Software & Tech

New job roles to emerge

A survey of CFOs in June by Duke University and the Atlanta and Richmond Federal Reserve banks found that 32% of organizations plan to use AI in the next year to complete tasks once done by humans. And in the first six months of 2024, nearly 60% of companies (and 84% of large companies) said they had deployed software, equipment, or technology to automate tasks previously done by employees\.

While some work is being negatively affected by the rapid proliferation of AI tools and platforms, new positions such as AI ethics specialists and AI prompt engineers will emerge as dedicated roles within global organizations.

“It is no secret that the existing chip manufacturers are essentially maxed out on their production capacity for the next couple of years when it comes to AI,” Park said. “Any ability that Intel has to further support AI workloads would be welcomed by the market at large. This is especially important because AI is often developed in the cloud due to the unpredictability of the workload, and AWS is potentially a blank check in terms of acquiring AI chips.”

Neil Shah, partner & co-founder at Counterpoint Research, noted that the deal marks a significant milestone for Intel, potentially allowing it to package Amazon’s next-generation Trainium chip — possibly Trainium 3 — which could exceed 1000 watts, putting it on par with Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture.

Microsoft has added a number of features to its Copilot artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled assistant for office productivity, as it builds out its AI strategy for business users.

The company has spent the past year fleshing out how AI through Copilot is helping its customers become more productive. In the earnings call for its full year and Q3 2024 results, CEO Satya Nadella said almost half of the Fortune 500 are using Copilot.

“We’ve seen accelerated adoption across industries and geographies, with companies like Amgen, BP, Cognizant, Koch Industries, Moody’s, Novo Nordisk, Nvidia and Tech Mahindra purchasing over 10,000 seats,” he said.

Rather than storing data in rows and columns for traditional searches, or as embeddings for vector search, a knowledge graph represents data points as nodes and edges. A node will be a distinct fact or characteristic, and edges will connect all the nodes that have relevant relationships to that fact. In the example of a product catalog, the nodes may be the individual products while the edges will be similar characteristics that each of those products possess, like size or color.

Sending a query to a knowledge graph involves looking for all the relevant entities to that search, and then creating a knowledge sub-graph that brings all those entities together.

Number three in the hard drive maker’s league, Toshiba, has announced products of 24TB and 28TB. These are the 24TB MG11, which is conventional magnetic recording (CMR) HDD technology, and the 28TB MA11, which uses shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology.

Seagate was the first to market around a year ago with similar drives, the CMR 24TB Exos X24 and an SMR variant at 28TB. Western Digital followed at the end of 2023 with its Ultrastar DC HC580 (24TB) and HC680 (28TB SMR). Toshiba’s previous HDD flagship capacity-wise was the 22TB conventional MG10F.