079 story [57]News [58]OpenAI Fiasco: Emmett Shear Becomes Interim OpenAI CEO as Altman Talks Break Down [59]38 Posted by [60]Slashdot Staff on Sunday November 19, 2023 @11:25PM from the bye-openai dept. Sam Altman will not be returning as CEO of OpenAI, after a furious weekend of negotiations. The Information [61]reports: Sam Altman won't return as CEO of OpenAI, despite efforts by the company's executives to bring him back, according to co-founder and board director Ilya Sutskever. After a weekend of negotiations with the board of directors that fired him Friday, as well as with its remaining leaders and top investors, Altman will not return to the startup he co-founded in 2015, Sutskever told staff. Emmett Shear, co-founder of Amazon-owned video streaming site Twitch, will take over as interim CEO, Sutskever said. The decision "which flew in the face of comments OpenAI executives shared with staff on Saturday and early Sunday "could deepen a crisis precipitated by the board's sudden ouster of Altman and its removal of President Greg Brockman from the board Friday. Brockman, a key engineer behind the company's successes, resigned later that day, followed by three senior researchers, threatening to set off a broader wave of departures to OpenAI's rivals, including Google, and to a new AI venture Altman has been plotting in the wake of his firing. Venture capitalist Jason Calacanis [62]predicts on X: The employees at OpenAI just lost billions of dollars in secondary share sales that were about to happen at a $90b valuation - that's over. Done. I think OpenAI will lose half their employees, the 12-18 month lead, and 90% of their valuation in 2024. Just insane value destruction What's your prediction for the future of OpenAI? apply tags__________ 172270419 story [63]AI [64]Cruise's CEO Resigns [65](techcrunch.com) [66]27 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday November 19, 2023 @10:55PM from the designating-drivers dept. An anonymous reader shared [67]this report from TechCrunch: Kyle Vogt, the serial entrepreneur who co-founded and led Cruise from a startup in a garage through its acquisition and ownership by General Motors, has resigned, according to an email sent to employees Sunday evening... The executive shakeup comes a less than a month after the California Department of Motor Vehicles [68]suspended Cruise's permits to operate self-driving vehicles on public roads after an [69]October 2 incident that saw a pedestrian — who had been initially hit by a human-driven car and landed in the path of a Cruise robotaxi — run over and dragged 20 feet by the AV. A video, which TechCrunch also viewed, showed the robotaxi braking aggressively and coming to a stop over the woman. The DMV's order of suspension stated that Cruise withheld about seven seconds of video footage, which showed the robotaxi then attempting to pull over and subsequently dragging the woman 20 feet... [M]ore layoffs are expected at the company that employs about 4,000 full-time employees. TechCrunch notes that Vogt previously co-founded Justin.tv Socialcam, Twitch, and shares this quote from an email that Vogt sent to all employees Sunday evening. "The startup I launched in my garage has given over 250,000 driverless rides across several cities, with each ride inspiring people with a small taste of the future... "The status quo on our roads sucks, but together we've proven there is something far better around the corner." apply tags__________ 172269841 story [70]The Almighty Buck [71]The IMF Launches 'Central Bank Digital Currency' Handbook, Says CBDCs Could Someday Replace Cash [72](cnbc.com) [73]56 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday November 19, 2023 @08:47PM from the making-money dept. An anonymous reader [74]shared this report from CNBC: Central bank digital currencies [75]have the potential to replace cash, but adoption could take time, said Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund on Wednesday. "CBDCs can replace cash which is costly to distribute in island economies," she said Wednesday at the Singapore FinTech Festival. "They can offer resilience in more advanced economies. And they can improve financial inclusion where few hold bank accounts." [...] "CBDCs would offer a safe and low-cost alternative [to cash]. They would also offer a bridge to go between private monies and a yardstick to measure their value, just like cash today which we can withdraw from our banks," the IMF chief said. The IMF has said that more than 100 countries are exploring CBDCs — or approximately 60% of countries in the world. "The level of global interest in CBDCs is unprecedented. Several central banks have already launched pilots or even issued a CBDC," the IMF said in [76]a September report. According to a 2022 survey conducted by the Bank for International Settlements, of the 86 central banks surveyed, [77]93% said they were exploring CBDCs, while 58% said they were likely to or may possibly issue a retail CBDC in either the short or medium term. But as of June, only 11 countries have adopted CBDCs, with an additional 53 in advanced planning stages and 46 researching the topic, according to data from the Atlantic Council... On Wednesday, the fund launched [78]a CBDC handbook as a reference guide for policymakers around the world... Georgieva also said that artificial intelligence "could amplify some of the benefits of CBDCs" by providing accurate credit scoring and personalized support. apply tags__________ 172269643 story [79]Role Playing (Games) [80]Text Adventures are Still Thriving in Interactive Fiction Competition - and On Threads [81](threads.net) [82]10 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday November 19, 2023 @07:41PM from the twisty-little-passages dept. Today saw the end of [83]IFComp.org's 29th annual text adventure competition (now administered by the charitable non-profit IF Technology Foundation). [84]74 new and original text adventures competed for a share of the $7,523 prize pool, with the winners announced in [85]a special online ceremony on Twitch this afternoon. After all the votes were tabulated, the winning game was [86]Dr Ludwig and the Devil, a 90-minute epic in which an esteemed mad scientist tries to double-cross Beelzebub himself — along with "the world's least effective torch and pitchfork-wielding mob!" Coming in second was [87]LAKE Adventure. (Its premise? That it's a 13-year-old's 1993 game being revisited by its author 28 years later — complete with some gloriously retro artwork.) And finishing third was [88]The Little Match Girl 4 (described as "a touching epic time travel fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.) But also this week, the owner of the web site [89]80sNostalgia.com has created [90]a text adventure using nothing but inter-linked posts on Threads. "Think you can get under The Bridge?" its first post challenges. "Test your gaming skills with this Threads exclusive text-based game! "And then try to get your head around got much work it took to make it..." apply tags__________ 172268965 story [91]Medicine [92]A Viral Post on Social Media Will Clear the Medical Debt of Strangers [93](msn.com) [94]142 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday November 19, 2023 @05:34PM from the last-act dept. "To celebrate my life, I've arranged to buy up others' medical debt and then destroy the debt," reads [95]a posthumous tweet posted Tuesday after the death of 38-year-old Casey McIntyre. [96]The Washington Post explains... McIntyre, who served as publisher at Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House, was diagnosed in 2019 and proceeded through treatment without taking on debt, [husband Andrew Rose] Gregory told The Washington Post. But many fellow cancer patients she met were in more precarious financial positions, Gregory added. "We were both so keenly aware that Casey had great health insurance through Penguin Random House," said Gregory, 41. "Casey had no medical debt...." About nine months before McIntyre died, her husband came across a [97]video online about members of a North Carolina church who purchased nearly $3.3 million of local residents' medical debt for $15,048 in a "debt jubilee," a historical reference to ancient stories about [98]personal debts being canceled at regular intervals. The couple chose to make monthly donations to [99]RIP Medical Debt, the same organization that partnered with the North Carolina churchgoers. The nonprofit organization aims to abolish medical debt "at pennies on the dollar," according to its website. For every $100 donated, the company relieves $10,000 of medical debt. As of Saturday, nearly [100]$200,000 had been donated to RIP Medical Debt in McIntyre's memory, which would wipe out approximately $20 million of unpaid medical bills. [By Sunday afternoon it had risen to over $334,000...] Allison Sesso, president and chief executive of RIP Medical Debt, said her organization found out about McIntyre's case after McIntyre's posthumous social media post went viral. Sesso said the pace of donations was record-setting for her charity. "What an incredible gesture to the world as you're exiting," Sesso told The Post. "This final act of generosity is blowing up. The amount that they're raising and the rate at which this has gone is not something that we're used to." McIntyre's [101]post on X has now received 65,400 likes — and 3,086 reposts. apply tags__________ 172268897 story [102]Microsoft [103]Microsoft Celebrates 20th Anniversary of 'Patch Tuesday' [104](microsoft.com) [105]11 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday November 19, 2023 @04:34PM from the Windows-updates dept. This week the Microsoft Security Response Center [106]celebrated the 20th anniversary of Patch Tuesday updates. In a blog post they call the updates "an initiative that has become a cornerstone of the IT world's approach to cybersecurity." Originating from the [107]Trustworthy Computing memo by Bill Gates in 2002, our unwavering commitment to protecting customers continues to this day and is reflected in Microsoft's [108]Secure Future Initiative announced this month. Each month, we deliver security updates on the second Tuesday, underscoring our pledge to cyber defense. As we commemorate this milestone, it's worth exploring the inception of Patch Tuesday and its evolution through the years, demonstrating our adaptability to new technology and emerging cyber threats... Before this unified approach, our security updates were sporadic, posing significant challenges for IT professionals and organizations in deploying critical patches in a timely manner. Senior leaders of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) at the time spearheaded the idea of a predictable schedule for patch releases, shifting from a "ship when ready" model to a regular weekly, and eventually, monthly cadence... This led to a shift from a "ship when ready" model to a regular weekly, and eventually, monthly cadence. In addition to consolidating patch releases into a monthly schedule, we also organized the security update release notes into a consolidated location. Prior to this change, customers had to navigate through various Knowledge Base articles, making it difficult to find the information they needed to secure themselves. Recognizing the need for clarity and convenience, we provided a comprehensive overview of monthly releases. This change was pivotal at a time when not all updates were delivered through Windows Update, and customers needed a reliable source to find essential updates for various products. Patch Tuesday has also influenced other vendors in the software and hardware spaces, leading to a broader industry-wide practice of synchronized security updates. This collaborative approach, especially with hardware vendors such as AMD and Intel, aims to provide a united front against vulnerabilities, enhancing the overall security posture of our ecosystems. While the volume and complexity of updates have increased, so has the collaboration with the security community. Patch Tuesday has fostered better relationships with security researchers, leading to more responsible vulnerability disclosures and quicker responses to emerging threats... As the landscape of security threats evolves, so does our strategy, but our core mission of safeguarding our customers remains unchanged. apply tags__________ 172268777 story [109]AI [110]Amazon Announces 'Olympus' LLM to Compete With OpenAI and Google [111](reuters.com) [112]14 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday November 19, 2023 @03:34PM from the AI-antics dept. Amazon "is investing millions in training an ambitious large language model," [113]reports Reuters, "hoping it could rival top models from OpenAI and Alphabet, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters." The model, codenamed as "Olympus", has 2 trillion parameters, the people said, which could make it one of the largest models being trained. OpenAI's GPT-4 model, one of the best models available, is reported to have one trillion parameters... The team is spearheaded by Rohit Prasad, former head of Alexa, who now reports directly to CEO Andy Jass... Amazon believes having homegrown models could make its offerings more attractive on AWS, where enterprise clients want to access top-performing models, the people familiar with the matter said, adding there is no specific timeline for releasing the new model. "While the parameter count doesn't automatically mean Olympus will outperform GPT-4, it's probably a good bet that it will, at minimum, [114]be very competitive with its rival from OpenAI," argues a financial writer at the Motley Fool — as well as Googles nascent AI projects. Amazon could have a key advantage over its competition, one that CEO Andy Jassy [115]alluded to in the company's third-quarter earnings call. Jassy said, "Customers want to bring the models to their data, not the other way around. And much of that data resides in AWS [Amazon Web Services] as the clear market segment leader in cloud infrastructure...." Amazon will likely also leverage Olympus in other ways. For example, the company could make its CodeWhisperer generative AI coding companion more powerful. Jassy noted in the Q3 call that all of Amazon's "significant businesses are working on generative AI applications to transform their customer experiences." Olympus could make those initiatives even more transformative. They point out that Amazon's profits more than tripled in the third quarter of 2023 from where they were in 2022. And Amazon's stock price has already jumped more than 40% in 2023. apply tags__________ 172268653 story [116]Supercomputing [117]Linux Foundation Announces Intent to Form 'High Performance Software Foundation' [118](linuxfoundation.org) [119]5 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday November 19, 2023 @02:34PM from the helping-hpc dept. This week the Linux Foundation "[120]announced the intention to form the [121]High Performance Software Foundation. "Through a series of technical projects, the High Performance Software Foundation aims to build, promote, and advance a portable software stack for high performance computing by increasing adoption, lowering barriers to contribution, and supporting development efforts." As use of high performance computing becomes ubiquitous in scientific computing and digital engineering, and AI use cases multiply, more and more data centers deploy GPUs and other compute accelerators. The High Performance Software Foundation intends to leverage investments made by the United States Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, and other international projects in accelerated high performance computing to exploit the performance of this diversifying set of architectures. As an umbrella project under the Linux Foundation, HPSF intends to provide a neutral space for pivotal projects in the high performance software ecosystem, enabling industry, academia, and government entities to collaborate together on the scientific software stack. The High Performance Software Foundation already benefits from strong support across the high performance computing landscape, including leading companies and organizations like Amazon Web Services, Argonne National Laboratory, CEA, CIQ, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Kitware, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NVIDIA, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, and the University of Oregon. Its first open source technical projects include: * Spack: the high performance computing package manager * Kokkos: a performance-portable programming model for writing modern C++ applications in a hardware-agnostic way. * AMReX: a performance-portable software framework designed to accelerate solving partial differential equations on block-structured, adaptively refined meshes. * WarpX: a performance-portable Particle-in-Cell code with advanced algorithms that won the 2022 Gordon Bell Prize * Trilinos: a collection of reusable scientific software libraries, known in particular for linear, non-linear, and transient solvers, as well as optimization and uncertainty quantification. * Apptainer: a container system and image format specifically designed for secure high-performance computing. * VTK-m: a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for accelerator architectures. * HPCToolkit: performance measurement and analysis tools for computers ranging from laptops to the world's largest GPU-accelerated supercomputers. * E4S: the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack * Charliecloud: high performance computing-tailored, lightweight, fully unprivileged container implementation. apply tags__________ 172268513 story [122]GNU is Not Unix [123]The FSF Condemns Unauthorized Derivatives of GNU Licenses [124](fsf.org) [125]38 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday November 19, 2023 @01:34PM from the that's-not-good-hackers dept. The Free Sofware Foundation [126]issued a clarifying blog post this week, saying the organization is "pleased when people use GNU licenses to distribute and license software." But "we condemn the use of unauthorized, confusing derivatives of the licenses." Unfortunately, some authors engage in confusing practices by drafting licenses using existing terms and conditions of GNU free software licenses, without the intention of granting all four freedoms to users. For example, we have long seen attempts to add restrictions to the license text itself, placed in the LICENSE file, or included elsewhere in the program's release. An example is the so-called "[127]Commons Clause," which, when applied to a free software license, affirms that the program is covered by the license. But, at the same time, is contradicting in its meaning by asserting that selling copies of the program or implementing a commercial service with the program is prohibited. The immediate consequence of the practice of inserting a restriction into a GNU license in this way is the confusion it causes for the community. Users still see the name of the original license, with its preamble and terms and conditions intact, transmitting a strong message that the purpose of the license is to enable users — grant users — their essential software freedoms. This message is clear from the license's text, and is bolstered from the renown accrued by the FSF and GNU trademarks, and their decades of free software advocacy. At the same time, these same users see a contradictory statement of the "Commons Clause," which is clearly contrary to the sprit of the free software movement and the Free Software Definition... [T]o make it even clearer that added restrictions are incompatible with our license, we gave users the right to delete such added restrictions [[128]in 2007] and preserve the program's freedom. But we at the FSF have another legal tool against attempts to release programs under GNU General Public Licenses that have been wrongly altered to become nonfree licenses. The FSF holds copyrights and common law trademarks to the GNU family of General Public Licenses. Moreover, the FSF holds registered trademarks for "FSF," "Free Software Foundation," and "GNU." [...] We can't control the drafting by others of proprietary software licenses, but we can and do forbid doing this in a way that misleadingly associates those licenses with GNU or GNU licenses... [W]e are entitled to legally enforce our copyright and trademark for FSF licenses that have been altered by added restrictions to a verbatim GNU license... Licenses that confuse users about the freedoms they grant are damaging to the free software movement because they threaten to dilute the value and power of these licenses. When GNU licenses are misused through such confusing practices, it harms the renown accrued by the GNU project and the FSF over decades of free software advocacy. It is our duty to all computer users to stop these practices, and, if necessary, we will use our legal rights to this end. apply tags__________ 172266455 story [129]Idle [130]1993's 'Second Reality' Demo Recreated for the Apple II [131](deater.net) [132]29 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday November 19, 2023 @12:34PM from the blasts-from-the-past dept. Long-time Slashdot reader [133]deater writes: The [134]Second Reality demoscene demo from 1993 is one of the most well known demos of all time, pushing a 486 running DOS to its limits. There have been remakes for other architectures over the years, including Atari ST, Gameboy color, and Commodore 64. At this past Demosplash 2023 demoparty a [135]version for the Apple II was released (and won 1st place), which [136]was quite a challenge as the Apple II graphics have essentially none of the hardware acceleration available on the other platforms. apply tags__________ 172265381 story [137]Science [138]Archaeologists Unearth a Secret Lost Language From 3,000 Years Ago [139](sciencealert.com) [140]86 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday November 19, 2023 @11:34AM from the klaatu-barada-nikto dept. "And no, it's not COBOL," jokes long-time Slashdot reader [141]schwit1, sharing [142]this report from ScienceAlert: A secret text has been discovered in Türkiye, scattered among tens of thousands of ancient clay tablets, which were written in the time of the Hittite Empire during the second millennium BCE. No one yet knows what the curious cuneiform script says, but it seems to be a long-lost language from more than 3,000 years ago. Experts say the mysterious idiom is unlike any other ancient written language found in the Middle East, although it seems to share roots with other Anatolian-Indo-European languages. The sneaky scrawlings start at the end of a cultic ritual text written in Hittite — the oldest known Indo-European tongue — after an introduction that essentially translates to: "From now on, read in the language of the country of [143]Kalasma"... Currently, there are no available photos of the newly discovered tablet with Kalamaic writings, as experts are still working out how to translate it. Schwemer and his colleagues hope to publish their results along with images of their discovery sometime next year. apply tags__________ 172265249 story [144]Python [145]How Mojo Hopes to Revamp Python for an AI World [146](acm.org) [147]25 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday November 19, 2023 @10:34AM from the AI-advances dept. Python "come with downsides," argues [148]a new article in Communications of the ACM. "Its programs tend to run slowly, and because it is inefficient at running processes in parallel, it is not well suited to some of the latest AI programming." "Hoping to overcome those difficulties, computer scientist Chris Lattner set out to create a new language, Mojo, which offers the ease of use of Python, but the performance of more complex languages such as C++ or Rust." Lattner tells the site "we don't want to break Python, we want to make Python better," while software architect Doug Meil says Mojo is essentially "Python for AI... and it's going to be way faster in scale across multiple hardware platforms." Lattner teamed up with Tim Davis, whom he had met when they both worked for Google, to form Modular in January 2022. The company, where Lattner is chief executive officer and Davis chief product officer, provides support for companies working on AI and is developing Mojo. A modern AI programming stack generally has Python on top, Lattner says, but because that is an inefficient language, it has C++ underneath to handle the implementation. The C++ then must communicate with performance accelerators or GPUs, so developers add a platform such as Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) to make efficient use of those GPUs. "Mojo came from the need to unify these three different parts of the stack so that we could build a unified solution that can scale up and down," Lattner says. The result is a language with the same syntax as Python, so people used to programming in Python can adopt it with little difficulty, but which, by some measures, can run up to 35,000 times faster. For AI, Mojo is especially fast at performing the matrix multiplications used in many neural networks because it compiles the multiplication code to run directly on the GPU, bypassing CUDA... "Increasingly, code is not being written by computer programmers. It's being written by doctors and journalists and chemists and gamers," says Jeremy Howard, an honorary professor of computer science at the University of Queensland, Australia, and a co-founder of fast.ai, a. "All data scientists write code, but very few data scientists would consider themselves professional computer programmers." Mojo attempts to fill that need by being a superset of Python. A program written in Python can be copied into Mojo and will immediately run faster, the company says. The speedup comes from a variety of factors. For instance, Mojo, like other modern languages, enables threads, small tasks that can be run simultaneously, rather than in sequence. Instead of using an interpreter to execute code as Python does, Mojo uses a compiler to turn the code into assembly language. Mojo also gives developers the option of using static typing, which defines data elements and reduces the number of errors... "Static behavior is good because it leads to performance," Lattner says. "Static behavior is also good because it leads to more correctness and safety guarantees." Python creator Guido van Rossum "says he is interested to watch how Mojo develops and whether it can hit the lofty goals Lattner is setting for it..." according to the article, " but he emphasizes that the language is in its early stages and, as of July 2023, Mojo had not yet been made available for download." In June, Lattner did [149]an hour-long interview with the TWIML AI podcast. And in 2017 Chris Lattner [150]answered questions from Slashdot's readers. apply tags__________ [151]« Newer [152]Older » Slashdot Top Deals Slashdot Top Deals [153]Slashdot Deals Slashdot Poll What's your favorite machine to play games on? (*) Xbox ( ) PlayStation ( ) Nintendo ( ) PC ( ) Smartphone (BUTTON) vote now [154]Read the 86 comments | 29050 votes Looks like someone has already voted from this IP. 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