Air Street Press Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital)

What went wrong and how to prevent this from happening again.

We recently stumbled across the first ever Hacker News thread discussing Attention Is All You Need, the landmark paper that describes the transformer architecture. The work had come out in the summer of 2017, but it took a while for the wider AI community to begin to grasp its significance and build on it. 

Most commenters at the time expressed interest or admiration. Some didn’t understand it. Others thought that the paper would probably be out of date in a few months. And one person asked what it could do for capsule networks.

But whatever happened to capsule networks?

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If foundation model economics is alchemy, what does that mean for hardware?

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Revisiting our work on European readiness.

It’s been close to six months since we published our report covering the challenges early-stage defense companies face in Europe. Since then, we’ve seen a rush of defense-related announcements from European governments, speculation about the future of US support for the Ukrainian war effort, and the Russian military continuing to step up its offensive.

Given the pace of developments, we’re re-examining our initial work and assessing what’s changed, what hasn’t, some points we didn’t evaluate last time, and where we go from here.

Yesterday, I was the opening act at the MIT Tech Review EmTech Digital conference, where I spoke about how easy it is to miss step changes in AI progress among the day-to-day swirl.

This prompted a series of reflections, which I’ve laid out in this blog.