Nvidia's got a new fancy chip designed for AI workloads - the Blackwell B200. This one is named after David Harold Blackwell, "a mathematician who specialized in game theory and statistics and was the first Black scholar inducted into the National Academy of Sciences". You'll never get to use one of these GPUs directly, so all you need to know is that it's shitloads faster than the H100 and will be gobbled up by OpenAI, Google and others to keep the AI hype train going. At the same conference, Nvidia and Ubisoft showed off AI-powered NPCs in games that can react to player input dynamically without the need for a voice-over artist to record every piece of the script. It's not as bad as I thought, but still not great.
Remember Netcomm? They are one of the few Australian businesses developing modems, routers and other networking gear for Australian conditions. They've been around for 40 years (I have fond memories of their dialup modems!) but last week entered voluntary administration. US company Casa Systems acquired Netcomm in 2019 off the back of some nice profits in 2018, but since then hasn't been doing too well, having lost US$25.6m despite US$62.1m in revenue in Q3 2023. The administrators told SmartCompany that Netcomm is "continuing to trade" and that their "objective is to sell this business to recapitalise to a new owner". Fingers crossed it can return to Aussie ownership and return to its former glory once again.
Logitech's got a new micro four thirds camera designed for live streaming, the Meevo Core. It's very reminiscent of the Blackmagic Micro Studio Camera 4K G2 or the Panasonic BGH1, being a little cube you slap a lens on that spits out a 4K HDMI image and can be controlled remotely. Logitech is flogging their own Mevo Multicam app and unlike the Blackmagic camera, supports NDI and SRT (like the Panasonic). While it supports wi-fi 6E, it doesn't have an Ethernet port which kinda sucks. Also doesn't do 4K60 or 1080p60, just 30fps. It'll sell at an RRP of US$999, the same price as the Blackmagic camera, but knowing how heavily Logitech stuff is discounted here could be quite cheap. Will be interesting to see what the autofocus quality is like as a lack of face/body detect AF is one of the shit things about the Blackmagic Micro camera, particularly in a multi-cam remote environment where a single person is doing all the A/V for the event being streamed.
The ABC has a good story about Breakthrough Victoria, the state owned VC fund that's got a $2b budget during a time when the best state in the country is going through a rough patch financially. It invests in startups across many industries, including tech companies like Infleqtion and Quantum Brilliance that dabble in the nebulous quantum computing market. The article reckons the state shouldn't even do this and Breakthrough Victoria closed down, but I think the bigger problem is the lack of transparency around these extremely speculative investments. Have any of these businesses made a profit? How likely is an exit? Are they even on track to deliver the products they pitched? Too bad finding out as all this stuff is "commercial in confidence" despite my money being used to invest in them.
Billionaire Bill Gates perches atop two stacks of paper representing the amount of information computers can squeeze onto a single CD-ROM (NNTVhunter / Internet Archive)
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