🤖🦾 It’s a Wrap: The Future of Computing Conference 2024, Google Willow, and Hyper Moore’s Law

A Newsletter for Computing Geeks, Entrepreneurs, and STEM Graduates

Author

Benjamin Wolba
December 14, 2024

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Happy Saturday! And huge thanks to everyone who helped us to make the Future of Computing Conference 2024 happen this week in Munich 🥳

Gathering 200 founders, VCs, and industry experts in computing, we had two great keynotes—from Keith Witek and Anastasiia Nosova—and 26 startups pitching:

And thanks to our co-organizers Tobias Wölfel, Christopher Trummer, David Reichmuth from TUM Venture Labs, and Oliver Hasse from INAM 🦾 

We’re planning a UK edition for March 2025 in London and a Berlin edition for June 2025 – stay tuned!

Future of Computing News

🦾 Intel looks beyond silicon, outlines breakthroughs in atomically-thin 2D transistors, chip packaging, and interconnects at IEDM 2024 (Tom’s Hardware)

🦾 Next-gen Nvidia GPU "Rubin" is ahead of schedule, uses 3nm manufacturing and HBM4 (Techspot)

🦾 Google takes on Nvidia Blackwell GPUs with the new Trillium TPUs (neowin)

🦾 Washington state creates working group to target CHIPS Act funding, stoke semiconductor industry (Geekwire)

⚡️ Co-packaged optics deliver high-speed connectivity to supercharge generative AI computing (IBM)

⚛️ BMW Group and Airbus reveal winners of Quantum Computing Challenge (BMW Group)

⚛️ Nordic Quantum Computing Group shuts down, blames Norway's lack of national quantum strategy (DCD)

🤖 Big news on Chatbot Arena: The new Google DeepMind model gemini-exp-1206 is crushing it (X)

🤖 Google goes “agentic” with Gemini 2.0’s ambitious AI agent features (Ars Technica)

🤖 Scripps Research scientists create AI that “watches” videos by mimicking the brain (Scripps)

🤖 I can now run a GPT-4 class model on my laptop (Simon Willison’s Weblog)

🤖 Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman says conversational AI is the next web browser (The Verge)

🤖 Scheming reasoning evaluations: We worked with OpenAI to test o1 before public deployment (Apollo Research)

Funding News

⚛️ Helsinki-based Arctic Instruments raises €2.3 million to advance quantum computing amplifiers (EU Startups)

⚛️ National Reconstruction Fund invests $13m in Quantum Brilliance (Capital Brief)

🤖 Musk's xAI raises around $6 bln in equity financing (Reuters)

🤖 Liquid AI closes $250 mln early-stage funding round led by AMD (Reuters)

🤖🦾 London-based Nscale secures €146 million Series A funding to fuel AI infrastructure growth and expansion (EU Startups)

🦾 Semicon Startup Netrasemi Raises Rs 10 Cr In Pre Series A Round From Unicorn India Ventures (bwdisrupt)

⚡️ Ayar Labs Secures $155M from Investors Including AMD, NVIDIA (Photonics Spectra)

⚛️ Deep Dive: The Google Willow Thing

This week, Google released news about their new quantum chip, Willow, featuring 105 qubits and claiming two things:

1) “Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits”
2) “Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years”

Quantum computing is back in the news with everyone talking about it – check out, for example, the coverage by Quanta Magazine 

TL;DR 1): This is an impressive technical milestone demonstrating that quantum error correction can work when increasing the number of qubits used for error correction, though at a rather small scale: after all, Google created only a single encoded qubit;

TL;DR 2): This is a benchmark specifically engineered to demonstrate quantum computers can outperform classical computers (with zero practical use);

While some, like Sabine Hossenfelder, are very negative that quantum computers will ever do anything useful, others, like Scott Aaronson on his blog ‘Shtetl-Optimized,’ are cautiously optimistic that at least researchers are achieving real technical milestones

P.S. Also worth reading: The Case Against Google’s Claims of “Quantum Supremacy”, discussing a similar benchmark set by Google’s Sycamore quantum computer and published in their 2019 Nature paper “Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor”

Good Reads

The AI We Deserve (Boston Review)

“Critiques of artificial intelligence abound. Where’s the utopian vision for what it could be?”

Moore’s Law is So Back (Sabine Hossenfelder)

“Two years ago, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the law was “dead” because we're hitting physical limits for the miniaturization of transistors. Now, though, he’s reversed that claim, instead predicting that we're about to see a “Hyper” Moore’s law.”

“Given this, if the U.S. is serious about AGI, then the true Manhattan Project — doing something that will be very expensive and not necessarily economically rational — is filling in the middle of the sandwich. Saving Intel, in other words.”

“Simply put, the Intel board has escaped blame for over a decade of failures. This decade of failure culminates in the ultimate mistake: dismissing CEO Pat Gelsinger.”

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