Top 5 Stories of the Week: DeepMind and OpenAI Improvements, Intel’s Plan for GPUs, Microsoft’s Zero-Day Flaws

This week, Googled tech lab, DeepMind, unveiled its first AI capable of creating its own algorithms to speed up matrix multiplication. Although taught in high school math, matrix multiplication is actually fundamental to computing tasks and remains a core activity in neural networks.

In a similar vein, OpenAI this week announced the release of Whisper – the open-source, deep learning model for speech recognition. The company claims that the technology is already showing promising results in transcribing audio in various languages.

Intel took part in the innovation sprint this week and has worked out a plan to make developers’ lives a little easier, with the goal of making it possible to one day build an application that can run on any operating system. Historically, this was a goal of the Java programming language, but even today the process isn’t uniform across the computing landscape — something Intel hopes to change.

On the security front, business leaders had several new announcements to watch out for this week, including the zero-day flaw exploit in Microsoft’s Exchange Server. The company confirmed that a suspected state-sponsored threat actor was able to successfully exfiltrate data from less than 10 organizations using its base platform.

While it’s no secret that these types of attacks continue to increase in both volume and intensity, methods of preventing attacks are also evolving. Vulnerability solutions provider Tenable is one that has evolved to change its main focus as well. This week, the company announced that it is shifting its focus from vulnerability management to attack surface management and released a new tool for enterprises with that focus.

Here’s more of our top five tech stories of the week:

1. DeepMind Unveils First AI to Discover Faster Matrix Multiplication Algorithms
   Can artificial intelligence (AI) create its own algorithms to accelerate matrix multiplication, one of the most fundamental tasks of machine learning? In a paper published in Nature, DeepMind unveiled AlphaTensor, the “first artificial intelligence system for discovering new, efficient and demonstrably correct algorithms.” Google’s lab said the research “sheds light” on a 50-year-old math open question about finding the fastest way to multiply two matrices.

   AlphaTensor builds on AlphaZero, an agent who has delivered superhuman feats in board games such as chess and Go, according to a DeepMind blog post. This new work takes the AlphaZero journey further, moving from playing games to tackling unsolved math problems.

   This research looks at how AI can be used to improve computer science itself.

2. Intel CTO wants developers to build once, then run on any GPU
   More than two decades ago, the Java programming language, originally developed by Sun Microsystems, offered developers the promise of building an application once and then running it on any operating system.

   However, the ability to build once and run anywhere won’t be uniform across the computing landscape in 2022. It’s a situation Intel wants to help change, at least when it comes to accelerated computing and the use of GPUs.

   Intel is a major contributor to the open-source SYCL specification (SYCL is pronounced “sickle”) that aims to do for GPU and accelerated computing what Java did for application development decades ago.

3. Tenable: Vulnerability management is out, attack surface management is in
   Vulnerability solutions provider Tenable has launched a new cloud-based exposure management platform known as Tenable One designed to discover assets and assess risk across the entire attack surface.

   Exposure management gives security teams a broader view of the attack surface and provides the ability to perform attack path analytics to analyze attack paths from externally identified points to internal assets. It also enables organizations to create a centralized inventory of all IT, cloud, Active Directory and web assets.

4. Microsoft Confirms Hackers Are Actively Exploiting Zero-Day Errors in Exchange
   Microsoft Exchange Server is one of those staple products for businesses, but it’s also a prime target for cybercriminals. Last week, GTSC reported that attacks had begun linking two new zero-day Exchange exploits as part of coordinated attacks.

   While information is limited, Microsoft confirmed in a blog post that these exploits were used by a suspected state-sponsored threat actor to target fewer than 10 organizations and successfully exfiltrate data.

5. How will OpenAI’s Whisper model affect AI applications?
   Last week, OpenAI released Whisper, an open-source deep learning model for speech recognition. OpenAI’s tests on Whisper show promising results in transcribing audio, not only in English, but also in several other languages.

   Developers and researchers who have experimented with Whisper are also impressed by what the model can do. But perhaps just as important is what the release of Whisper tells us about the changing culture in artificial intelligence (AI) research and the types of applications we can expect in the future.