🤖🦾 Distributed Quantum Computing, AI Chip Export Regulations, and Our First Meetup in 2025

A Newsletter for Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Computing Geeks

Second newsletter of the year—innovation meets geopolitics. The Biden administration just drew new lines in the sand with AI chip export regulations, dividing Europe into camps. The UK aspires to take leadership in AI, there’s a flood of new AI models (also from China!), and one notable new AGI lab. Also, the data center buildout continues undeterred.

We’re excited to announce our first event of the year—join us for the Future of Quantum Computing Meetup on February 4 in Berlin. We’ll have two speakers from Quantistry and Kipu Quantum, and we’ll bring the quantum community together:

Spotlights

Qoro Quantum, established in 2024 by Stephen DiAdamo and Dan Holme, is developing the network infrastructure for distributed quantum computing. Their technology facilitates the scaling of quantum algorithms across diverse computing networks, automates processing pipelines, and orchestrates various hardware environments.

Finchetto is addressing the growing energy demands of AI by rethinking data center infrastructure and focusing on innovative technologies, such as fully optical, passive network switches. These switches, built using nonlinear photonic crystals, eliminate the need for energy-intensive optoelectronic conversions, drastically reducing power consumption while increasing speed and throughput.

The inference scaling paradigm enhances AI performance by leveraging increased computational resources and extended chain-of-thought (CoT) processes, as seen in OpenAI's o1 and o3 models, but introduces both opportunities and challenges for AI safety. It may slightly accelerate AGI timelines and mitigate risks from rapid proliferation due to high operational costs, limiting misuse to well-funded actors.

The Biden administration has introduced new regulations on global AI chip exports, categorizing countries into three tiers of access. Eighteen key U.S. allies, including Canada, the UK, and Germany, will have unrestricted access to advanced AI chips. Nations such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea remain under existing bans, prohibiting their access to these technologies. These measures aim to prevent the misuse of AI capabilities.

The United Kingdom has unveiled a comprehensive strategy to position itself as a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI). This initiative includes significant investments in computing infrastructure, such as the construction of a new supercomputer and the establishment of AI "growth zones" to expedite the development of private data centers.

Headlines

🤖 AI researcher François Chollet founds a new AI lab focused on AGI – check out Ndea (TechCrunch)

🤖 Holistic Agent Leaderboard – standardized, cost-aware, and third-party leaderboard for evaluating agents by the SAgE team at Princeton University (Princeton)

🤖 o1 isn’t a chat model: How did I go from hating o1 to using it every day for my most important questions? (Latent Space)

🤖 Sky-T1: Train your own O1 preview model within $450 (NovaSky)

🤖 MiniMax-01 is Now Open-Source: Chinese MiniMax has released and open-sourced the all-new MiniMax-01 series of models (Minimax)

🤖 Transformer²: Self-Adaptive LLMs – this vision of self-adaptive AI is at the heart of our latest research paper (Sakanai AI)

⚛️ A Global Race for Supremacy in Quantum Computing – recent developments fuel the hype of achieving commercial “quantum advantage” (EETimes)

⚛️ Canadian non-profit Open Quantum Design partners with quantum heavy hitters Xanadu, University of Waterloo, Unitary Foundation, and Haiqu (OQD)

💡 New Computer Breakthrough is Defying the Laws of Physics: Learn more about Vaire Computing on the Anastasi in Tech channel (YouTube)

🦾 Hosted by imec, the $1.4bn NanoIC pilot line will go beyond the 2nm process technology currently being developed, from 1nm down to 7A (EENews Europe)

🦾 GPU Glossary by Modal: a glossary that spans the whole stack in one place (Modal)

🦾 TSMC: First Apple chips "made in USA" on the way (Heise Online)

🦾 Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI – emphasizes practical AI applications that deliver tangible business benefits (The Verge)

🦾 How low-precision computing boosts efficiency — without hurting accuracy (IBM)

🧠 Resistive memory-based zero-shot liquid state machine for multimodal event data learning (arXiv)

⚡️ Enabling the Silicon Photonics Revolution: How Israeli Teramount is Solving the Connectivity Bottleneck (Entrepreneur Asia Pacific)

Only some EU member states are exempt
from new US export restrictions on AI chips

Funding News

⚡️ €4.75M SeedPhoton IP: energy-efficient photonic chips based on a proprietary process that combines III-V materials with silicon on a single chip (N24)

⚛️ $20M Series AQuantum Brilliance: diamond quantum technology for developing compact and ruggedized quantum sensors and accelerators (Quantum Insider)

🦾 $20.5M SeedVertical Compute: innovative chiplet technology integrating vertical data lanes on computation units to minimize data movement and reduce energy use by up to 80% (TFN)

🦾⚛️ $30M Series ASEEQC: digital chips to power quantum computing systems, working at ultra-low temperatures just like qubits (SEEQC)

🦾 $90M Series DNetradyne: CA-based SaaS provider of artificial intelligence and edge computing solutions (Finsmes)

Bonus:

🦾 NXP Secures €1 billion EIB loan to advance semiconductor innovation in Europe (Innovation Origins)

🌐 Databricks reportedly secures $5bn in debt financing (Silicon Republic)

Deep Dive: How Much Quantum is There?

It's 2025, and quantum computing has become the Schrödinger's cat of tech: it's simultaneously the future of computing and a commercial mystery.

While there's steady technological progress, and for every technical milestone, a new roadmap or consortia is getting announced, it's an industry built on the promise of future value rather than current value. This is also reflected by the tech stack: the higher up you go, the less quantum there is typically.

Hardware developers are all-in on quantum, naturally, but as you move up the stack, companies tend to sprinkle "quantum" into their branding while focusing on hybrid algorithms, adjacent technologies, or even good old-fashioned classical computing.

This layered dynamic is both strategic and telling: the further you drift from the lab and closer to potential business models, the more "quantum" starts to sound like a buzzword.

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