In this week’s edition of The Prototype, we look at chips designed for AI, building modular nuclear reactors, creating real-life web fluid, the Nobel Prize and more. You can sign up to get The Prototype in your inbox here.
Let’s get started, shall we?
Last week, OpenAI announced that it had raised $6.6 billion in new investments. But despite this staggering amount of money, The Information reported that the company expects to spend up to $9.5 billion annually in computing costs over the next few years to train new models for research.
A big part of this expense has to do with the underlying architecture of computers, which keeps memory and processing in separate parts of a chip, requiring a constant shuffling of data between those two parts. When it comes to AI models that are crunching massive amounts of data, this constant moving between memory and processing accounts for a significant amount of the energy consumed by chips.
U.K.-based hardware startup Fractile, recently emerged from stealth with $15 million in backing, is developing an AI co-processor that integrates memory and processing together. 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 told Forbes, one thing that distinguishes his company’s approach is that the chips will only handle the “very small set of operations” that AI algorithms utilize. So rather than a general-purpose chip, Fractile’s hardware is specific for LLMs. The company said this means it could run models up to 100 times faster at one-tenth of the current cost.
Fractile still has a ways to go, though. Currently, Goodwin said it has “a bunch of prototyping efforts” for its new chips, and added that “in terms of getting to a full first product, I think we have a very clear path to get there.”
Stay tuned.
This Startup Aims To Build Cheap Nuclear Reactors In Shipyards
Speaking of power-hungry AI applications, their fast growth has created a surge in energy demand. That’s not only straining the grid but also making it difficult to meet goals to reduce carbon emissions. One potential source of clean power is nuclear. But despite a resurgence of interest, the technology remains expensive and it can take around a decade to build a new plant.
Jake Jurewicz has a plan to make nuclear power more practical. His company, Blue Energy, just emerged from stealth with $45 million in investment backing. His company is developing the means to build modular nuclear reactors for coastal areas in shipyards, spinning out of a research group at MIT that developed form factors for nuclear plants out of components already used for “ offshore wind and offshore oil and gas,” Jurewicz told Forbes. “We’re not inventing anything.”
With this approach, the company estimates it can cut construction time from 10 years 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 plant, though it did not name the customers.
The design utilizes existing reactor technologies widely in use, and envisions the reactor part of the plant to actually sit underwater. Jurewicz said that this both improves safety from external threats and by adding another source of cooling. It also makes it easier to site a nuclear power plant without dealing with considerations of putting it on land. “We can prefabricate everything inside of multiple shipyards, float it to an operating site and install it,” he said.
DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK: RESEARCHERS MADE SPIDER-MAN’S WEB FLUID
Researchers at Tufts University have created a real-life version of Spider-Man’s web fluid, which can pick up objects over 80 times its weight. To do that, they developed a process to extract fibers from silk moth cocoons to make a liquid. They then added chemical additives to the liquid. When the fluid is squeezed out of a needle, it solidifies when it’s exposed to air. Assistant professor Marco Lo Presti discovered this process by accident, but subsequent experiments let them refine it. Their findings were published this week in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.
FINAL FRONTIER: MOVING ROCKS FROM MARS
NASA awarded California-based space company Rocket Lab a contract to develop a mission proposal for retrieving samples of the Martian surface and bringing them back to Earth. The company said that it’s working on a proposal for a mission concept that would both be cheaper than NASA’s current plans and capable of bringing the samples back several years before the agency’s target date of 2040. Rocket Lab has worked on several other missions for NASA, including launch of the Capstone satellite in 2022 and it’s currently building spacecraft for NASA’s Escapade mission to Mars, currently slated to launch next spring.
FORBES CALLED IT: NOBEL PRIZE EDITION
This week, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNA, a crucial part of the mechanism that your body uses to regulate when to use what parts of your DNA. Their seminal paper was published in 2000, which showed that microRNAs were utilized across the plant and animal kingdoms. It took 24 more years to get the Nobel accolade, but a 2005 article in Forbes by Matthew Herper and Robert Langreth highlighted the many ways this discovery was already impacting the field, noting the promise it held for unearthing “hundreds of new targets for experimental drugs.”
WHAT ELSE I WROTE THIS WEEK
I talked to billionaire Robinhood cofounder 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 also wrote about Cytovale, which just raised $100 million in investment capital to expand the commercialization of its rapid test for sepsis, the third-biggest killer in America’s hospitals. At one hospital in Louisiana, use of this test reduced sepsis mortality by 35% over the past year.
SCIENCE AND TECH TIDBITS
My colleague Alan Ohnsman wrote about Redwood Materials announcing that its facilities will now start recycling EV batteries that have been damaged by fires and floods.
Venture capital firm DCVC released its annual report of where it sees investment opportunities in deep tech right now.
European robotics firm German Bionic announced the launch of its Apogee+, an exoskeleton that can be worn by nurses and other healthcare professionals to aid them in lifting and repositioning patients.
Researchers at MIT have developed a solar-powered desalination system that can produce large amounts of clean drinking water from the ocean without the need for any additional power sources.
PRO SCIENCE TIP: EXPOSE YOUR KIDS TO MISINFORMATION—AND SKEPTICISM
As a parent, it might be tempting to closely monitor the information your kids get, making sure they’re not exposed to misinformation. But new research published in Nature Human Behaviour found that it’s better to provide them with access to wrong information–along with guidance on how to look out for it. In the study, kids who were exposed to easy-to-spot misinformation were more likely to identify wrong information in later experiments than kids whose media intake was kept free of anything wrong. “We need to give children experience flexing these skepticism muscles,” one of the researchers said in a press release.
WHAT’S ENTERTAINING ME THIS WEEK
Season 4 of Only Murders In The Building has been a complete delight so far. The chemistry between the three leads remains strong, the mystery is genuinely puzzling and this season’s guest stars are stellar, particularly Richard Kind, Zach Galifianakis and Melissa McCarthy. All seasons are currently streaming on Hulu.
