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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