Tuesday 4th June 2024
  • The Global Chip Battle, in Charts

    Governments have stepped up efforts to bolster their domestic productions of the chips that power everything from cars to electronics to artificial intelligence, and companies worldwide are competing to be part of the frenzy. Global semiconductor revenue is expected to top $1 trillion by the end of the decade, according to forecasts by the chip-industry consulting firm International Business Strategies.

    Stronger domestic production could diversify the highly specialized semiconductor supply chain, which in certain regions has strengths in some areas of the process and weaknesses in others. U.S. companies are leaders in many areas of chip design, for example, while those in Taiwan, South Korea and mainland China dominate the later production and assembly stages.

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  • Nobel laureate Paul Krugman agrees Beijing is making too much stuff: 'The world will not accept everything China wants to export' - Fortune Asia (No paywall)

    China's economy suffers from "vastly inadequate" domestic spending, the Nobel Prize-winning economist said in a television interview.

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  • iPhone 16 Pro will break a world record with this new feature, according to new reports

    However, I'd suggest you have your grain of salt ready. Last August, shortly before the reveal of the iPhone 15, 9to5Mac claimed that the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max models will sport "1.5mm bezels". The outlet even leaned on Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, a respected Apple analyst and leaker, to corroborate the rumor. However, this leak turned out to be false.

    As such, we won't know for sure if these rumors are true until the Cupertino-based tech giant reveals the next-generation iPhones later this year. However, this scuttlebutt does appear to meet Apple's ultra-thin plans for its products. After all, the recently unveiled iPad Pro is Apple's thinnest product ever.

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  • Peter Orszag wants to reimagine Lazard. Will his bankers let him? - FT (No paywall)

    Barack Obama’s economist has brought star power to a faded investment bank, but rank and file have doubts about his plan

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  • Sam Altman Admits That OpenAI Doesn't Actually Understand How Its AI Works

    During a recent summit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was stumped after being asked how his company's AIs actually work, pointing to a larger issue.

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  • Scientists should use AI as a tool, not an oracle

    Who produces AI hype? As we discuss in the AI Snake Oil book, it is not just companies and the media but also AI researchers. For example, a pair of widely-publicized papers in Nature in December 2023 claimed to have discovered over 2.2 million new materials using AI, and robotically synthesized 41 of them. Unfortunately, the claims were quickly debunked: “Most of the [41] materials produced were misidentified, and the rest were already known”. As for the large dataset, examining a sample of 250 compounds showed that it was mostly junk.

    A core selling point of machine learning is discovery without understanding, which is why errors are particularly common in machine-learning-based science. Three years ago, we compiled evidence revealing that an error called leakage — the machine learning version of teaching to the test — was pervasive, affecting hundreds of papers from 17 disciplines. Since then, we have been trying to understand the problem better and devise solutions. 

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  • Psychedelics Are Challenging the Scientific Gold Standard - The Atlantic (No paywall)

    How do you study mind-altering drugs when every clinical-trial participant knows they’re tripping?

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  • I watched Nvidia's Computex 2024 keynote and it made my blood run cold

    Nvidia's pre-Computex keynote address was certainly something, and none of it felt good.

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  • Psychedelics Are Challenging the Scientific Gold Standard

    How do you study mind-altering drugs when every clinical-trial participant knows they're tripping?Tomorrow, a Food and Drug Administration advisory committee will meet to discuss whether the United States should approve its first psychedelic drug. The fate of the treatment—MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder—will turn on how the FDA interprets data from two clinical trials that, on their face, are promising. Long-suffering patients who took the drug while undergoing intensive talk therapy were about twice as likely to recover from PTSD as patients who got the placebo with therapy.


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  • The GOP's Single-Message Machine

    This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.After the 2016 release of the Access Hollywood tape in which Donald Trump boasts about groping women, Republicans considered their options—and Trump's candidacy faced a moment of maximum peril. But after Trump's conviction last week, an enraged MAGA establishment moved quickly to enforce new litmus tests.


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