Mustapha Suleyman knows a thing or two about AI.  Originally co-founder of DeepMind, a company and IP eventually acquired by Google, Mr. Suleyman is now CEO of AI at Microsoft. In this latest "Surfing the Singularity" blog installment, we'll review his recent book "The Coming Wave". Hang ten! Go Where You Wanna Go As a game, Go is notorious for its huge array of potential moves, exponentially more complex than chess for example, where computer models beat the best chess player way back in 1997. In 2016, DeepMind's model AlphaGo beat the best Go player in world after being trained the better part of a year with reinforced machine learning on a data set of human Go games and computer-vs-computer play. The following year, DeepMind's AlphaZero exceeded that performance in just a few days of training computation without ever being shown a single Go game, just having been described the rules of the game.[1]    Alas, born at the wrong time. In his Bill Gates-re...

Hello and happy holidays to all. In this blog installment I'll report back from SuperComputing 2024, offer up a programmer-friendly view of the quantum computing space with a code tour of Grover's algorithm, and share some of my own thoughts on using the latest crop of AI programmer assistant tools. (Sadly, not this Grover.) It was a pleasant SC24 high performance computing (HPC) conference in November. Having attended in past either in-person (Atlanta this year) or virtual, this year I chose virtual again. The big loss was being unable to troll the enormous vendor hall, but otherwise, webcasts make it much easier to be in two places at one time or to skim topics of passing interest.[1] There's a new top HPC machine (that we know of) - El Capitan, and its powered by AMD, containing about a million CPU cores and about 10 million GPU cores.[2] Molecular dynamics papers presented using a GPU-accelerated exascale computer reminds that, quantum aside for a moment, the real wor...