Lifeboat Foundation

Jason Matheny is a delight to speak with, provided you’re up for a lengthy conversation about potential technological and biomedical catastrophe.

Now CEO and president of Rand Corporation, Matheny has built a career out of thinking about such gloomy scenarios. An economist by training with a focus on public health, he dived into the worlds of pharmaceutical development and cultivated meat before turning his attention to national security.

As director of Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the US intelligence community’s research agency, he pushed for more attention to the dangers of biological weapons and badly designed artificial intelligence. In 2021, Matheny was tapped to be President Biden’s senior adviser on technology and national security issues. And then, in July of last year, he became CEO and president of Rand, the oldest nonprofit think tank in the US, which has shaped government policy on nuclear strategy, the Vietnam War, and the development of the internet.

Indeed, the costs of building fabs in Germany, Japan, and the U.S. are higher than the costs of building fabs in Taiwan and TSMC has complained about it a number of times in the past. The company even had to delay production start at its Fab 21 near Phoenix, Arizona, due to problems with tools installation and negotiations with trade unions.

Therefore, if a TSMC customer wants to produce its chips at a specific location, then the foundry will charge a premium. How high is that premium will be remains to be seen, but last year a media report indicated that chips made in Arizona on TSMC’s N5 and N4 production nodes could be from 20% to 30% more expensive than the same chips produced in Taiwan.

Due to higher construction and operational expenses of fabs in Japan, Germany, and the U.S., TSMC plans to transfer these additional costs to its customers to sustain its target gross margin of 53%. Although American chip designers may not welcome the increased production costs in the U.S., they will probably manufacture chips intended for government and other markets less sensitive to price increases at the Arizona facility. Consequently, they should manage to pass on these higher costs to at least some of their end customers without jeopardizing their market competitiveness.

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Saudi Arabia’s plan to build a 170km long, 500m tall, mirrored city in the desert, filled with 9 million people has been curtailed to 2.4km long.

Continue reading “Neom — The Line — The Rise and Fall of Saudi Arabia’s Linear City” »

GMA provides economic and litigation support to companies and U.S. government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Justice, bringing civil litigation. According to its data breach notice, GMA told affected individuals that their personal information “was obtained by the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) as part of a civil litigation matter” supported by GMA.

The reasons and target of the DOJ’s civil litigation are not known. A spokesperson for the Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

GMA said that individuals notified of the data breach are “not the subject of this investigation or the associated litigation matters,” and that the cyberattack “does not impact your current Medicare benefits or coverage.”

A national security expert predicts practical quantum computing tools are just three to five years away from integration into the workforce, NextGov is reporting.

Neal Ziring, the Technical Director of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Cybersecurity Directorate, made the forecast during a recent public sector cybersecurity event hosted by Palo Alto Networks in Palo Alto. As reported by NextGov, Ziring expects the devices to be accessible predominantly through cloud-based platforms.

Ziring added that the impracticality and cost-prohibitive nature of would put on-premise installations for quantum computing systems out of reach for most organizations, including government agencies.

The third proof point is both the increase in manufacturing capacity investment and the change in how that investment will be managed. With the interest in governments to secure future semiconductor manufacturing for both supply security and economic growth, Mr. Gelsinger went on a spending spree with investment in expanding capacity in Oregon, Ireland, and Israel, as well as six new fabs in Arizona, Ohio, and Germany. Most of the initial investment was made without the promise of government grants, such as the US Chips Act. However, Intel has now secured more than $50B from US and European government incentives, customer commitments starting with its first five customers on the 18A process node, and its financial partners. Intel has also secured an additional $11B loan from the US government and a 25% investment tax credit.

In addition to it’s own investment in fab capacity, Intel is partnering with Tower Semiconductor and UMC, two foundries with long and successful histories. Tower will be investing in new equipment to be installed in Intel’s New Mexico facility for analog products, and UMC will partner with Intel to leverage three of the older Arizona fabs and process nodes, starting with the 12nm, to support applications like industrial IoT, mobile, communications infrastructure, and networking.

The second side of this investment is how current and future capacity will be used. As strictly an IDM, Intel has historically capitalized on its investments in the physical fab structures by retrofitting the fabs after three process nodes, on average. While this allowed for the reuse of the structures and infrastructure, it eliminated support for older process nodes, which are important for many foundry customers. According to Omdia Research, less than 3% of all semiconductors are produced on the latest process nodes. As a result, Intel is shifting from retrofitting fabs for new process nodes to maintaining fabs to support extended life cycles of older process nodes, as shown in the chart below. This requires additional capacity for newer process nodes.

“I think of [the agreement] as marking the next chapter in our journey on AI safety, working hand in glove with the United States government,” Donelan told TIME in an interview at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. on Monday. “I see the role of the United States and the U.K. as being the real driving force in what will become a network of institutes eventually.”

The U.K. and U.S. AI Safety Institutes were established just one day apart, around the inaugural AI Safety Summit hosted by the U.K. government at Bletchley Park in November 2023. While the two organizations’ cooperation was announced at the time of their creation, Donelan says that the new agreement “formalizes” and “puts meat on the bones” of that cooperation. She also said it “offers the opportunity for them—the United States government—to lean on us a little bit in the stage where they’re establishing and formalizing their institute, because ours is up and running and fully functioning.”

The two AI safety testing bodies will develop a common approach to AI safety testing that involves using the same methods and underlying infrastructure, according to a news release. The bodies will look to exchange employees and share information with each other “in accordance with national laws and regulations, and contracts.” The release also stated that the institutes intend to perform a joint testing exercise on an AI model available to the public.

Demis Hassabis, CEO and one of three founders of Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) subsidiary DeepMind, has been awarded a knighthood in the U.K. for “services to artificial intelligence.”

Ian Hogarth, chair of the U.K. government’s recently launched AI Safety Institute and previously founder of music startup Songkick, was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to AI; as was Matt Clifford, AI adviser to the U.K. government and co-founder of super–early-stage investor Entrepreneur First.

In the future we will rely ever more on Artificial Intelligence to run our civilization, but what role will AI and computers playing in governing?

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