Five Things Tech: Computing Power, Drones, Desalination, Lobbying, Dreams
Here are five must-read articles just for you!
Hello again, and welcome back to Five Things Tech!
So this week this newsletter is dealing with some fun topics. We’ll start with the interesting discussion on what to do with an abundance of computing power. Then we’ll learn more about modern warfare and drones. After that we’ll take a look at desalination and how tech is making this much more accessable. It might not be the biggest news, but Silicon Valley is doing a lot of lobbying and this should be discussed. Finally, we learn about innovation and how Elon Musk is pushing his dreams forward.
So, there’s a lot to unpack, read on!
Quick reminder: your reading pleasure is so much better after you go paid. So don’t hesitate!
Businesses should prepare for an abundance of computing power
“Computing power is an important strategic asset. Greater compute, at near-zero processing cost and coupled with AI capabilities, can have deeply disruptive effects.
So, if you’re a business leader, what should you do?
For computing power to be effective, high-quality data as input is essential. Without it, your computing power has nothing to process. Ninety percent of business data is unstructured; with generative AI, you now have a method to structure the data and create more organised data sources for your business.”
Anduril’s Bolt-M Is The Future For U.S. Forces, If They Can Afford It
We’ve seen cheap drones getting deployed in masses by the Ukrainian army and now Anduril is building more expensive AI-assisted drones, which can have a lot of impact in warfare, but at a different price-level.
Solar-powered desalination system requires no extra batteries
“The solar-powered system removes salt from water at a pace that closely follows changes in solar energy. As sunlight increases through the day, the system ramps up its desalting process and automatically adjusts to any sudden variation in sunlight, for example by dialing down in response to a passing cloud or revving up as the skies clear.” - it’s so cool how tech advances and there will be plenty of use cases in a time where more and more natural disasters are happening.
Silicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monster
Big Tech is doing Big Lobbying. This is not really news, but the way they do it and the immensity of it is really striking. And a huge problem for the decision making processes in the political spheres in D.C., Brussels, Berlin and elsewhere.
Elon Dreams and Bitter Lessons
“The Tesla bet, though, is that Waymo’s approach ultimately doesn’t scale and isn’t generalizable to true Level 5, while starting with the dream — true autonomy — leads Tesla down a better path of relying on nothing but AI, fueled by data and fine-tuning that you can only do if you already have millions of cars on the road. That is the connection to SpaceX and what happened this weekend: if you start with the dream, then understand the cost structure necessary to achieve that dream, you force yourself down the only path possible, forgoing easier solutions that don’t scale for fantastical ones that do.”
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
— Nico