Europe has entered the big leagues of supercomputing with Jupiter, which this month became the first European system to achieve the exascale threshold of more than one quintillion (a billion billion) operations per second. Jupiter is Europe’s most powerful compute platform and the fourth fastest worldwide. It is a hybrid platform that uses a combination of SiPearl and Nvidia chips, respectively supporting HPC tasks like simulations and data analysis as well as AI workloads, such as training large language models and providing access to the Jupiter AI Factory (JAIF), a managed interface for developers and academics. Continue reading Europe’s Most Powerful Supercomputer Designed to Foster AI

AI media firm Runway has launched Gen-3 Alpha, building on the text-to-video model by using images to prompt realistic videos generated in seconds. Navigate to Runway’s web-based interface and click on “try Gen 3-Alpha” and you’ll land on a screen with an image uploader, as well as a text box for those who either prefer that approach or want to use natural language to tweak results. Runway lets users generate up to 10 seconds of contiguous video using a credit system. “Image to Video is major update that greatly improves the artistic control,” Runway said in an announcement. Continue reading Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha Creates Realistic Video from Still Image

Graphic design company Canva announced it is acquiring fellow Australian startup Leonardo AI with plans to have Leonardo’s 120 employees, including executives, join the Canva AI team. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sydney-based Leonardo has been gaining attention for its advanced generative AI platform that helps users create images and art based on the open-source Stable Diffusion model developed by Stability AI. The Leonardo team claims its offering is different than other AI art platforms since it provides users with more control. Users can experiment with text prompts and quick sketches as Leonardo.ai creates photorealistic images in real time. Continue reading Canva Aims to Boost Its GenAI Efforts with Leonardo Purchase