Github’s Copilot, Million Dollar Code Auction And More In This Week’s Top News

The World Wide Web’s DNA has been auctioned. Tim Berners Lee’s source code powers the internet as we know today, was put on auction last month by Sotheby's. A non-fungible token of the original code for the World Wide Web has sold for $5.4 million in a Sotheby’s online auction. The auction, which finished at 7 p.m. London time on Wednesday fetched $5.4 million for Sir Tim Berners Lee.The original code, although open sourced, has been offered as an NFT(non fungible token). The NFT packages the original archive of dated and time-stamped files containing the source code, written between 3 October 1990 and 24 August 1991. These files contain code with approximately 9,555 lines, the contents of which include implementations of HTML, HTTP and URIs as well as the original HTML documents. The world wide web was invented at the CERN research laboratory in Switzerland. Until very recently, said Sotheby’s,  selling a digital-born artifact was not a possibility, however the advent of NFTs has now made this possible. According to Sotheby’s, every piece of digital media is infinitely reproducible, but there is only one NFT and one corresponding owner. 

It includes original time-stamped files containing the source code written by Berners-Lee, an animated visualization of the code, a letter written by Berners-Lee on the code and its creation, and a digital “poster” of the full code. They will all be digitally signed by Berners-Lee.

GitHub Co Pilot

Github is bringing the power of OpenAI’s technology to coding. This week, the company launched an AI pair programmer that helps programmers write code faster. GitHub Copilot, which is powered by OpenAI Codex, draws context from comments and code, and suggests individual lines and whole functions instantly. Trying to code in an unfamiliar language by googling everything is like navigating a foreign country with just a phrase book. Using GitHub Copilot is like hiring an interpreter,” said Harri Edwards of OpenAI. But can it write perfect code? “No”, says Github. “While we are working hard to make GitHub Copilot better, code suggested by GitHub Copilot should be carefully tested, reviewed, and vetted, like any other code.”

GitHub Copilot requires state-of-the-art AI hardware. For now GitHub Copilot will be offered only to a limited number of testers for free. 

Google Leads MLPerf Results

The latest round of MLPerf benchmark results have been released, and Google's TPU v4 supercomputers claim to have outclassed NVIDIA in many benchmarks. demonstrated record-breaking performance at scale. This is a timely milestone since large-scale machine learning training has enabled many of the recent breakthroughs in AI, with the latest models encompassing billions or even trillions of parameters (T5,d, GShard, Switch Transformer, and GPT-3). 

Google also announced that it will be offering TPU v4 Pods on Google Cloud, making the world’s fastest machine learning training supercomputers available to customers around the world.

Amazon Scouts In Finland

On Thursday, Amazon announced the creation of a new Amazon Scout Development Center in Helsinki, Finland focused on autonomous delivery technology. The new team will consist of over two dozen engineers in Helsinki to start, and will be dedicated to research and development for Amazon Scout, Amazon’s fully electric autonomous delivery service that currently operates in the U.S.

New FTC Commissioner Takes On Big Tech

The new chair of the Federal Trade Commission(FTC), Lina Khan who was sworn in last month has already started to tighten screws on big tech. The Democratic majority commission voted to revoke a 2015 policy that would allow FTC to crack down on big tech’s alleged monopolistic practices. “It is a critical tool that the agency can and must utilize in fulfilling its congressional mandate to condemn unfair methods of competition,” said Khan in her statement. Amazon, on the other hand, filed a request with the FTC seeking the recusal of Khan from antitrust investigations of the company, in light of her extensive past criticisms of the online giant. According to WSJ, Amazon accused Khan of making “numerous” public pronouncements about the company. 

Google Cloud To Use 5G To Offer Cloud Services

According to reports, Google has partnered with Ericsson AB to extend its cloud arm through 5G technology. Google plans to leverage 5G’s flexible open architecture to push the cloud to the edge. This will help hyperscale cloud vendors to enable more flexible, automated networks with improved orchestration, visibility, and control across multi-vendor, multi-cloud and hyperscale cloud-provider environments. “The shift to 5G will place tremendous focus on the ecosystem, and it needs to be an ecosystem that includes CSPs, public cloud providers, application developers and technology providers, all coming together to optimize the user experiences across industry applications,” said Bikash Koley, VP and Head of Google Global Networking.