(Re)Share | #33 - Woke the plank
Woke LLMs | Advanced lithography | 3D metal printing | Orbital maneuvering | CRISPR
Slower than desired to get this out because I once again have failed to account for cross-London travel time. So here are a bunch of interesting deep tech stories and now I’m late again…
Stuff Worth Sharing
Woke the plank - We have to talk about #Geminigate, perhaps the most disastrous product rollout since Tay. The powerful new image generation tool was built upon moderation protocols that had very, very unintended consequences. For two days nearly all of my Twitter was flooded with example of progressively minded overly incorrect image generation, (examples here, here, here). Debate was fiery on the socials with many claiming this being the manifestation of the woke agenda. I think this was more a case of well intentions gone wrong, but still it’s really not good. This particular model was designed by the Bard team who have seemingly lower QA focus than their Deepmind colleagues. GOOG is down 10.62% for the month so unsurprisingly, they pulled the model.
Guilt-free chips - Canon has shipped their first nano imprint lithography (NIL) machine, their low cost alternative to ASML's extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology. Beyond the obvious importance of anything that’s touching advanced chip design, NIL is notable for its bold claim to use 90% less energy than competing methods. NIL is a 15 year technology in the making and achieves the energy advantage by stamping chip designs directly onto silicon wafers rather than the laser-heavy EUV.
Not so heavy metal - An MIT group unveiled a new 3D printing technique that leverages liquid metal to produce large-scale parts like table legs and chair frames in a matter of minutes. Liquid metal printing (LMP), involves depositing molten aluminum along a predefined path into a bed of tiny glass beads, which quickly hardens into a 3D structure. This is a notable innovation over the more common powdered metal fusion which offers strength and flexibility at the cost of speed. My very first VC deep dive during my intern days was to form a view on whether 3D printing was a ripe area of investment. It wasn’t then and still isn’t, but it’s cool and I want that chair.
Extra credit - The European Parliament reached a provisional political agreement on a regulation to establish the first EU-level certification framework for permanent carbon removals, carbon farming and carbon storage in products. More specifically it dictates four levels of creditworthiness based on the relative permanence, a monitoring protocol and a proposed EU regisry that should improve accounting. Regulation and the tech world are not fast friends but this is required, in my opinion, if we’re ever to get a viable carbon asset market going. To date the industry has broadly policed itself, which is why the past 12 months have been a tire fire of trust for for voluntary credits. This proposal is preliminary and not perfect but promising.
International trash can of mystery - A Japanese startup is preparing the world’s first orbital maneuver mission that targets an uncontrolled object. Orbital maneuvers are nothing new but they always involved two remotely controlled entities (e.g. nano-satellite and the ISS) but here the object of interest is a defunct upper stage rocket that’s circling the globe at ~5 miles per second. This mission is simply to navigate, co-locate and take alignment photos but in future attempts we could leverage robotics and eventually attempt the removal of space debris, which has population of space debris in orbit has increased by 76% since 2019.
Back to the future - For the first time in over 50 years we successfully landed an (unmanned) spacecraft on the lunar surface, the last time being the Apollo mission. More importantly, this is the first time a mission like that has been successfully run by a private company. That honor is now held by Intuitive Machines, a Houston-based company, and its Odysseus vessel. The private innovation of newspace is extremely exciting. For over a decade there’s been legitimate concerns that investment in the area is too early but I really think those days are numbered.
Rock, paper, genetic scissors - CRISPR-Cas9 got an upgrade. Recent Stanford research unveiled in Nature Cell introduced Cas13d, which targets and cuts RNA rather than DNA. This has two major benefits. The first is that by targeting RNA any undesired effects are quickly dissipated through the cells normal RNA elimination process. The second is improved resilience. CRISPR–Cas13d systems can shut down the production of multiple proteins through mRNA removal, which effectively turns off up to ten genes at a time and eliminates the production of problematic proteins in question.
Come to my window, I’ll be home soon - Just last week we discussed Google’s best-in-class window limit of 1 million tokens and just seven days later that record’s been broken. This LongRoPE research successfully demonstrates a context window extension to 2 million tokens, enabling radically more powerful use case in summarization, investigation and understanding. With only 1k fine-tuning steps at within 256k training lengths, the team was able to maintain performance aa the original context window (128k tokens).
Portfolio Flex
Software’s still eating - The team behind Software Defined Automation (SDA) published a thought piece in Forbes on the potential of and challenges to true factory automation.
Check please - Orbital Materials announced their $16 million Series A led by Radical Ventures to continue the mission of building a proprietary foundation model for materials science.