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Category: finance – Page 52

The forecast, first reported by Reuters, represents how some in Silicon Valley are betting the underlying technology will go far beyond splashy and sometimes flawed public demos.

OpenAI was most recently valued at $20 billion in a secondary share sale, one of the sources said. The startup has already inspired rivals and companies building applications atop its generative AI software, which includes the image maker DALL-E 2. OpenAI charges developers licensing its technology about a penny or a little more to generate 20,000 words of text, and about 2 cents to create an image from a written prompt, according to its website.

A spokesperson for OpenAI declined to comment on its financials and strategy. The company, which started releasing commercial products in 2020, has said its mission remains advancing AI safely for humanity.

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Standing among solar arrays and power grid equipment at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), you might hear a faint, distorted melody buzzing from somewhere. You are not hallucinating—that gray box really is singing the Star Wars Theme, or the ice cream truck song, or Chopin’s Waltz in A minor. Power system engineers are just having some fun with an NREL capability that prevents stability problems on the electrical grid.

Usually, the engineers send another kind of waveform through the inverters and load banks: megawatts of power and voltage vibrations at many frequencies. The purpose of their research is to see how and the grid interact—to get them “in tune” and prevent dangerous electrical oscillations that show up like screechy feedback or a booming sub-bass.

The engineers can do this analysis at with NREL hardware using the lab’s advanced impedance measurement system, and they have also produced a commercially available software called the Grid Impedance Scan Tool or GIST that can do the same with simulated power on device models, allowing any manufacturer or grid operator to certify grid with renewable energy resources.

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Structuring, Financing & Growing Novel Longevity Ventures — Dr. Tobias Reichmuth Ph.D., Founding Partner, Maximon

Dr. Tobias Reichmuth, Ph.D. is Founding Partner at Maximon (https://www.maximon.com/), The Longevity Company Builder, which empowers entrepreneurs to build impactful, science-based and scalable companies providing healthy aging and rejuvenation solutions.

Maximon recently announced the launch of their 100 million CHF Longevity Co-Investment Fund, which will be looking to invest up to CHF 10 million per company, which allows them to finance up to 10–12 start-ups in this fast growing industry over the next four years.

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Japan wants to get back into the leading-edge semiconductor business and very recently a new company was formed to reboot its semiconductor industry. The company is named Rapidus, referring to rapid production of new chips, a clear reference to how the company plans to differentiate its business from other foundries such as TSMC, Samsung, and Intel. The company has announced a partnership with IBM Research to develop IBM’s 2nm technology in fabs that Rapidus plans to build in Japan during the second part of this decade. Previously, Rapidus announced a collaboration with the Belgium-based microelectronics research hub IMEC on advanced semiconductor technologies. Imec is collaborative semiconductor research organization working the world’s major foundries, IDMs, fabless and fablite companies, material and tool suppliers, EDA companies and application developers.

The IBM process uses gate-all-around transistors — IBM refers to them as nano sheet FETs — which is the next generation of transistor design that enables device scaling beyond today’s FinFETs. The 2nm structures will require Rapidus to use ASML’s EUV manufacturing equipment. Business details with IBM were not disclosed, but there’s likely two parts to the deal: a cross-licensing agreement for the intellectual property necessary to build the product and a joint development agreement. While the announcement is nominally for IBM’s 2nm process, it likely includes a long-term commitment to build advanced semiconductor chips going beyond the 2nm process node.

Rapidus was formed by semiconductor veterans such as Rapidus President Atsuyoshi Koike, with backing by leading Japanese technology and financial firms, including Denso, Kioxia, Mitsubishi UFJ Bank, NEC, NTT, Softbank, Sony, and Toyota Motor. The Japanese government is also subsidizing Rapidus. The big change for Japan compared to prior national efforts is the collaboration with international organizations. It’s a recognition Japan cannot go it alone. This appears to be a fundamental change in Japanese attitudes. Building a fab in Japan will be helped by Japan’s strong manufacturing ecosystem of materials, equipment, and engineering talent.

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FTX’s fallen CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, is scheduled to testify tomorrow as a witness before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services.

The committee is investigating the events that led up to FTX’s implosion, which resulted in the crypto exchange filing for bankruptcy last month. Prior to Bankman-Fried testifying, John J. Ray III, the new CEO of FTX, will speak to the House during its first panel.

The hearing, “Investigating the Collapse of FTX, Part I,” sounds like a movie title — and some parts of it probably feel like one, given how crazy this whole situation has become. But questions surrounding what really happened at FTX may remain unanswered; even though Bankman-Fried is scheduled to testify, there are still concerns he may get cold feet.

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Microsoft today announced that it acquired Lumenisity, a U.K.-based startup developing “hollow core fiber (HCF)” technologies primarily for data centers and ISPs. Microsoft says that the purchase, the terms of which weren’t disclosed, will “expand [its] ability to further optimize its global cloud infrastructure” and “serve Microsoft’s cloud platform and services customers with strict latency and security requirements.”

HCF cables fundamentally combine optical fiber and coaxial cable. They’ve been around since the ’90s, but what Lumenisity brings to the table is a proprietary design with an air-filled center channel surrounded by a ring of glass tubes. The idea is that light can travel faster through air than glass; in a trial with Comcast in April, a single strand of Lumenisity HCF was reportedly able to deliver traffic rates ranging from 10 Gbps to 400 Gbps.

“HCF can provide benefits across a broad range of industries including healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, retail and government,” Girish Bablani, CVP of Microsoft’s Azure Core business, wrote in a blog post. “For the public sector, HCF could provide enhanced security and intrusion detection for federal and local governments across the globe. In healthcare, because HCF can accommodate the size and volume of large data sets, it could help accelerate medical image retrieval, facilitating providers’ ability to ingest, persist and share medical imaging data in the cloud. And with the rise of the digital economy, HCF could help international financial institutions seeking fast, secure transactions across a broad geographic region.”

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The quiet October 29 announcement of the partnership is light on details, stating that Trust Lab and In-Q-Tel — which invests in and collaborates with firms it believes will advance the mission of the CIA — will work on “a long-term project that will help identify harmful content and actors in order to safeguard the internet.” Key terms like “harmful” and “safeguard” are unexplained, but the press release goes on to say that the company will work toward “pinpointing many types of online harmful content, including toxicity and misinformation.”

Though Trust Lab’s stated mission is sympathetic and grounded in reality — online content moderation is genuinely broken — it’s difficult to imagine how aligning the startup with the CIA is compatible with Siegel’s goal of bringing greater transparency and integrity to internet governance. What would it mean, for instance, to incubate counter-misinformation technology for an agency with a vast history of perpetuating misinformation? Placing the company within the CIA’s tech pipeline also raises questions about Trust Lab’s view of who or what might be a “harmful” online, a nebulous concept that will no doubt mean something very different to the U.S. intelligence community than it means elsewhere in the internet-using world.

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Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are suffering unimaginable injuries in the country’s war with Russia. Many of the more seriously wounded have lost one or more limbs. Now a company in New York is stepping up to help. For access to live and exclusive video from CNBC subscribe to CNBC PRO: https://cnb.cx/2NGeIvi.

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Government support is needed, however, to help consumers overcome heat pumps’ higher upfront costs relative to alternatives. The costs of purchasing and installing a heat pump can be up to four times as much as those for a gas boiler. Financial incentives for heat pumps are now available in 30 countries.

In the IEA’s most optimistic scenario – in which all governments achieve their energy and climate pledges in full – heat pumps become the main way of decarbonising space and water heating worldwide. The agency estimates that heat pumps have the potential to reduce global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by at least 500 million tonnes in 2030 – equal to the annual CO2 emissions of all cars in Europe today. Leading manufacturers report promising signs of momentum and policy support and have announced plans to invest more than US$4 billion in expanding heat pump production and related efforts, mostly in Europe.

Opportunities also exist for heat pumps to provide low-temperature heat in industrial sectors, especially in the paper, food, and chemicals industries. In Europe alone, 15 gigawatts of heat pumps could be installed across 3,000 facilities in these three sectors, which have been hit hard by recent rises in natural gas prices.

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‘Pangeos’ is a turtle-shaped ‘terayacht,’ a giant floating city imagined by Italian firm Lazzarini Design Studio. While it only exists as a rendering for now, upon completion it could be the largest floating structure in the world. #yahoofinance.

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