Cliff Saran

1 week ago | computerweekly.com | Cliff Saran

Industrial applications While quantum computing evolves, there’s also a lot of interest in hybrid approaches that can take advantage of the technology to speed up computationally complex calculations. D-Wave, for instance, recently expanded its quantum-optimisation offering, with several initiatives aimed at boosting adoption.

1 week ago | computerweekly.com | Cliff Saran

National interests While policymakers in the EU and the UK have been on a path to encourage sovereign AI and cloud datacentre facilities, their existing plans recognise the huge upfront costs involved in developing chip manufacturing without relying on other countries. The EU Chip Act provides €43bn in semiconductor investment until 2030.

1 week ago | computerweekly.com | Cliff Saran

The government has committed £121m of funding over the next 12 months to support quantum computing in the UK. While quantum computing remains a nascent technology, it promises to revolutionise research and development, and power computational tasks that cannot be performed on today’s most advanced supercomputer, paving the way to significant economic benefits in countries that can harness the technology effectively.

1 week ago | computerweekly.com | Cliff Saran

Augmenting SLMs Neither an LLM nor an SLM alone may deliver everything an organisation needs. Enterprise users will typically want to combine the data held in their corporate IT systems with an AI model. According to Dominik Tomicevic, CEO of graph database provider Memgraph, context lies at the core of the entire model debate. “For very general, homework-level problems, an LLM works fine, but the moment you need a language-based AI to be truly useful, you have to go with an SLM,” he says.

1 week ago | computerweekly.com | Cliff Saran

On-prem and public cloud datacentres face cost rises The tariffs are set to have a knock-on effect on the price of datacentre equipment and will affect IT buyers, whether they are purchasing wholly for on-premise deployments or are acquiring greater public cloud capacity. Discussing the implications, Forrester principal analyst Lee Sustar said: “The trade wars will impact the public cloud platform in multiple ways. In the near term, cloud providers face price shocks in their supply lines.