Table of Contents
In this week’s edition of The Prototype, we look at chips designed for AI, building modular nuclear reactors, creating real web fluid, the Nobel Prize, and more. You can sign up here to receive the prototype in your inbox.
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Walter Goodwin, CEO of Fractile
Fragile
LLast week, OpenAI announced it had raised $6.6 billion in new investments. But despite this staggering amount, The information reported that the company expects to spend $9.5 billion annually in computing costs in the coming years on training new models for research.
Much of this cost has to do with the underlying architecture of computers, which keeps memory and processing in separate parts of a chip, requiring a constant exchange of data between these two parts. When it comes to AI models that process massive amounts of data, this constant movement between memory and processing is responsible for a significant portion of the energy consumed by chips.
British hardware startup Fractile, recently emerged from the stealth world with $15 million in backing, is developing an AI coprocessor that integrates memory and processing. While it’s not the first company to work on a new hardware architecture, competitors like Groq and Cerebras have raised hundreds of millions between them, CEO Walter Goodwin said. ForbesOne thing that sets his company’s approach apart is that the chips can only perform the “very small set of operations” that AI algorithms use. So instead of a general-purpose chip, Fractile’s hardware is specific to LLMs. The company said this means it can make models run up to 100 times faster at a tenth of the current cost.
However, Fractile still has a way to go. Currently, Goodwin said it has “a lot of prototyping efforts” for its new chips, adding that “in terms of getting to a full first product, I think we have a very clear path to get there.”
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This startup aims to build cheap nuclear reactors in shipyards
Concept art of a Blue Energy nuclear power plant.
Blue Energy
SWhile the number of power-hungry AI applications is peaking, their rapid growth has led to a surge in energy demand. This not only burdens the electricity grid, but also makes it difficult to achieve the targets for reducing CO2 emissions. One potential source of clean energy is nuclear energy. But despite the revival of interest, the technology remains expensive and it can take about ten years to build a new factory.
Jake Jurewicz has a plan to make nuclear energy more practical. His company, Blue Energy, just emerged from stealth with $45 million in investment support. His company is developing the means to build modular nuclear reactors for coastal shipyards, growing out of a research group at MIT that developed form factors for nuclear power plants from components already used for “offshore wind energy and offshore oil and gas,” Jurewicz said. Forbes. “We don’t invent anything.”
With this approach, the company estimates it can reduce construction time from 10 to 2 years, and capital costs by a similar margin. Blue Energy also said it has a letter of intent from a data center and cloud provider for its first factory, although it did not name the customers.
The design takes advantage of existing reactor technologies that are in widespread use, and envisions the reactor portion of the plant actually being underwater. Jurewicz said this both improves security against external threats and adds a new source of cooling. It also makes it easier to build a nuclear power plant without having to deal with the considerations of putting it on land. “We can prefabricate everything at multiple shipyards, take it to an operating site and install it,” he said.
DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK: RESEARCHERS CREATE SPIDER-MAN’S WEB LIQUID
Researchers at Tufts University have a real life version of Spider-Man’s web fluidwhich can pick up objects more than 80 times its weight. To do that, they developed a process to extract fibers cocoons of silk moths make a liquid. They then added chemical additives to the liquid. When the liquid is squeezed out of a needle, it solidifies when exposed to air. Assistant professor Marco Lo Presti discovered this process accidentally, but subsequent experiments allowed them to refine it. Their findings were published this week in the news Advanced functional materials.
FINAL FRONTIER: ROCKS MOVE FROM MARS
NASA promised A California-based aerospace company Rocket Lab a contract to develop a retrieval mission proposal samples from the surface of Mars and bring them back to Earth. The company said it is working on a proposed mission concept that would be both cheaper than NASA’s current plans and able to bring back the samples several years earlier the agency’s target date is 2040. Rocket Lab has worked on several other missions for NASA, including the 2022 launch of the Capstone satellite, and it is currently building spacecraft for NASA’s Escapade Mission to Mars, currently set to launch next spring.
FORBES CALLED IT: NOBEL PRIZE EDITION
This week is the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNAa crucial part of the mechanism your body uses to control when to use which parts of your body DNA. Their groundbreaking article was published in 2000which showed that microRNAs were used in the plant and animal kingdoms. It took another 24 years before the Nobel Prize was awarded, but a Article from 2005 Forbes by Matthew Herper and Robert Langreth highlighted the many ways in which this discovery occurred is already having an impact on the fieldnoting the promise that it would unearth “hundreds of new targets for experimental drugs.”
WHAT ELSE I WROTE THIS WEEK
I spoke to the billionaire co-founder of Robinhood Baiju Bhatt and his new company, Aetherflux, which aims to build a constellation of satellites that capture solar energy and beam it back to Earth with lasers.
I wrote about it too Cytovalewhich just raised $100 million in investment capital to expand commercialization of its rapid test sepsisthe third leading killer in US hospitals. This test was used in a hospital in Louisiana reduced mortality from sepsis increased by 35% last year.
SCIENCE AND TECHNICAL SCIENCE
My colleague Alan Ohnsman wrote about it Redwood materials announces that its facilities will now begin recycling EV batteries damaged by fires and floods.
Venture capital firm DCVC has been released annual report from where it currently sees investment opportunities in deep tech.
European robotics company German bionic announced the launch of its Apogee+an exoskeleton that can be worn by nurses and other healthcare professionals to assist them in lifting and repositioning patients.
Researchers at MIT have developed one solar desalination system that can produce large quantities of clean drinking water from the ocean without the need for additional energy sources.
PRO SCIENCE TIP: Expose your kids to misinformation and skepticism
Like one olderit may be tempting to closely monitor the information your children receive and ensure they are not exposed wrong information. But new research published in Nature Human behavior felt it is better to give them access to wrong information-together with accompaniment about how to pay attention to it. In the study, children were exposed to easily recognizable misinformation were more likely to identify misinformation in later experiments than children whose media intake was kept free of any misinformation. “We need to give children experience in flexing these skepticism muscles,” says one of the researchers a press release.
WHAT’S BUILDING ME THIS WEEK
Season 4 of Only murders in the building has been a great pleasure so far. The chemistry between the three leads remains strong, the mystery is truly puzzling, and this season’s guest stars are great, especially Richard Kind, Zach Galifianakis, and Melissa McCarthy. All seasons are currently streaming on Hulu.
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