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Nvidia’s Chinese tweak
GPU and chip giant Nvidia has tweaked its advanced H100 chip in order to comply with restrictions set by U.S. regulators to prevent such chips from being exported or sold to Chinese customers, for national security reasons. Instead, Nvidia confirmed that another version of the chip, called the H800, will be exported to China. The company also said that the chip was being used by Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent.
The curbs were part of the Biden administration’s push to stop the Chinese government from accessing chips that make it possible to develop advanced AI models and modernise military systems. Nvidia is a leader in the AI chip space. However, the company would not explain how exactly the H100 was different from the H800 in terms of technical specifications.
Google slowly frees Bard
Users in the UK and the U.S. can join a waitlist to test out Google’s Bard chatbot in its English language version. Before this, only approved testers could try out the chatbot and its capabilities. Reuters reported that one major difference between Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT is that Bard produces paragraphs at once while ChatGPT types out responses by the word. However, Bard is still prone to errors and did generate incorrect answers when responding to prompts.
A senior product director at Google denied that the company was competing with Microsoft in the AI space, in spite of the two companies announcing new AI-powered work tools for their users.
Qualcomm may face class action suit
Some Qualcomm shareholders complaining about anticompetitive practices in the company may sue as a class, ruled a federal judge in the U.S. The class-action lawsuit concerns whether or not Qualcomm harmed competition in the market by falsely reporting its chip business and its technology licensing business separately. Those who want to sue the company believe that the way Qualcomm represented its business artificially inflated stock prices.
Qualcomm opposed the allegations and claimed they were “meritless,” saying that its business practices were already known. However, the judge did not agree with the argument.
