NextBigFuture.com

People say that X aka Twitter was a bad investment because advertising revenue is down from when Elon Musk purchased it at $44 billion. The losses are not that bad while advertising is down, Elon was able to drastically reduce costs and headcount. X also added subscription revenue. A major thing that people forget is ... Read more

DARPA is hosting a QBI (Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI)) proposers day on Sept. 3, 2024, for quantum computing companies that believe they are on track to develop an industrial-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer in the near term. The goal of the hybrid in-person and virtual proposers day is to introduce the quantum computing research and development ... Read more

Nextbigfuture on substack now has weekly update on AI. It does deep dives on major developments in AI, AI startups, AI research and AI funding. 1. Google launches Gemini Live for advanced voice conversations 2. XAI launches Grok 2 3. Sakana AI makes a powerful AI Scientist 4. Cosine Genie launches a superior AI Software ... Read more

Cary, United States / North Carolina, 16th August 2024, CyberNewsWire

Archimedes Defense, a recognized leader in high-power solutions for government and defense applications, has partnered with Unplugged Performance and its specialized fleet division, UP.FIT, to develop STING. For those facing extreme threats, STING APC is the ultimate defense upgrade, offering enhanced IED/mine protection and upgraded bolt-on, bolt-off external offset steel and ceramic armor plating, meticulously ... Read more

The Boring Company is prioritizing an extension of the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop to go to the Vegas Airport. This will greatly increase the usage and revenue generation of the system. The Boring company Loop should be able to provide consistent 7-ten minute travel times to the airport from the strip. If there were ... Read more

Boring Company Prurfock 3 and the new Prufrock 4 tunneling machines can only tunnel about 11 hours per day. There are limitations are maintenance and how they have to stop tunneling to put in the concrete segments. The Boring Company likely has a program to rapidly develop and test new machines to reach the goal ... Read more

Hypersonic plane startup, Hermeus, plans to make a plane faster than the SR-71 blackbird spy plane. the SR-71 could reach mach 3.3 and fly at 85000 to 100,000 feet in altitude. Quarterhorse Mk 2 will fly with this precooler-F100 engine combination and be capable of hitting speeds greater than Mach 2.5. The entire Chimera engine, ... Read more

On Tuesday morning (Aug. 6), a Chinese Long March 6A rocket launched the first 18 satellites for the Qianfan (Thousand Sails") broadband network, which will eventually host up to 14,000 spacecraft. The rocket successfully delivered the satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO), at an altitude of about 500 miles (800 kilometers) but then its upper ... Read more

Japanese startup Sakana AI claims they have built the world's first AI Scientist. One of the grand challenges of artificial general intelligence is developing agents capable of conducting scientific research and discovering new knowledge. This new work is a major advance toward that goal. While frontier models have already been used as aids to human ... Read more

NASA has found multiple quality problems with the Space Launch System Block 1B. However, Block 1B development efforts have encountered multiple issues including Boeing's ineffective quality management and inexperienced workforce, continued cost increases and schedule delays, and the delayed establishment of a cost and schedule baseline. Boeing is Unable to Perform Basic Tasks for Building ... Read more

The Figure 02 humanoid bot is an improved humanoid bot. Speech-to-speech reasoning: Figure 02 can have full conversations with humans. Onboard mics + speakers + custom AI models (partnered with OpenAI) = a robot you can actually talk to. The human-scale hands are equipped with 16 degrees of freedom and human-equivalent strength which enables a ... Read more

The decentralized artificial intelligence compute network startup HyperCycle is hoping to get some attention this week as it enters the spotlight at Ai4 2024, one of the hottest AI events on the calendar. HyperCycle is unusual compared to most other decentralized AI players in that its distributed network is not based on a blockchain. Rather, ... Read more

XAI is releasing Grok 2 in beta. This will be about equal to OpenAI GPT4 artificial intelligence models. Elon Musk has said XAI is assembled 100,000 Nvidia H100 chips for a total of 400 Exaflops of compute to train Grok 3 by the end of this year. Grok 3 will be at about the power ... Read more

Torrance, United States / California, 12th August 2024, CyberNewsWire

Grok at XAI will likely update to Grok 2 tomorrow. Elon posted that the Grok 2 beta release is soon. Elon Musk has previously stated that Grok 2 should beat GPT 4 on most metrics. However, there have been some improved versions from OpenAI and Anthropic. Grok 2 beta release soon pic.twitter.com/t6e9RcXPkl - Elon Musk ... Read more

SpaceX has shown a test firing of the new Raptor 3 engine. The new engine has removed so many parts that United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno thought it was incomplete. SpaceX President & COO Gwynne Shotwell joins broadband.io and Ready.net CEO Jase Wilson for a fireside chat at Mountain Connect 2024. Works pretty good ... Read more

In a groundbreaking development, scientists at Nagoya University in Japan have created the world's most powerful loop heat pipe (LHP), capable of transporting an astounding 10 kilowatts of heat without using any electricity. This innovation promises to revolutionize energy efficiency across multiple industries, from electric vehicles to data centers. Understanding Loop Heat Pipes Before delving ... Read more

Ukraine has taken a few hundred square kilometers of territory in Russia in the Kursk region. This is an escalation of the Ukraine Russia war. IF Ukraine can hold the territory then it would be possible for an exchange of territory to occur in a possible peace settlement. It does increase the probability that Russia ... Read more

The startup Hermeus is rapidly developing a hypersonic plane. They have begun testing their proprietary precooler technology with the Pratt & Whitney F100 engine. This video highlights some of our favorite camera angles from testing. What's a precooler and why are they testing it? The Hermeus precooler increases the maximum speed of the turbine engine ... Read more

High Temperature Superconductor (HTS) wires must be be better than copper wire on price-performance metrics before copper can be widely replaced. A HTS wire segment shows the energy density properties that are five to ten times better than commercial HTS wire. It will need to be scaled up to the hundreds of tons of production ... Read more

George Church spoke at Aubrey de Grey's conference to discuss using gene editing to provide radical life extension. George is hopeful that gene editing can be used to realize longevity escape velocity. Longevity escape velocity is where we add one year of life extension to people life in less than one year. If Longevity escape ... Read more

On July 17, 2024, two research teams reported that have re-detected the phosphine, and have tentatively found ammonia as well. Phospine and ammonia are produced by living microorganisms. It's not proof that living microbes are floating around in Venus' atmosphere. The findings presented at the national astronomy meeting in Hull on Wednesday bolster evidence for ... Read more

Hundreds of billions will be spent to scale AI data centers to Millions of Exaflops by 2029. The systems will be 3000 times more powerful than the largest AI training centers today. There will be huge challenges making massive data centers that will use many gigawatts of power. Here we review which Nvidia chips will ... Read more

NASA scientists have now discovered a single place on Mars with signs it once hosted all three of life's main ingredients: liquid water, energy, and organic molecules. On July 21, NASA's Perseverance rover spotted a strange rock partially buried in a dry riverbed. White streaks hinted water once flowed through the stone, and Perseverance detected ... Read more

NASA is worried that multiple small reaction control system thrusters could fail while the Starliner is near the space station and cause a disaster. There are combinations of Starliner thrusters failures would make it become uncontrollable and cause a collision with the space station. The thrusters are needed later in the flight back to Earth ... Read more

Nanonuclear is vertically integrated microreactor and advanced nuclear technology company that raised $20 million on July 18, 2024 in a stock offering and had raised $8 million in earlier funding. Brian Wang of Nextbigfuture interviewed the CEO James Walker. Mr. Walker is a Nuclear Physicist and was the project lead and manager for constructing the ... Read more

Ars Technica reports that there has been a lot of recent activity at NASA, Boeing, and SpaceX. This activity suggests that two ISS astronauts (Wilmore and Williams) could come home aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft rather than Starliner. Nextbigfuture believes that it is a needless risk to have the astronauts return on Boeing Starliner. Multiple ... Read more

NASA awarded SpaceX a contract for $843 million to make a giant version of the Dragon Spacecraft to de-orbit the Space Station. It will use 47 Draco engines instead of the 16 on the Crew dragon. It will four times the thrust and six times the propellant. If there was ever a mission to move ... Read more

SpaceX has unveiled the Raptor 3 engine, marking significant advancements in thrust, specific impulse, and mass efficiency compared to previous versions. The Raptor 3 boasts a thrust of 280 tf, a specific impulse of 350s, and an engine mass of 1525 kg. The SpaceX Raptor 3 engine has potential to exceed 300 tons of thrust ... Read more

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott says that the AI large language models are still exponentially scaling. It takes 6-24 months to reach each successive scaling node but the scaling is still working. AI Inference is becoming larger than AI training. The data for AI training is different than the reference data used by AI to generate ... Read more

What kind of future energy does humanity really need to develop? We need a lot more energy than you think. We need to build faster and it needs to be cheap. There is vastly more electrical energy that is needed. The world has added about 700 TWh per year in electricity in 2022 and in ... Read more

Lex Fridman interviews Elon Musk and the Neuralink team on the Future of Humanity for over 8 hours. Lex interviews them in sequence. Elon Musk is CEO of Neuralink, SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, and CTO of X. DJ Seo is COO & President of Neuralink. Matthew MacDougall is Head Neurosurgeon at Neuralink. Bliss Chapman is Brain ... Read more

Elon Musk and Tesla will have the capability to go all-in on robotaxi in 2025. Will they choose to use it? The Full self driving software is improving by two to five times every three months in terms of miles between interventions. They will get to feature complete by the end of this year. Tesla ... Read more

NASA and Boeing continue to analyze the Boeing Starliner at the International Space Station. The Boeing Starliner has been delayed about six weeks before a planned return flight of two astronauts. Michael Tzukran is a satellite photographer who captured a picture of the Boeing Starliner being inspected by the Canadarm. NASA said SpaceX's Crew Dragon ... Read more

Philadelphia, United States, 1st August 2024, CyberNewsWire

Elon Musk will meet Samsung CEO Lee Jae-yong and Hyundai CEO Chung Eui-sun in Paris in early August. It is reported they will dine in Paris this weekend. They will also discuss the development of next-generation technologies and explore ways to cooperate. The meeting was reportedly made at the suggestion of Chairman Lee Jae-yong. Elon ... Read more

A startup, Cutting Edge Superconductors, claims to have a variant of the South Korean LK99 room temperature superconductor that shows low resistance and some weak evidence of meissner effect and quantum locking. The sample is tiny. They are trying to get a few hundred thousand in SBIR and NASA grants and $600,000 in crowdfunding. The ... Read more

OpenAI has starting to roll out advanced Voice Mode to a small group of ChatGPT Plus users. Advanced Voice Mode offers more natural, real-time conversations, allows you to interrupt anytime, and senses and responds to your emotions. Advanced voice mode can translate between languages in realtime. It can also sing and do other voice generation ... Read more

Miami, United States, 1st August 2024, CyberNewsWire

Uber will help finance drivers to get 100,000 EVs from BYD. They will target Europe and Latin America and will also expand to markets including the Middle East, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They will also work together to develop future BYD autonomous vehicles. Uber will provide drivers with pricing and financing for BYD cars ... Read more

Nvidia is writing new domain specific libraries to enable the rewriting of applications to use accelerated GPUs instead of CPUs. This can reduce the energy used by 20 times and speeding up the applications. Nvidia is enabling humanoid robotics with compute for the training, compute for the simulation and then compute for the robot.

Nvidia is enabling all knowing AI powered video analysis. This will enable the comprehension of everything happening in all video cameras. They describe how this will be good to enforce what should happen. It is also clear that this will enable Orwellian levels of control and monitoring. Powerful AI tools can be used for good ... Read more

GenAI is being used to improve the recommendation engines across all of the Facebook content. It will upgrade all of the processes and systems that we use. We will give it our intent and then it will return the results. AI will be improving to perform superior planning for better results. Meta is making an ... Read more

The SpaceX Super Heavy booster in the FAA report was analyzed with up to 35 engines and 103 million newtons of thrust. This would be just short of triple the thrust of the Saturn V. The SpaceX Starship was analyzed with up to 9 engines and 28.7 million newtons of thrust. The Saturn V had ... Read more

Crowdsourced data shows that Tesla FSD 12.5 is three to five times better than FSD (Full self driving supervised) 12.3.6. The FSD 12.5 is showing 744 miles between critical disengagement and 111 miles between any disengagement. The FSD critical disengagements improved 3.8 times from 194 miles with 12.3.6. There was also a 3.8 times improvement ... Read more

Las Vegas, Nevada, 30th July 2024, CyberNewsWire

In China, 13.5k Tesla insurance registrations were reported for the week of July 22 to 28. The quarter is +49.6% QoQ and +18.9% vs. 24Q1 the best quarter after 4 weeks. YTD is at -1.8% YoY. Highest week of the quarter. $TSLA BREAKING: Tesla China insured units <July 2024> 1-7 : 6,500 8-14 : 11,400 ... Read more

XAI is using about 150 Megawatts to power its 100,000 H100 liquid cooled AI training center in a few months. Nvidia H100s have about 4 petaflops of compute power. This would be 400 exaflops of peak computing. The next step after that will be about 300,000 Nvidia B200s with a CX8 network in the summer ... Read more

SpaceX Starship will be ready for its fifth orbital flight in about 2-3 weeks but the FAA giving approval and having the actual flight will likely slip to September. There is 60-80% chance that the new improved heat shield will fully work. There is a 50% chance of a successful catch of the booster on ... Read more