Future Technology[Daily Briefing] Jeff Dean quits Google 🚪, chips up 15% 💸, 400bn Suns ✨
Four people just walked out of Google carrying its foundations
Jeff Dean spent 27 years at Google. He did not leave alone. Sanjay Ghemawat, his long time collaborator, went with him, along with Oriol Vinyals from DeepMind and Quoc Le from Google Brain. Between the four of them they are carrying MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow, AlphaStar, seq2seq and AutoML out of the building.
The new company is called Discovery Loop. It is structured as a public benefit corporation rather than a standard startup, and the stated goal is to automate scientific and engineering research itself. Phase one is automating machine learning research. After that they have named hardware design, drug discovery and clean energy. Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are co leading the seed round.
The odd detail is who else is on the cap table. Google is a founding investor and cloud partner, which is an unusual way to lose four of your most important engineers. It gets to keep a stake in whatever they build while no longer employing any of them.
The bet underneath all of this is worth sitting with. Every large lab currently assumes the route to better AI is a bigger model trained on more compute. Discovery Loop is betting the route is an AI that runs the research loop, generates its own experiments, and compounds. If that turns out to be right, the definition of what an AI lab even is changes.
Why it matters: this is the first serious attempt to point frontier AI at the process of research rather than at the product of it. If it works, the bottleneck on progress stops being GPUs and starts being ideas.
Quick hits
- Samsung raised chip prices by up to 15 percent. The 4nm and 5nm nodes climbed 10 to 15 percent and even the older 8nm line rose nearly 10 percent, with Chinese designers absorbing the steepest increases because export controls leave them nowhere else to go. Read more
- The H200 reached China and memory prices moved 20 percent. Each H200 carries six stacks of HBM3E, so opening one market added a block of demand that only three companies on earth can supply. Read more
- Three more vulnerabilities went on the actively exploited list. An authentication bypass in N-able N-central sits above hundreds of customer networks at once, and August Patch Tuesday cleared 421 CVEs from Microsoft alone. Read more
- A black hole shredded a massive star and something survived. The event briefly released as much energy as 400 billion Suns, and months later astronomers found helium moving faster than the standard picture allows. Read more
- Your chatbot now has to tell you it is a chatbot. Article 50 of the EU AI Act is in force, the penalty ceiling is 15 million euro or 3 percent of global turnover, and burying the disclosure in terms and conditions does not count. Read more
Tool of the day
Celestron Cometron 7x50 binoculars
After writing about a star being torn apart by a black hole, the honest advice is that you will never see anything like it from a garden in the UK. What you will see, on a clear night with no tripod and no setup time, is the Andromeda galaxy as a smudge, four moons around Jupiter, and considerably more of the Milky Way than your eyes manage alone.
These sit around 40 pounds. The optics are ordinary rather than special and the 7x50 spec means a wide, bright, forgiving view, which matters more than magnification when you are holding them by hand. The real caveat: at 50mm they are heavy enough that your arms will shake after a minute or two, so lean on a fence or a car roof. If you want a telescope instead, buy a telescope. If you want something you will actually pick up on a Tuesday, this is the one.
Celestron Cometron 7x50 on Amazon
One question for you today. If a lab like Discovery Loop really does automate machine learning research, does that make progress faster, or just harder for the rest of us to follow? Hit reply, I read every one.
Nath, Future Technology
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