🤖⚡️ Developing Integrated Photonics, LLM Release News, and Preventing Computer Crashes

Wave Photonics: Shaping the Future of Developing Integrated Photonics

While the challenge in microelectronics is to lay out billions of transistors on a microchip, integrated photonics typically involves only thousands of components. But unlike transistors, they’re not all the same. Today, designing photonic components is a manual and arduous process that requires great effort from photonic engineers. And every time you change a process or wavelength, you need to adjust the designs of your photonic components manually.

Wave Photonics has automated the process of designing photonic components and built a large library of photonic components that accounts for many different parameters and the tolerances of different foundries. 

Founded by James Lee, Matthew Anderson, and Mateusz Kubica in 2021, it recently raised a €5.3M Seed round from UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund and Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, joined by Redstone QAI Quantum Fund, Kyra Ventures, Parkwalk’s University of Cambridge Enterprise Fund IX, and Deeptech Labs.

Learn more about the future of developing integrated photonics from our interview with the co-founder and CEO, James Lee: 

Future of Computing News

🤖 So many new LLM release news this week:

• Meta releasing a 405B parameter open-source as part of Llama 3.1

• Mistral releasing a ‘large enough’ big model Mistral Large 2

• OpenAI released its most cost-efficient small model GPT-4o mini

• Apple expands its family of small and open DCML models

• Elon Musk tweets that the Memphis cluster is training Grok 2.0 and 3.0

🤖 To ensure the UK reaps the benefits of Artificial Intelligence: Matt Clifford appointed to lead Action Plan (Gov UK)

🤖 Alpha for solving math problems: AI achieves silver-medal standard solving International Mathematical Olympiad problems (DeepMind)

⚡️ The future is bright if we fund it: Experts urge EU to increase investment in photonics (new electronics)

🦾 Update on how the European RISC-V landscape is evolving: RISC-V Shows Ambitious Prospects in Europe (EETimes) 

🦾 The proof is still in the pudding: AMD says its new laptop chips can beat Apple (The Verge)

⚛️ The quest for quantum utility continues: Kipu Quantum explores the potential of its novel quantum algorithms for BASF’s logistics optimization (KIPU)

⚛️ Just a polynomial speedup but still cool: Solving The Travelling Salesman Problem Using A Single Qubit (arXiv)

🌐 Better security isn’t consolidated security: Crashes and Competition (Stratechery)

🌐 In the future, computers will not crash due to bad software updates: No More Blue Fridays (Brendan Gregg's Blog)

Funding News

Lakera, which protects enterprises from LLM vulnerabilities, raises $20M (TechCrunch)

AI Startup Cohere Valued at $5.5 Billion in New Funding Round (Bloomberg)

London-based Fractile exits stealth with €13.8 million seed to develop radical new AI chip (EU Startups)

One Data closes EUR 32 million Series B Extension to scale its next-gen data product management platform internationally (One Data)

Arrcus receives $15 million from NVIDIA in latest funding round (RCR Wireless News)

AI startup Code Metal raises $16.5m in seed funding (DCD)

Halo Industries Grabs Us$80 Million in Series B Funding for a Laser-Based Process for Producing Silicon Carbide (Sic) Semiconductor Wafer Substrates (Optica)

Gcore Raises $60M in Series a Funding Round for Expanding Its AI Edge and Cloud Platform (DCD)

Nearfield Instruments closes $147.6 million Series C funding round (DCD)

Toshiba's Investment in Quantum Investment Fund Quantonation II (Toshiba)

Anthology Fund – a $100 million initiative created through a partnership between Menlo Ventures and Anthropic (Menlo VC)

Also: Singapore commits $74.3M for quantum and AI in finance (CoinTelegraph)

Great news this week: we crossed 600 e-mail subscribers for this newsletter

Welcome to the 25+ new subscribers who saw the LinkedIn post and decided to subscribe as well (and managed to get through double opt-in 🦾)

We also announced the first 10 startups pitching at the Future of Computing Conference 2024—check out the event website.

Good Reads

Mark Zuckerberg on Llama 3.1, Open Source, AI Agents, Safety, and more (YouTube)

Great interview by Rowan Cheung from The Rundown AI newsletter 

Why Big Tech Wants to Make AI Cost Nothing (DuBlog)

“The apparent magnanimity of this release reminded me of a very classic business strategy in Silicon Valley - “commoditize your complement”. Best articulated by Joel Spolsky’s “Strategy Letter V” from 22 years ago, the idea is that as the value of a product’s complement goes down towards the lowest sustainable “commodity price”, demand for that product in turn goes higher.”

Why is Shor’s algorithm such a keystone application of quantum computing? (Classiq)

"While the hardware to run Shor’s algorithm on numbers large enough to make a difference in cryptography hasn’t happened yet, it has influenced a new group of people interested in quantum technologies.”

RydbergGPT (arXiv)

“We introduce a generative pretrained transformer (GPT) designed to learn the measurement outcomes of a neutral atom array quantum computer.”

Reconfigurable Photonic GEMM Based on Phase-Change-Materials and Stochastic Computing (IEEE Xplore)

“With the inclusion of phase-change materials (PCM) that bring computation in memory (CIM) to photonics, we propose a novel general matrix multiplication (GEMM) circuit and architecture capable of accurate tiled matrix multiplication in real-life noise conditions.”

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