EU AI Act, Groq and Walmart are this week’s top stories
1-EU AI Act goes into effect, claiming global standard for AI governance
The European Union’s AI Act entered into force by the beginning of August. History reveals It is the world’s first detailed regulation for artificial intelligence. Actually, the act was first agreed upon by December 2023, and it followed a risk-based view. When we check the EU AI Act, we see very strict measures only apply to “high-risk” systems that covers tools related to employment and law enforcement. The act totally forbids AI systems handled “unacceptable,” for example social scoring or police profiling. The Act also launches a special set of rules for general-purpose AI, which covers foundation models such as the ones powering ChatGPT.
“The European approach to technology puts people first and ensures that everyone’s rights are preserved,” EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager announced in a statement.
Most parts of the Act’s provisions will apply from August 2026. The ban of AI systems that pose “unacceptable risks” will apply in six months, while the rules for general-purpose AI will put into effect next year.
All companies that provide services or products in the EU must follow the rule. If companies fail to comply, they can face penalties of up to 7% of their annual global sales.
2-AI chipmaking startup Groq raises $640mio, reaches $2.8B valuation
AI chip startup Groq raised $640 million, reaching $2.8B valuation. The round is led by BlackRock, Cisco, and Samsung Catalyst Fund, according to company’s announcement. Having founded in 2016, Groq is active in AI inference, which means, “…is achieved through an “inference engine” that applies logical rules to the knowledge base to evaluate and analyze new information. In the process of machine learning, there are two phases. First, is the training phase where intelligence is developed by recording, storing, and labeling information. If, for example, you’re training a machine to identify cars, the machine-learning algorithm is fed with many images of different cars the machine can later refer to. Second, is the inference phase where the machine uses the intelligence gathered and stored in phase one to understand new data. In this phase, the machine can use inference to identify and categorize new images as “cars” despite having never seen them before. In more complex scenarios, this inference learning can be used to augment human decision making,”
How to use the funding
Groq to use the funding to scale the capacity of its tokens-as-a-service (TaaS) offering and add new models and features to the GroqCloud. “You can’t power AI without inference compute,” as put by Jonathan Ross, CEO and Founder of Groq. “We intend to make the resources available so that anyone can create cutting-edge AI products, not just the largest tech companies. This funding will enable us to deploy more than 100,000 additional LPUs into GroqCloud. Training AI models is solved, now it’s time to deploy these models so the world can use them.” Groq has grown to over 360,000 developers building on GroqCloud, generating AI applications on openly-available models such as Llama 3.1 from Meta, Whisper Large V3 from OpenAI, Gemma from Google, and Mixtral from Mistral.
3-Walmart’s in-store tech move in cutting food waste
I saw this story at Sustainability Magazine and Walmart has taken food and packaging recycling into the heart of its US stores with a tech-driven partnership that simplifies sustainability, said the story. Walmart collaborated with Denali, an organic materials recycler, to separate food from packaging and make sustainability the ‘default action’ in stores. The partnership will help the employees at 1,400 Walmart stores using the Denali technology to separate the unsold food from their packaging.
The program is called Zero Depack, removing expired food, which is destined for the waste stream, from its packaging. RJ Zanes, VP, Facility Services, Walmart US explained Zero Depack in a blogpost: “In order to recycle unsalable packaged foods, the food must first be depackaged. In the past, this was a time-consuming process, requiring associates to manually remove perishable food products — including produce and meats — from their packaging.” Denali explains the new machines can separate as much as 97% of all trash from organic food waste. (I have a story here about Nivogo, a Turkish startup in circular economy)
As a side note, ReFED, a national nonprofit dedicated to ending food loss and waste by advancing data-driven solutions, emphasizes the US generated about 77.6 million tons of food waste in 2022.
