Ayar Labs is the latest moonshot eliciting significant interest and investment amid the artificial intelligence frenzy. The San Jose-based company has raised $155 million in funding rounds from tech giants, including Nvidia (NVDA), Intel (INTC), and AMD Ventures. The capital raised values the company at about $1 billion.
Ayar AI Chips
The investment comes from Ayar Labs, which is making a name for itself by leveraging light to transfer data between chips. Ayar Labs is staring at tremendous opportunity amid growing demand for technologies that enable rapid and constant transmission of data in server systems. Its technology stands out partly because it uses light photons to speed up data transmission. Light has been used for many years to transport data, as seen in the subsea fiber optic cables that link continents.
Ayar Labs has reduced its size by several orders of magnitude to fit the technology into a chip package. Customers are already testing Ayar Labs’ chips for high-volume manufacturing operations. He stated that production will be scaled up with the funds raised in this round.
GlobalFoundries is currently producing the startup chips, and Ayar Labs has partnered with Intel Corp. to incorporate its technology into the Santa Clara Company’s production portfolio. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM), a leader in the industry, is also in contact with the startup… To hasten the adoption of silicon photonics technology, including in chip packaging, TSMC joined a consortium of businesses that established an industry alliance this year.
Gemini 2.0 Upgrade
Meanwhile, Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Google has unveiled a new iteration of its flagship AI model, which it claims is twice as quick as its predecessor and will power user-assistance virtual agents. The new model, Gemini 2.0, can help with coding projects and online searches in addition to producing audio and images in multiple languages. The new Gemini capabilities “make it possible to build agents that can think, remember, plan, and even take action on your behalf.”
Google has been attempting to make sure that the newest wave of AI tools stays strong in search and advertising. Although the company has managed to maintain its market share in search thus far, OpenAI is exerting pressure on the industry leader by integrating additional search functions into ChatGPT. The ultimate goal of both businesses is to create artificial general intelligence, or software, that can carry out tasks just as well as or even better than people.
Consequently, the tech giant has added more AI to its search engine, which is still its lifeblood, in addition to its experimental products. It plans to start testing Gemini 2.0 in search and AI Overviews, the summaries powered by AI that appear at the top of Google searches. This will enhance the speed and calibre of search results for more complicated queries, such as sophisticated mathematical formulas. Gemini 2.0 Flash, the company’s quick and effective AI model, was also made available to developers on Wednesday. According to Google, it could process images more effectively and simulate human reasoning.
