9 technologies that could change the world

 2022 9 Game Changers

2022 9 Game Changers

9 technologies that could change the world

Smart Grids vs Centralized Grid (Emerging Tech)

 Smart vs Centralized

Smart grids could soften the blow of cyberattacks, but make them more common

Experts say the trade-off could be worthwhile because it reduces vulnerabilities and the potential payoff for attackers.

SEPTEMBER 20, 2021

Smart grids (Emerging Tech)

Centralized vs Decentralized Networks 

CONNECTIVITY

Smart grids could soften the blow of cyberattacks, but make them more common

Experts say the trade-off could be worthwhile because it reduces vulnerabilities and the potential payoff for attackers.

SEPTEMBER 20, 2021

SEMICONDUCTORS The shortage grows longer

 

SEMICONDUCTORS The shortage grows longer

 Francis Scialabba

As Neal over at the daily newsletter wrote last week, the chip shortage was supposed to start easing up in the second half of 2021.  But it’s not: Susquehanna Financial Group found that the average time it takes for a semiconductor order to be delivered—i.e., lead time—increased to 20.2 weeks in July. That’s up from 19.3 weeks in June, and up from 12.6 weeks a year ago.  As Bloomberg notes, the lead times grew most for the chips that go into cars, home electronics, and industrial machinery.  Wait times actually fell for power management chips, which underpin small battery powered devices like smartphones.  In case you need help visualizing the real-world impact, Toyota—which was heralded for its ability to withstand the chip crisis just a few months ago—announced it’d slash auto production in Japan by 40% next month due to...you guessed it. That translates to somewhere between 60,000 and 90,000 fewer vehicles.  Last week, GM, Ford, Stellantis, and VW said they’d likely cut production due to the ongoing shortage, too.  Looking ahead: The semiconductor shortage has been a defining story of this year, and now some companies expect it to spill over into 2022.—DM

HOW-TO CRYPTO (Guide) Emerg Tech

 

HOW-TO CRYPTO

In partnership with Grayscale

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eToto Crypto News - Emerg Tech

 

SPONSORED BY ETORO Dip Your Cryptoes in the Crypto Pool

Want to explore these newfangled currencies running around the internet...but not sure where to start? We’ve got the answer: start with eToro.  Right now, if you buy $1,000 worth of crypto on eToro, you’ll get $50 smackeroos. That’s a nice swordfish dinner, just for getting into crypto on eToro.  On eToro, you can…  Browse over a dozen cryptocurrencies  Experiment with a virtual portfolio—you get $100K in “play money” to help you get the hang of crypto trading Copy the moves of top-performing traders automatically with CopyTrader™  Bone up on the industry with market guides and a weekly newsletter  20 million users worldwide are already on eToro. That’s 20 million people who don’t feel lost when crypto comes up in social conversations.  Join eToro and become one of them here.

AV Guide - Emerging Tech (Autonomous Vehicles)

  Autonomous Vehicle Guide

Big Pharma Pays-Big for Oxy

 

McKinsey's Gonna Need More Than a Spoonful of Sugar

 

Prominent consulting shop McKinsey & Co. has agreed to pay DC and most US states and territories $573 million for its role in the opioid epidemic—the first such nationwide settlement.  The allegations: In 2013, when the impacts of opioids and addiction were already well-documented, the firm advised OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma on how to "supercharge" sales by $100 million, including by targeting doctors who might have overprescribed opioids and by switching patients to more powerful doses.  Under the settlement, McKinsey admits no wrongdoing.  Most of the settlement money will head to treatment and rehab programs in areas hit hard by the epidemic, which has killed 400,000+ Americans. $15 million will be used to reimburse the National Association of Attorneys General for investigation costs.  The payout is larger than revenues the firm brought in advising opioid clients (a practice it stopped in 2019).   Zoom out: A wave of litigation that started in 2017 against companies linked to the opioid crisis is seeing results. Some pharma companies have reached settlements with individual states; Purdue Pharma agreed to pay the DOJ $8.3 billion; and Johnson & Johnson and three drug distributors are in negotiations for another multistate settlement worth $26 billion.

Fords E-Pony Mustang

 Fords E-Pony

Emerging Tech 02-03-21

 MACARM'd

Buttery Smooth: The Mac ARMed

Nov. 29, 2020 11:43 AM ET

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 About: Apple Inc. (AAPL), Includes: ADBE, AMD, AMZN, DELL, GOOG, GOOGL, HP, INTC, MSFT, NVDA, QCOM

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Long/Short Equity, Value, long-term horizon, Growth

(4,576 followers)

Summary

As promised, the Apple Silicon Macs are “buttery smooth.” They exceed even my very high expectations.

It represents a huge milestone in a slow revolution in tech. This is the biggest threat ever to the x86 platform.

Apple has shown everyone that ARM platforms can not only compete with x86, but can exceed its performance.

Owning “the whole widget” gives Apple a huge advantage here and with future products.

There is a very large opportunity for someone else to make robust platforms for ARM on Windows and in the data center.

State of AI Report 2020 - MBrew

 

AI State of AI Report 2020

Giphy/Boston Dynamics

Every year, the algorithm that runs this newsletter eagerly awaits an annual AI report from U.K. investors Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth. Their 2020 findings didn’t disappoint.  Research  Language models are improving and getting really big. They tend to be developed by large organizations and distinguished by hefty training costs. OpenAI’s GPT-3 has over 10x the parameters of the next biggest language model, which was developed by Microsoft.  Biology is having a breakout “AI moment,” with an explosion of research publications this year and last year involving AI methods. Privacy-preserving AI research has also ballooned, with more papers in the H1 2020 than all of 2019 that mention federated learning.  A drawback: “We’re rapidly approaching outrageous computational, economic, and environmental costs to gain incrementally smaller improvements in model performance.”  The human brains powering everything The exodus from academia to Big Tech continues, which may affect graduates’ entrepreneurship rates. The U.S. remains a magnet for AI talent, meaning some countries are experiencing brain drain.  An interesting stat: The majority of elite AI researchers employed in the U.S. were not trained here.  Ethics and politics Facial recognition is already widely deployed around the world. This year it really became a hot-button issue, with Facebook settling a class-action lawsuit, multiple U.S. municipal bans, and large companies like Microsoft and Amazon reconsidering facial recognition work.  Then, there’s the Washington-Beijing tech tensions. Those get enough airtime in this newsletter, so we’ll move on: The report points to a rising tide of “AI nationalism,” governments limiting foreign takeovers of superstar tech startups. The future Benaich and Hogarth provide eight predictions for the next year. File the sauciest one—Nvidia doesn’t complete its Arm acquisition—under AI nationalism. Other predictions: A top tech company will shutter its AI lab in a strategic reset. Google’s DeepMind will make a breakthrough in biology-drug discovery, while Facebook will make one with computer vision and AR/VR. An AI-first drug discovery startup exits for $1+ billion.  We’ll see you back here in 2021 to check on those predictions. In the meantime, you can read the Brew’s AI guide for deeper industry breakdowns.

The race to Exascale computing is the space race of our century.

 

SPONSORED BY HPE

The race to Exascale computing is the space race of our century. What is Exascale? It’s a supercomputer performing a billion billion calculations per second. Imagine how researchers might use that kind of power to tackle everything from vaccine discovery to the climate crisis. HPE spoke with Rick Stevens, leader of Argonne National Lab’s Exascale Computing Initiative, about how these new supercomputers will change the world. Read the Q&A.

Snowflake (SNOW) Coud IPO

 

IPO That’s Snowbiz, Baby Francis Scialabba Buzzy tech startup Snowflake will go public on the NYSE today under the ticker SNOW. It’s expected to pop like *NSYNC.  The backstory: The eight-year-old startup provides cloud-based data management for businesses (stop snoring, it’s rude). Bloomberg describes its product as “a vacuum sucking up data strewn across in different systems, so that businesses can analyze it all together.”  Investors have that surprise snow day feeling  Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and Salesforce have each thrown $250 million in the pot. And while Snowflake initially targeted a share price between $75 and $85, last night it priced its IPO at a reported $120/share.  Worth $33.3 billion, it would be the most valuable software startup ever to go public.  Why the hype? The enterprise cloud biz is torrential—lots of businesses need lots of data stored and analyzed. Snowflake is competing with mammoth incumbents Oracle and Amazon Web Services’s Redshift, but some analysts say Snowflake’s product is stronger and more flexible than the legacy players'.  Snowflake hauled in a Minneapolis-in-December drift of revenue in its most recent fiscal year, growing 174% annually to $265 million. But the company, which embarked on a pricey expansion last year following a CEO shakeup, is not profitable.  You know what they say about IPOs: When it snows, it blizzards  As of the end of last week, U.S.-listed companies had raised over $78 billion in 2020...though many of them are doing it the new-fashioned way: blank-check companies, also known as SPACs.  Former Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya’s SPAC, Social Capital Hedosophia II, took real estate tech company Opendoor public yesterday at a $4.8 billion valuation.  Looking ahead...with 12 entrants, this is the busiest week for IPOs since Uber went public in May 2019. Videogame engine maker Unity will join Snowflake on the NYSE today, looking to raise up to $1.2 billion.

ARMS to Nvidia for $40Billion

 

M&A It Takes an Army Francis Scialabba The speculation was true. In the biggest chip deal ever, SoftBank has agreed to sell UK-based Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40 billion in cash and stock. The B2B deal is likely more consequential than the TikTok spectacle hogging the limelight.  Even so, regulators won’t be rubber-stamping this tie-up. Nvidia expects the nuptials in ~18 months.  In newsletter terms, that’s light-years away And Arm’s own cofounder, Hermann Hauser, wants to stop the deal. In an open letter to PM Boris Johnson, Hauser said a Nvidia takeover could damage the UK tech sector and nullify Arm’s neutrality.  Neutrality? Arm designs chip blueprints and licenses them to 500+ companies, making it the Switzerland of semiconductors. Nvidia says it will honor Arm’s customer neutrality and open-licensing model.  What’s in it for Nvidia?  Explicit: “We are joining arms with Arm [haha] to create the leading computing company for the age of AI,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote to employees [parenthetical mine]. Huang mentioned “AI” 14 times in the memo and said Nvidia will break ground on a “world-class AI research center” in Cambridge, Arm’s HQ.   The combined R&D teams will turbocharge Nvidia’s data center, edge AI, and IoT business lines, per Huang.  Reading between those lines: Nvidia was a huge winner of the machine learning renaissance. It already has a robust data center business. Arm was recently eyeing a spinout for its IoT business to focus on mobile chip design, its core competency.  Mobile was likely a clincher for Nvidia, even though the company didn’t say so. Arm’s blueprints are in nearly every phone in the world. Nvidia may have steered clear of discussing that due to antsy-trust concerns and antsy Arm customers/Nvidia competitors.  Zoom out: The proposed sale would give Washington more leverage over origin technology. China is a key market for Arm, and regulators there could scuttle the deal or extract tech transfer concessions. RISC-V, a fledgling open-source chip design effort, may also rake in more investment and club members.

World Without Airconditioning

 Andlinger Institute: World Without Airconditioning

Proposed "Cooling Wall"              

                Benefits vs Airconditioning

EFA Endless Fro tier Act

POLICY The Limit Does Not Exist

Francis Scialabba

This week, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) unveiled the Endless Frontier Act (EFA).  I’m normally not in the business of covering laws, much less proposed ones. But EFA is an exception since it seeks to turbocharge American “discovery, creation, and commercialization of critical tech.” By that, the lawmakers mean every technology you read about in this newsletter.  EFA’s core proposals Restructure the National Science Foundation into the National Science and Technology Foundation (NSTF) In the NSTF, stand up a Technology Directorate that receives $100 billion over five years and operates like DARPA Hand the Commerce Department $10 billion to invest across 10-15 regional tech hubs over five years This is great news for U.S. universities and businesses, because EFA would pad R&D budgets, establish new scholarships, and create cutting-edge labs and fabrication plants.  What’s driving the frontier mindset? As I wrote in the fall, the private sector overtook Washington in R&D investment four decades ago. EFA’s sponsors want to expand the pool of capital so that all of Washington’s tech priorities are advanced in the U.S. The other reason for EFA, which its sponsors explicitly call out: China. While Beijing’s bid for tech supremacy is better described as a “slow burn” rather than a “Sputnik moment,” the country’s tech industrial base is now a true contender with the U.S. There’s more to come:  China plans to invest $1.4 trillion in emerging tech over the next six years.  Chinese chipmaker SMIC recently announced a $2 billion investment from state-backed funds.  Tencent will spend $70 billion on tech infrastructure over the next five years.  "The U.S. needs to pursue with all-of-the-above strategy and intensify efforts," a person familiar with the legislation told Emerging Tech Brew. Bottom line: As Bill of Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just a Bill” could tell you, EFA may never see the light of day. But adding $$$ to tech R&D and accelerating the U.S.-China tech decoupling are bipartisan priorities.

POLICY The Limit Does Not Exist

Francis Scialabba

This week, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) unveiled the Endless Frontier Act (EFA). I’m normally not in the business of covering laws, much less proposed ones. But EFA is an exception since it seeks to turbocharge American “discovery, creation, and commercialization of critical tech.” By that, the lawmakers mean every technology you read about in this newsletter.  EFA’s core proposals Restructure the National Science Foundation into the National Science and Technology Foundation (NSTF) In the NSTF, stand up a Technology Directorate that receives $100 billion over five years and operates like DARPA Hand the Commerce Department $10 billion to invest across 10-15 regional tech hubs over five years This is great news for U.S. universities and businesses, because EFA would pad R&D budgets, establish new scholarships, and create cutting-edge labs and fabrication plants.  What’s driving the frontier mindset? As I wrote in the fall, the private sector overtook Washington in R&D investment four decades ago. EFA’s sponsors want to expand the pool of capital so that all of Washington’s tech priorities are advanced in the U.S. The other reason for EFA, which its sponsors explicitly call out: China. While Beijing’s bid for tech supremacy is better described as a “slow burn” rather than a “Sputnik moment,” the country’s tech industrial base is now a true contender with the U.S. There’s more to come:  China plans to invest $1.4 trillion in emerging tech over the next six years.  Chinese chipmaker SMIC recently announced a $2 billion investment from state-backed funds.  Tencent will spend $70 billion on tech infrastructure over the next five years.  "The U.S. needs to pursue with all-of-the-above strategy and intensify efforts," a person familiar with the legislation told Emerging Tech Brew. Bottom line: As Bill of Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just a Bill” could tell you, EFA may never see the light of day. But adding $$$ to tech R&D and accelerating the U.S.-China tech decoupling are bipartisan priorities.