(Re)Share | #22 - Oppenheimer vibes
Semiconductors | Acoustic cyberattacks | AI safety | AI in defense | EV batteries
All the [deep tech] news that’s fit to [digitally] print.
Stuff worth sharing
Stacking chips - Germany is the latest country to throw its hat in the global-semiconductor-supply-chain-reshoring ring. Earlier this month TSMC announced an $11 billion plant in their effort to replicate manufacturing outside of Taiwan. Germany is hungry to establish itself as a core EU hub for this tech-driven gold rush and are paying up - $5 billion to win the title of ESMC. With Intel also investing heavily in the nation, they seem to be doing just that. This plant would specifically focus on the non-leading edge (<3 nanometers) in order to provide local resiliency for the auto industry. Much of the discussion we’ve had in (Re)Share has been focused on the geopolitical concerns of losing bleeding edge superiority, but for anyone that’s tried to buy a car in recent years, it’s actually older tech that matters.
Your money’s no good there - The Biden administration proposed new rules that limit US investments in advanced technology industries in China under the banner of national security. This “reverse-CFIUS” has been all over my finance nerd Twitter - both for the potential implications and doubt in probability of happening. In last week’s issue I shared some thoughts on the China-focused Congressional testimony and this announcement further indicates just how quickly we’re seeing adversarial lines being drawn. It’s one thing to limit foreign investment within domestic ventures but to stop outbound investment is a few steps closer to sanctions-level.
Finding signal in noise - Move over privacy screens! A recent paper unveiled a study which was able to achieve 90%+ accuracy in predicting passwords simply by listening to keystrokes. The research walks through the construction and deployment of “acoustic side attacks” via self-attention transformer layers, as well as some interesting real-world experiments they ran. I can think of no better time to launch my long awaited typing mittens business.
Reducing skid marks - Google released research that helps airlines reduce their climate impact by avoiding contrails. Contrails, the white lines that trail planes in the sky, are formed when a plane travels through humid air. The cirrus clouds trap large amounts of heat that would otherwise leave the Earth’s atmosphere and contribute up to 35% of the airline industry’s climate impact.
M-AI-stro, please - Meta released AudioCraft, a Generative AI for audio toolkit. I found this to be one of the more fun LLM applications, namely because I a) like music, b) can sort of think of music in my head and c) have virtually no musical talent in any capacity whatsoever. Melodic creation is, of course, more complex than a more standard text-to-audio sample of environmental sounds (e.g. car siren, dog barking) and the post goes into some explanation on both. Full paper here.
Fear and Loathing in DC - In what’s quickly becoming a segment in this newsletter, I once again devoted multiple hours to a Congressional testimony. This week I watched the hearing on AI Principles for Regulation, which featured testimony from Dario Amodei (CEO of Anthropic), Yoshua Bengio (AI royalty) and Stuart Russel (UC Berkeley). The hearing was fascinating and well worth the time if you’re into this stuff (skip the first 22 minutes). While Amodei’s testimony was probably the most cited, I actually found Bengio’s Oppenheimer vibes to be the standout. He highlighted a number of proposals, some standard (operating licenses, researcher access) and others that were more novel (government funded counter labs). One of the more plausible suggestions, which is already in process under Biden, is to control the field’s physical supply chain because it provides an actionable chokepoint to maintain control.
Controlling Skynet - An overview of the current state of AI deployment within the theater of war and the changing definition of offensive intelligence. This is no longer a question of ability but one of accountability, which places equal parts moral and legal topics at hand. I found the idea of Engineered Inefficiency, the deliberate slow down of decision processing to ensure proper assessment, to be fascinating. The article mentions a few firms involved but the most notable being Palantir, who earlier this year released their Artificial Intelligence Platform offering. I highly recommend watching the AIP for Defense demo.
Against my better judgement - OpenAI released some detail on how they’re levering language models to provide scalable content moderation. Long time readers will know that this space has been an investment white whale of mine - see Investing in: Authentic(AI)tion - so I’m all about this.
Going the distance - CATL unveiled a “god-like movement” battery that is able to refuel up to 400 kilometers (250 miles) of range in 10 minutes. I don’t own an EV but I want one so this makes me happy.
Portfolio Flex
Lakera introduced Lakera Guard – a developer-first API to bring enterprise-grade security to LLM applications. It’s a pretty magical time when a company finds product-market fit so I’m very much enjoy my courtside seats for this one.
Wayve featured in CNBC. Nothing covered here that we haven’t covered in past issues, but still cool.
Job Drop
Quick reminder that every week I share new roles from the Fly portfolio here.