Category: Science & Technology News

BY LUCINDA SHEN AND ANNE SRADERS

Startup investor Keith Rabois recently revealed plans to leave the tech hub in favor of Miami, telling Fortune, “I think San Francisco is just so massively improperly run and managed.” Now Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and Splunk CEO Douglas Merritt reportedly plan to make Austin their new permanent residences, per The Information, and Brex co-founders Henrique Duburgras and Pedro Franceschi have landed in Los Angeles.

Oh, and Palantir co-founder and 8VC Founding Partner Jon Lonsdale has decamped for Austin. 

Each has his own motivations—be it the city’s management, the wildfires, the high taxes, or some combination of all of the above—but here’s a notable excerpt from Lonsdale’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal from earlier this month that explains much of his.

“Politics in the state is in many ways closed off to different ideas. We grew weary of California’s intolerant far left, which would rather demonize opponents than discuss honest differences of opinion.”

Lonsdale’s op-ed tells us more than just the fact that people are leaving the city. While more exits from San Francisco will happen, Lonsdale notes that “few top venture capitalists consider living anywhere other than California and a handful of global financial centers.” While exits from the crowded and troubled city are splashy, it’s worth meditating upon who stays to understand the full impact of the changes on the city.

Elizabeth Blackstock

The state of Nevada has given Motional, the self-driving car company backed by Hyundai and Aptiv, the green light to debut autonomous cars in Las Vegas without a human driver behind the wheel.

Driverless vehicles are still a huge risk. Autonomous technology is still very new, and most cars that claim to be self-driving still need a human behind the wheel to prevent any accidents. Motional’s machines are Level 4 autonomy, which basically means the car can perform the basics of driving, including some safety-critical functions, without driver input. But it’s still not equivalent to a human driver, and the car isn’t capable of predicting and handling every scenario it can run into on the road.

There are only a handful of companies who have debuted driverless cars on public roads, with Waymo and Yandex being the two largest. Motional is looking to come in and further develop the technology while still in its incipient stages.

That doesn’t mean we’re going to see these cars on the road immediately — it just means that, when the company wants to do so, it can.

Shane McGlaun 

Deep learning neural networks are artificial intelligence systems that are being used for increasingly important decisions. Deep learning neural networks are used for tasks as varied as autonomous driving to diagnosing medical conditions. This type of network excels at recognizing patterns in large and complex datasets to help with decision-making.

One big challenge is determining if the neural network is correct. Researchers at MIT and Harvard University have developed a quick way for a neural network to churn through data and provide a prediction along with the neural network’s confidence level in its answer. Researchers on the project believe that their system could save lives since deep learning is already deployed in the real world.

Currently, uncertainty estimation for neural networks tends to be computationally expensive and too slow for split-second decisions. The approach devised by the researchers is called “deep evidential regression” and speeds the process up, potentially leading to safer outcomes. Researchers on the project say we need the ability to have high-performance models and understand when results from the models can’t be trusted.

By Rain Noe 

These days every major auto manufacturer is at least considering the autonomous driving future, but settling on what the interiors will actually look like and do is an unanswered matter. In concept videos we’ve seen, for instance, unused steering wheels can still be summoned at a moment’s notice.

ELON MUSK MADE a lot of promises during  Tesla’s Battery Day last September. Soon, he said, the company would have a car that runs on batteries with pure silicon anodes to boost their performance and reduced cobalt in the cathodes to lower their price. Its battery pack will be integrated into the chassis so that it provides mechanical support in addition to energy, a design that Musk claimed will reduce the car’s weight by 10 percent and improve its mileage by even more. He hailed Tesla’s structural battery as a “revolution” in engineering—but for some battery researchers, Musk’s future looked a lot like the past.

“He’s essentially doing something that we did 10 years ago,” says Emile Greenhalgh, a materials scientist at Imperial College London and the Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies. He’s one of the world’s leading experts on structural batteries, an approach to energy storage that erases the boundary between the battery and the object it powers. “What we’re doing is going beyond what Elon Musk has been talking about,” Greenhalgh says. “There are no embedded batteries. The material itself is the energy storage device.”

Today, batteries account for a substantial portion of the size and weight of most electronics. A smartphone is mostly a lithium-ion cell with some processors stuffed around it. Drones are limited in size by the batteries they can carry. And about a third of the weight of an electric vehicle is its battery pack. One way to address this issue is by building conventional batteries into the structure of the car itself, as Tesla plans to do. Rather than using the floor of the car to support the battery pack, the battery pack becomes the floor.