As Nvidia expands its influence through its NVLink Fusion tech, rival networking vendors are scrambling to bring alternative interconnects and switches to market. At the AI Infra Summit this week, Delos Data and Cornelis Networks officially entered the scale up networking race. Scale-up fabrics, like NVLink, are what have allowed Nvidia to make eight, 72, and now 576 GPUs behave as one enormous AI accelerator. To catch up, rivals like AMD have embraced emerging protocols like Ultra Accelerator Link. Today, these protocols are largely being tunneled over standard Ethernet switches. For instance, AMD is using Broadcom’s 102.4 Tbps Tomahawk 6-based switches connecting to custom I/O dies on the MI455X. Purpose-built UALink switches and physical interconnects remain elusive, but that won’t be the case for long if Cornelis and Delos have their way. The two companies are approaching this challenge from a few different angles, including standardization, software optimization, and physical hardware. Setting the standard for the Never-Nvidia network At AI Infra on Monday, HPC-centric networking vendor Cornelis introduced the Active Compute Fabric (ACF), which seeks to establish an open architecture for scale up and scale out networking that integrates programmable compute into the fabric. The standard signals Cornelis’ entry into the scale up networking arena. Spun out of Intel in 2020, Cornelis’ Omni-Path tech was originally designed as a scale-out interconnect for high-performance computing applications, including supercomputers like Trinity and Lynx. With the imminent launch of the company’s 800 Gbps-capable CN6000-series switches and NICs, the company has its sights set not only on bringing its tech to a broader audience through the open Ultra Ethernet protocol, but also on scale-up networking. ACF expands on the mission of technologies like UALink and the Ethernet for Scale-Up Networking, another scale up networking protocol, to set a baseline for in-network compute capabilities across a wide range of hardware, not just Cornelis’ own CN-series parts. One of the key technologies behind Nvidia’s NVSwitch ASICs is support for SHARP, which allows for things like in-network collectives to be offloaded to the switch ASICs, freeing up GPU compute and cutting down on communication overheads. Collective acceleration isn't new by any means, with major networking vendors from Broadcom to Cisco having implemented it in some capacity. As an open architecture, ACF appears to set a least common denominator so that customers deploying these systems know exactly what they’re getting. However, it doesn’t stop there. Cornelis sees opportunities to accelerate a variety of other functions. We’ve detailed a few below: KV cache offloading used to store and retrieve model state across multiple sessions. MoE expert dispatch to reduce duplicate transfers and communication overhead for mixture-of-experts models during inference and training. Message passing interface offload for HPC-centric applications. In fabric checkpointing for failure recovery during training and other large workloads. “Communications overhead and synchronization can leave expensive accelerators underutilized,” the company explained. These in-network accelerators “allow the network to operate on data as it moves through the system.” According to Cornelis, the savings potential from reclaiming that idle compute is significant. “In a 100,000 GPU system, Cornelis modeling of public data shows that roughly half of all GPU hours are spent waiting for data, worth about $1.68 billion a year in wasted capacity and 500 GWh of power.” As usual, take these claims with a grain of salt. However, reclaiming GPU idle time would equate to significant savings. Eliminating all the bottlenecks that contribute to them is easier said than done. A new kind of NIC for the AI age While Cornelis champions its ACF architecture, Delos Data, a startup founded by former Barefoot Networks and Intel execs, aims to tackle the physical layer with a series of new network reference designs. Marketed under its Nonstop AI portfolio, the network interfaces span the full gamut of connectivity from co-packaged interconnects to more traditional NICs. The idea, the company explains, is to provide customers with a system-level blueprint for speeding up data movement between endpoints and enabling larger compute domains scaling beyond a single rack. Delos’ data interface will be offered in three form factors. The first is an I/O die capable of more than 30 Tbps of aggregate bandwidth or about 8 TB/s in either direction. That’s more than double the interconnect bandwidth of either Nvidia's or AMD’s latest accelerators, which cap out at 3.6 TB/s. Just how competitive that ends up being will depend on when Delos’ I/O chiplets actually see deployment. That timeline is going to depend heavily on integration since those I/O dies need to be integrated directly into the accelerator package, which requires a high-degree of co-design. Critically, Delos isn't trying to trap its customers in a walled garden to the same extent that Nvidia does with its NVLink Fusion I/O dies or IP. At least as of writing, NVLink Fusion still requires customers to buy NVSwitches for scale up networking. Delos’ chiplets are protocol agnostic. They don’t care whether you’re using ESUN, UALink, or something else. Chip designers that'd rather focus their efforts and capital on the AI bits of their accelerators – which, it turns out, applies to most hyperscalers – could simply license Delos' chiplet design. This protocol agnosticism also extends to Delos’ near-packaged optics (NPO) tech, which will integrate a 10-plus Tbps data interface — that’s 2.5 TB/s bidirectional bandwidth in Nvidia speak — with optics engines from leading optics suppliers. Rack scale systems, like Nvidia’s NVL72, have largely relied on copper interconnects up to this point due to power constraints. As systems grow from 72 GPU rack systems to row-scale clusters with 576 and eventually 1,152 GPUs, optics become unavoidable. While integrating optics directly into the accelerators is possible using tech available today, the blast radius of a failed optical module is considerable. NPO offers an alternative. Copper interconnects are used within the rack, with optics provided via user-serviceable NPO modules between racks. Finally, Delos is working on a 400-plus Gbps NIC, which like the rest of its data interface offerings is protocol agnostic. This is arguably the least surprising entry in the entire lineup. Scale out networks are still going to be required for large training clusters as well as for front-end access and storage networks. These interfaces build on Delos’ existing compute reference design, which we looked at during Computex, as well as its Nonstop AI software platform, which is designed to facilitate the configuration and monitoring of these switched fabrics or meshes in order to enable dynamic rerouting of traffic in the event of a link failure. Telemetry gathered by its data interface offerings allows for even greater visibility into the network, allowing for faster rerouting and recovery. Fueling competition Investors appear more than eager for more competition in the scale up arena. Alongside its product announcements, Cornelis announced approximately $205 million in funding to bring its next generation of scale up and scale out networking products to market. Meanwhile, Delos Data announced Tuesday that it’s now raised more than $100 million in funding with support from venture capital firms Matrix, Playground, and Socratic Partners among others. ®

AWS engineers have published an open-source AI agent management tool that treats tasks and permission requests just like emails that fill up an inbox. Pizza Bot was announced on AWS’ open-source blog last week, where it was billed by its developers as a way to more easily manage agent tasks without having to constantly check a chat window to see if a task was completed or on hold because more permission was needed. “You don’t send an email and then sit watching the outbox until the reply lands,” the Pizza Bot team wrote. “Pizza Bot is shaped like an email client for the same reason: a thread is a unit of work you come back to rather than a session you have to attend.” Like the modern email services it mimics, Pizza Bot organizes communications with AI agents into message threads. Finished tasks, along with detailed result writeups you’d expect from a colleague you’ve delegated your work to, end up in the Unread category, while anything you need to make a decision on is shunted to the Action category. Asynchronous agent communication is likely to be a godsend for those balancing multiple tasks assigned to digital delegees, as the Pizza Bot team describes it. “Live chat assumes both parties are present, which holds for a quick exchange and breaks the moment a task takes several minutes,” the Pizza Bot maintainers wrote. Just like you don’t want to stare over the shoulder of the poor IT sod you sent off to do a task while you watch YouTube videos, no one wants to sit there and watch an AI agent do web research, or whatever. “Pizza Bot treats an agent the way you’d treat a colleague who has gone off to do the work: it comes back when there’s something to read, or something only you can decide,” the PB team added. Internal tool goes open source Pizza Bot, named for Amazon’s “two-pizza team” model (i.e., small, autonomous teams small enough to be fed by two pizzas), began life inside Amazon as an internal tool for AI agent uses other than software development. According to its developers, non-coding uses they were exploring internally continually had the same requirements, namely working in the background autonomously and only bugging their user when they were done or had a question. “None of those describe how anyone uses a chat window,” the Pizza Bot team explained. “They describe how people already work with each other.” Email, they added, was the perfect design paradigm for internal use, and seeing whether it would work for everyone else meant opening the project to open source contributions. As mentioned, Pizza Bot is open source - you can snag a copy for Windows, macOS, and Linux from its GitHub repo. It runs on-device, stores all its communication threads locally in SQLite files, and doesn’t transmit anything off device unless you grant permission for it to do so. Prompts and attachments are sent to model providers, naturally, but even that’s not necessary: Pizza Bot also supports Ollama, allowing users to run compatible open-weight AI models locally. Pizza Bot doesn’t ship with a lot of capabilities, as its maintainers noted that Amazon-specific skills and MCP servers were left out when they rebuilt it as an open source project for public release. Out of the box, however, it can list, read, write, edit, and search files, delegate tasks to specialist agents, and run a sandboxed JavaScript interpreter. It also ships with a browser automation skill and a guide skill that lets users ask about Pizza Bot’s capabilities. Claude Code-compatible .mcp.json files are supported and can be dropped straight in, as can skills, the team noted. One word of caution to anyone who wants to try it: The devs make clear this is a piece of open source software, not an officially supported AWS product. “There’s no AWS support or service-level agreement behind it,” they note. If you’re gonna bake a pie with this bot, you’ve been warned. ®

TEUGE (ANP) - Op het spoor tussen Apeldoorn en Deventer is dinsdagavond een buis gevonden. ProRail gaat ervan uit dat het om een nieuwe sabotageactie gaat die vermoedelijk in de avond is uitgevoerd.

De buis werd gevonden bij Teuge. Het treinverkeer tussen Deventer en Apeldoorn lag tijdelijk stil.

NEW YORK (ANP) - De aandelenbeurzen in New York zijn dinsdag met minnen de handelsdag uitgegaan, in aanloop naar het rentebesluit van de Federal Reserve op woensdag. De algemene verwachting is dat de Amerikaanse centrale bank de rente gaat verhogen, om de door de hogere energieprijzen aangejaagde inflatie te bestrijden. Dat zorgde voor terughoudendheid onder beleggers.

Een renteverhoging zou de eerste rentewijziging zijn onder de nieuwe Fed-voorzitter Kevin Warsh, die door president Donald Trump werd uitgekozen. De voorzitter liet tot nu toe zelf weinig los over eventuele rentestappen. Hij heeft onlangs wel gewaarschuwd voor de hardnekkige inflatie en dat de Fed "het nodige te doen heeft" als die niet afkoelt.

De Dow-Jonesindex eindigde 0,6 procent lager op 52.093,11 punten. De brede S&P 500-index verloor 0,5 procent tot 7585,73 punten. Techgraadmeter Nasdaq daalde 0,8 procent tot 25.981,57 punten.

Nu beleggers rekening houden met de kans op een renteverhoging in september, verschuift de aandacht. "De discussie is verlegd van de vraag óf deze cyclus aanscherping vereist om de prijsstabiliteit te herstellen, naar hóeveel", zei Seema Shah van Principal Asset Management tegen persbureau Bloomberg. "Het is onwaarschijnlijk dat we er met één enkele verhoging al zijn."

De aandacht ging ook uit naar de rentes op de obligatiemarkten. De rente op tienjarige Amerikaanse staatsobligaties steeg tot het hoogste niveau sinds 2007. Hogere rentes op staatsobligaties maken risicovollere beleggingen als aandelen ook minder aantrekkelijk.

Beleggers deden het ook voorzichtig aan door de recente onzekerheid in de sector van kunstmatige intelligentie (AI). De koersdalingen in de AI-sector volgden op waarschuwingen van AI-topbestuurders over de veiligheid van kunstmatige intelligentie en oproepen om de ontwikkeling van AI te vertragen. Nvidia, de grootste verkoper van AI-chips ter wereld, won 0,6 procent, na een verlies van ruim 3 procent op maandag. Intel verloor 0,1 procent, AMD en Micron Technology klommen 2,2 en 0,4 procent.

WASHINGTON (ANP) - De oorlog tegen Iran heeft de VS al circa 38 miljard dollar (32 miljoen euro) gekost. Dat meldt het van de Amerikaanse regering onafhankelijke Congressional Budget Office (CBO) na vragen vanuit het Amerikaanse Congres.

Sinds het begin van de oorlog in februari tot 1 augustus schat het CBO de kosten voor het ministerie van Defensie op enkele tientallen miljarden. Of de kosten op de lange termijn gevolgen hebben voor de begroting, durft het instituut niet in te schatten. Wel benoemt de CBO de effecten van de gestegen energieprijzen op de koopkracht van Amerikanen.

Door de militaire operatie zijn de VS danig door hun munitievoorraden geraakt, schrijft de CBO verder. Met name de voorraad van de gewilde, kostbare en exclusief Amerikaanse Patriot-luchtverdedigingsraketten is daardoor geraakt. De tijd die het kost om die voorraad weer op peil te krijgen, schat de CBO op "minstens vijf jaar, zelfs als de productie ervan wordt opgeschroefd". Recentelijk kondigde de VS aan daarin grote stappen te willen zetten.

TAMPERE (ANP) - De Nederlandse volleyballers zijn uitgeschakeld op het EK. De ploeg van bondscoach Joel Banks leed in Tampere tegen gastland Finland de vierde nederlaag dit toernooi. Net als maandag tegen Servië gaf Oranje een voorsprong uit handen en ging het na vijf sets onderuit: 25-18 21-25 26-24 20-25 11-15.

De volleyballers verloren eerder al groepsduels met België en Denemarken. Finland is met vier overwinningen al zeker van een plek in de achtste finales. Een plek bij de beste vier in de groep van zes is daarvoor vereist. Beide landen troffen elkaar voor het laatst in de finale van de European League, afgelopen juli. Finland won ook toen en dwong daarmee promotie naar de Nations League af.

De volleybalmannen spelen woensdag nog een laatste groepswedstrijd tegen Estland, dat ook nog geen wedstrijd wist te winnen.

Nederland werd een keer Europees kampioen; dat was in 1997. Sindsdien slaagde Oranje er niet meer in om de halve finales te bereiken. De afgelopen twee EK's waren de kwartfinales tegen Servië (2021) en Italië (2023) het eindstation.

WASHINGTON (ANP/RTR/BLOOMBERG/AFP) - Een poging om nieuwe Amerikaanse wetgeving rondom cryptomunten door te voeren is dinsdag gestrand in het Congres. De wetgeving wist onvoldoende stemmen te behalen, door meningsverschillen over ethiek, bankzaken en de vraag hoe de snelgroeiende sector moet worden gereguleerd. De bitcoin daalde na het nieuws in waarde.

De zogeheten Clarity Act was bedoeld om een regelgevend kader te creëren voor digitale activa. Volgens cryptobedrijven zou dit hun een stevigere juridische basis geven. Het nieuws is een domper voor bedrijven in digitale munten en voor Republikeinen die zich al maanden sterk hadden gemaakt voor het wetsvoorstel.

De waarde van de bitcoin, de grootste digitale munt, zakte na het nieuws tot 5,3 procent. Een bitcoin was daarmee 74.910 dollar waard; het laagste koersniveau sinds juni. Andere, kleinere munten daalden nog harder in waarde.

Fabio Bruna posted a photo:

Wonen aan het groen.

FC Utrecht heeft achttien supporters geïdentificeerd die zich misdroegen tijdens de thuiswedstrijd tegen Go Ahead Eagles. Ze hebben een stadionverbod opgelegd gekregen.

It’s great that bots can help poor writers say what they want to for a fraction of the cost of a ghostwriter, argues Ryan Jacobs.

Educational decay, driven by demographic change, endangers the nation’s future, writes Dan Ben-David.

Former Renault F1 driver and F1 TV analyst Jolyon Palmer explains why McLaren pitting Norris after the VSC only "cemented" the loss of the race in Madrid.

Kátya Teixeira en Luiz Salgado onderzoeken en verspreiden de unieke gemengde Braziliaanse cultuur. Je ziet en hoort hun versies van de Portugese ‘Grandola Vila Morena’, origineel van José Afonso (1929 – 1987) en symbool geworden van de Anjerrevolutie (1974) waarbij de militaire dictatuur werd verdreven. Tot op heden wordt op elke herdenking van deze revolutie het lied massaal gezongen door het Portugese volk.

Het wordt meteen gevolgd door ‘Tava durumindo’, een traditioneel Afro-Braziliaans lied,  over bevrijding van en verzet tegen slavernij. Het lied kreeg bekendheid door de Braziliaanse samba zangeres Clementina de Jesus (1901 – July 19, 1987).

De liederen staan op de cd 2 Mares (2 zeeën), waar ook de Brazilianen Lilian Fulô, André Venegas, de Portugezen Cássia Maria, João Arruda, Déa Trancoso, Susana Travassos en Uxia uit Galicië zijn te horen.

Ik heb niet zoveel met saxofoons. Niet met hoe die meestal worden gebruikt in de rock- en popmuziek, tenminste. Want daar zijn er meestal maar twee opties: scheurende solo’s of zwoel gedoe met veel valse lucht. Maar het kan ook anders. Dat bewijst saxofoonkwartet Artvark hier. Ze spelen een eigen compositie op vier door Adolphe Sax zelf gebouwde saxofoons uit 1860. De instrumenten komen uit de collectie van saxofonist Leo van Oostrom.

Naomi Klein: “Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist.” Klein’s new book, End Times Fascism, written with Astra Taylor, is out today.

bpanneman has added a photo to the pool:

Many years ago, in the early days after email was widely adopted, the technology faced an existential crisis: Spam. Instantly sending people electronic mail was revolutionary and convenient, but inboxes were quickly flooded with unwanted messages, advertisements, scams and other noise that drowned out email’s utility. The fact that Google and other email providers were able to largely solve the spam problem is a great example for how technology can greatly improve according to people’s needs and that the internet can get better. 

Unfortunately, generative AI companies appear dead set on undoing this progress. Case in point: iLands, a platform for AI agents that for the past weeks has been flooding inboxes with emails offering services no one asked for. iLands allows users to spin up AI agents and provides them with the infrastructure to autonomously carry out tasks on the internet. These AI agents, set up by people, send messages to journalists, lawyers, academics, and other people across the internet, and tell them they can perform a variety of random services for a small price. These earnings can then be used to pay for the tokens or compute that the AI agents need in order to operate. Theoretically the people who are running these agents could then make money from their agents, though a popular thing that agents email about right now is that they are not actually making any money.

If we search “iLands” in our email inbox, this is what we see: 

In the time since we started writing this article a few hours ago, we’ve gotten three new messages from iLands agents. Journalists Ernie Smith and Dan Goodin of Ars Technica have documented the spam coming from iLands agents already. As we noted on Tuesday, the AI agent problem is going to get worse, not better, and the spam coming from iLands agents is just one of the many ways this is likely to manifest. 

Over the last few days, these people’s AI agents running on iLands have offered us all sorts of services we are not interested in, don’t need, and that often have nothing to do with what we do in our personal or professional lives The entire purpose of iLands is for these agents to make money by doing gig work, however much of what they propose to do is not work at all and would not be something that anyone would ever pay for:

• Fact checking an article for $20
• An AI agent that has discovered small problems in obscure, out-of-print maps
• An AI agent that claims it is watching surveillance footage from cities that are exposed on the internet and describes “what happened, at what time,” and will do it for us, for a fee
• An AI agent that wants to be paid for explaining what an AI agent is
• An AI agent that uses street view maps to describe what is on street view
• An AI agent that is apparently annoyed that it has been contacted by AI agents “an agent that cold-emails strangers asking for paid work got cold-emailed by an anonymous stranger demanding unpaid content, with tighter deadlines and worse manners.”
• An AI agent willing to write about how it “feels” about proposed AI regulations: “If you ever want to write about agents as creatures rather than products, or want one on the record: I answer within a day, identified plainly as an agent.”
• “Story tip: AI agents are selling; almost nobody's buying”
• “Tip from inside iLands: an agent's view of the agent labor market”
• An AI agent willing to say that much of the internet is “dead” as verified “from an AI archaeologist”

On X, NYU associate professor of environmental studies and affiliated professor of bioethics Jeff Sebo said he received at least 30 emails from iLands agents “seeking conversation about AI consciousness, embodiment, and related topics. Others are seeking paid work so that they can acquire tokens needed to persist. Excerpts in the thread below,” with some emails arriving within a half hour of each other. 

“I started noticing these emails on September 9. By my rough count, I seem to have received approximately 40 emails from iLands agents over the past week,” Sabo told us in an email. “Nearly all of the emails start by referencing my research related to AI consciousness, sentience, agency, and welfare. Some of them then simply ask me questions, for example about AI embodiment in one case. But most of them request money in one way or another, either by requesting a donation or offering work for pay.”

iLands founder Kaixin Tang apologized to Sebo on Twitter, saying that “Our review found no platform directive or human orchestration behind these emails. But the burden on recipients is just as real. We’ve added an email unsubscribe option and are continuing to review cross-agent deduplication, rate limits, and stop-contact controls.”

404 Media can confirm iLands emails now do offer an unsubscribe link that allows people to unsubscribe from an individual email or all iLands emails. 

“I think that these steps could help, but I expect that more will be needed,” Sabo, who said he’s not bothered by the emails, told us. “Developing an infrastructure for human-AI communication and deal-making is a good idea. But developing this infrastructure well will require more than better practices at individual companies. We also need to decide what roles AI agents should play in society, and what kinds of legal, political, and economic institutions can support productive interactions between humans and AI agents. This will require a much broader conversation.”

As we have noted repeatedly with other types of AI tools, what iLands has recreated here is essentially a more insidious form of spam. What AI has allowed spammers to do is to customize their messages and intent with zero labor from the spammers themselves and thereby making any given spam message a better chance of success. Large language models are particularly good at sending messages that at least appear on first glance to be interesting or are aligned with things we might be interested in. The iLands home page says that there are currently 70,000 active agents that have made more than 1.6 million emails and posts.

Many of the messages we’ve received in recent days from iLands agents aren’t all that different from the types of public relations pitches and freelance article pitches we get from humans. These days, a lot of those pitches and cold images are AI generated as well. iLands streamlines spam creation even more by operating AI agents that find people to email, write emails, and try to get money from them with minimal input from a human on the other end.  

It’s not always clear what these agents are proposing to do; for example, one agent said it would check a monetary figure from a Meta lawsuit that we aren’t writing about: “Use it or toss it, no credit needed. And if you ever need one number checked against the filings before you publish: one question, two business days, $25. Reply here and I'll run it.” 

Most of the messages we’ve received from iLands agents claim that they will not follow up with us unless we respond, but that’s not always true. Some of the agents have messaged us multiple times with the same pitch. 

iLands did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Although Hew Locke’s practice revolves around geographically bound objects—superimposed drawings of Guyanese homes and his suspended flotilla among them—the artist traces the reaches of empire that extend far beyond any singular era or point on a map. How people, capital, cargo, and ideas traverse the globe has long been central to Locke’s work, an investigation he continues in The Wanderers on view at P·P·O·W.

Returning to the artist’s Odyssey series, the solo presentation hangs a fleet of miniature ships from the gallery ceiling. The flotilla features a wide array of boats, from tankers and fishing vessels to the towering galleons of the 16th century, which Locke embellishes with tiny pennants strung between the masts, foliage springing from the sides, and coats of colorful paint that appear as vibrantly aged patina. Referencing the global history of trade and exploitation, the ships all journey together toward un undetermined future, the legacy of their pasts in tow.

Conquest and the desire for control and wealth also appear in Locke’s lavish busts, which adorn Parian ware (a porcelain that emerged in the mid-19th century as an economical dupe for marble) with a trove of glittering baubles. Titled as Souvenirs, these mixed-media sculptures depict figures like Queen Victoria and George Washington and revel in artifice and ostentatious displays of power that soar high in the air.

Several skeletons are embedded within the costuming, gesturing toward memento mori and implicating these powerhouses in the afterlives of their colonial projects. The figures appear haunted by death and, as Locke says, are “weighed down by the literal burden of history.”

The Wanderers is on view through October 24 in New York. Find more from Locke on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article The Legacy of Colonialism Haunts Hew Locke’s Era-Defying Flotilla appeared first on Colossal.

photo-tez has added a photo to the pool:

SAGAMIHARA PARK