Author: azeeadmin

Amazon Web Services today announced Amazon Elastic Inference, a new service that lets customers attach GPU-powered inference acceleration to any Amazon EC2 instance and reduces deep learning costs by up to 75 percent.

“What we see typically is that the average utilization of these P3 instances GPUs are about 10 to 30 percent, which is pretty wasteful with elastic inference. You don’t have to waste all that costs and all that GPU,” AWS chief executive Andy Jassy said on stage at the AWS re:Invent conference earlier today. “[Amazon Elastic Inference] is a pretty significant game changer in being able to run inference much more cost-effectively.”

Amazon Elastic Inference will also be available for Amazon SageMaker notebook instances and endpoints, “bringing acceleration to built-in algorithms and to deep learning environments” the company wrote in a blog post. It will support machine learning frameworks TensorFlow, Apache MXNet and ONNX.

It’s available in three sizes:

• eia1.medium: 8 TeraFLOPs of mixed-precision performance.
• eia1.large: 16 TeraFLOPs of mixed-precision performance.
• eia1.xlarge: 32 TeraFLOPs of mixed-precision performance.

Dive deeper into the new service here.

You can’t build a good machine learning model without good training data. But building those training sets is hard, often manual work, that involves labeling thousand and thousands of images, for example. With SageMaker, AWS has been working on a service that makes building machine learning models a lot easier. But until today, that labeling task was still up to the user. Now, however, the company is launching SageMaker Ground Truth, a training set labeling service.

Using Ground Truth, developers can point the service at the storage buckets that hold the data and allow the service to automatically label it. What’s nifty here is that you can both set a confidence level for the fully automatic service or you can send the data to human laborers. Those human labelers, who probably have the most mind-numbing job in tech, can either be the company’s Mechanical Turk users or third-party service. If you really hate your employees, you can also have them do the labeling, too.

Currently the service supports text classification, image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation. Users can also create their own tasks.

As the labeling data comes in, Ground Truth then pulls some of the objects and sends them to human labelers to build a new custom model for the user.

“This is a total game changer in being able to label your data,” said AWS CEO Andy Jassy. “So you can build those types of models that before were really difficult or nearly impossible or too expensive to do.”

AWS is not content to cede any part of any market to any company. When it comes to machine learning chips, names like Nvidia or Google come to mind, but today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced a new dedicated machine learning chip of its own called Inferentia.

“Inferentia will be a very high throughput low-latency, sustained performance very cost-effective processor,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy explained during the announcement.

Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research says that while Amazon is far behind, this is a good step for them as companies try to differentiate their machine learning approaches in the future.

“The speed and cost of running machine learning operations — ideally in deep learning — are a competitive differentiator for enterprises. Speed advantages will make or break success of enterprises (and nations when you think of warfare). That speed can only be achieved with custom hardware, and Inferentia is AWS’s first step to get in to this game,” Mueller told TechCrunch. As he pointed out, Google has a 2-3 year head start with its TPU infrastructure.

Inferentia supports popular frameworks like INT8, FP16 and and mixed precision. What’s more, it supports multiple machine learning frameworks including Tensorflow, Caffe2 and ONNX.

Of course, being an Amazon product, it also supports data from popular AWS products such as EC2, Sagemaker and the new Elastic Inference Engine announced today

While the chip was announced today, AWS CEO Andy Jassy indicated it won’t actually be available until next year.

Who doesn’t love robotics? And who doesn’t love robotics and AI together for the first time? Take it all in at TC Sessions: Robotics + AI at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on April 18, 2019. Get your tickets today at the Early Bird discount of $249 while they last. Students, we even have deeply discounted $45 tickets just for you!

TC Sessions: Robotics at UC Berkeley last year and MIT the year prior were epic by any standard. The speakers were the titans in the field — including Helen Greiner (CyPhyWorks), Rodney Brooks (ReThink Robotics), Ken Goldberg (UC Berkeley), Martin Buehler (Disney), Tye Brady (Amazon Robotics), Daniela Rus (MIT), Ayanna Howard (Georgia Tech), Homayoon Kazerooni (UC Berkeley, Ekso Bionics) and many, many more.

At both events, we noticed a focus on AI within robotics, which emerged in almost every session onstage. So this year, artificial intelligence will officially be a part of the event theme.

At TC Sessions: Robotics + AI, TechCrunch’s editors will run a full day of interviews and demos on the main stage and in parallel there will be workshops and networking sessions. Based on our past robotics events, we’re expecting an audience of more than 1,000 people, overwhelmingly made up of engineering students, technologists, founders and investors. So if you fall into one of those categories, please mark your calendars and join TechCrunch on April 18, 2019.

Get your tickets at the Early Bird rate now

Amazon last year dismissed the idea of getting into the blockchain with AWS, but today that’s changed. The company announced a new service called Amazon Quantum Ledger Database or QLDB, which is a fully managed ledger database with a central trusted authority. The service, which is launching into preview today, offers an append-only, immutable journal that tracks the history of all changes, Amazon said.

And all the changes are cryptographically chained and verifiable.

The company announced the product on stage today at AWS:ReInvent, noting QLDB’s other features – including its transparent nature, ability to automatically scale up or down as needed, ease of use, and speed. The database can execute two to three times more transactions, Amazon claimed, compared with existing products.

It also announced a managed blockchain service.

“It will be really scalable, you’ll have a much more flexible and robust set of APIs for you to make any kind of changes or adjustments to the ledger database,” said Andy Jassy, AWS CEO, in describing the new QLDB offering.

On the QLDB website, Amazon explains the new database in more depth:

Amazon QLDB is a new class of database that eliminates the need to engage in the complex development effort of building your own ledger-like applications. With QLDB, your data’s change history is immutable – it cannot be altered or deleted – and using cryptography, you can easily verify that there have been no unintended modifications to your application’s data. QLDB uses an immutable transactional log, known as a journal, that tracks each application data change and maintains a complete and verifiable history of changes over time. QLDB is easy to use because it provides developers with a familiar SQL-like API, a flexible document data model, and full support for transactions. QLDB is also serverless, so it automatically scales to support the demands of your application. There are no servers to manage and no read or write limits to configure. With QLDB, you only pay for what you use.

QLDB was one of AWS’ blockchain-related announcements today. The company also debuted AWS Managed Blockchain, which can work with QLDB. (More on that here).

“Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service that allows you to set up and manage a scalable blockchain network with just a few clicks,” Amazon said in an announcement. The product eliminates the overhead required to create the network and automatically scales to meet the demands of thousands of applications running millions of transactions, it said.

It also manages your certificates, lets you easily invite new members to join the network, and tracks operational metrics such as usage of compute, memory, and storage resources.

Managed Blockchain is able to replicate an immutable copy of your blockchain network activity into Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), which lets you analyze the network activity outside the network and gain insights into trends.

Interested customers can sign up for Amazon Managed Blockchain preview here.

And those with applications that need an immutable and verifiable ledger database can try out Amazon QLDB here.

It was only a year ago that AWS CEO Andy Jassy said that he wasn’t all that interested in blockchain services. Clearly something has changed over the course of the last year because today, the company is launching two new blockchain services: Quantum Ledger Database and Amazon Managed Blockchain.

As the name implies, AWS Managed Blockchain is a managed blockchain service. It supports Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric.

“This service is going to make it much easier for you to use the two most popular blockchain frameworks,” said AWS CEO Andy Jassy. He noted that companies tend to use Hyperledger Fabric when they know the number of members in their blockchain network and want robust private operations and capabilities. AWS promises that the service will scale to thousands of applications and will allow users to run millions of transactions (though the company didn’t say with what kind of latency).

Support for Hyperledger Fabric is available today. Ethereum support is launching a few months from now.

Getting started with Managed Blockchain is a matter of using the AWS Console and configuring nodes, adding members and deploying applications.

“When we heard people saying ‘blockchain,’ we felt like there was their weird conveluting and conflating what they really wanted,” said Jassy. “And as we spent time working with customers and figuring out the jobs they were really trying to solve, this is what we think people are trying to do with blockchain.”

AWS announced a new time series database today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. The new product called DynamoDB On-Demand is a fully managed database designed to track items over time, which can be particularly useful for Internet of Things scenarios.

“With time series data each data point consists of a timestamp and one or more attributes and it really measures how things change over time and helps drive real time decisions,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy explained.

He sees a problem though with existing open source and commercial solutions, which says don’t scale well and hard to manage. This is of course a problem that a cloud service like AWS often helps solve.

Not surprising as customers were looking for a good time series database solution, AWS decided to create one themselves. “Today we are introducing Amazon DynamoDB on-demand, a flexible new billing option for DynamoDB capable of serving thousands of requests per second without capacity planning,” Danilo Poccia from AWS wrote in the blog post introducing the new service.

Jassy said that they built DynamoDB on-demand from the ground up with an architecture that organizes data by time intervals and enables time series specific data compression, which leads to less scanning and faster performance.

He claims it will be a thousand times faster at a tenth of cost, and of course it scales up and down as required and includes all of the analytics capabilities you need to understand all of the data you are tracking.

This new service is available across the world starting today.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) unveiled its latest updates to security on its cloud services platform today at AWS re:Invent, the company’s annual conference for database storage enthusiasts.

AWS Security Hub is a new place for businesses to centrally manage compliance and identify security across AWS environment, says AWS chief executive officer Andy Jassy. The service will help AWS users derive insights from attack patterns and techniques so they can take action more quickly.

“This is going to pretty radically change how easy it is to look at what’s happening security-wise across … AWS,” Jassy said. “Whether you’re using AWS security services like Inspector for vulnerability scanning or GuardDuty for network intrusion or Macie for anomalous data patterns or whether you’re using a very large number of third-party software security services in our ecosystem.”

AWS has signed up a number of its partners for the initial roll out, including CrowdStrike, McAfee, Symantec and Tenable.

The concept of data lakes has been around for a long time, but being able to set up one of these systems, which store vasts amount of raw data in its native formats, was never easy. AWS wants to change this with the launch of AWS Lake Formation. At its core, this new service, which is available today, allows developers to create a secure data lake within a few days.

While ‘a few days’ may still sound like a long time in this age of instant gratification, it’s nothing in the world of enterprise software.

“Everybody is excited about data lakes,” said AWS CEO Andy Jassy in today’s keynote. “People realize that there is significant value in moving all that disparate data that lives in your company in different silos and make it much easier by consolidating it in a data lake.”

Setting up a data lake today means you have to, among other things, configure your storage and (on AWS) S3 buckets, move your data, add metadata and add that to a catalog. And then you have to clean up that data and set up the right security policies for the data lake. “This is a lot of work and for most companies, it takes them several months to set up a data lake. It’s frustrating,” said Jassy.

Lake Formation is meant to handle all of these complications with just a few clicks. It sets up the right tags and cleans up and dedupes the data automatically. And it provides admins with a list of security policies to help secure that data.

“This is a step-level change for how easy it is to set up data lakes,” said Jassy.

A fintech whale quietly going about its business in Southeast Asia has come out from under the radar after Oriente, a Hong Kong-based business headed by Skype’s first employee, announced that it has raised a whopping $105 million.

It may not be well known at this point, but the company has some serious street cred.

Oriente was started in 2017 by Geoff Prentice, a Skype co-founder and ex-Chief Strategy Officer, Hubert Tai, a founder of Ping An’s Lufax and Chinese unicorn dangdang.com, and investor Lawrence Chu. The trio came together when Prentice moved on to Atomico — the VC firm started by Skype’s founders after they sold to eBay — and Chu, then with investment firm BlackPine, invited him to invest in Lufax where he bumped into Tai.

“I was going to start this fund with Lawrence to focus on old and new economy stuff together. We went to look at Southeast Asia financial services [businesses] and we were like ‘there’s nothing here.’ So I literally begged Hubert out of retirement and said ‘you’ve got to do this,'” Prentice, very much a straight shooter, told TechCrunch in an interview.

“Silicon Valley isn’t my cup of tea,” he added.

The project is definitely a far cry from the latest buzz in The Valley.

Oriente is aimed at providing digital credit and financial products in Southeast Asia, a region of 650 million people where the digital economy is predicted to triple over the next six years. Right now, it operates in the Philippines and Indonesia where its two services — Cashalo and Finmas, respectively — offer credit services for consumers using a mixture of online and offline. It is taking steps to launch in Vietnam but Prentice told TechCrunch that there is no other expansion plan at this point.

The goal is to digitizing financial services and help more people in Southeast Asia get access to banking services. While Southeast Asia is often reported to have a booming middle class, many are out of reach of that.

For example, in the Philippines — Oriente’s debut market — some 77 percent of the 105 million population is unbanked, according to a recent report. Of those unbanked, some 60 percent said that they do not operate an account due to a lack of money. The numbers are similar across other parts of Southeast Asia, yet mobile access is surging — Southeast Asia has more internet users than the entire U.S. population — offer a potential bridge to improve the situation.

Oriente’s first product was Cashalo which launched in the Philippines in June 2018

The services are digital but they use offline touch points to reach new customers. In the latter case, Oriente’s local businesses deploy salespeople in major malls and stores to help customers learn about the services themselves and the concept of payback schemes. Oriente takes a slight twist on the take. Instead of offering payback on single items, the services cover a basket of items to allow customers to pay a series of items on credit.

To help that offline push, Oriente has recruited top corporate as investors, including Berjaya Group, JG Summit Holdings, and Sinar Mas. Beyond providing capital, these businesses are highly strategic. Malaysia’s Berjaya is in property, consumer marketing and more; JG Summit operates retail, banking and even aviation in the Philippines; while Indonesia’s Sinar Mas covers financial services, telecom and more.

“If you want to build the financial services behemoth of Southeast Asia in the next 10 years how do you do that? Well, it’s going to be on a digital platform obviously but then, of course, we also have to have KYC people, you need your own collections people, you need offline sales… you need to take the best of the best technology part and then you merge it with the best of the other things,” Prentice said of the offline-online focus.

The business itself already has some 1,200 employees spread across seven offices in Asia — including a 200-person engineering team in Shanghai, composed of many former Lufax workers — with 60,000 borrowers in the Philippines alone. The Indonesian business is newer, having launched only in August and in beta, but the company expects to reach “millions” of lenders across its three markets next year.

One big challenge from an engineering perspective is constructing basic infrastructure, such as credit scoring, KYC and assessment. Existing credit bureau systems don’t cover many of the population, so Oriente is investing heavily in data-based systems to develop signals for credit assessment and, importantly, to combat fraud.

There are plenty of others battling the same fight in the region, with Ant Financial — Alibaba’s fintech affiliate — in particular setting up businesses across the region with a focus on payments and digital financial services. Grab, the ride-hailing firm that purchased Uber’s local business earlier this year, has also ventured into payments with plans for financial services as its nemesis Go-Jek has done already. That’s quite the backdrop for a battle with Oriente and its unique blend of experienced founders from the East and West and strategic corporate backers.