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Author: avi maxwel

How Agoda is shaping up to be a technology powerhouse

How Agoda is shaping up to be a technology powerhouse

With a massive technology footprint, including half a million CPU cores that process some two trillion Kafka messages a day, Agoda has the scale and expertise to run its IT operations efficiently and at a lower cost than many of its peers.

That’s why the online travel agency, which caters primarily to consumers in Asia-Pacific, runs its IT infrastructure almost entirely on its private cloud. The company, an emerging technology powerhouse, operates four datacentres across the region and uses a lot of open-source software to build its services.

In an interview with Computer Weekly, Idan Zalzberg, chief technology officer (CTO) at Agoda, talks up the company’s technology strategy, such as building its own expertise to avoid vendor lock-in. He also shares his thoughts on the challenges of public cloud adoption and what Agoda is doing to manage the complexities of working with a large partner ecosystem.

Aaron Tan: Tell

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Does Technology Win Wars? The U.S. Military Needs Low-Cost Innovation—Not Big-Ticket Boondoggles

Does Technology Win Wars? The U.S. Military Needs Low-Cost Innovation—Not Big-Ticket Boondoggles

It is ironic that, despite two decades of U.S.-led conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq, it took just a few months of Russia’s war in Ukraine to finally draw attention to the depleted state of U.S. weapons stocks and the vulnerabilities in U.S. military supply chains. In recent months, American military leaders have expressed increasing frustration with the defense industrial base. As the U.S. Navy’s top officer, Admiral Mike Gilday, told Defense News in January, “Not only am I trying to fill magazines with weapons, but I’m trying to put U.S. production lines at their maximum level right now and to try and maintain that set of headlights in subsequent budgets so that we continue to produce those weapons.” The fighting in Ukraine, Gilday noted, has made it clear to military leaders “that the expenditure of those high-end weapons in conflict could be higher than we estimated.”

Tellingly, just 100 days

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AI could cause nuclear-level disaster, third of experts tell poll | Technology

AI could cause nuclear-level disaster, third of experts tell poll | Technology

Stanford University report says ‘incidents and controversies’ associated with AI have increased 26 times in a decade.

More than one-third of researchers believe artificial intelligence (AI) could lead to a “nuclear-level catastrophe”, according to a Stanford University survey, underscoring concerns in the sector about the risks posed by the rapidly advancing technology.

The survey is among the findings highlighted in the 2023 AI Index Report, released by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, which explores the latest developments, risks and opportunities in the burgeoning field of AI.

“These systems demonstrate capabilities in question answering, and the generation of text, image, and code was unimagined a decade ago, and they outperform the state of the art on many benchmarks, old and new,” the report’s authors said.

“However, they are prone to hallucinations, routinely biased, and can be tricked into serving nefarious aims, highlighting the complicated ethical challenges associated with their

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See How 29 Celebrities Aged With AI Technology

See How 29 Celebrities Aged With AI Technology

See How 29 Celebrities Aged With AI Technology

So, for the past week and a half, my entire FYP has been people using AI to see what they’d look like older.

So, I wondered just how accurate are these AI filters? What would happen if I used this same technology on pictures of older celebs when they were younger? Here are the results:

1.

First, this is what Dick Van Dyke looked like in 1958 when he was 33:

Here’s what AI technology thinks Dick would look like today, at 97 years old:

And here’s a side-by-side of AI-generated Dick vs. the real Dick:

2.

This is what Meryl Streep looked like in 1979 when she was 30:

Here’s what AI technology thinks Meryl would look like today, at 73 years old:

And here’s a side-by-side of AI-generated Meryl vs. the real Meryl:

3.

This is what Robert De Niro

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Amazon is ‘investing heavily’ in the technology behind ChatGPT

Amazon is ‘investing heavily’ in the technology behind ChatGPT



CNN
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Amazon wants investors to know it won’t be left behind in the latest Big Tech arms race over artificial intelligence.

in a letter to shareholders Thursday, Amazon

(AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy said the company is “investing heavily” in large language models (LLMs) and generative AI, the same technology that underpins ChatGPT and other similar AI chatbots.

“We have been working on our own LLMs for a while now, believe it will transform and improve virtually every customer experience, and will continue to invest substantially in these models across all of our consumer, seller, brand, and creator experiences,” Jassy wrote in his letter to shareholders.

The remarks, which were part of Jassy’s second annual letter to shareholder since taking over as CEO, hint at the pressure that many tech companies feel to explain how they can tap into the rapidly evolving marketplace for AI products. Since ChatGPT was released

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