Bookmarks (344)

The problematic Boeing Starliner should be leaving the Space Station in about 24 minutes. It will try to return to Earth in about 6 hours and Starliner will contain no astronauts. They had thruster problems and helium leaks. They had to fix the software over a month to switch from crewed mode to uncrewed.

Tesla uses robotaxi sensors at training time but then the AI is trained and they remove the training wheels for vision only deployment. Karpathy believes Tesla is ahead of Waymo. Waymo has a hardware problem while Tesla has a software problem. I believe Waymo also has business model and scaling problems.

Anthropic CEO talks about AI scaling laws which is a discussion about how good AI gets with more compute training. Dario Amodei, CEO and Co-founder of Anthropic. Dario talks about the economics of AI development, the comparative advantage of AI companies like Anthropic, AI safety, and his stance on California’s SB 1047 bill. They also ... Read more

Tesla AI team released the FSD roadmap. Each FSD sale is the profit of a car. some of my FSD catalysts from a few months ago were late. 12.5 happened late in July. One month late on this roadmap is ok. But the team is driving and testing FSD V13 for over a month. They ... Read more

Nextbigfuture at substack has all of the big AI news for the week. There was big news this week in AI, AI startups, AI research and AI funding. 1. OpenAI’s Japan CEO reveals GPT-Next will be released this year, and its effective computational load is 100x greater than GPT-4 2. Two $125 Billion AI Training ... Read more

10 weeks ago X-Chief Scientist of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever said Superintelligence is within reach and created a new startup, Safe Superintelligence Inc. Ilya announced that Safe Superintelligence has raised $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation. NFDG, a16z, Sequoia, DST Global, and SV Angel are the main funders. Building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most ... Read more

Destinus is a startup developing hydrogen powered hypersonic drones and planes. They are headquartered in Switzerland. Destinus has received $58+M funding from private and public sources. In 2026, they plan to test the supersonic hydrogen prototype, and by 2030, to build a hypersonic airplane. The design of Destinus E is set to make its first ... Read more

Exosonic is startup developing supersonic UAVs to support the aerial target, collaborative combat aircraft, and adversary air training missions for both government and commercial customers. Exosonic designed, manufactured, and brought the EX-3M to flight test in only nine months. They useed rapid iteration of the aircraft design, diversifying the supply chain, and maintaining the assembly ... Read more

There is a AI Infrastructure Summit in San Francisco, Union Square on September 27, 2024. It will bring together AI Developers, Tech Luminaries, AI Enterprises, AI Builders and Industry giants. This is convergence of the ecosystem at the AI INFRA SUMMIT. It is headlined by industry giants AMD and Supermicro, this groundbreaking summit unites pioneers ... Read more

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician, economist, former Managing Director of Thiel Capital and a podcaster. Eric give his thoughts on the 2024 presidential election, whether we are being gaslit on a global scale by the media. Eric has many interesting ideas but this means people will not agree with all or possibly most of the ... Read more

xkcd’s What If? Asks could you survive teleporting to the sun for a nanosecond. As always the video provides an entertaining answer based upon physics and calculation.

This weekend, the xAI team brought the Colossus 100k H100 training cluster online. From start to finish, it was done in 122 days. Colossus is the most powerful AI training system in the world. Moreover, it will double in size to 200k (50k H200s) in a few months. This weekend, the @xAI team brought our ... Read more

NASA and Boeing strongly disagreed about the safety of the Boeing Starliner. Boeing was convinced that the Starliner was in good enough condition to bring the astronauts home, and NASA strongly disagreed. NASA thought that Boeing was being wildly irresponsible. NASA decided to overrule Boeing and have Elon Musk’s Space X Crew Dragon bring the ... Read more

Venus Aerospace, making hypersonic flight a reality for commercial and defense purposes, has achieved the first long-duration engine test of their Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine (RDRE) in partnership with DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). They have a detonation ramjet engine and a rotating detonation rocket engine. Venus Aerospace has raised over $48 million in ... Read more

Tesla will be showing the robotaxi on October 10, 2024 at the 110 acre Warner Brothers Studio (62 acres main studio and another 28 acres of backlot). This is about 17% of a square mile. Tesla is gathering extra information in the Warner Brothers Studio area. This is about 40 blocks. **If you are looking ... Read more

Nanqiang No. 1 is a small (500 kilogram) ground testing model for a Chinese hypersonic plane program. They have completed over two years of testing. In 2025, China will flight test a small drone. In 2025, construction of a 72 ton hypersonic plane will begin. They are targeting 2028 for flight tests of a hypersonic ... Read more

Tesla has always used lidar to calibrate autopilot and FSD. This is one valid use-case for lidar. Hinrichs Zanegler has published videos of the Tesla Semi starting robotrucking tests. The prototype production is scaling up as Zanegler shows pictures of 23 Tesla Semis parked together. Tesla is scaling up to a few hundred serial production ... Read more

A classified contract that involves a highly complex design and systems integration project fell $45 million deeper into losses at Lockheed. Based on Lockheed’s quarterly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, that places the total Lockheed losses associated with this single shadow program up to some $335 million since 2022. Between February 2018, ... Read more

Startup Hermeus is developing hypersonic propulsion system for their Quarterhorse and Darkhorse vehicles. This could be achieving mach 5 speeds in 2026 to 2027. Quarterhorse Development Timeline: Mk 1: The first flyable version of Quarterhorse, Mk 1, is set for flight tests later in 2024. These tests will focus on high-speed takeoffs and landings Mk ... Read more

We need to make bigger solar sails from materials that can take high temperatures. Taking high temperatures means the solar sails could fly closer to the sun. If we got four times closer to the sun than Mercury (9 million miles or so )then we could go 20AU per year which is about 3 times ... Read more

NASA plans to build larger solar sails that can generate more thrust. A new unique composite carbon fiber booms, the ACS3 system has the potential to support sails as large as 2,000 square meters, or about 21,500 square feet, or about half the area of a soccer field. The ACS3 system has been in low ... Read more

There has been several updates on the numbers of Tesla Dojo systems that have been built. The main technical details are compared between the Tesla Dojo version 1 and the Nvidia H100 and chips from a startup Etched. These are some of the main AI chips that are competing for the future multi-trillion AI training ... Read more

Researchers at ETH Zurich have teamed up with the food industry to produce a whole-fruit variety of chocolate. * ETH researchers have developed a type of chocolate that is more sustainable and nutritious than conventional varieties. * Cocoa-fruit chocolate uses cocoa fruit jelly as a replacement for powdered sugar, reducing the sugar content and increasing ... Read more

Every business owner wants their business to succeed, but unfortunately, not all of them will. There are both objective and subjective factors that can influence the survivability of your company, and it pays to study both successful and unsuccessful examples of businesses so that you can put yours in a better position to succeed. Adaptable ... Read more

BYD’s significant cash burn for the second consecutive quarter is a major concern. BYD will likely slash production in 3Q to release inventory capital, alleviating cash burn. BYD has about $15 billion in inventory (66 days). This is about tracking to 3 million sales for the year. 550k cars in inventory. BYD’s growth will significantly ... Read more

The booster landed with a speed that was far higher than normal. This resulted in damage that eventually broke one of three landing legs. SpaceX had a run of 267 consecutive successful landings. SpaceX booster 1062 has suffered a landing failure after its 23rd flight! 💥 This ends a run of 267 consecutive landings. pic.twitter.com/2TNhegTjp9 ... Read more

Nvidia has released their quarterly results and they have beat on revenue with $30 billion versus expectations of $27 billion. Nvidia is guiding to $32.5 billion for revenue in the next quarter versus expectations of $31 billion. Record quarterly revenue of $30.0 billion, up 15% from Q1 and up 122% from a year ago Record ... Read more

Tesla just presented a highly technical talk about Dojo’s networking protocol at the Hot Chips conference. The Tesla networking protocol is twice as fast as the industry standard NVLink used in Nvidia supercomputers. Tesla Dojo is cost competitive to Nvidia. Tesla is nearing the end of Dojo Version 1. They are working on Dojo Version ... Read more

BYD has another quarter of billions in quarterly negative free cash flow. BYD is the major competitor to Tesla for the number of electric vehicles they make. In the fourth quarter of 2023, BYD made more electric cars than Tesla but since then Tesla has retaken the lead in electric car production. BYD is selling ... Read more

Humanity is on the verge of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted decades ago that we would reach AGI in 2029. AI and Large Language Models could reach AGI sooner than 2029. However, the definitions of artificial intelligence that surpasses individual humans has issues around definitions and measurement. Kurzweil also predicted the Singularity ... Read more

Boeing Starliner is designed to operate autonomously and previously completed two uncrewed flights. NASA and Boeing will work together to adjust end-of-mission planning and Starliner’s systems to set up for the uncrewed return in the coming weeks. Starliner must return to Earth before the Crew-9 mission launches to ensure a docking port is available on ... Read more

Cerebras is a startup that makes wafer sized AI chips. They are making a data center with those AI wafer chips to provide super-fast AI inference. ‣ Llama3.1-70B at 450 tokens/s – 20x faster than GPUs ‣ 60c per M tokens – a fifth the price of hyperscalers ‣ Full 16-bit precision for full model ... Read more

Tomorrow should be the start of a SpaceX Dragon mission that will take advantage of Falcon 9 and Dragon’s maximum performance, flying higher than any Dragon mission to date and endeavoring to reach the highest Earth orbit ever flown. Orbiting through portions of the Van Allen radiation belt, Polaris Dawn will conduct research with the ... Read more

Mitochondrial dysfunction is implicated in dozens of age- related diseases, including Alzheimer’s, retinal disease, liver dysfunction, immune senescence, and more. Mitrix Bio has pioneered a new way of addressing these diseases, using young bioreactor-grown mitochondria encased in vesicles, which they call Mitlets. Mitochondrial energy declines as we age, causing a wide array of chronic diseases. ... Read more

Here’s a summary of the major problems associated with various Boeing aircraft models and projects, based on the information available up to August 2024: Boeing 737 MAX Crashes: Two fatal crashes (Lion Air Flight 610 in 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in 2019) led to the grounding of the entire fleet due to issues ... Read more

2024 World Robotics Conference in China has two human actors in front of some humanoid robots. This video from the 2024 World Robotics Conference in China is going viral Hate to break it to you: The front two ‘robots’ are human actors (just look at the hands) Seems like the point of the demo was ... Read more

The data from NASA’s Insight lander allowed the scientists to estimate that the amount of deep groundwater could cover the entire planet to a depth of between 1 and 2 kilometers, or about a mile. A cutout of the Martian interior beneath NASA’s Insight lander. The top 5 kilometers of the crust appear to be ... Read more

The US Federal government is projected to spend about $6.5 trillion (23% of US GDP in 2024). The US government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis as of Q3 2023 estimates $10.0 Trillion in annual total government expenditure and $27.6 trillion annual total GDP which is 36.2%. The OECD for 2021 shows general US government spending at ... Read more

Usain Bolt has the world record for the 100 meters at 9.58. He did not run his best race as he often would look around at the finish. If we combined his best 20 meter sections then Bolt could have run 9.52. This would take his best start, best finish etc… There many records set ... Read more

The two astronauts, Butch and Sunny, who launched on Boeing Starliner will now return on SpaceX Crew 9 in February 2025. The Boeing Starliner will leave uncrewed in early September. It will have a modified departure that will get away from the ISS faster than previous mission profiles. Boeing will try to figure out how ... Read more

AstroForge announced it has raised $40 million in a Series A funding round led by Nova Threshold, including investments from 776, Initialized, Caladan, YC, Uncorrelated Ventures, and Jed McCaleb. The funding brought AstroForge’s total capital to $55 million. AstroForge has several upcoming missions, including the development of its third mission, Vestri. Scheduled to launch in ... Read more

Fed Chair Jerome Powell declared, “THE TIME HAS COME FOR POLICY TO ADJUST,” which confirms that the Federal reserve will start cutting interest rates. The stock market is up on the news.

Here is a 2015 Stanford analysis of the impact of venture capital backed companies. The importance and contribution of companies that were started with venture capital has only increased. Venture capital backed companies are now well over half of the value of the SP500 stock index. Tax increases get passed along. The rich run the ... Read more