Yesterday was published
V2 of the State of AI Report Compute Index

A few notes:

- Usage in AI research papers (early adopters) as a leading indicator of industry usage.
- Papers using AI semi startup chips almost all have authors from the startup.
- FY2022 is extrapolated from 4 Dec '22.

You'll find live counts of AI research papers using chips from NVIDIA, TPUs, ASICs, FPGAs, and AI semi startups.

First, here's an updated count of papers using:
- any NVIDIA chip
- Google's TPU
- ASICs
- FPGAs
- chips from graphcoreai SambaNovaAI CerebrasSystems Cambricon and habanalabs
- Huawei's Ascend 910

You'll see that NVIDIA is just *leagues* ahead...by 2 orders of magnitude!

For now here are the AI research paper counts for the 5 major AI semiconductor startup contenders.

Combined, they're used 125x less than NVIDIA's chips.

After the explosive growth of the last few years, Amazon now has 7-8% of US retail sales, and Amazon’s own retailing (i.e excluding Marketplace) is 3-4%
All ‘online-only’ retailers combined have 12-13% of US retail.

China's Zhejiang province to build $28.7 billion metaverse industry by 2025

The Zhejiang Province of China is setting in motion plans to construct a metaverse industry worth more than 200 billion Yuan by 2025. The South China Morning Post reported that the home of Alibaba is eyeing the development that would be worth $28.5 billion.

The western province is the latest Chinese region to extend plans for a metaverse industry. The report noted that the concept was met with an enthusiastic reception by local authorities. All of which are participating in the developmental plans.

Zhejiang Embracing Metaverse

The Zhejiang province is the home of Alibaba Group Holding headquarters, the driving force behind the new plans to develop a metaverse industry worth billions. The proposed plan is aiming to, “develop metaverse-related industries valued at more than 200 billion yuan.”

The report from South China Morning Post stated that the news comes from an official development plan. Furthermore, that plan was published by the provincial development and reform commission last week.

Artificial intelligence could help cool buildings more efficiently. DeepMind trained an AI to minimise energy usage by cooling systems under different weather conditions

Stablecoins have settled more than $7 trillion in value, a record-breaking value compared to previous years — link

PwC just released their Global Crypto Regulation Report 2023

Below is their Crypto Regulation at a Glance table which provides a nice concise jurisdiction by jurisdiction comparison.

The full report is 68 pages long and you can access it here

- Where crypto regulation is heading
- Views from global standard setters
- EU single market for digital assets (nice pictorial for upcoming #mica regulatory framework and requirements for crypto businesses)
- Summaries from different jurisdictions

Brain computer interface to distinguish between self and other related errors in human agent collaboration

When a human and machine collaborate on a shared task, ambiguous events might occur that could be perceived as an error by the human partner.

In such events, spontaneous error-related potentials (ErrPs) are evoked in the human brain. Knowing whom the human perceived as responsible for the error would help a machine in co-adaptation and shared control paradigms to better adapt to human preferences.

Therefore, we ask whether self- and agent-related errors evoke different ErrPs. Eleven subjects participated in an electroencephalography human-agent collaboration experiment with a collaborative trajectory-following task on two collaboration levels, where movement errors occurred as trajectory deviations.

Independently of the collaboration level, we observed a higher amplitude of the responses on the midline central Cz electrode for self-related errors compared to observed errors made by the agent.

On average, Support Vector Machines classified self- and agent-related errors with 72.64% accuracy using subject-specific features.

These results demonstrate that ErrPs can tell if a person relates an error to themselves or an external autonomous agent during collaboration. Thus, the collaborative machine will receive more informed feedback for the error attribution that allows appropriate error identification, a possibility for correction, and avoidance in future actions.

A new speech-to-speech translation architecture, UnitY

UnitY translates source language speech to the target text and the corresponding discrete acoustic units in the two-pass way.

Animoca Brands Unveils $2B Metaverse Fund

Hong Kong-based blockchain gaming giant Animoca Brands is all set to roll out a massive $2 billion fund, dubbed “Animoca Capital,” to invest in metaverse businesses, according to co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu.

While speaking to Nikkei Asia, the exec revealed that the upcoming metaverse fund, which will make its first investment in 2023, will focus on digital property rights. It also seeks to provide opportunities to access Web3 companies.

Meanwhile, its portfolio boasts over 380 investments, including Colossal, Axie Infinity, OpenSea, Dapper Labs (NBA Top Shot), Alien Worlds, and Star Atlas, among others.

Crypto trends for 2023 by Messari - must read

Someone implemented a framework to allow you to train PaLM (Google’s 540B parameter LM) using the same reinforcement learning strategy as ChatGPT!

Open source strikes again.

No U.S. tech company that IPO'd in the last decade now ranks in the top 250 global companies by value. Airbnb is the most valuable of the bunch, at ~$54B, coming in at #270.

The previous decade (2002-2012) included the IPOs of Google, Tesla, and Facebook, now worth $1.15T, $389B, and $314B, respectively -- or about 21, 7, and 6 times Airbnb, respectively.

In other words, despite the torrent of investor optimism unleashed by Facebook's IPO in May 2012, the U.S. tech industry has not produced any publicly traded corporations since that event that come anywhere close to being the "next Facebook".

Note that Stripe and SpaceX are not publicly traded, and may break this trend if and when they decide to IPO.

Also it's worth noting that the most valuable publicly traded companies that have IPOd in the last decade are in fairly quotidian industries -hotels and taxis.

Btw, that some huge Chinese companies (Alibaba, for instance) IPO'd over the past decade, and Bitcoin and Ethereum was created during this time and is now worth $149B.

In 2023 the Japanese Financial Services Agency may lift the ban on the circulation of stablecoins issued overseas (such as USDC USDT, etc.) in Japan, and the remittance limit will be set at 1 million yen ($7,500) per transaction.

Mental image reading: "MinD-Vis is a framework for decoding human visual stimuli from brain recording."

SOTA model. Has 24% top-1 out-of-100 accuracy.

Paper page: mind-vis.github.io
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2211.06956

How USD can become an open 3D standard of the metaverse

USD is a 3D file format that can be like a lingua franca that makes those assets compatible, with a chance to unify both user experiences and developer workflows. It could be a standard that enables the metaverse — which many see as the next version of the internet — just like HTML enabled the Web.

Richard Kerris, vice president of the Omniverse platform at Nvidia, said: “We think of USD as the HTML of 3D. The connective tissue that we experience the web through today is HTML. That’s what makes it seamless from website to website, device to device. It wasn’t always that way. But those of us that are old enough to remember what extension do you have loaded? What browser?”
He added, “Once that got remedied with HTML, everything’s been smooth sailing. USD is going to do that for 3D so that we can go from virtual world to virtual world seamlessly.”

To make the metaverse happen faster, Kerris believes everybody needs to align around a standard.
“We’re seeing that happen more and more with USD,” he said. “I think every 3D company out there today either supports USD or has a plan to support USD in one way or another, whether it’s exporting out to it or creating a live bidirectional connector to the platform. But that takes time. And it takes everybody working together for it. You don’t want to have walled gardens around this. It doesn’t work on the internet. It’s not going to work in the metaverse. You want to have everything be open and accessible.”

The Scientific Singularity: Vision for The Future of Research with IP-NFTs