Lifeboat Foundation

According to Nvidia’s roadmap, it’ll unveil its next-gen Blackwell architecture soon. The company always launches a new architecture with data center products first and then reveals the cut-down GeForce versions many months later, so that’s what’s expected this time as well. On that note, the company’s semi-annual GTC technology conference starts in two weeks, so we expect a lot to be revealed at the show. As proof that Nvidia is close to pulling the wraps off its new data center GPUs, a Dell executive has already shared some juicy info about next-gen Nvidia hardware, saying in a recent earnings call the company has a 1,000W data center GPU in the pipeline.

The executive who has probably already received an angry call from Jensen is Jeff Clarke, a COO at Dell. On a Feb. 29 earnings call (PDF), the executive discussed Dell’s engineering superiority and how upcoming hardware from Nvidia will give the company a chance to show it off. “We’re excited about what happens at the B100 and the B200,” he said, which are the die names for Nvidia’s next-generation data center GPU and its apparent successor. For context, Nvidia currently has the H100 as its flagship data center GPU and is just now launching the second iteration with faster HBM3e memory, dubbed H200. We all know the B100 is the Blackwell successor to this chip, so it appears the B200 will be that GPU’s second iteration, though it does not currently appear on Nvidia’s roadmap (below).

It’s hard to imagine that a Ford F-150 Lightning out there already has nearly 100,000 miles on its odometer. Especially since they’ve only been on the roads since late May of 2022. That’s less than two years ago, yet here we have a Ford F-150 Lightning owner reporting on his electric truck with 93,000 miles on the odometer.

He’s owned this F-150 Lightning for 21 months now, so that works out to an average of 4,429 miles driven per month or about 53,000 miles yearly. And while that’s certainly a lot of driving, what’s perhaps most interesting is the battery health of the electric pickup truck.

He then left Google and started a new AI lab called Inflection AI, which he ran as CEO. He and Inflection’s chief scientist, Karén Simonyan, are now jumping ship to help lead Microsoft AI.

Suleyman will become both a Microsoft EVP and run the new Microsoft AI group as CEO. On why he was selected, Nadella said: “I’ve known Mustafa for several years and have greatly admired him as a founder of both DeepMind and Inflection, and as a visionary, product maker, and builder of pioneering teams that go after bold missions.”

Meanwhile, Suleyman noted in a LinkedIn post: “I’ll be leading all consumer AI products and research, including Copilot, Bing and Edge.” Several of his co-workers at Inflection have also decided to migrate to Microsoft, he wrote.

Boffins show less platinum may be needed for long-lived power source.

A new device uses a reflective cavity, a tiny bead and an electrode to create a laser beam of sound particles ten times more powerful and much narrower than other “phonon lasers”

NIO’s entry-level Standard battery pack option will soon get an upgrade with the new 2024 model year cars.

According to the company (via CnEVPost), the 75-kilowatt-hour dual-chemistry (LFP/NCM) Standard battery will be replaced by a new 75-kWh battery with only LFP battery cells. This should simplify the pack and reduce costs. LFP’s battery cell chemistry is known as one of the least expensive per kWh.

Landauer’s principle formulated in 1961 states that logical irreversibility implies physical irreversibility and demonstrated that information is physical. Here we formulate a new principle of mass-energy-information equivalence proposing that a bit of information is not just physical, as already demonstrated, but it has a finite and quantifiable mass while it stores information. In this framework, it is shown that the mass of a bit of information at room temperature (300K) is 3.19 × 10^-38 Kg. To test the hypothesis we propose here an experiment, predicting that the mass of a data storage device would increase by a small amount when is full of digital information relative to its mass in erased state. For 1Tb device the estimated mass change is 2.5 × 10^-25 Kg.

Memory, or the ability to store information in a readily accessible way, is an essential operation in computers and human brains. A key difference is that while brain information processing involves performing computations directly on stored data, computers shuttle data back and forth between a memory unit and a central processing unit (CPU). This inefficient separation (the von Neumann bottleneck) contributes to the rising energy cost of computers.

Approximately 4 billion years ago, Earth was in the process of creating conditions suitable for life. Origin-of-life scientists often wonder if the type of chemistry found on the early Earth was similar to what life requires today. They know that spherical collections of fats, called protocells, were the precursor to cells during this emergence of life. But how did simple protocells first arise and diversify to eventually lead to life on Earth?

Now, Scripps Research scientists have discovered one plausible pathway for how protocells may have first formed and chemically progressed to allow for a diversity of functions.

Continue reading “New Phospholipid Discovery Rewrites the Story of the Origin of Life” »