💎 OpenAI's search challenge, 🚗 China's EV dominance, and 🛰️ Starlink's stellar success
💎 OpenAI's search challenge, 🚗 China's EV dominance, and 🛰️ Starlink's stellar success
Thomas's Innovation Wrap #77
Greetings,
Here’s the best technology, innovation, and finance news from the past week.
🔬 Biology
DeepMind has unveiled the third version of its AlphaFold, which can now predict how proteins will interact with other molecules. This could dramatically speed up the process of identifying promising drug candidates.
"With these new capabilities, we can design a molecule that will bind to a specific place on a protein, and we can predict how strongly it will bind," Hassabis said in a press briefing on Tuesday.
"It's a critical step if you want to design drugs and compounds that will help with disease."
💊 Health
Recursion Pharmaceuticals is also using AI to accelerate the drug discovery process, aiming to cut costs and development time from 5-6 years and hundreds of millions of dollars down to 1-2 years and $10-20 million.
"Think of it as, like, Google Street View driving around taking pictures of everything," he said. "We have microscopes taking tens of millions of pictures of cells every week, and we're using a lot of the same AI algorithms to turn those images into mathematical representations of biology that we think could unlock some really exciting secrets."
Researchers have developed a personalised mRNA cancer vaccine that uses a novel delivery mechanism to rapidly reprogram the immune system to target glioblastoma, the deadliest form of brain cancer, in both humans and dogs. The results are extremely promising, with immune response seen in less than 48 hours.
"Instead of us injecting single particles, we're injecting clusters of particles that are wrapping around each other like onions, like a bag full of onions," said senior author Elias Sayour, M.D., Ph.D., a UF Health pediatric oncologist who pioneered the new vaccine, which like other immunotherapies attempts to "educate" the immune system that a tumor is foreign. "And the reason we've done that in the context of cancer is these clusters alert the immune system in a much more profound way than single particles would."
💎 Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI is set to unveil a new AI-powered search product today that could seriously challenge Google's long-held dominance. This comes at an awkward time for Google, with the announcement timed just a day before their annual I/O conference, which is set to focus on their own AI offerings.
OpenAI is seemingly attempting to build off that trust, with sources telling The Verge this week that the company is aggressively trying to poach Google employees to work on its own search offering.
Paris-based startup Mistral AI is raising $600 million at a $6 billion valuation, nearly tripling its valuation from six months ago. It aims to challenge Silicon Valley giants in the race to develop and commercialise AI tools. At Minotaur, we currently use Mistral for translation and news embeddings.
Spies can now use generative AI, too, after Microsoft deployed an air-gapped generative AI model for its most discerning customers.
Spy agencies around the world want generative AI to help them understand and analyze the growing amounts of classified information generated daily, but must balance turning to large language models with the risk that data could leak into the open — or get deliberately hacked.
So, who else is talking about Generative AI?
Duolingo attributed their 54% year-over-year growth in paid subscribers to generative AI (it wasn’t enough; the stock fell 22 last week).
Meta is rolling out new generative AI tools to help its 10 million advertisers create product images and marketing copy.
VISA is using generative AI to combat the growing threat of enumeration attacks and card-not-present fraud, which cost over $1 billion last year.
EA is eager to incorporate generative AI into their game development process to create bigger, more immersive games faster. While this may boost efficiency, the enthusiasm for AI amidst recent mass layoffs in the gaming industry feels somewhat tone-deaf.
⚙️ Mobility
Wayve, a British self-driving car startup, has raised $1.05 billion in a Series C funding round led by SoftBank, with participation from Microsoft and Nvidia. The company is developing "embodied AI" technology that allows vehicles to learn from and interact with human behaviour on real-world roads.
"Vehicles can now interpret their surroundings like humans, enabling enhanced decision-making that promises higher safety standards," Kentaro Matsui, a managing partner at SoftBank, said in a statement. "The potential of this type of technology is transformative; it could eliminate 99% of traffic accidents."
Is the perception of Chinese EVs improving? InsideEVs recently visited the Beijing Auto Show and came back with a stark conclusion: Western Automakers Are Cooked.
No matter the price point, they all felt incredibly convincing. They’re high-tech, well-executed machines in ways I hadn’t experienced from European or American manufacturers.
In related news, the Biden administration is expected to quadruple import tariffs on Chinese EVs to roughly 100%.
The existing 25% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles has so far effectively barred those models, often cheaper than Western-made cars, from the U.S. market. Biden administration officials, automakers and some lawmakers worry that wouldn’t be enough given the scale of Chinese manufacturing.
Echoing this sentiment, Forrest Auto's review of the YangWang U8, a luxury EV that can travel over 1000 kilometres and float in water, started with: “I know why Chinese cars aren’t sold in America: it’s ‘cause they would dominate.”
Brad Setser on X pointed out that China is on track to top 6 million vehicle exports per year, up from around 1 million in 2020 (around 30% of these are EVs).
CATL unveiled its Shenxing Plus lithium-iron phosphate battery, which uses granular gradation technology to deliver an impressive 600km range in just 10 minutes of ultra-fast charging.
Daimler Truck has unveiled an autonomous electric truck demonstrator that it says will enable fully driverless freight hauling by 2027.
💻 Chips and Computing
Apple is accelerating its push into generative AI by using its own in-house processors in cloud-computing servers to process the most advanced AI tasks coming to Apple devices.
The move, coming as part of Apple's iOS 18 rollout in the fall, represents a shift for the company. For years, Apple prioritized on-device processing, touting it as a better way to ensure security and privacy.
TSMC's April sales jumped 60% as AI chip demand remained strong and the consumer electronics market began to recover.
The world's largest contract chipmaker is running well ahead of estimates for revenue growth in the current quarter, after sales increased by 34.3% in March, buoyed largely by insatiable appetite for AI semiconductors.
🌞 Renewables and Energy
Sunrun's virtual power plant in California has set a new record, networking over 16,000 customers' solar and battery systems to support the state's electrical grid during the demanding summer months. The CalReady program is expected to nearly double in capacity and participants compared to the previous year.
Sunrun CEO Mary Powell said that "a typical customer won't even notice that they're sharing their stored power to bolster the grid while getting compensated for doing so."
Sam Altman's Oklo is looking to commercialise mini nuclear reactors to power the energy-hungry AI models of companies like OpenAI. The company recently went public through a SPAC, but faces a challenging road ahead with no revenue or deployed nuclear plants so far. The stock (OKLO) fell 54% on Friday.
"I don't see a way for us to get there without nuclear," Altman told CNBC in 2023. "I mean, maybe we could get there just with solar and storage. But from my vantage point, I feel like this is the most likely and the best way to get there."
SK E&S has opened the world's largest liquefied hydrogen plant in Incheon, Korea, aiming to boost the adoption of hydrogen vehicles. The plant will produce 30,000 tons of liquefied hydrogen annually, which can fuel 5,000 hydrogen buses for a year.
An SK E&S official said, "The price of liquid hydrogen will remain similar to or higher than that of gaseous hydrogen for the time being, but once production and distribution begin in earnest and economies of scale are realized, the price of hydrogen will fall significantly."
Wollongong-based green hydrogen company Hysata has raised $172 million in a Series B round led by oil and gas giant BP's venture arm and Hong Kong's Templewater Group.
The proceeds are earmarked to expand Hysata’s Wollongong facility and to further develop its technology. It has 75 staff and plans to grow to 200 in the next few years.
🛰️ Space
Quilty Space analysts have been blown away by the rapid rise and profitability of SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet business. They say the business is self-sustaining and profitable, with an estimated free cash flow of around $600 million this year.
"A lot of industry veterans kind of scoffed at the idea," he said. "We'd seen this before."
DigiTimes wrote about how Starlink service is disrupting the traditional telecommunications industry, paving the way for new cross-border collaborations between satellite operators and telecom giants.
Looking ahead, Dr. Ting envisions a commercial model where satellite infrastructure is complemented by local telcos, with companies specializing in satellite deployment leveraging ground networks for signal transmission. This symbiotic relationship, he suggests, could redefine the industry, with telecom operators assuming a pivotal role in the global connectivity ecosystem.
Undark wrote an interesting piece about the companies aiming to mine asteroids. While some companies are focusing solely on space mining, others, like Asteroid Mining Corporation, are pursuing terrestrial applications first to generate revenue and fund future cosmic endeavors. For example, they've built a six-legged robot called SCAR-E that can crawl around rugged surfaces, take data, and collect samples - with plans to inspect ship hulls on Earth before eventually demonstrating lunar soil analysis.
"My opinion is that unless you've built something which makes sense on Earth," he added, "you're never going to be able to mine an asteroid."
💲 Finance
Zeekr (ZK), the Geely-owned EV maker, saw its shares rise 34% on its IPO in the biggest US listing by a Chinese company in three years.
Zeekr debuted in the face of new trade barriers set to be imposed by the US and Europe on China-made cleantech. The Biden administration is expected to raise tariffs on Chinese EV imports from 25 per cent to 100 per cent on Tuesday. The European Commission is investigating electric car imports from China and is widely expected to raise tariffs in the coming months.
Personal plug: The Minotaur Global Opportunities Fund successfully launched last Friday. It feels great to be back in markets!
⚡ Other Snippets
Alibaba is using its cloud computing resources to invest in China's leading AI startups, offering them valuable cloud credits instead of cash in exchange for equity
"Providing compute is actually more valuable than cash," said one Chinese AI scientist. "With the shortage of semiconductors, it's very hard to get access to a 10,000 GPU [processing] cluster, which Alibaba has."
Microsoft has announced it will launch a browser-based mobile game store in July. The store will initially offer discounts on in-game items for its own games like Candy Crush Saga. The move puts Microsoft in direct competition with Apple and Google's app stores and their 30% fees.
Bond says the store is launching on the web, versus an app, so it's "accessible across all devices, all countries, no matter what, independent of the policies of closed ecosystem stores."
TikTok has set an ambitious worldwide gross merchandise value target of $50 billion for its e-commerce business this year as it expands into new markets.
TikTok is poised to expand its e-commerce operations into Mexico, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, as the ByteDance-owned short video platform remains under scrutiny in the United States and the European Union.
Have a great week,
Thomas
About Thomas Rice
Thomas Rice co-founded Minotaur Capital, and is based in Sydney, Australia. He can be found on the platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter at @thomasrice_au.