Always Be Curious #210: Technofeudalism, Intel's Gaudi 3 chip, and farewell interviews with ASML's outgoing execs
This week in ABC: Technofeudalism means you're a serf to the socials, Intel's going after NVIDIA, and big profiles of ASML's outgoing CEO Wennink and CTO Van den Brink in Dutch media
This week marked another special week in a series of goodbyes and thankyous to ASML’s outgoing executives Peter Wennink and Martin van den Brink, who are ending their terms on 24 April. If you’re going to read just a couple of pieces in this week’s ABC, then check out the farewell interview (Dutch, English) of both of them in magazine Management Scope and/or read this longer article (paywall, Dutch only) by Marc Hijink (author of Focus) in NRC.
“Martin is one of the most passionate and driven individuals I know. Someone with very clear core values. Everything with Martin must be genuine, has to matter. He is highly structured. And he is always relentless, as the English say it so well, always relentlessly seeking how things should be. He will always talk to several people before coming to a decision, but ultimately, he makes the call. Also based on intuition. But the core of his personality revolves around his sense of values, a sense of values that I very much share with him.”
“Those first 15 years on the board laid the foundation for our trust. We dealt with very significant issues back then, both in terms of content and organization. But we always felt trust in each other. We valued each other’s input and insights. Peter is equally averse to self-interest. Not a single opportunity passes without him telling the story about being born a dime never to become a quarter.”
“Our core competence nowadays is complex system integration. That is what we do. Organizing that effectively can be quite challenging. Some people say we excel at managing the entire ecosystem around us. But believe me, our wonderful ecosystem is simply the result of our early days of poverty and neglect.”
“We grew with our customers. Our major clients today were small players back in 1987. You grow with your customers. You are as bad as a customer tolerates you to be. If you associate with the wrong customers, then it becomes a tough story.”
Have a good week, stay safe and sound,
👨💻The round-up in sci-tech💡
📉 How Google lost ground in the AI race (Financial Times)🔐
The Silicon Valley group has stumbled in the rollout of generative AI. Insiders say cultural and organisational issues are to blame.
⚙️ Welcome to the Age of Technofeudalism (WIRED)🔐
In Yanis Varoufakis’ latest book, the former Greek finance minister argues that companies like Apple and Meta have treated their users like modern-day serfs.
👎 Humane AI Pin review: not even close (The Verge)
Remember when we all raved about the AI pin? Well, AI gadgets certainly might be great. But not today, and not this one.
🔮 Tesla’s Musk predicts AI will be smarter than the smartest human next year (South China Morning Post)
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said artificial intelligence (AI) would be smarter than the smartest human probably by next year, or by 2026, adding that AI development was constrained by the availability of electricity.
🥇 Randomness in computation wins computer-science ‘Nobel’ (Nature)
Computer scientist Avi Wigderson is known for clarifying the role of randomness in algorithms, and for studying their complexity.
😵 Official investigation reveals how superconductivity physicist faked blockbuster results (Nature)
The confidential 124-page report from the University of Rochester, disclosed in a lawsuit, details the extent of Ranga Dias’s scientific misconduct.
🎧 New Scientist podcast: The multiverse just got bigger (New Scientist)
🤓This week in chips⚠
🇺🇸 Farewell interview - ASML’s CTO Martin van den Brink and CEO Peter Wennink (Management Scope)
🇳🇱 Afscheidsinterview - ASML’s CTO Martin van den Brink and CEO Peter Wennink (Management Scope)
“The legendary leaders of semiconductor equipment manufacturer ASML are retiring. A very good reason for an exclusive conversation with the co-presidents.”
🇳🇱 De yin en yang van ASML stappen op. Wat was de succesformule van topmannen Martin van den Brink en Peter Wennink? (NRC) / The yin and yang of ASML are leaving. What made them a winning team? (NRC)
Martin van den Brink and Peter Wennink, the two co-presidents who have led ASML since 2013, are both retiring. These two opposites balanced each other out and developed the Dutch chip machine manufacturer into a technology giant. What was the key to their success?
🥊 Intel’s Gaudi 3 goes after NVIDIA (IEEE Spectrum)
The company predicts victory over H100 in LLMs.
🏢 Samsung to produce 290-layer V9 NAND to win chip stacking war (KED)
Already the world's top NAND player, Samsung plans to widen its lead by launching 430-layer products next year.
✨ Google, Intel debut new AI chips to fight Nvidia’s dominance (South China Morning Post)
Intel debuted a new version of its artificial intelligence chip on Tuesday, while Google revealed the details of a new version of its data-centre artificial intelligence chips and announced an Arm-based based central processor.
💪 Intel says Lunar Lake’s NPU is 4x faster than Meteor (The Register)
Pat Gelsinger claims 3x performance in next-gen silicon for AI PCs.
🇨🇳 Huawei building vast chip equipment R&D center in Shanghai (Nikkei)
China tech company spending billions, snapping up talent in battle against U.S. crackdown
✨ Our next generation Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (Meta)
Meta is sharing details of its next generation chip in their Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) family. MTIA is a long-term bet to provide the most efficient architecture for Meta’s unique workloads.
🇺🇸 Quick Bytes: AMD’s AI strategy (More Than Moore)
To say that AMD’s story has been a roller coaster would be an understatement - there is a massive contrast between the AMD of 2014 and AMD of 2024. Where the AMD of a decade ago was floundering, the AMD of today is resurgent and is a key player in many markets. As with many other players in this space, AI is a primary focus, with the company building a dedicated AI team internally to cover the full end-to-end strategy for a rapidly blooming AI market.
🇹🇼🇺🇸 TSMC to receive $6.6B under US CHIPS Act, set to build 2nm fab in Arizona (Anandtech)
TSMC has entered into a preliminary agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce, securing up to $6.6 billion in direct funding and access to up to $5 billion in loans under the CHIPS and Science Act. With this latest round of support from the U.S. government, TSMC in turn will be adding a third fab to their Arizona project, with its investment in the region soaring to more than $65 billion. This move not only signifies the largest foreign direct investment in Arizona but also marks one of the biggest support packages that the U.S. government plans to make under the CHIPS Act, second only to Intel's $8.5 billion award last month.
🎭 Memory on logic: the good and bad (Semiconductor Engineering)
Do the benefits outweigh the costs of using memory on logic as a stepping-stone toward 3D-ICs?
📈By the numbers📉
💰 TSMC's Q1 revenue rise beats market expectations on AI boom (Reuters)
Taiwan chipmaker TSMC reported a 16.5% rise in first-quarter revenue on Wednesday, beating market expectations and at the high end of the company's own guidance as its sales boom on demand for artificial intelligence applications.
🫨 Micron flags hit to its DRAM supply from Taiwan earthquake (Reuters)
Memory chipmaker Micron Technology said on Thursday the April 3 earthquake in Taiwan would hurt a calendar quarter of its dynamic random access memory (DRAM) supply by up to a mid-single digit percentage.
❤️For the love of tech❤️
✝️ Peter Higgs: science mourns giant of particle physics (Nature)
The British physicist, who has died aged 94, predicted the existence of the Higgs boson in the 1960s.
Always Be Curious is the personal newsletter of Sander Hofman, Senior Creative Content Strategist at ASML. Opinions expressed in this curated newsletter are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.