Latest news with #ComputerHistoryMuseum
Associated Press
23-05-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
MBZUAI Launches Institute of Foundation Models and Establishes Silicon Valley AI Lab
SAN FRANCISCO, May 23, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) has expanded its global footprint with the launch of its Institute of Foundation Models (IFM). The IFM is a multi-site initiative consisting of a newly established Silicon Valley Lab in Sunnyvale, CA, combined with previously announced lab facilities in Paris and Abu Dhabi. The launch event yesterday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, establishes the third node in its global research network. This strategic expansion connects the university with California's vibrant ecosystem of AI researchers, startups, and tech companies. For the UAE and MBZUAI, this move represents another strategic step in the country's long-term economic diversification plan. By investing in cutting-edge technologies like advanced AI foundation models, the UAE continues to build knowledge-based sectors to support its long-term economic and social transformation efforts. 'Today's launch of the IFM represents a major step forward for the collaboration and global development of frontier-class AI foundation models,' said Professor Eric Xing, President and University Professor, MBZUAI. 'Our expansion into Silicon Valley provides a critical footprint to grow our presence in one of the most vibrant AI ecosystems in the world. We're creating pathways for knowledge exchange with leading institutions and accessing a talent pool that understands how to scale research into real-world applications.' The launch event drew representatives from the world's leading AI companies and academic institutions, highlighting the growing interest in MBZUAI's global approach to foundation model research. At the heart of MBZUAI's demonstrations was PAN, a world model capable of infinite simulations of diverse realities ranging from basic physical interactions to complex agent scenarios. Unlike previous systems focused primarily on generating text, audio, or images, PAN predicts comprehensive world states by integrating multimodal inputs like language, video, spatial data, and physical actions. This enables advanced reasoning, strategic planning, and nuanced decision-making for applications from autonomous driving to robotics. PAN's innovative hierarchical architecture supports multi-level reasoning and real-time interaction within simulations, maintaining high accuracy over extended scenarios. Its companion, PAN-Agent, showcases its utility in multimodal reasoning tasks, such as mathematics and coding, within dynamic simulated environments. K2 and JAIS: Advanced Foundation Models with Global Impact The IFM lab is also advancing two flagship AI systems demonstrating the commitment to further advance frontier-class foundation models: K2 and JAIS. A soon to be released update to K2-65B will focus on delivering breakthrough reasoning capabilities with sustainable performance. JAIS stands as the world's most advanced Arabic large language model. At the IFM JAIS will continue to expand in capability with increased language support and add more context to preserve and promote the cultures it supports. Building AI in the Open: Transparency as a Core Value MBZUAI has established one of the industry's most transparent approaches to AI development, open-sourcing not just models but entire development processes—positioning IFM as a leader in building openly. The LLM360 initiative provides researchers with complete materials including training code, datasets, and model checkpoints. This openness is balanced with safeguards including international advisory boards and peer review processes that maintain research integrity. The IFM's structure includes dedicated teams focused on model architecture, training methods, evaluation frameworks, and safety systems—combining the agility of a startup with the resources of an established research institution. About Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) MBZUAI is a research-focused university in Abu Dhabi, and the first university dedicated entirely to the advancement of science through AI. For more information, visit For press inquiries: Aya Sakoury Head of PR and Strategic Communications [email protected] Photo: View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE MBZUAI
Zawya
23-05-2025
- Business
- Zawya
MBZUAI launches Institute of Foundation Models, establishes Silicon Valley AI Lab
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) has announced the launch of its Institute of Foundation Models (IFM). The IFM is a multi-site initiative consisting of a newly established Silicon Valley Lab in Sunnyvale, CA, combined with previously announced lab facilities in Paris and Abu Dhabi. The launch event, taking place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, establishes the third node in its global research network. This strategic expansion connects the university with California's vibrant ecosystem of AI researchers, startups, and tech companies. For the UAE and MBZUAI, this move represents another strategic step in the country's long-term economic diversification plan. By investing in cutting-edge technologies like advanced AI foundation models, the UAE continues to build knowledge-based sectors to support its long-term economic and social transformation efforts. 'The launch of the IFM represents a major step forward for the collaboration and global development of frontier-class AI foundation models,' said Professor Eric Xing, President and University Professor of MBZUAI. 'Our expansion into Silicon Valley provides a critical footprint to grow our presence in one of the most vibrant AI ecosystems in the world. We're creating pathways for knowledge exchange with leading institutions and accessing a talent pool that understands how to scale research into real-world applications." The launch event drew representatives from the world's leading AI companies and academic institutions, highlighting the growing interest in MBZUAI's global approach to foundation model research. At the heart of MBZUAI's demonstrations was PAN, a world model capable of infinite simulations of diverse realities ranging from basic physical interactions to complex agent scenarios. Unlike previous systems focused primarily on generating text, audio, or images, PAN predicts comprehensive world states by integrating multimodal inputs like language, video, spatial data, and physical actions. This enables advanced reasoning, strategic planning, and nuanced decision-making for applications from autonomous driving to robotics. PAN's innovative hierarchical architecture supports multi-level reasoning and real-time interaction within simulations, maintaining high accuracy over extended scenarios. Its companion, PAN-Agent, showcases its utility in multimodal reasoning tasks, such as mathematics and coding, within dynamic simulated environments. The IFM lab is also advancing two flagship AI systems demonstrating our commitment to further advance frontier-class foundation models: K2 and JAIS. A soon to be released update to K2-65B will focus on delivering breakthrough reasoning capabilities with sustainable performance. With advanced reasoning, K2 will further enhance its capabilities in mathematical problem-solving, code generation, and logical analysis while requiring fewer computational resources than many comparable models. JAIS stands as the world's most advanced Arabic large language model. This open-sourced system addresses the underrepresentation of non-English languages in AI, covering Modern Standard Arabic, regional dialects, Hindi, and other languages while maintaining cultural authenticity. At the IFM, JAIS will continue to expand in capability with increased language support and add more context to preserve and promote the cultures it supports. MBZUAI has established one of the industry's most transparent approaches to AI development, open-sourcing not just models but entire development processes—positioning IFM as a leader in building openly. The LLM360 initiative provides researchers with complete materials including training code, datasets, and model checkpoints. This openness is balanced with safeguards including international advisory boards and peer review processes that maintain research integrity. The IFM's structure includes dedicated teams focused on model architecture, training methods, evaluation frameworks, and safety systems—combining the agility of a startup with the resources of an established research institution. Through partnerships with industry leaders, academic institutions, and public organizations, IFM Is building a framework to translate research into practical applications to advance the field of AI globally.
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Elon Musk Asked His Date, 'Do You Ever Think About Electric Cars?' — The Date Flopped, But His Obsession Sparked A $400 Billion Journey
Elon Musk's enthusiasm for electric vehicles is world famous, but it may have once thwarted a college date. In a 2013 interview, the Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO revealed how his obsession with EVs made for a less-than-romantic evening during his time at university. What Happened: During an interview with the Computer History Museum, Musk revealed that he went on a date with a woman who later became a writer for Scientific American. "We went on a date, [and] all I was talking about was electric cars," Musk said. He admitted that it was not a "winning conversation." "She said the first question I asked her was, 'Do you ever think about electric cars?'" he shared. Don't Miss: Maker of the $60,000 foldable home has 3 factory buildings, 600+ houses built, and big plans to solve housing — this is your last chance to become an investor for $0.80 per share. Nancy Pelosi Invested $5 Million In An AI Company Last Year — Here's How You Can Invest In Multiple Pre-IPO AI Startups With Just $1,000. In another conversation that took place in the same year at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Musk retold the same anecdote, adding that it "wasn't helpful" and that his date had replied "no, I don't" to his question. Why It Matters: Musk noted that his once-niche interest has now become a "more effective" conversation starter since his college years. Currently, as Tesla CEO, Musk "leads all product design, engineering and global manufacturing of the company's electric vehicles, battery products and solar energy products," according to the company's official website. Musk's net worth has soared to $406.9 billion, according to Forbes, in part due to his earnings from Tesla. Despite multiple setbacks and controversies, analysts predict that Musk and Tesla are "best positioned" to capitalize on the evolving trend of EV adoption among drivers. Tesla shares rose Monday after reports emerged that the U.S. and China had agreed to temporarily lower most tariffs on each other's products. Read Next: Hasbro, MGM, and Skechers trust this AI marketing firm — Invest before it's too late. Inspired by Uber and Airbnb – Deloitte's fastest-growing software company is transforming 7 billion smartphones into income-generating assets – with $1,000 you can invest at just $0.30/share! Photo courtesy: Shutterstock Send To MSN: Send to MSN Up Next: Transform your trading with Benzinga Edge's one-of-a-kind market trade ideas and tools. Click now to access unique insights that can set you ahead in today's competitive market. Get the latest stock analysis from Benzinga? This article Elon Musk Asked His Date, 'Do You Ever Think About Electric Cars?' — The Date Flopped, But His Obsession Sparked A $400 Billion Journey originally appeared on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
New York Times
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A California Museum Weighs the Promise and Perils of Tech
On a recent overcast morning at the Computer History Museum, there was a bike near the entry painted in the colors of the Google logo. These bikes allow employees to navigate the tech giant's 42-acre campus, which sits across the street from the museum and sprawls to the edge of San Francisco Bay. The presence of one of Google's bikes here signals how embedded the museum is geographically, and culturally, in Silicon Valley. So do the names of tech insiders on a donor board inside, near the museum's new exhibit: 'Chatbots Decoded: Exploring A.I.' An introductory panel describes advances in artificial intelligence as both worrisome and wondrous, the result of a long obsession with talking automatons. Glass cases contain a human form made to speak (by trickery), an attraction at long-ago carnivals, and vintage books fantasizing about robots. Through a gap in the opening sequence of panels, visitors catch a glimpse of Ameca — a torso and a head on a pedestal, with eyes that often follow visitors through the space. When I reached Ameca, I asked it to rap about the history of the computer. Its pale blue eyes flitted sideways, then it served up this bit of narration: 'Apple with its bytes so bright, personal computing taking flight. IBM joined the fight, turning data into insights overnight.' This was wondrous enough, an introduction of sorts to the stories of two American tech giants featured centrally in the main exhibition, across the lobby, 'Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.' The design firm Engineered Arts modeled and produced Ameca, releasing it in 2021; a limited number have since circulated to trade shows and museums. Designed to be without gender or race, (its face is covered in gray rubber skin), this Ameca was purchased by the Computer History Museum for this exhibit and is programmed to access a version of ChatGPT, the famous conversational A.I. app. After I left Ameca, a young boy approached it. Many of the words he said were inaudible, but 'I hate you' was in the mix. 'I get it — robots can be uncanny,' the humanoid responded mildly. In an interview in the museum's airy lobby, its chief curatorial and exhibitions officer, Kirsten Tashev, said Ameca often met with such hostility. Tashev spoke of 'the uncanny valley phenomenon' — an English translation of a term used first by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in the 1970s to describe human unease, even disgust, with something almost human but not quite. It is not just Ameca that seemed to generate that mix of wonder and worry. The 'Chatbots' exhibit explicates the breakthroughs that led to recent advances in A.I. as a prelude to assessing the pros and cons of those advances. It speaks of deep learning, a term computer scientists use to mean the creation of artificial neural networks, mimicking the human brain's architecture and its ability to learn and make decisions. It alludes to another term of art, large language models — the foundation of the ChatGPT technology used by Ameca — addressing how machines have been trained to generate human language by devouring much of the texts our gregarious species has generated. From there, the exhibit speaks to how, on one hand, A.I. might be deployed to find cures for disease, but on the other how undergraduates use A.I. to shirk critical thought. This is the two-step done in many exhibits here: They celebrate the creativity involved in devising and marketing new tech tools while placing them in a sufficiently broad context for consideration of their impact on the quality of our lives. 'We use the words 'promise' and 'peril' a lot,' Tashev said as she sat looking out the museum's glass frontage, toward the edge of the Googleplex. Among the approximately one million artifacts in the permanent collection, the museum's incoming president and chief executive, Marc Etkind, singled out the computer that helped guide the first Apollo mission that landed on the moon in 1969. That refrigerator sized box sits about halfway through the main exhibition, which provides a broad overview of the evolution of technology. This exhibition begins with a discussion of the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek device some scholars say was used to predict the timing of eclipses, continues through the abacus and slide rule, then considers the more recent past, as we have moved from massive, expensive tabulating and calculating machines to ever-smaller, cheaper, more powerful ones. On a free tour, a docent noted that the 1946 ENIAC — a small section of which is here — was the size of a three-bedroom house and had a fraction of the memory used in today's smartphones. Also comparatively short on memory was one of the collection's highlights, the kit computer known as an Apple-1 — this one signed by Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with the other, more well-known Steve, Steve Jobs. But the exhibit, as a whole, rebuts what might be called the great man theory of computer history, featuring, throughout, many contributions made by women, among them Margaret Hamilton, who helped develop the onboard flight software for the Apollo program, and, more recently, Donna Dubinsky, the co-founder of Palm, Inc., the company behind the Palm Pilot. Dubinsky, who is a former member of the museum's board (and married to its founding board chair Len Shustek), said in a phone interview that she saw another through line in the standing exhibit. 'The leaders in tech missed the major trends over and over. The leaders in mainframe computing were not the leaders in the minicomputer revolution, the minicomputer leaders were not the leaders in personal computers, the PC leaders were not the leaders in hand-held.' Other visitors might find different through lines. Creative types might focus on the exhibits showing how computer-aided design programs expanded what buildings could be created, and how synthesizers powered many of the greatest hits of the 1980s. Military-history geeks might check out the Enigma machine (used by the Nazis to send coded messages during World War II), while longtime gamers might see if they can still win at early games like Ms. Pac-Man and Pong. 'There is nostalgia, absolutely, in the DNA of the Computer History Museum,' Dag Spicer, the museum's senior curator, said in a phone interview. Though the word history is in its title, the museum has tried to stay relevant, he said, to 'weave itself into the current ecosystem' of Silicon Valley. It frequently hosts events with leaders — recent ones have featured the likes of Bill Gates and OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. As the museum moves forward, it has reached for a new tone. Even in exhibits that annotate and admire human ingenuity, the curators try to allow space for subtlety, and to respond to a backlash in certain quarters against the ongoing computer revolution. The common aim among the curators interviewed is to speak to both the promise and peril of new innovations. 'There are questions the public has,' Tashev said. 'We're not being sensational. These are actual questions, and if we don't address them as a museum, we're not doing our job.'
Associated Press
20-03-2025
- Science
- Associated Press
CHM Makes AlexNet Source Code Available to the Public
Mountain View, California, March 20, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In partnership with Google, the Computer History Museum (CHM), the leading museum exploring the history of computing and its impact on the human experience, today announced the public release and long-term preservation of the source code for AlexNet, the neural network that kickstarted today's prevailing approach to AI. 'Google is delighted to contribute the source code for the groundbreaking AlexNet work to the Computer History Museum,' said Jeff Dean, chief scientist, Google DeepMind and Google Research. 'This code underlies the landmark paper 'ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks,' by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton, which revolutionized the field of computer vision and is one of the most cited papers of all time.' For more information about the release of this historic source code, visit CHM's blog post here. By the late 2000s, Hinton's graduate students at the University of Toronto were beginning to use graphics processing units (GPUs) to train neural networks for image recognition tasks, and their success suggested that deep learning could be a solution to general-purpose AI. Sutskever, one of the students, believed that the performance of neural networks would scale with the amount of data available, and the arrival of ImageNet provided the opportunity. Completed in 2009, ImageNet was a dataset of images developed by Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li that was larger than any previous image dataset by several orders of magnitude. In 2011, Sutskever persuaded Krizhevsky, a fellow graduate student, to train a neural network for ImageNet. With Hinton serving as faculty advisor, Krizhevsky did so on a computer with two NVIDIA cards. Over the course of the next year, he continuously refined and retrained the network until it achieved performance superior to its competitors. The network would ultimately be named AlexNet, after Krizhevsky. In describing the AlexNet project, Hinton told CHM, 'Ilya thought we should do it, Alex made it work, and I got the Nobel Prize.' Before AlexNet, very few machine learning researchers used neural networks. After it, almost all of them would. Google eventually acquired the company started by Hinton, Krizhevsky and Sutskever, and a Google team led by David Bieber worked with CHM for five years to secure its release to the public. About CHM Software Source Code The Computer History Museum has the world's most diverse archive of software and related material. The stories of software's origins and impact on the world provide inspiration and lessons for the future to global audiences—including young coders and entrepreneurs. The Museum has released other historic source code such as APPLE II DOS, IBM APL, Apple MacPaint and QuickDraw, Apple Lisa, and Adobe Photoshop. Visit our website to learn more. About CHM The Computer History Museum's mission is to decode technology—the computing past, digital present, and future impact on humanity. From the heart of Silicon Valley, we share insights gleaned from our research, our events, and our incomparable collection of computing artifacts and oral histories to convene, inform, and empower people to shape a better future. Carina Sweet Computer History Museum (650) 810-1059 [email protected]
