# forck.live — 1–7 November 2021

> AI lab announcements, news reports and podcasts.

forck.live follows what companies announce about their own products. Press may
corroborate an official story; it never leads and never appears as an item of its
own. A missing date stays missing. A title is the publisher's words — where a
company does not publish in English, an English rendering is listed separately
as `Title in English` and named as this site's translation, never as theirs.

This file is one issue of the weekly archive: every confirmed
first-party announcement of ISO week 2021-W44, 1–7 November 2021, newest
first. The window never moves, so this URL always names the same seven days —
but a post published inside them and detected later is added when it arrives,
so a closed week can still gain entries.

Every entry is one first-party announcement, and carries the same eight fields
in this order before any others:

    Company · Announced · Category · Coverage · Announcement · Group · Source · Record

`Source` is the company's own page the announcement was traced to and `Record`
is this site's page for it. Both are safe to cite.

`Coverage` is a number of outlets, or `not counted` — which means this record
reached no count of its own, never that nobody wrote about it.

`Category` is this tracker's own analysis, and is authoritative wherever it is
stated. `not stated` means either that nothing has analysed the post yet or
that the analysis placed it outside this taxonomy; neither is a verdict about
the announcement.

`Announcement` is whether the post is news of something the company did, rather
than a how-to, a customer story, a changelog listing or a staffing note.

`Group` is which of this record's groups the entry falls in, carried on the
entry itself so it holds where the groups are headings and where they are not.
One of: `models`, `covered`, `announcements`, `routine`.

Anything after `Record` is held detail that only some announcements carry.

- This week's page: https://forck.live/week/2021-W44
- The current issue, and the catalogue of the other weeks: https://forck.live/briefing.md
- Catalogue: https://forck.live/llms.txt

## Announcements

### Hugging Face — Scaling up BERT-like model Inference on modern CPU - Part 2

- Company: Hugging Face (huggingface.co)
- Announced: 2021-11-04
- Category: not stated
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: no
- Group: routine
- Source: https://huggingface.co/blog/bert-cpu-scaling-part-2
- Record: https://forck.live/items/2242-scaling-up-bert-like-model-inference-on-modern-cpu-part-2
- Subject: Platform

Software optimizations for BERT-like model inference on modern Intel CPUs, focusing on Intel oneAPI libraries and performance tuning knobs, and provides benchmark results for the Ice Lake generation of Xeon processors.

### Runway — Distributing Work: Adventures in queuing

- Company: Runway (runway.com)
- Announced: 2021-11-01T16:22:35.195000+00:00
- Category: not stated
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: no
- Group: routine
- Source: https://runway.com/research/distributing-work-adventures-queuing-and-autoscaling
- Record: https://forck.live/items/7946-distributing-work-adventures-in-queuing
- Subject: Gen / Aleph

Runway describes engineering challenges with video streaming and their migration from HTTP load balancing to eager worker queues to reduce latency and variance in response times for real-time video processing.

### Isomorphic Labs — Introducing Isomorphic Labs

- Company: Isomorphic Labs (isomorphiclabs.com)
- Announced: 2021-11-01
- Category: not stated
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: yes
- Group: announcements
- Source: https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/articles/introducing-isomorphic-labs
- Record: https://forck.live/items/19143-introducing-isomorphic-labs
- Subject: Drug Design Engine / AlphaFold

I believe we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of biological and medical research. Last year DeepMind’s breakthrough AI system AlphaFold2 was recognised as a solution to the 50-year-old grand challenge of protein folding, capable of predicting the 3D structure of a protein directly from its amino acid sequence to atomic-level accuracy. This has been a watershed moment for computational and AI methods for biology. Building on this advance, today, I'm thrilled to announce the creation of a new Alphabet company – Isomorphic Labs – a commercial venture with the mission to reimagine the entire drug discovery process from first principles with an AI-first approach and, ultimately, to model and understand some of the fundamental mechanisms of life. For over a decade DeepMind has been in the vanguard of advancing the state-of-the-art in AI, often using games as a proving ground for developing general purpose learning systems, like AlphaGo , our program that beat the world champion at the complex game of Go. …