New York-based Hugging Face, a startup known by an app launched in 2017 that allows you to chat with an artificial digital friend, recently open-sourced its library for natural language processing (NLP) framework, called Transformers. It had massive success as there are over a million downloads and 1,000 companies using it, including Microsoft’s Bing. Transformers can be leveraged for text classification, information extraction, summarization, text generation, and conversational artificial intelligence.

On Tuesday, Hugging Face, with just 15 employees, announced the close of a $15 million series, a funding round that adds to a previous amount of $5 million.

[Source: IBL News]

It was an intriguing and entertaining year for open-source software in 2019, with news headlines that were all over the map. In the biggest news, IBM completed its acquisition of open source market leader Red Hat, bringing the two powerhouses together on a new shared path of making their now-connected futures successfully work out for both.

But there was plenty more happening as well, from SUSE dropping OpenStack to Microsoft continuing to deepen its role and relationships in open source with Azure. Where will 2020 take us?

[Source: ChannelFutures]

While the promised flexibility of open source could have advantages and possibilities for processors and SoCs, where does the industry stand on verification approaches and methodologies from here? Single-source ISAs of the past relied on general industry verification technologies and methodologies, but open-source ISA-based processor users and adopters will need to review the verification flows of the processor and SoC.

Simon Davidmann, CEO, Imperas Software pointed out during a panel last week at the RISC-V Summit held in Silicon Valley that designs based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture bring interesting verification challenges.

[Source: SemiEngineering]