🔍 Real-Time AI Search, 🔬 Bio-Engineered REE Mining, and 💊 Unconscious Therapy
Thomas's Innovation Wrap #102
Greetings,
Here’s your weekly wrap of technology, innovation, and finance news.
💎 Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI is launching a ChatGPT-powered search engine that provides real-time information. While this enters OpenAI into the search market, it’s unlikely to challenge Google’s dominance in the near future given how slowly habits change.
Meta is working towards developing its own AI-powered search engine, aiming to reduce its future reliance on Google and Microsoft.
Google is integrating generative AI into Maps, Earth, and Waze. Powered by Gemini AI, new features include detailed search results and conversational requests.
"Think of features like Lens and maps. When you're on a street corner, you can lift up your phone and look, and through your camera view, you can actually see we laid places on top of your view. So you can see a business. Is it open? What are the ratings for it? Is it busy? You can even see businesses that are out of your line of sight," he explained.
AI search engine Perplexity is building an AI-powered shopping experience. The “Pro Shop” feature allows for product research and purchases directly on its platform.
"This is a really big step for Perplexity, a small company trying to make a splash in AI search," said Debra Aho Williamson, founder and chief analyst, Sonata Insights. "Ecommerce companies struggle with this, let alone a startup like Perplexity."
MIT Technology Review warns that AI search could "break the web" by disrupting the traditional traffic flows between content producers and aggregators. Unlike Google searches, where users click through to publisher websites (generating traffic and potential revenue), AI search keeps users on the platform by providing summaries. This could leave publishers high and dry. It’s probably only a matter of time before the Australian Government steps in to force OpenAI and Anthropic to start coughing up cash for Aussie newspapers, like they did with Facebook and Google.
Yet for all its pitfalls, mandatory bargaining may become an attractive response to AI search. For one thing, the case is stronger. Unlike traditional search—which indexes, links, and displays brief snippets from sources to help a user decide whether to click through—AI search could directly substitute generated summaries for the underlying source material, potentially draining traffic, eyeballs, and exposure from downstream websites.
Decart’s AI model Oasis simulates Minecraft in real-time, showcasing impressive on-the-fly content generation. However, limitations like poor object permanence hinder its practicality. While it's a clever demo, it's worth noting that Minecraft's vast library of gameplay footage makes it an ideal candidate for such a simulation, and significant challenges remain for broader applications in gaming and entertainment. You can try it here.
Microsoft's OmniParser is quickly gained popularity on Hugging Face. This open-source tool helps AI understand GUIs, potentially transforming how AI navigates screen-based environments.
OmniParser is essentially a powerful new tool designed to parse screenshots into structured elements that a vision-language model (VLM) can understand and act upon. As LLMs become more integrated into daily workflows, Microsoft recognized the need for AI to operate seamlessly across varied GUIs.
Nearly 5% of new English Wikipedia pages appear to contain AI-generated content, raising concerns about the site’s reliability.
Patronus AI has launched an API to detect and prevent AI errors. The tool uses a model called Lynx to spot AI hallucinations, allows companies to write custom rules in plain English, and can pinpoint specific problematic text for quick fixes.
"Many companies are grappling with AI failures in production, facing issues like hallucinations, security vulnerabilities, and unpredictable behavior," said Anand Kannappan, Patronus AI's CEO, in an interview with VentureBeat.
An AI system called Tutor CoPilot is helping human tutors become more effective at teaching math to children from underserved communities. By leveraging the expertise of experienced teachers, the system provides suggestions to tutors on how to guide students towards correct answers while promoting deeper understanding (see the paper).
"I'm really excited about the future of human-AI collaboration systems," says Rose Wang, a PhD student at Stanford University who worked on the project, which was published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed "I think this technology is a huge enabler, but only if it's designed well."
💻 Chips and Computing
New York is set to become the US centre for advanced chip research. The Commerce Department is allocating up to $825 million for an Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) Accelerator facility at Albany NanoTech Complex.
Apple's latest M4 chips are making waves, with leaked benchmarks suggesting the M4 Max chip achieves impressive scores of 4,060 (single-core) and 26,675 (multi-core), significantly outperforming previous Apple chips and most competing products. The M4 Pro also outperformed the previous M2 Ultra chip in multi-core tests, despite being in a more affordable Mac mini.
In other words, Apple is offering nearly the same level of performance from a very recent high-end desktop computer in a much smaller device that costs just over half as much.
OpenAI is developing its first in-house AI chip, collaborating with Broadcom and TSMC for inferencing workloads. This move aims to reduce Nvidia dependence and optimise AI capabilities.
OpenAI is said to be building a hybrid model of "AI compute acquisition," which means that the firm is planning to expand its AI capabilities through the integration of existing architectures, such as those from NVIDIA and AMD, along with developing in-house solutions, to ensure diversity in workloads and reduce dependency on its partners.
In other news, over 90% of AWS's top 1,000 customers now use its Graviton chips, Samsung plans to introduce its first High-NA EUV equipment by early 2025, crucial for sub-2nm processes, and Bloomberg produced a 10-minute video on why AI can't exist without Taiwan, highlighting the country's dominance in AI hardware manufacturing.
🌞 Energy
Commonwealth Fusion Systems is making progress towards demonstrating net-positive fusion energy. Their SPARC reactor facility is under construction, with plans to achieve the Q>1 milestone (producing more energy than needed to power it) by 2027. While the tokamak hall currently houses an empty slot for SPARC, the company remains ambitious about their timeline, aiming to have the reactor running by 2026.
AI's insatiable energy demand is driving a surge in natural gas consumption.
“Hyperscalers are driving crazy demand into natural gas right now,” [BP CEO Murray] Auchincloss said on Tuesday during a presentation to investors. “I’m pretty optimistic on natural gas prices through the decade.”
👓 Virtual and Augmented Reality
Engadget recently tried out Meta's Orion AR prototype, first revealed in September, calling it “the most impressive AR hardware” they've seen.
Orion has the potential to be much bigger. Now, Meta isn’t just trying to create a more convenient form factor for mixed reality hobbyists and gamers. It’s offering a glimpse into how it views the future, and what our lives might look like when we’re no longer tethered to our phones.
Palmer Luckey's Anduril is revamping the Pentagon's IVAS program by integrating their AI-powered Lattice system with mixed-reality headsets, creating a "hive eye" for soldiers.
"It's not quite a hive mind, but it's certainly a hive eye" is how Luckey described it to me.
Scientists are exploring psychedelics and VR to understand how our brains construct reality. Neuroscientist Zeus Tipado plans to combine DMT (a powerful psychedelic drug) with VR to identify a potential "immersion circuit" in the brain, with implications for VR development, psychedelic therapy, and consciousness studies.
"Our brain is easily deceived as to what reality is," says Tipado.
🤖 Robotics
Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot is turning heads - quite literally - with its latest autonomous capabilities. In a pre-Halloween demo, the all-electric humanoid performs Exorcist-like head spins while autonomously sorting engine parts (see the video).
Atlas uses machine learning to detect environmental changes and work around them. It also has a “specialized grasping policy” to help it maintain a firm hold on objects, continuously estimating the state of what it’s holding. After receiving some bin locations to move parts between, Atlas will get to work without prescribed movements, opting to perform tasks independently.
Meta is advancing robotic touch perception with its new AI tools. The company has unveiled Sparsh and Digit 360, aiming to give robots a more human-like sense of touch. Meta is also releasing the PARTNR benchmark to evaluate AI models in human-robot collaboration scenarios.
Japan leads in integrating robots into daily life. A Bloomberg Originals video explores how robots are being incorporated into various sectors, from retail to agriculture. Companies like Telexistence are deploying robots in convenience stores, while Kubota is developing autonomous machinery for farming.
💊 Health
Exosomes, once dismissed as cellular waste, are now at the forefront of medical research. These microscopic packages show promise for diagnosing diseases, delivering drugs, and treating cancer. Scientists are particularly intrigued by exosomes' potential as drug delivery vehicles. Their natural origin makes them less likely to trigger immune responses, and they can be engineered to target specific tissues. Some researchers are even using exosomes to tackle rare neurological disorders.
In their research, Carter and his colleagues can change almost everything about the exosomes they study. They can alter their contents, loading them with proteins or viruses or even gene-editing therapies. They can tweak the proteins on their surfaces to make them target different cells and tissues. They can control how long exosomes stay in an animal’s circulation.
“I always used to love playing with Lego,” he adds. “I feel like I’m playing with Lego when I’m working with exosomes.”
New "unconscious" therapies are showing promise in treating phobias without conscious confrontation. Techniques like "very brief exposure" (VBE) and "decoded neurofeedback" (DecNef) help people overcome fears subconsciously. These gentler methods could reduce dropout rates in fear-related treatments and may apply to social anxiety and PTSD.
"The unconscious exposure paradigm contradicts what's considered sacred dogma in cognitive behaviorism and clinical psychology," Siegel says, "which is that if people are going to get over their fears, they have to confront them."
🔬 Biology
Researchers have also created the first single-cell atlas of prenatal human skin, unveiling a molecular "recipe" for building skin and hair follicles. This breakthrough could lead to new treatments for skin disorders and enhance regenerative medicine techniques.
"With our prenatal human skin atlas, we've provided the first molecular 'recipe' for making human skin and uncovered how human hair follicles are formed before birth. These insights have amazing clinical potential and could be used in regenerative medicine, when offering skin and hair transplants, such as for burn victims or those with scarring alopecia," said Dr Elena Winheim, co-first author from the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
In environmental science, Penn State researchers have engineered a bacterial protein that could revolutionise rare earth element (REE) mining. The protein efficiently separates valuable REEs from less useful ones, potentially making the process greener and less expensive (see the paper).
"Current industrial methods are inefficient and require heavy use of toxic chemicals, so a protein-based method for rare earth mining could make this process more efficient, greener, and less expensive."
Viruses in soil may influence the movement of over a billion tonnes of carbon. By killing microbes and releasing their contents, these microscopic entities could significantly contribute to persistent carbon in soil, highlighting their outsized impact on global carbon cycles.
"While there are still gaps, we're understanding that viruses can have a huge impact on soil carbon," says Kirsten Hofmockel at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state.
⚙️ Mobility
Zoox co-founder Jesse Levinson has thrown shade at Tesla's self-driving ambitions, claiming the electric car giant “doesn't have technology that works”.
Levinson went on to say he believes FSD is “about 100 times less safe than a human if you look at all the metrics that are publicly available.”
Joby Aviation tested its eVTOL "flying car" in Japan. The aircraft can reach 320 km/h with a 160 km range.
"It takes four to five hours to drive here from Tokyo, but flying would take just 25 minutes," said Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda. "This will change people's lifestyles."
In the US, Beta Technologies has secured $318 million in funding to accelerate its electric aircraft development.
"This investment validates progress and milestones toward commercializing electric aviation," Kyle Clark, BETA founder and CEO, said in a statement. "For years, we've flown across the country and deployed with partners to prove the safety and reliability of our aircraft and chargers. Now, we're beginning to produce products for our customers."
Waymo have developed EMMA, a vision-based end-to-end driving model using Google's Gemini LLM. They are now providing over 150,000 paid robotaxi rides weekly, a 50% increase since August.
"Waymo is now a clear technical leader within the autonomous vehicle industry and creating a growing commercial opportunity," Pichai said. "Now each week Waymo is driving more than 1 million fully autonomous miles and serves over 150,000 paid rides, the first time any AV company has reached this kind of mainstream use."
Indonesia is revving up its EV ambitions, with CATL and BYD making significant investments. CATL is investing $1.18 billion in a battery plant, while BYD plans a $754 million automotive factory.
The Indonesian government has set an ambitious target of having 2 million EVs and 13 million electric motorcycles on the road by 2030. To support this goal, it is actively attracting investments from automakers, exemplified by the recent groundbreaking of VinFast's assembly plant in July.
💲 Finance
Reddit reported its first-ever quarterly profit, driving its shares up 39% last week. The stock has tripled since its March IPO, highlighting the growing value of user-generated content for AI training.
Nvidia will replace Intel on Dow Jones Industrial Average, ending Intel's 25-year run and reflecting AI's dominance in tech.
🧊 Simulation
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have developed Augmented Physics, an AI tool that transforms static textbook diagrams into interactive 3D simulations. Students can now visualise and manipulate physics concepts in real-time, potentially revolutionising education. While the tool's current 60% success rate leaves room for improvement, it's a promising step towards more engaging learning experiences.
"Usually, those diagrams are fixed. We have to imagine what happens," said Suzuki, assistant professor in the ATLAS Institute and Department of Computer Science. "But what if we could take any static diagram from any textbook and make it interactive?"
Siemens has acquired Altair Engineering for $10 billion, aiming to create "the world's most complete AI-powered design and simulation portfolio". This move combines Altair's simulation and AI expertise with Siemens' Xcelerator platform, bolstering Siemens' position in industrial software.
🤩 Advertising
Swedish fintech Klarna has launched nearly 30 AI-created marketing campaigns this year, reducing annual marketing spend by 12%. Marketing chief David Sandstorm:
"We've removed a lot of the cumbersome, expensive, and mundane tasks of marketing. We've saved millions on that ideation process alone."
However, AI still struggles with high-concept, brand-defining campaigns:
"For months, we've tried to have AI crack a fantastic out-of-home campaign, but it cannot do that. Everything becomes bland or boring or not really on-brand," said Sandstorm.
🛰️ Space
The US Space Force is offering $6 billion in satellite launch contracts. This “on-ramp strategy” could provide up to 70 additional missions, provided bidders are ready for launch by December 2025. Companies including SpaceX and Rocket Lab are competing for these contracts.
Part of the rationale, for example, is that if one launch provider encounters an issue with their rocket design, a competitor's vehicle will still be available to get critical military hardware into orbit when needed.
⚡ Other Snippets
CRISPR gene-editing technology is being applied to climate change mitigation, with researchers exploring ways to reduce water loss in rice crops and decrease methane emissions from cattle.
"If we succeed, it could potentially be something that could be applicable to nearly every cow in the world," he says.
In a blend of tradition and modernity, the Vatican unveiled Luce, an anime-inspired mascot for Holy Year 2025. With her blue hair and sparkling eyes, Luce could easily be mistaken for popular Hololive VTuber Hoshimachi Suisei sporting a new pilgrim-themed outfit…
…Speaking of VTubers, Dungeon Investing wrote an insightful piece on Cover Corp, which is one of our (Minotaur Capital) largest positions. The stock rose 39% last week after announcing a profit upgrade, followed by Morgan Stanley initiating on the stock with a ¥3,900 price target (last price ¥2,094).
We wrote about Cover Corp in our June Quarterly. Our September Quarterly went out last week — it covers how we’re exploring the GLP-1 trend and getting more constructive on regions like the UK, along with updates on how we’re using AI in funds management. You can read it here.
Have a great week,
Thomas
About Thomas Rice
Thomas Rice co-founded Minotaur Capital, a technology-driven, AI-led global equities fund, and is based in Sydney, Australia. He can be found on the X at @thomasrice_au.