#AI infrastructure**

[aishuglb12]

IBM’s Strategic Acquisition of Seek AI and the Launch of Watsonx AI Labs in New York City

In a significant move to bolster its position in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector, IBM has acquired Seek AI, a data analysis startup specializing in natural language processing for enterprise data queries. Concurrently, IBM announced the establishment of Watsonx AI Labs, an AI accelerator located in New York City. These initiatives underscore IBM’s commitment to advancing AI technologies and fostering innovation within the enterprise sector.

Understanding Seek AI and Its Innovations

Founded in 2021 by Sarah Nagy, Seek AI has developed a platform that enables users to interact with enterprise data using natural language. This technology allows individuals to pose questions in everyday language, which the system then translates into database queries, facilitating intuitive and efficient data analysis. Seek AI’s solutions have been particularly impactful in sectors such as e-commerce, financial services, and consumer packaged goods, where rapid data insights are crucial for decision-making.

Timeline and Strategic Planning Behind the Acquisition

IBM’s acquisition of Seek AI is part of a broader strategy to enhance its AI capabilities, particularly in natural language processing and data analytics. The planning for this acquisition began in early 2025, with IBM identifying Seek AI’s technology as complementary to its existing AI portfolio. The deal was finalized and publicly announced on June 2, 2025.

Key Figures and Their Roles

The acquisition brings Sarah Nagy, Seek AI’s founder and CEO, into IBM’s fold. Nagy’s expertise in data analytics and AI will be instrumental in integrating Seek AI’s technology into IBM’s offerings. Additionally, Ritika Gunnar, IBM’s General Manager of Data and AI, has been a pivotal figure in orchestrating the launch of Watsonx AI Labs and aligning it with IBM’s strategic objectives.

Significance of the Acquisition and the AI Accelerator

This acquisition is significant for several reasons:

Technological Enhancement: Integrating Seek AI’s natural language processing capabilities enhances IBM’s AI solutions, making them more user-friendly and accessible to enterprise clients.

Market Positioning: By acquiring a startup with innovative technology, IBM strengthens its position in the competitive AI market, particularly in the realm of enterprise data analytics.

Innovation Hub: The establishment of Watsonx AI Labs in New York City positions IBM at the heart of a vibrant tech ecosystem, fostering collaboration and innovation.

Rationale Behind IBM’s Strategic Moves

An AI Lab—short for Artificial Intelligence Laboratory—is a dedicated center for the research, development, and application of AI technologies. These labs are typically operated by universities, tech giants, startups, or public-private partnerships. The goal is to advance the state of artificial intelligence through cutting-edge experiments, model development, ethical testing, and product innovation.

Unlike a regular software development unit, AI labs are innovation-driven, where the focus lies on solving complex problems using machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and even robotics. They serve as hubs for technologists, researchers, students, and entrepreneurs to collaborate, ideate, and build the future of intelligent systems.

AI Labs operate at the intersection of technology, business, and academia. Here’s what typically happens within these innovation centers:

1. Pioneering AI Research

The primary mission of most AI Labs is to drive advanced research in areas like deep learning, generative AI, large language models (LLMs), and reinforcement learning. These labs often publish white papers, participate in global AI challenges, and contribute to the open-source AI ecosystem.

Read More : IBM’s Strategic Acquisition of Seek AI and the Launch of Watsonx AI Labs in New York City

[vm9pza]

space AU

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense

This is the LAST DAY to get my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

If there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating.

Silicon Valley claims to be the epicenter of American innovation, but what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is some combination of nonsense, climate-wrecking tech, and climate-wrecking nonsense tech. Forget Jeff Hammerbacher's lament about "the best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people click ads." Today's best-paid, best-trained technologists are enlisted to making boobytrapped IoT gadgets:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Planet-destroying cryptocurrency scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

NFT frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/crypto-copyright-%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%92%a9/

Or planet-destroying AI frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

If that was the best "innovation" the human race had to offer, we'd be fucking doomed.

But – as Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect – there's a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and exciting innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech:

https://prospect.org/environment/2024-05-30-green-energy-revolution-real-innovation/

The green energy revolution – funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act – is accomplishing amazing feats, which are barely registering amid the clamor of AI nonsense and other hype. I did an interview a while ago about my climate novel The Lost Cause and the interviewer wanted to know what role AI would play in resolving the climate emergency. I was momentarily speechless, then I said, "Well, I guess maybe all the energy used to train and operate models could make it much worse? What role do you think it could play?" The interviewer had no answer.

Here's brief tour of the revolution:

2023 saw 32GW of new solar energy come online in the USA (up 50% from 2022);

Wind increased from 118GW to 141GW;

Grid-scale batteries doubled in 2023 and will double again in 2024;

EV sales increased from 20,000 to 90,000/month.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2023/12/19/building-a-thriving-clean-energy-economy-in-2023-and-beyond/

The cost of clean energy is plummeting, and that's triggering other areas of innovation, like using "hot rocks" to replace fossil fuel heat (25% of overall US energy consumption):

https://rondo.com/products

Increasing our access to cheap, clean energy will require a lot of materials, and material production is very carbon intensive. Luckily, the existing supply of cheap, clean energy is fueling "green steel" production experiments:

https://www.wdam.com/2024/03/25/americas-1st-green-steel-plant-coming-perry-county-1b-federal-investment/

Cheap, clean energy also makes it possible to recover valuable minerals from aluminum production tailings, a process that doubles as site-remediation:

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/toxic-red-mud-co2-free-iron

And while all this electrification is going to require grid upgrades, there's lots we can do with our existing grid, like power-line automation that increases capacity by 40%:

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/13/1187620367/power-grid-enhancing-technologies-climate-change

It's also going to require a lot of storage, which is why it's so exciting that we're figuring out how to turn decommissioned mines into giant batteries. During the day, excess renewable energy is channeled into raising rock-laden platforms to the top of the mine-shafts, and at night, these unspool, releasing energy that's fed into the high-availability power-lines that are already present at every mine-site:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Why are we paying so much attention to Silicon Valley pump-and-dumps and ignoring all this incredible, potentially planet-saving, real innovation? Cooper cites a plausible explanation from the Apperceptive newsletter:

https://buttondown.email/apperceptive/archive/destructive-investing-and-the-siren-song-of/

Silicon Valley is the land of low-capital, low-labor growth. Software development requires fewer people than infrastructure and hard goods manufacturing, both to get started and to run as an ongoing operation. Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It's run by investors who hate the idea of paying people. That's why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete. A company without employees is a company without labor issues, without messy co-determination fights, without any moral consideration for others. It's the natural progression for an industry that started by misclassifying the workers in its buildings as "contractors," and then graduated to pretending that millions of workers were actually "independent small businesses."

It's also the natural next step for an industry that hates workers so much that it will pretend that their work is being done by robots, and then outsource the labor itself to distant Indian call-centers (no wonder Indian techies joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

Contrast this with climate tech: this is a profoundly physical kind of technology. It is labor intensive. It is skilled. The workers who perform it have power, both because they are so far from their employers' direct oversight and because these fed-funded sectors are more likely to be unionized than Silicon Valley shops. Moreover, climate tech is capital intensive. All of those workers are out there moving stuff around: solar panels, wires, batteries.

Climate tech is infrastructural. As Deb Chachra writes in her must-read 2023 book How Infrastructure Works, infrastructure is a gift we give to our descendants. Infrastructure projects rarely pay for themselves during the lives of the people who decide to build them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Climate tech also produces gigantic, diffused, uncapturable benefits. The "social cost of carbon" is a measure that seeks to capture how much we all pay as polluters despoil our shared world. It includes the direct health impacts of burning fossil fuels, and the indirect costs of wildfires and extreme weather events. The "social savings" of climate tech are massive:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

For every MWh of renewable power produced, we save $100 in social carbon costs. That's $100 worth of people not sickening and dying from pollution, $100 worth of homes and habitats not burning down or disappearing under floodwaters. All told, US renewables have delivered $250,000,000,000 (one quarter of one trillion dollars) in social carbon savings over the past four years:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

In other words, climate tech is unselfish tech. It's a gift to the future and to the broad public. It shares its spoils with workers. It requires public action. By contrast, Silicon Valley is greedy tech that is relentlessly focused on the shortest-term returns that can be extracted with the least share going to labor. It also requires massive public investment, but it also totally committed to giving as little back to the public as is possible.

No wonder America's richest and most powerful people are lining up to endorse and fund Trump:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-05-30-democracy-deshmocracy-mega-financiers-flocking-to-trump/

Silicon Valley epitomizes Stafford Beer's motto that "the purpose of a system is what it does." If Silicon Valley produces nothing but planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams, then these are all features of the tech sector, not bugs.

As Anil Dash writes:

Driving change requires us to make the machine want something else. If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system.

https://www.anildash.com/2024/05/29/systems-the-purpose-of-a-system/

To give climate tech the attention, excitement, and political will it deserves, we need to recalibrate our understanding of the world. We need to have object permanence. We need to remember just how few people were actually using cryptocurrency during the bubble and apply that understanding to AI hype. Only 2% of Britons surveyed in a recent study use AI tools:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511x4g7x7jo

If we want our tech companies to do good, we have to understand that their ground state is to create planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams. We need to make these companies small enough to fail, small enough to jail, and small enough to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

We need to hold companies responsible, and we need to change the microeconomics of the board room, to make it easier for tech workers who want to do good to shout down the scammers, nonsense-peddlers and grifters:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that the FTC could hold Amazon executives personally liable for the decision to trick people into signing up for Prime, and for making the unsubscribe-from-Prime process into a Kafka-as-a-service nightmare:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/amazon-execs-may-be-personally-liable-for-tricking-users-into-prime-sign-ups/

Imagine how powerful a precedent this could set. The Amazon employees who vociferously objected to their bosses' decision to make Prime as confusing as possible could have raised the objection that doing this could end up personally costing those bosses millions of dollars in fines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

We need to make climate tech, not Big Tech, the center of our scrutiny and will. The climate emergency is so terrifying as to be nearly unponderable. Science fiction writers are increasingly being called upon to try to frame this incomprehensible risk in human terms. SF writer (and biologist) Peter Watts's conversation with evolutionary biologist Dan Brooks is an eye-opener:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt/

They draw a distinction between "sustainability" meaning "what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it?" and sustainability meaning, "what changes in behavior will allow us to save ourselves with the technology that is possible?"

Writing about the Watts/Brooks dialog for Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith invokes William Gibson's The Peripheral:

With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before…. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/preparing-for-collapse-why-the-focus-on-climate-energy-sustainability-is-destructive.html

Gibson doesn't think this is likely, mind, and even if it's attainable, it will come amidst "unimaginable suffering."

But the universe of possible technologies is quite large. As Chachra points out in How Infrastructure Works, we could give every person on Earth a Canadian's energy budget (like an American's, but colder), by capturing a mere 0.4% of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface every day. Doing this will require heroic amounts of material and labor, especially if we're going to do it without destroying the planet through material extraction and manufacturing.

These are the questions that we should be concerning ourselves with: what behavioral changes will allow us to realize cheap, abundant, green energy? What "innovations" will our society need to focus on the things we need, rather than the scams and nonsense that creates Silicon Valley fortunes?

How can we use planning, and solidarity, and codetermination to usher in the kind of tech that makes it possible for us to get through the climate bottleneck with as little death and destruction as possible? How can we use enforcement, discernment, and labor rights to thwart the enshittificatory impulses of Silicon Valley's biggest assholes?

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

[thatswhatsushesaid]

just like with machine learning, we can and should demystify “the cloud” without demonizing it in the process. cloud computing and cloud storage architecture are extremely useful tools; it’s how they get deployed by big tech companies that can be a problem.

[bitchfitch]

tbh the worst part of this newest ai debacle is the simple fact that being given the option to opt out still puts Tumblr head and shoulders above it's competition for data security. and that's not a compliment to Tumblr.

Because like. let's be frank here. Mindjourney was already scraping Tumblr and probably had been before mindjourney even went public. The anti scraping infrastructure on this site amounts to a "pretty please don't download this:(" note and some misdirection. * And that's still more than a lot of major tech companies are doing. MJ is paying for convenience, not for access.

but by entering an official partnership mindjourney touching shit it doesn't have explicit permission to means an easy court date for a site that's in desperate need for cash. It sucks that this is still one of the best places to post art.

[queen-mabs-revenge]

communist generative ai boosters on this website truly like

[rouge-fauna]

Today on Transportation Engineering: best sidewalk ever

Honestly, I can’t decide which is dumber, the utility polls going in after the sidewalk or the sidewalk being put in around the existing polls…

[probablyasocialecologist]

In some of the work you’ve done on data centers, you talk about how AI is presented as a climate solution, even as it requires resource-intensive data centers and computing to power it. What do you think is the risk of presenting resource-intensive AI as a solution to climate change? This is something that’s already happening, which is basically the imposition of ecological visions of a few, especially in the Global North with private interests, onto the rest of the world. We can see this operating not only when it comes to data centers, but also lithium extraction. Lithium is used for rechargeable batteries, which is a key component of so-called transition technologies, such as electric vehicles. If we want to design a transition towards new forms of energy or less carbon-intensive energies, we need to cooperate with these communities and a very important actor are the ones that are participating in the AI value chain. Companies have a big interest in hiding this value chain, in making sure that these communities don’t have a voice in the media, in regulatory discussions, and so on, because this is crucial for their business model and for the technical capacities that they need. There is a big interest in silencing them. This is why they don’t provide information about what they do. It’s also very important that as we discuss AI governance or regulation, we ask how we can incorporate these communities. If you look at what’s happening in Europe, there is upcoming regulation that is going to request that companies provide some transparency when it comes to energy use. But what about something more radical? What about incorporating these communities in the very governance of data centers? Or if we really want more just technologies for environmental transition, why not have a collective discussion, incorporating actors from different contexts and regions of the world to discuss what will be the most efficient — if you want to use that word — way of allocating data centers. In the case of indigenous communities in the Atacama Desert, water is sacred. They have a special relationship with water. One of the few words that they still have is uma, which stands for water. So how do we make sure that these companies respect the way these communities relate to the environment? It’s impossible to think of any kind of transition without considering and respecting the ecological visions of these groups. I don’t really believe in any technologically intensive form of transition that’s made by technocrats in the Global North and that ignores the effects that these infrastructures are having in the rest of the world and the visions of these communities.

[collapseofindustrialcivilization]

AI-Driven Cyberattacks, Climate Change, and the Fragility of Modern Civilization

The weaponization of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems stands as one of the most plausible and catastrophic risks facing modern civilization. As AI capabilities accelerate, so too does their potential to destabilize the complex, interdependent systems that sustain our societies—namely, power grids, communication networks, and global supply chains. In a scenario increasingly discussed…

[antifataylorswift]

The developers i work with are asking chatgpt questions about my infrastructure that are in our docs. Unsurprisingly they are getting bad advice for our particular setup, and are bothering my team with a bunch of questions about if the advice is right and what would happen if they ran those commands.

[business-watch-daily]

Donald Trump unveils an ambitious plan, heralding private sector contributions of up to $500 billion towards the advancement of artificial intelligence infrastructure

Read More

[jcmarchi]

Industry First: UCIe Optical Chiplet Unveiled by Ayar Labs

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/industry-first-ucie-optical-chiplet-unveiled-by-ayar-labs/

Industry First: UCIe Optical Chiplet Unveiled by Ayar Labs

Ayar Labs has unveiled the industry’s first Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) optical interconnect chiplet, designed specifically to maximize AI infrastructure performance and efficiency while reducing latency and power consumption for large-scale AI workloads.

This breakthrough will help address the increasing demands of advanced computing architectures, especially as AI systems continue to scale. By incorporating a UCIe electrical interface, the new chiplet is designed to eliminate data bottlenecks while enabling seamless integration with chips from different vendors, fostering a more accessible and cost-effective ecosystem for adopting advanced optical technologies.

The chiplet, named TeraPHY™, achieves 8 Tbps bandwidth and is powered by Ayar Labs’ 16-wavelength SuperNova™ light source. This optical interconnect technology aims to overcome the limitations of traditional copper interconnects, particularly for data-intensive AI applications.

“Optical interconnects are needed to solve power density challenges in scale-up AI fabrics,” said Mark Wade, CEO of Ayar Labs.

The integration with the UCIe standard is particularly significant as it allows chiplets from different manufacturers to work together seamlessly. This interoperability is critical for the future of chip design, which is increasingly moving toward multi-vendor, modular approaches.

The UCIe Standard: Creating an Open Chiplet Ecosystem

The UCIe Consortium, which developed the standard, aims to build “an open ecosystem of chiplets for on-package innovations.” Their Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express specification addresses industry demands for more customizable, package-level integration by combining high-performance die-to-die interconnect technology with multi-vendor interoperability.

“The advancement of the UCIe standard marks significant progress toward creating more integrated and efficient AI infrastructure thanks to an ecosystem of interoperable chiplets,” said Dr. Debendra Das Sharma, Chair of the UCIe Consortium.

The standard establishes a universal interconnect at the package level, enabling chip designers to mix and match components from different vendors to create more specialized and efficient systems. The UCIe Consortium recently announced its UCIe 2.0 Specification release, indicating the standard’s continued development and refinement.

Industry Support and Implications

The announcement has garnered strong endorsements from major players in the semiconductor and AI industries, all members of the UCIe Consortium.

Mark Papermaster from AMD emphasized the importance of open standards: “The robust, open and vendor neutral chiplet ecosystem provided by UCIe is critical to meeting the challenge of scaling networking solutions to deliver on the full potential of AI. We’re excited that Ayar Labs is one of the first deployments that leverages the UCIe platform to its full extent.”

This sentiment was echoed by Kevin Soukup from GlobalFoundries, who noted, “As the industry transitions to a chiplet-based approach to system partitioning, the UCIe interface for chiplet-to-chiplet communication is rapidly becoming a de facto standard. We are excited to see Ayar Labs demonstrating the UCIe standard over an optical interface, a pivotal technology for scale-up networks.”

Technical Advantages and Future Applications

The convergence of UCIe and optical interconnects represents a paradigm shift in computing architecture. By combining silicon photonics in a chiplet form factor with the UCIe standard, the technology allows GPUs and other accelerators to “communicate across a wide range of distances, from millimeters to kilometers, while effectively functioning as a single, giant GPU.”

The technology also facilitates Co-Packaged Optics (CPO), with multinational manufacturing company Jabil already showcasing a model featuring Ayar Labs’ light sources capable of “up to a petabit per second of bi-directional bandwidth.” This approach promises greater compute density per rack, enhanced cooling efficiency, and support for hot-swap capability.

“Co-packaged optical (CPO) chiplets are set to transform the way we address data bottlenecks in large-scale AI computing,” said Lucas Tsai from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). “The availability of UCIe optical chiplets will foster a strong ecosystem, ultimately driving both broader adoption and continued innovation across the industry.”

Transforming the Future of Computing

As AI workloads continue to grow in complexity and scale, the semiconductor industry is increasingly looking toward chiplet-based architectures as a more flexible and collaborative approach to chip design. Ayar Labs’ introduction of the first UCIe optical chiplet addresses the bandwidth and power consumption challenges that have become bottlenecks for high-performance computing and AI workloads.

The combination of the open UCIe standard with advanced optical interconnect technology promises to revolutionize system-level integration and drive the future of scalable, efficient computing infrastructure, particularly for the demanding requirements of next-generation AI systems.

The strong industry support for this development indicates the potential for a rapidly expanding ecosystem of UCIe-compatible technologies, which could accelerate innovation across the semiconductor industry while making advanced optical interconnect solutions more widely available and cost-effective.

[impact-newswire]

ISG to Assess Google Cloud Partner Ecosystem

Upcoming ISG Provider Lens™ reports will study service provider offerings for enabling AI, other workloads on the Google Cloud platform Press Release – February 06, 2025 – STAMFORD, Conn. – Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm, has launched a research study evaluating service providers supporting enterprise use of Google Cloud…

[queen-mabs-revenge]

I'm just saying maybe you shouldn't talk about the Luddites if you actually refuse to engage with their historical struggle and the reasons for it and instead just perpetuate the bourgeois propaganda about them and somehow act that's the materialist take. get fucking serious please.