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  • Google Provides Top Search Trends of 2023

Google Provides Top Search Trends of 2023

Plus: Why scientists are making transparent wood

Author

Cash Nut
December 12, 2023

In Today’s Edition 

  • Mistral AI, a Paris-based OpenAI rival, closed its $415 million funding round

  • Why Are We Surprised That Startups Are So Freaking Hard? 

  • The race between Intel, Samsung, and TSMC to ship the first 2 nm chip

  • Google Provides Insight into the Top Search Trends of 2023, and the Last 25 Years 

  • iOS 17.2 arrives with new Journal app and spatial video capture support

  • The real research behind the wild rumors about OpenAI’s Q* project

  • Why scientists are making transparent wood 

🚀Startups Nuts

Mistral AI has closed its Series A funding round, raising around $415 million. The company, which is valued at roughly $2 billion, is opening up its commercial platform today. The platform will allow developers to access the Mistral 7B model, Mistral-medium, and the new Mixtral 8x7B model, which uses a router network to process input tokens and choose the most apt group of parameters to give answers. Mixtral 8x7B has been released under the Apache 2.0 license and is available as a free download.

Why Are We Surprised That Startups Are So Freaking Hard? 

Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang recently said that if he could be 30 again, he wouldn't start a company as the work he put into Nvidia wasn't worth it. This article explores Huang's statement from a founder's perspective with a focus on figuring out why it's such a surprise to people that building a startup would be hard. No matter how successful a company is, nearly every founder says that the work was much harder than they thought it would be. This doesn't happen in fields like sports, where athletes work hard for decades but they are never surprised about how hard it was.

🏭Business Nuts 

The race between Intel, Samsung, and TSMC to ship the first 2 nm chip

The world's leading semiconductor companies are racing to make 2-nanometer processor chips to power the next generation of technologies. Smaller transistors mean less energy consumption and higher speeds. The chip industry pulled in well over $500 billion in global chip sales last year and demand is projected to grow further. Several companies say they will be ready to ship 2nm ships in 2025.

Google's latest 'Year in Search' overview highlights the most searched topics over the past year. It provides global and regional insights as well as interactive displays, games, and more. Google added a new element dedicated to historic Search trends to celebrate 25 years of Search. It allows users to see how things have evolved over the years and how that's reflected in the top trends.

📱Tech Nuts

iOS 17.2 is now available for compatible devices. The update includes a new Journal app designed to get users writing about events in their lives with prompts that draw from data on their phones. The update also adds the option to record spatial videos. Other features include the ability to set the iPhone 15 Pro's Action Button to translate phrases, new Weather widgets, new features for the Messages app, Qi2 support for the iPhone 13 and 14, and more. Apple also recently released watchOS 10.2 and tvOS 17.2.

OpenAI's Q* model can reportedly perform math on the level of grade-school students. While Q* might not be the crucial breakthrough that will lead to artificial general intelligence, it might be an important step towards an AI with general reasoning abilities. This article takes a look at the area of AI math research and explains why step-by-step reasoning techniques designed for math problems could have much broader applications. Building a general reasoning engine will require a way for language models to learn new abstractions that go beyond their training data and have these evolving abstractions influence the model's choices as it explores the space of possible solutions.

🎁Miscellaneous

Transparent wood could soon find uses as super-strong screens for smartphones, glowing light fixtures, and structural features like color-changing windows. The material outperforms plastic and glass in tests measuring how easily materials fracture or break under pressure. It is a far better insulator than glass, so windows made out of the material could help buildings retain heat or keep it out. For now, transparent wood still has a higher environmental impact than glass, but scaling up manufacturing and embracing greener production schemes could help make it more sustainable.

💡What else are we reading and seeing?

😎Fun Fact

The world's first recorded credit card transaction was in 1950, when a man named Frank McNamara used a Diners Club card to pay for a meal at a New York City restaurant

🔥 Hot Book of the Day

When President Biden announced Janet Yellen as his choice for secretary of the treasury, it was the peak moment of a remarkable life. Not only the first woman in the more than two-century history of the office, Yellen is the first person to hold all three top economic policy jobs in the United States: chair of both the Federal Reserve and the President’s Council of Economic Advisors as well as treasury secretary.

Through Owen Ullmann’s intimate portrait, we glean two remarkable aspects of Yellen’s approach to economics: first, her commitment to putting those on the bottom half of the economic ladder at the center of economic policy, and employing forward-looking ideas to use the power of government to create a more prosperous, productive life for everyone.

And second, her ability to maintain humanity in a Washington policy world where fierce political combat casts others as either friend or enemy, never more so than in our current age of polarization.

As Ullmann takes us through Yellen’s life and work, we clearly see her brilliance and meticulous preparation. What stands out, though, is Yellen as an icon of progress—the “Ruth Bader Ginsburg of economics”—a superb-yet-different kind of player in a cold, male-dominated profession that all too often devises policies to benefit the already well-to-do.

With humility and compassion as her trademarks, we see the influence of Yellen’s father, a physician whose pay-what-you-can philosophy meant never turning anyone away. That compassion, rooted in her family life in Brooklyn, now extends across our entire country.

“An enlightening study of a trailblazing yet ‘unassuming’ public figure.”

🐦Joke of the Day

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