Sharing the 5 most interesting articles I read this past week (7th Nov 2023)
Romain Groleau
Helping Enterprises & Organisations to embrace the power of Data, AI and Cloud to extract and create optimal & sustainable value from their technology and business transformation | Managing Director at Accenture
Hey LinkedIn network,
In a world where the pace of change is continuously accelerating and new tech are bending the innovation curve I found it critical to keep learning, unlearning and relearning. While I read about pretty much about everything I thought I would start sharing more about the articles which have stuck with me for the past week. I will focus my sharing about emerging tech, cloud, data, AI, sustainability to start with. Here the top 5 articles I selected for the week.
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IBM has developed a brain-inspired computer chip called NorthPole that removes some of the inherent architecture bottlenecks of existing computer chips. While it will be optimised to achieve better performance for compute-intensive workloads like AI-image recognition the fascinating outcome is that it could be 25x more efficient than current CPU architecture. The article flips the idea on its head comparing the current CPU architecture and brain architecture stating that if we were to simulate our brain on the current inefficient CPU architecture we would need the equivalent output of 12 nuclear reactors, it gives a good idea of the level of inefficiencies and potential improvement to make Technology greener.
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There are a lot of talks about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) which refers to the hypothetical future artificial intelligence that possesses human-like capability to learn and think which implies having some form of self-awareness and consciousness. OpenAI CEO is saying it will happen within the next decade, Elon Musk said by 2029, others are backing the theory it will happen within the next 10 years too. When we look at the amount of investments being poured in AI (see article #4 below) and the brightest brains focusing their energy on AI it is easy to imagine it being a realistic scenario. Hopefully we don't take shortcuts to get there and build responsible and ethical guardrails in terms of sustainability, bias, IP, fairness as the technology evolves.
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领英推荐
A more narrow use case of AI with computer vision capabilities Amazon uses on their fleet of trucks. I liked the simplicity of the use case and the very tangible value it delivers: it takes off 80% effort and time to inspect an Amazon truck (1min down from 5min) and improves safety by providing a consistent approach to detecting failures and maintenance requirements. When you consider a fleet of 100,000 trucks the 80% time reduction is a great business case.
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AI startups in Silicon Valley secured a $17.9 billion?in funding, more than any other tech sectors. Startup deals dropped by 31% but investments in AI companies jumped by 27% in the third quarter. We will continue to see the trend that every startup is an AI company and has AI in its name, slogan or mission, same as what we saw with cloud over the past 5 years.
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This is a one of my favourite and most anticipated report every year, I find the research very well conducted, over large samples of organisations, talent and roles and it always have some eye-opening nuggets. This year the report focused on capabilities required to deliver organisational performance beyond revenue, team performance, employee well-being and also covers software delivery and operation performance. A few of the nuggets this year include: a) high quality documentation increases ~13x the organisation performance compare to low quality documentation, b) fair distribution of work and impact on well-being - there is a direct correlation between the amount of repetitive work underrepresented individuals and women do (29-40% more than men) and the amount of burnout this group of individuals experience (24% more than men), c) if there were one area of focus to improve software delivery it would have to be speeding up code reviews, indeed teams with faster code reviews delivered 50% more software performance (safety, time to market and efficiency).
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That's a wrap for this week, if you have any comments / feedback or want to highlight an article or reading which you found impactful please share below in the comment section or in a private message.