The Weekend Briefing No. 29
It’s been a while but I’ve decided to restart The Weekend Briefing with interesting links and short commentary.
In this week’s issue 🗞️
- Alex Karp of Palantir Technologies
- Texas Instruments is Building New Wafer Plants
- Our Neurons Might be Entangled on The Quantum Level
- A Small Language Model
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Alex Karp of Palantir Technologies
An introverted and elusive man is the Founder and the CEO of the powerful analytics firm Palantir (PLTR). Palantir Technologies Inc. builds and deploys software platforms for the intelligence community to assist in counterterrorism investigations and operations in the United States, the United Kingdom, and internationally. - via Yahoo Finance
Mr. Karp is a lean, extremely fit billionaire with unruly salt-and-pepper curls. He is introvert-charming (something I aspire to myself). He has A.D.H.D. and can’t hide it if he is not interested in what someone is saying. After a hyper spurt of talking, he loses energy and has to recharge on the stationary bike or by reading. Even though he thinks of himself as different, he seems to like being different. He enjoys being a provocateur onstage and in interviews.
The firm's name, Palantir, is a hat tip to the seeing stones - palantíri - from the J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy novels.
Texas Instruments is Building New Wafer Plants
It looks like the CHIPs Act is being put to good use inside the USA. Texas Instruments is about to secure 16 billion dollars to build three new wafer plants in Texas and Utah.
Skye Jacobs
This funding would support the construction of three 300mm wafer fabrication facilities in Texas and Utah. Alongside this, TI anticipates receiving an additional $6 billion to $8 billion from the US Department of Treasury's Investment Tax Credit, designed to incentivize qualified US manufacturing investments. Together, these financial boosts are set to help TI secure a geopolitically stable supply of essential analog and embedded processing semiconductors.
This is good news as semiconductor design and production is a key component of the United States competitive advantage and national security.
Our Neurons Might be Entangled on The Quantum Level
Talk about some far-out left-field theories, but this article proposes that our consciousness might be due to our neurons being entangled at the quantum level.
Mike McRae
Proposed by the highly respected physicist Roger Penrose and the American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, the model suggests networks of cytoskeleton tubules that lend structure to cells – in this case, our neurons – act as a kind of quantum computer that somehow shapes our thinking.
The article cautions the reader - in abundance - that this is a wild idea and nothing concrete has been proven or validated. If it were to be found true in the future, my next question would be, “What are we entangled with?”
A Small Language Model
H2O.ai released their next iteration of Danube, a small language model capable of inferencing on-edge devices such as your mobile phone.
The newly released H2O-Danube3 is now available worldwide on Hugging Face. This latest addition to the H2O SLM series includes both the H2O-Danube3-4B and the H2O-Danube3-500M models. These models aim to democratize advanced NLP capabilities and showcase remarkable versatility and efficiency, making them ideal for chatbots, research, and on-device applications. - via H2O.ai
Note, H2O is my employer and this link is not sponsored. I share it because it’s interesting.
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