Latest news with #scope
Forbes
5 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
The New Cloud Rush: How AI Is Reshaping Everything
Jeffrey Gregor is General Manager of OVHcloud US . getty AI is driving a seismic shift in how we think about cloud infrastructure. As businesses rush to integrate AI, cloud service providers are having to evolve to meet soaring demand, and we're only just starting to grasp the full scope of this transformation. In my work with enterprise clients, tech teams and cloud architects, I've seen firsthand how AI is reshaping expectations and capabilities. Let's look at how AI is redefining the cloud, what businesses should watch for and how they can extract real value while keeping costs and risks under control. One of the most common use cases at the moment is AI-powered virtual assistants and internal chatbots. These tools help support teams respond more efficiently by enabling employees to retrieve company-specific data through simple questions—no need to dig through files or wikis. In legal departments, AI is transforming how research is conducted. Instead of sifting through documents or search engines, firms can connect proprietary databases to LLMs that give relevant answers instantly. It's like having a tireless assistant with domain knowledge built in, available 24/7. Firms are also increasingly leveraging AI to assess and refine trial strategies, aiming to enhance their chances of success in the courtroom. The technology can help predict judicial decisions, simulate jury behavior, enhance legal research and help with document review. AI workloads are incredibly resource-intensive, requiring powerful GPUs, high-speed networking and secure environments for sensitive data. Building and maintaining this in-house is out of reach for many businesses. Fortunately, cloud providers are on hand to offer instant access to the latest cutting-edge chips, tools and frameworks. Cloud platforms also democratize AI. Whether you're using pretrained models, APIs for image recognition or full-blown GenAI, cloud providers offer an easy usage-based on-ramp for organizations at any stage of AI adoption, at a fraction of the cost required to build this infrastructure. Many companies are still exploring what AI can do for them, and the cloud makes that process fast while minimizing risk. Crucially, the cloud supports rapid testing and iteration. You don't necessarily need the most powerful GPUs or deepest pockets to get started; models like the NVIDIA L40S can be a cost-effective, lower-power option for high-performance inference and training without the cost or power draw of the H200. The key is to test, refine and scale what works without committing to massive infrastructure investments up front. Trust, Transparency And Cost Control Public cloud models come with their own risks, especially when it comes to cost and trust. Even as excitement around AI grows, companies are discovering that evaluating costs and ROI can be challenging. I've heard many clients share their frustrations about unpredictable cloud billing, with unexpected and quickly mounting fees for storage, bandwidth or API calls. To use AI responsibly in the cloud, transparent pricing models are key so businesses are clear about costs up front. That means understanding factors like egress and ingress charges, query volumes, storage tiers and model usage limits. Security and trust are just as important. GenAI often involves sensitive or proprietary data. If you're using a shared model or public API, you must ensure your data isn't being logged, used for training or exposed to risks like prompt injection. Poorly configured AI services have already led to accidental data leaks. That's why I often recommend hosting your own model in a controlled cloud environment, especially when regulations like HIPAA or GDPR are involved. Many top cloud providers offer dedicated hardened environments, encryption and certifications. Another often-overlooked factor is networking. Moving data between your systems and the cloud can be slow and expensive unless your provider offers enterprise-grade connectivity. Not all clouds are created equal. Some run on their own global fiber, while others don't. Ask questions before you commit. Looking Ahead: The AI-Cloud Era We're at the dawn of a new era in enterprise technology. Cloud platforms are becoming the foundations of secure, intelligent and scalable systems. AI—especially GenAI and now agentic AI—is driving this evolution, and things are only going to accelerate. A handful of major players, along with a thriving open-source community, are laying the foundation for powerful, customizable AI tools. Success in this new landscape comes down to three things: know what you need, ensure you're getting value and keep control over your data. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Sharjah 24
21 hours ago
- Business
- Sharjah 24
UAE, Kuwait sign MoUs to boost cooperation
The signings took place during His Highness Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed's official visit to Kuwait and were held at Bayan Palace. These agreements are intended to broaden the scope of strategic partnerships between the two nations and to support their mutual development priorities. The agreements and memorandums include the following: An MoU for cooperation in the health sector, signed by Abdul Rahman bin Mohammad bin Nasser Al Owais, UAE Minister of Health and Prevention, and Dr. Ahmed Abdul Wahab Al-Awadi, Minister of Health of Kuwait. An MoU between the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy (AGDA) and the Sheikh Soud Nasser AlSabah Kuwait Diplomatic Institute, signed by Khalifa Shaheen Al Marar, UAE Minister of State, and Abdullah Ali Al Yahya, Foreign Minister of the State of Kuwait. An MoU in the field of land transport and roads infrastructure, signed by Suhail bin Mohammed Al Mazrouei, UAE Minister of Energy and Infrastructure, and Dr Noura Mohammed Al-Mashaan, Minister of Public Works & Municipality of Kuwait. An MoU in the field of social development affairs, signed by Shamma bint Suhail Faris Al Mazrui, UAE Minister of Community Empowerment, and Dr. Amthal Hadi Al-Huwaila, Minister of Social Affairs, Social Development, and Family and Childhood of Kuwait. An MoU in industry and advanced technology, signed by Dr. Sultan bin Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology, and Khalifa Abdullah Dhahi Al-Ajeel Al-Askar, Minister of Commerce and Industry of Kuwait. An MoU in education sector, signed by Sarah bint Yousif Al Amiri, UAE Minister of Education, and Sayed Jalal Sayed Abdul Mohsen Al-Tabtabaei Minister of Education of Kuwait. An MoU in oil and gas cooperation, signed by Suhail bin Mohammed Al Mazrouei, UAE Minister of Energy and Infrastructure, and Tariq Suleiman Al-Roumi, Oil Minister of Kuwait. An MoU in the field of combating human trafficking and another on legal cooperation were signed by Abdullah bin Sultan bin Awad Al Nuaimi, UAE Minister of Justice, and Nasser Yousef Al-Sumait, Minister of Justice of Kuwait. An MoU in the field of electricity, water, and future energy, signed by Suhail bin Mohammed Al Mazrouei, UAE Minister of Energy and Infrastructure and Dr. Subaih Al-Mukhaizeem, Minister of Electricity, Water, and Renewable Energy of Kuwait. An MoU in the field of promoting direct investment, signed by Mohamed Hassan Al Suwaidi, UAE Minister of Investment, and Dr. Meshaal Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, Director-General of Kuwait Direct Investment Promotion Authority (KDIPA). An MoU in the field of data protection and information exchange in joint security projects, signed by Major General Khalifa Hareb Al Khaili, Undersecretary of the UAE Ministry of Interior, and Major General Ali Al-Adwani, Acting Undersecretary of Ministry of Interior of Kuwait. An agreement was also signed earlier on the "Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership" launched by MGX, BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners, and Microsoft, which now includes the Kuwait Investment Authority as a partner. In addition, a contract was signed between the Kuwait's Ministry of Defence and the UAE's EDGE Group for the procurement and delivery of several 'Falaj 3' class missile boats.
Elle
a day ago
- Health
- Elle
With ‘Hum,' Helen Phillips Embraces the ‘Vast Gray Area' of Modern Technology
Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy. The dish rags were disconcerting. In the fall of 2019, author Helen Phillips had already accumulated a hundred-plus-page document's worth of anecdotes about AI and surveillance for a potential book she wanted to write, the book that would become last year's Hum, now out in paperback. But it wasn't until Phillips herself experienced the slow creep of data tracking that the concepts of her book started feeling routinely manifest. During one particular walk home from work, she'd realized she needed to buy new dish rags; she'd opened her computer shortly after, and there they were, advertised for her. 'Had I ever searched for them? I didn't remember,' Phillips tells me now. 'Had I said something aloud? It was just that weird feeling of being surveilled.' She went ahead and bought the dish rags, but the purchase didn't rid her of 'that little ick feeling,' that sense of being watched. 'What if you took that kind of consumer surveillance to an extreme place?' Phillips asks. That question ended up forming the central premise of Hum, a taut work of literary science-fiction that's as much about the insecurities of intimacy and parenthood as it is the expanding scope of technology. The story takes place in a climate-ravaged near-future world, in which Phillips's protagonist, May, loses her job to the proliferation of AI, a proliferation that has led to the increasing presence of robots nicknamed 'hums.' After undergoing an experimental surgery that prevents her face from being recognized by surveillance tech, May uses her earnings to take her husband and kids to the Botanical Garden, a lush and luxurious paradise protected from the climbing temperatures outside its fortress. But even a world inside an insulated bubble isn't always a legible one, and soon May has to depend on a hum to keep her family intact. Below, Phillips discusses how she tackled the big questions of technology, parenthood, and climate change in such a tight story; what working on Hum taught her about the future; and the common denominator amongst her books, including the 2019 National Book Award-longlisted The Need and 2015's The Beautiful Bureaucrat. The first line of the book came to me early on: 'The needle inched closer to her eye, and she tried not to flinch.' There's a bit of the anxiety of the future that we are facing right there in that line. May is interested in the possibility of not being recognizable in a city where surveillance is so common. She's also doing it for money because she has lost her job to artificial intelligence. That's what she has to sell at this point in her life: herself as a test subject. There's also a different answer to that question that's a little more personal. When I was 11 years old, I lost all of my hair due to alopecia. So I've been a bald woman for the vast majority of my life. And when I was about 13, my mom and I had the idea to get eyebrows and eyeliner tattooed on my face so that I wouldn't have to apply that in the morning. The process of having facial tattoos at that age—my sense memory of that is very present in [the book's] initial scene. So that was where the physical grounding of it came from. When I am setting out to write a novel, it is, in a large part, a way of processing my own anxieties—a way of understanding them better. I was assembling the things that I'm concerned about as I look to the future; there's a long laundry list of those. And as I was reading and thinking about this plot, they all coalesced. The original draft of the book was twice as long and had a lot more research in it. I cut the book basically in half, because what I want is [the research] to be the iceberg that you feel under the book, but not the focus point of the book. I certainly wanted to explore the vast gray area that I feel in my own life about technology. It is actually encouraging or reassuring that you can know where your children are at all times. But, is it also troubling that we surveil our children by way of their devices? And always know where they are? Is there some loss of essential human exploration and adventure that they lose when they know that we're tracking them? I'm concerned about that. The hums are an embodiment of that [dissonance]. My hope is that the reader experiences the hums in a lot of different ways and have a range of different feelings toward them: from finding them sinister to finding them comforting and cute. I think that's how technology is for us: It's nice that when I'm lost, I can find my way on my phone. I don't even know how I'd get around the world without it. But do I find it eerie that, in order for my phone to help me navigate a map, someone somewhere basically knows where I am at all times? It's such a double-edged sword; I wanted to get at that in the book. Since I began writing Hum, climate change has accelerated and artificial intelligence—when I was writing, it was GPT-3, not ChatGPT, which is a whole leap. So these problems have only become thornier since I began researching the book. But in the interviews I did as I was researching the book, I would ask people, 'What can we do?' And a refrain I heard was that we have to have community; we have to have meaningful communities. It's only from that sense of interconnectedness and collective action that we can hope to have change. The book doesn't really get to that collective action place, but I do intend that, at the end—at least in the unit of the family—there's some sense of an interconnected body of care and wellbeing. I do feel like The Beautiful Bureaucrat, The Need, and Hum are kind of in a series together. They all have female protagonists, and they're told in the close-third [point of view] with a real intimacy to that protagonist's anxiety and desire. They all have some element of speculation or science fiction that, for me, is reflecting back on the world we do live in. They also all have a very different element of scientific research. With The Beautiful Bureaucrat, I did a lot of mathematical research. With The Need, I did a lot of research about paleobotany because that was the profession of the protagonist. For this book, I did a lot of research about artificial intelligence and climate change. But they're speaking to each other in a deeper way, too. A reviewer recently said, 'Helen makes anxiety a genre,' which is maybe a dubious distinction. But I do think that—to some extent—these are books about confronting your anxieties. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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Business Standard
a day ago
- Business
- Business Standard
Waaree Renewable Technologies bags Rs 345 cr solar project in Rajasthan
Waaree Renewable Technologies Ltd (WRTL) on Tuesday announced securing a solar project worth Rs 345 crore in Rajasthan from a prominent domestic renewable energy generation company. The project is scheduled for completion in the financial year 2025-26, the company said. WRTL has secured a significant EPC order for a 300 MW AC (alternate current)/ 435 MW DC (direct current) ground-mounted solar photovoltaic project in Bikaner, Rajasthan. The order, valued at more than Rs 345 crore, was awarded by a prominent domestic renewable energy generation company, the company said, without disclosing any further details. "This collaboration marks a significant milestone in our relationship, built on mutual trust, shared vision, and a commitment to sustainable growth. We value this partnership deeply and look forward to working closely together to deliver impactful outcomes now and into the future," said Sunil Rathi, Executive Director, WRTL. The scope of work includes engineering, procurement, construction and commissioning of the solar plant, along with the development of a 33/220 kV pooling substation. The project will also feature advanced robotic cleaning systems to ensure high performance and reduce long-term operations and maintenance (O&M) costs. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Metro
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
Nick Frost makes strong vow about Harry Potter TV series after backlash
Nick Frost knows he's got some gigantic boots to fill – or half gigantic at least – when he plays Hagrid in the upcoming Harry Potter TV show. In April, the news broke that the comedy star, 53, was set to play the Hogwarts groundskeeper and Keeper of the Keys in the HBO show. He's joining a cast boasting more stars than a wizard's robe, including John Lithgow as Dumbledore, Janet McTeer as Professor McGonnagall, and Paapa Essiedu as Severus Snape. However, in a new interview, the star touched on the pressure of playing such a beloved character and made a promise to fans to put his own spin on the half-giant instead of replicating what Robbie Coltrane, who played Hagrid in the Harry Potter movies, did. Nick told Collider: 'You get cast because you're going to bring something to that. While I'm really aware of what went before me in terms of Robbie [Coltrane]'s amazing performance, I'm never going to try and be Robbie.' 'I'm going to try and do something, not 'different'' I think you have to be respectful to the subject matter, but within that, there's scope for minutia,' he continued. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video 'I always read Hagrid as he's like a lovely, lost, violent, funny, warm child. I think the beauty of being able to do a book a season means I get to explore that a lot more, and I can't wait. He's funny! I want it to be funny and cheeky and scared and protective and childlike. That's what I'm planning on doing.' The news that Nick was joining the Wizarding World, however, has not been without controversy. When the Shaun of the Dead star shared a picture of himself posing with a copy of the Philosopher's Stone, he found himself inundated with comments from disappointed fans who were annoyed he'd willingly associate himself with the controversial series. The Harry Potter TV show and the franchise in general have been subject to backlash following JK Rowling's comments about the trans community. The author has been criticised for expressing views that have been deemed transphobic by some. Several members of the Harry Potter movie cast have been critical of the 59-year-old author's stance on trans people, including Daniel Radcliffe, Eddie Redmayne, David Tennant, and Emma Watson. After Nick muted the post, a number of people took to social media to express their frustration with the star. @WizardingNews wrote: 'Actor Nick Frost is currently getting destroyed on his Instagram for willingly joining the cast of JK Rowling's new Harry Potter TV show reboot & tacitly supporting her irredeemable bigotry. It's so bad he disabled comments on a post holding up a Harry Potter book. Not great.' @Steeeeeeevens also claimed: 'Lmao Nick Frost turned off the comments on his Instagram post about doing the new Harry Potter show. Sorry, man, those are the lumps you gotta take when you decide to do the terf show.' 'Honestly, I am shocked by him. I genuinely had more faith in him,' X user Sam replied. Dominic McLaughlin as Harry Potter Alastair Stout as Ron Weasley Arabella Stanton as Hermione Granger John Lithgow as Albus Dumbledore Janet McTeer as Minerva McGonagall Paapa Essiedu as Severus Snape Nick Frost as Rubeus Hagrid Paul Whitehouse as Argus Filch Luke Thallon as Quirinus Quirrell Despite the backlash, though, Nick made clear he's keen to get to work on the show, explaining More Trending 'I'm just so excited to get going,' he explained. 'I've gone in to do head sculpts and have your hand stand and stuff, and they say, 'Oh, have a look at this.' And you're like, 'Wow. That's the coolest thing.' 'I love films. I've loved cinema my whole life, so to be part of that universe now and that they're showing me, like, a dancing mushroom, it's like, 'That is so cool!'' The Harry Potter reboot series is currently gearing up for production, with filming expected to begin this summer in the UK. View More » The Harry Potter TV show is set for release in 2026. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Netflix viewers have days to binge 'phenomenal' drama before new episodes drop MORE: Furious WWE fans 'hijack' major Raw matches after heartbreaking cuts MORE: 16 and Pregnant star Whitney Purvis 'living a nightmare' after son Weston dies aged 16
