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Quantum computing could turbo-charge AI into something “massively, universally transformative ,” argues the South China Morning Post, citing a quote from theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. “AI has the ability to learn new, complex tasks, and quantum computers can provide the computational muscle it needs…” “AI will give us the ability to create learning machines that can begin to mimic human abilities, while quantum computers may provide the calculational power to finally create an intelligent machine....

I’ve noticed that for several years now, one of the most frequently asked questions in agile forums deals with the splitting of stories. We simply can’t create a feature, epic, or improvement in a single gesture. If we are going to make progress, we have to start somewhere and build in small pieces. One way or another, whether we release after each piece or not, we have to make progress in bits and pieces....

Fully autonomous vehicles were once the unimaginable future. For many San Franciscans they’re now a daily reality and an essential mode of transportation. Since late 2022, thousands of SF residents across all neighborhoods have relied on our fully autonomous Waymo One service to get around the city 24/7. Now, we’re making the experience available to more people. Today, Waymo received its driverless deployment permit from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), the final step in a robust process with regulators before we could offer a paid fully autonomous ride-hailing service in San Francisco....

High value at low cost. There’s nothing quite like finding a bargain. That’s why my colleagues and I bargain hunt when planning and developing software. Bargains in software are high-value features available at a fraction of the full price. Many teams pay full price for features because they don’t take time to shop for bargains. They follow a popular process like this: Product Owner writes stories. Product Owner prioritizes stories. Developers estimate stories....

Sydney’s Opera House was originally forecast in 1957 to be completed in 1963. It didn’t happen that way. 10 years later and at 15 times greater expense than predicted, the magnificent structure was finally completed. As the complexity of projects increases, so too does the failure rate of meeting schedule. The problem is known as Hofstadter’s law. In 1979, Scientist Douglas Hofstadter conceived an ironic and recursive rule that everything takes longer than planned....

In order to reduce risk on large software development projects, you need to figure out all the big unknowns as early as possible. The best way to do this is to have a real end-to-end test with no stubs against a system that’s deployed in production. You could do this by building a so-called Walking Skeleton, a term coined by Alistair Cockburn . He defined it as a tiny implementation of the system that performs a small end-to-end function....

One of the most common struggles faced by agile teams is the need to split user stories . I’m sure you’ve struggled with this. I certainly did at first. In fact, when I first began using Scrum , some of our product backlog items were so big that we occasionally opted for six-week sprints. With a bit more experience, though, that team and I saw enough ways to split work that we could have done one-day sprints if we’d wanted....

Palo Alto-based startup Inflection AI yesterday said it is building the world’s largest AI cluster comprised of 22,000 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs that will deliver 22 exaFLOPS performance. The company also said it has raised $1.3 billion in a funding round led by Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and new investor NVIDIA, bringing total funding raised by the company to $1.525 billion. Along with partners CoreWeave, which is a GPU cloud provider (see recent Coreweave coverage ), and NVIDIA, Inflection AI said it will develop the cluster for training and deployment of large-scale generative AI models....

Palo Alto, CA, June, 27, 2023 – Along with our partners, Inflection AI is building one of the largest computing clusters in the world, today comprising thousands of NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs. We’re excited to announce that this cluster has delivered state-of-the-art performance on the open source benchmark MLPerf , completing the reference training task in just 11 minutes. In a joint submission with CoreWeave and NVIDIA, the Inflection AI cluster—which today stands at over 3,500 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs—was shown to be the fastest on this benchmark in training large language models....

I like to say that I may have invented story points, and if I did, I’m sorry now. Let’s explore my current thinking on story points. At least one of us is interested in what I think. Stories, of course, are an XP idea, not a Scrum idea. Somehow, Scrum practitioners have adopted the idea. Even though the official Scrum Guide refers to backlog items, having backlog items be User Stories is a common Scrum practice....