The week's developments in AI, quantum, and biotech, explained | 06.12.23

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Good news for the deeptech community: a new report found that the industry was one of Europe’s most resilient in 2023. Despite a difficult funding climate, European deeptechs have raised $15 billion so far this year. Read on to find out what gives Europe an edge over the US.

Meanwhile, DeepMind claims to have saved centuries of trial and error with the discovery of 2.2 million new crystals. The revelation shows AI’s potential to discover and develop new materials faster and at a greater scale than ever before. 

And a decade after 2011’s high-profile climate tech bust, green startups are thriving. But can they succeed where their predecessors failed? 

Read on for these stories and more — including including the restoration of Europe’s space access and new research on AI’s vulnerability to malicious attacks.

- Charlie and the Research and Intelligence Team

🚀 Don't miss your chance to secure your spot at the CogX Festival 2024! A limited number of super early bird tickets are now up for grabs at a 75% discount.

Innovation and Releases

🔮 DeepMind’s latest discovery unlocked “800 years’ worth of knowledge”. It discovered 2.2 million new crystals — 380,000 of which are stable materials that could power technologies from chips to solar panels, thanks to neural networking tool GNoME.

💰 Deeptech was one of Europe’s most resilient sectors in 2023. Amid a difficult investment climate, European deeptech startups raised $15 billion this year. A new report attributes Europe’s success to the fact that it has 1.5 times as many STEM graduates than the US. 

🚀 The European Space Agency’s Ariane 6 rocket will finally launch in mid-2024. The inaugural flight was first scheduled for four years ago, but was delayed by technical issues, Covid-19 and design changes. The launch is welcome news for the continent’s struggling space sector. 

🍃 Cleantech is back, and can’t afford to fail this time. After climate tech’s 2011 bust, green startups are flourishing again and headed toward commercialisation. But many still face the same issues that tripped up the green revolution a decade ago — here’s how they can learn from their predecessors’ mistakes. 

AI Tools of the Week

📽️ Create: GenVid helps users create customised product launch videos at studio quality.

👁️ Visualise: Magic Dash helps you quickly and easily understand the data underpinning your company with intuitive data visualisation.

📝 Write: EverMail AI allows you to create and send personalised emails at scale.

Latest Research

👩‍💻 AI is more vulnerable to malicious attacks than previously thought. That’s according to a new study that tested the vulnerability of four commonly used deep neural networks to adversarial attacks. Hackers were able to successfully attack all four.

🤖 How do you make a robot smarter? Program it to know what it doesn’t know. Princeton University and Google engineers have devised a new way to quantify the fuzziness of human language and use it to tell robots when to ask for further directions. 

🧠 Researchers harnessed AI to understand how our brains process images. They’re using AI-selected natural images and AI-generated synthetic images as neuroscientific tools that can map brain responses and help us better understand how vision is organised. 

In case you missed it

Learn how advanced sensor technologies, AI research and automation are transforming the next era of robotics from experts at CogX Festival 2023:

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