Around the world in 7 days #8

Charge for 10 mins and drive about 1200km

Toyota claimed that their SSB (Solid State battery) can give a 1200km mileage on a 10 min charge. On July 3, the company said it had simplified the production of the material used to make SSB and hailed the discovery as a significant leap forward that could dramatically cut charging times and increase driving range.

He also added that it would be simpler to manufacture than a conventional lithium-ion battery.

Toyota also said they will plan to manufacture 3 million of them a year by 2030 — half with solid-state batteries. Tesla just announced it produced nearly a half million cars last quarter alone.

My take : SSB technology is still elusive and many companies like Quantum Scape are claiming to work on this, if true this claim by Toyota is really a game changer. SSB tech advancement comes with skepticism if done by a startup, however with reputed companies like Toyota it would mean that they are seriously looking to develop this tech. Markets also didn't react much to this news.

Stanford Uni develops faster way to train LLMs

A Stanford team has developed Sophia, a new way to optimize the pretraining of large language models that's twice as fast as current approaches.

By using two techniques :curvature?estimation and Clipping. Imagine LLMs (large language models) like a factory layout which make a product. Here faster way to train LLM means to reduce the number of steps involved in making the products. In the factory metaphor, curvature is akin to a factory worker's workload. The Stanford team designed Sophia to estimate parameters' curvature only about every 10 steps. Clipping in factory analogy is like setting a workload limitation for all employees

Sophia's combination of curvature estimation and clipping allowed the LLM pretraining optimization to smoothly proceed to the lowest valley in half the number of steps and half the time required by Adam.

My take : This is a great development since a reduced time would mean a much simpler GPU can be used. This will enable them to develop a larger LLM using Sophia. This will lead to Sophia being applied to other areas of machine learning such as computer vision models or multi-modal models. It may take some time and resources to move Sophia to a new domain, but since it is open source, the community could certainly do it as well.

Elon & Mark got entangled in "Suit" made of "Thread"

Meta a released a new social networking site called "Thread" , it gained a lot of tractions and followers through Instagram as Instagram users can connect with their followers easily into "Threads". Thread works in similar ways as Twitter Musk's lawyer Alex Spiro wrote a?letter?on behalf of X Corp. to Meta CEO Zuckerberg. "Based on recent reports regarding your recently launched 'Threads' app, Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property."

My take : Mark isn't new to being sued for stealing ideas, however the move might have moved some of the followers who wanted to quit Twitter and Meta smelled the need and has created a platform. One needs to see if this will rival Twitter. X corp is also moving on its AI super app. A new social media app with in 2023 is hard , remember how twitter used Space feature and dropped Club house engagements. Cage match got delayed for sure.

Japan planning to score the Semiconductor goal

Koike heads a startup called Rapidus that plans to invest some $35 billion by 2027 building a factory in northern Japan to manufacture 2-nanometer chips, the current state-of-the-art design. IBM, the first company to announce 2-nanometer technology in 2021, is supplying its chipmaking playbook to Rapidus, making it the central partner in Koike’s game plan. Rapidus says it wants to begin pilot production in 2025 and full-scale production in 2027. Some 6,000 workers are being drafted to put up the factory.

My take : Rapidus still has to master a level of manufacturing technology attained so far by only two companies, TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics. Both are projected to have the ability to mass-produce 2-nanometer chips by 2025. In fact NVDIA already has given orders to both of these companies. It is far but at least Japan can catch up with the production if this succeeds.

EGYM raises $225 M in the most difficult time for health/fitness industry

EGYM, the Munich-based “smart workout solution” business, has agreed to a monster equity investment of €207 million ($225 million) on the back of a very strong year of growth, led by the investment firm started by Jared Kushner.

The company’s business includes both a line of connected hardware (its own gym equipment); software (apps and diagnostics to measure and optimize how people work out on EGYM’s and other connected fitness equipment); a corporate health network operation called Wellpass with more than 2.5 million users; and a mission: to improve healthcare outcomes by focusing on “the shared economy of a gym,” in the words of CEO and co-founder Philipp Roesch-Schlanderer.

The technology industry at large might not be in the best of health at the moment, but health and fitness startups appear to be alive and well. EGYM, the Munich-based “smart workout solution” business, has agreed to a monster equity investment of €207 million ($225 million) on the back of a very strong year of growth, led by the investment firm started by Jared Kushner.

The company’s business includes both a line of connected hardware (its own gym equipment); software (apps and diagnostics to measure and optimize how people work out on EGYM’s and other connected fitness equipment); a corporate health network operation called Wellpass with more than 2.5 million users; and a mission: to improve healthcare outcomes by focusing on “the shared economy of a gym,” in the words of CEO and co-founder Philipp Roesch-Schlanderer.

My take : If you are an investor be wary of new ipo this year, but if you are a fitness enthusiasts please visit your nearest EGYM and try this tech. This looks like decent way to use existing gym spaces with new machines and give better progress update to their customers. They also seems to have an enterprise solution where in they world with Gyms to build solution for their needs. They also host some equipment that downsizes the need for instructors , which is good for a gym where as since a "No need of instructors" is something we have to worry about for both customers and gyms.

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