Microsoft's quantum breakthrough

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Welcome back, Superhuman. Microsoft claims that in its quest to build a usable quantum computer, it just synthesized an entirely new state of matter. We’ll explore how it happened — and why it’s such a big deal for the future of AI.

Today’s Insights

• Alphabet’s AI co-scientist, a scrappy Operator rival, and Nvidia’s gene editor

• Frontier: Microsoft’s quantum breakthrough

• Tutorial: How to create video animations with Deep AI

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• News, memes, what’s trending on socials, and more

TODAY IN AI

1. Google’s new AI tool makes novel biological discoveries: The search giant just unveiled an AI co-scientist that can propose entirely new hypotheses and even map out experiments for researchers to try. Scientists are already using it to find alternative treatments for acute myeloid leukemia and liver fibrosis. It also independently explained how medicine-resistant genes spread through a certain type of bacteria — something that a team of scientists had recently discovered but hadn’t yet made public.

2. Tiny UK startup drops Operator rival: A scrappy, Salesforce-backed company with just a few dozen employees and $12M in funding just launched its own AI agent. Proxy 1.0, from London-based startup Convergence, can buy groceries on your behalf, book reservations, or write emails based on the day’s news.

3. Nvidia-powered AI masters genetics ‘across all domains of life’: The chip giant teamed up with the Arc Institute and Stanford University to release Evo 2, an open-source model trained on over 9.3 trillion nucleotides. While its predecessor worked only with bacteria, this one can make discoveries related to plant and animal genetics, too. It can even construct new genetic sequences from scratch, helping scientists engineer synthetic materials for use across healthcare, agriculture, and more.

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FROM THE FRONTIER

Microsoft’s quantum breakthrough paves the way for new AI discoveries

Welcome to the Quantum Age: Microsoft says it just built the world’s first topoconductor — a chip that taps into an entirely new state of matter existing beyond the traditional solid, liquid, or gas phases. The breakthrough could pave the way for quantum computers “in years, not decades.” 

The details: 

• One of the things that makes quantum computers so difficult to design is that they use qubits as their building blocks

• Qubits are like bits in classical computing, except due to their quantum properties, they’re extremely delicate and sensitive to noise

• Microsoft’s new chip harnesses a special type of particle called a Majorana, which can keep qubits under control

• This approach lets it fit 1M qubits on a single tiny chip, called Majorana 1

• Here’s a deep-dive video if you want to learn more

Why it matters: The chip could help “solve certain types of problems in chemistry, materials science and other industries that are impossible for today’s classical computers to accurately calculate” — even ones that would otherwise take longer than the age of the universe to figure out. 

What it means for AI: It’ll likely take years of refinement before the chips hit the market. But the breakthrough could speed up that timeline by decades. It could also potentially accelerate certain areas of AI substantially. For example, quantum computers could theoretically speed up specific tasks — such as solving certain optimization problems or linear algebra operations — that are integral to training and running AI models.

THE AI ACADEMY

How to create video animations using Deep AI

• Go to Deep AI and sign up with your account.

• Select ‘Video’ from the menu, enter your prompt, and press enter.

Sample prompt: Show Cristiano Ronaldo doing a flip

• You’ll get your video animation ready within seconds.

• You can chat, create images, videos, and even generate music using Deep AI.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

📈 Scaling Up: DeepSeek could soon accept outside funding for the first time, with the Chinese government and Alibaba already showing interest in the R1-maker.

✨ Grok Giveaway: xAI announced that it’s making Grok-3 available to everyone for a limited time — or at least “until our servers melt.”

🎮 Retro Resurrection: Microsoft Research teamed up with game studio Ninja Theory to build Muse, a first-of-its-kind model that could help preserve older games that are no longer compatible with modern-day consoles.

🌊 AI Highway: Meta announced plans to build the “world’s longest” undersea cable to support its AI infrastructure needs. It’s expected to span 31,000 miles at depths of up to 7,000 meters.

📱 Packs a Punch: Apple unveiled the new iPhone 16e, which is more affordable than the base model but still powerful enough to run Apple Intelligence. It’ll also feature Apple’s first in-house cellular modem, which the company claims is the most efficient one on the market.

💰 Funding: SF-based Baseten, which hosts LLMs on its cloud network, raised $75M, bringing its valuation to $825M. Medical startup OpenEvidence also raised $75M, with plans to bring its AI-powered search engine to more doctors. And Nvidia joined a $480M Series D round for AI cloud company Lambda, which is now valued at around $2.5B.

PRODUCTIVITY

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PROMPT OF THE DAY

Develop a pricing strategy for a new product

Prompt: Generate strategies for determining the pricing model and pricing strategy for [your product or service]. Consider factors such as value proposition, competitive landscape, target market, and pricing elasticity to optimize revenue generation and market penetration. 

_{Source: ChatGPT AI Hub}

SOCIAL SIGNALS

What’s trending on socials today

👀 Quantum Candy: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella showed off the new Majorana 1 quantum computing chip — and it’s a thing of beauty.

🖨️ Last Laugh: Critics of failed AI hardware startup Humane are feeling some schadenfreude at the news that its team is now in charge of building AI-powered printers at HP. Others like entrepreneur Will Ahmed commended the startup for taking a big risk.

🚭 Digital Detox: A Reddit user claims they were able to quit smoking by prompting ChatGPT to act as a conversational hypnotist.

🗣️ Word Play: An 18-year-old designer named Ayush Paul built an app that can break down the etymology of any word. It even learned how to decipher the meaning of words that don’t exist yet. (Try it here.)

👨‍💻 Inside Scoop: Builder Pietro Schirano shared a useful 30-minute tutorial showing how to build a fully-functioning app with AI.

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Chocolate delight

Midjourney Prompt: A group of tiny bakers decorating a freshly baked croissant with chocolate. One chef stands on a small ladder, carefully pouring a stream of glossy melted chocolate from a tiny bucket, while others use minuscule spatulas to spread it evenly. Chocolate shavings and cocoa powder are artfully arranged around them, enhancing the richness of the scene. --ar 9:16

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Zain & the Superhuman AI team