CHIPS Act in Action

In the News Today

OpenAI completes tender offer - The company was valued at $80 billion after employees and the company were able to cash-in equity in a sale to venture firm Thrive Capital. This follows on the heels of a similar deal last year with Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and K2 Global that valued the company at $29 billion.

Global Foundries (GFS) has received $1.5 billion from the CHIPS Act to build greater fabrication capabilities in upstate NY as part of the Federal program to boost semiconductor production in the US.

What originally started as a fund to increase American semiconductor competitiveness with China and other countries in research and production, is rapidly devolving into payola for large cap companies that can afford to invest for themselves, and which can afford the large lobbying fees and campaign donations that result in government tit-for-tat largess.

While we agreed with the original premise of the CHIPs Act, which may eventually help spark some R&D in the US, the current list of recipients remains those least likely to need the funding including Intel, Micron, Apple, Samsung, Taiwan Semiconductor. Using taxpayer funding to fund the largest, most profitable semiconductor companies in the world is right up there with building tunnels in Boston or high-speed railways in California. The original pitch included spending on research and development, helping new technologies to grow and expand the marketplace of ideas, and that is rapidly disappearing. The R&D portion of the Act is now being earmarked as a $10 billion money-grab by five regional “innovation and technology” hubs, led by universities, which will likely use most of the money to build magnificent new “centers of excellence.” These will no doubt help foster new programs that will help educate a new crop of engineers, but will not directly help small-to-mid cap semiconductor companies in the US that would benefit from direct investment.

In any event, it is a great hand-out to Global Foundries, and the other winners in the large-cap semiconductor space including those listed above, which should help keep the momentum in the group sparked by the current artificial intelligence trend.

CrowdStrike announced the general availability of its Charlotte AI and Falcon for IT this morning, along with updates to its Falcon Data Protection.

Charlotte AI Brings Conversational AI to Security

By leveraging multiple foundational AI models, makes security teams faster across the Falcon platform by:

• Enabling analysts to ask questions, get answers back in plain language and take action through workflow automation

• Minimizing investigation and response time

• Simplifying cybersecurity management, including viewable and traceable source data, role-based access controls and advanced safeguards keeps organizations safe

Falcon for IT Unifies Security and IT Operations

Falcon for IT consolidates multiple use cases across Security and IT, enabling organizations to replace legacy products with the single-agent architecture of the Falcon platform:

• Ask any question in plain language to rationalize the technology estate and gain real-time visibility of any asset across operating systems

• Get instant answers from Charlotte AI on the state and risk potential of assets across the organization to close potential gaps

• Take immediate action across Security and IT with powerful, automated responses to speed troubleshooting, enforce compliance and accelerate forensics investigations

Falcon Data Protection Prevents GenAI Data Exposure

• The latest innovations for Falcon Data Protection help organizations confidently adopt new AI technologies by instantly stopping data leakage when sensitive data is copied, pasted or uploaded to web-based, commercial GenAI tools.

Quantum Start-Up Competition - Quantonation is sponsoring a pitch competition in Paris on March 7th, 2024 for any start-up involved with the development of quantum technologies and computing as long as they are in the seed or pre-seed stage of development. Winners will enter due diligence for potential seed investment by Quantonation. The deadline to submit is February 29th, so head on over to their website if you want to enter the competition.

New AI model targets drug complications - Researchers at Duke University, MIT and Brigham Women’s Hospital have developed a strategy to identify the transporters for different drugs. Oral medications must pass through the digestive tract using transporter proteins, but for many drugs, it is “unknown which of those transporters they use to exit the digestive tract.” If two drugs use the same transporter, then they can interfere with each other, and the new study has already found negative interactions among commonly paired drugs. Article

Will quantum computing cure cancer? Researchers say they have demonstrated the first generative AI model built on quantum hardware that outperforms existing models in the generation of viable cancer drug candidates. The Quantum Insider

Insider Activity

CEO Sijbrandij System of Gitlab sold 100% of his stock as of February 14th, 2024, according to a filed Form 4. That shows an incredible lack of faith in the direction of the company.

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