Tag: cofounder

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OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei’s new startup Nothing takes intention at Apple

OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei's new startup Nothing takes aim at Apple

OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei speaks on stage during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019.

Steve Jennings | Getty Images for TechCrunch

LONDON – Carl Pei, co-founder of the Chinese smartphone manufacturer OnePlus, is restarting.

The Chinese-born Swedish entrepreneur founded a new consumer tech company called Nothing late last year. The company is expected to launch its first product in June, a pair of wireless earbuds called the Ear 1.

While the specs for Nothing’s headphones are not yet known, Pei suggests that they will be minimalist in terms of features. Instead of “20 different levels” of noise cancellation, Pei says, people only need a maximum of two or three settings. Nothing’s products will also have a “retro-futuristic” design, Pei said, adding that the company has spent a lot of time perfecting its design philosophy.

“We want to bring this element of human warmth back into our products,” Pei told CNBC in an interview.

“Products aren’t just cold electronics,” he added. “They are designed by people and used intelligently by people. It seems like product companies (today) are run by big companies.”

OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei’s new start-up, Nothing, announced the name of its upcoming wireless earbuds on Tuesday: Ear 1.

Nothing

Pei and his former colleague Pete Lau founded OnePlus in 2013. OnePlus, majority-owned by China’s Oppo, a subsidiary of Guangzhou-based BBK Electronics, has become known for making cheap Android phones with decent specifications. Pei left the company in October to start his new hardware company.

Pei hopes his new London-based company, Nothing, will shape the consumer tech industry in the same way that Apple’s iMac G3 rocked the PC market in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “Today is like the personal computer industry in the 80s and 90s where everyone was making gray boxes,” he said.

The 31-year-old tech entrepreneur said he was once Apple’s “biggest fan,” but “overall innovation has only slowed down a lot” in recent years.

Apple’s iPhone was a game changer that ushered in a move to touchscreen-based cell phones and apps that have grown into multi-billion dollar companies. However, some believe that the modern smartphone industry is stagnating, introducing minor updates every year, albeit at higher prices. Large companies are trying to freshen up smartphones with super-fast 5G WiFi and even collapsible displays.

“There is a general feeling, ‘Why should I update my technology?’ because each new generation is similar to the previous one, “added Pei. “In the past people were so optimistic about technology. But now people are indifferent. And there has to be a way to break the cycle.”

Apple declined to comment when contacted by CNBC. Apple has made a number of improvements to the iPhone over the years, including 5G and its powerful new A14 Bionic chip. Other recent product launches include new high-end iPads, colorful iMacs, and lost item trackers called AirTags.

Pei’s second act

Pei was born in Beijing and grew up in Sweden. He recalls that his uncle, who worked for Nokia, gave him old cell phones to play around with. Pei dropped out of college in 2011 to work in the Chinese smartphone industry. Now the entrepreneur is starting from scratch and targeting consumer tech giants like Apple and Samsung.

Pei’s new venture has been puzzling over the past few months, but he tried to generate a hype on Twitter with cryptic posts and raised $ 1.24 million from loyal crowdfunding investors in March.

Pei says he’s frustrated having to download different apps for each of his smart devices. Instead, he wants to build a technological ecosystem, all supported by the same software, and take a sheet out of Apple’s playbook.

“We see a future where technology is everywhere and nowhere,” said Pei. “The first step for us is to create an ecosystem of smart devices that seamlessly connect to each other.”

Uphill battle

However, it won’t be easy. Hardware is a notoriously tricky market.

“The first rule of hardware is that it’s known to be difficult – it’s complex and capital-intensive,” Tom Hulme, general partner at Alphabet’s Venture Capital Arm GV, an investor in nothing, told CNBC.

“If you make a mistake, it can have a devastating impact on the company,” Pei said. “A lot of investors shy away from it and there could therefore be less competition.”

Total sales of true wireless headphones – buds without wires – were 233 million units in 2020, with Apple’s AirPods accounting for nearly a third of the market, according to Counterpoint Research. Counterpoint predicts the market will grow 33% to 310 million units this year and expects Apple’s market share to decrease in competition with new entrants.

Nothing has attracted an impressive number of investors, including Alphabet’s GV, iPod inventor Tony Fadell, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and YouTube star Casey Neistat. The company is aiming to raise funds again later this year or early 2022.

“We have enough runway for a couple of years,” he told CNBC. “But I think we want to increase, maybe by the end of the year or the beginning of next year, when our first products are on the market or when our future products gradually become more definitive.”

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World News

Neuralink cofounder Max Hodak leaves Elon Musk’s mind implant firm

Neuralink cofounder Max Hodak leaves Elon Musk's brain implant company

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and chief executive officer of Tesla, waves as he arrives for a discussion at the Satellite 2020 conference in Washington, DC on Monday, March 9, 2020.

Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Neuralink President Max Hodak announced on Saturday via Twitter that he is no longer with the health tech company he founded together with Elon Musk and has not been for a few weeks. He did not disclose the circumstances of his departure.

Neuralink, headquartered in Fremont, California, is developing “ultra-high-bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect people and computers,” according to the company’s self-description on LinkedIn.

Musk, who is also CEO of electric car maker Tesla and aerospace defense company SpaceX, said without providing evidence that Neuralink’s devices could enable “superhuman perception” and enable paralyzed people to use their smartphones or robotic limbs to operate heads one day and “resolve” autism and schizophrenia.

Neuralink was founded in 2016 and invests tens of millions of his significant personal wealth. Neuralink is also developing surgical robotics to implant its devices. Essentially, tiny wires about a quarter the diameter of a human hair are sewn to connect the implants to the brain.

Skeptics abound.

Musk described the surgery to insert a Neuralink device as less than an hour.

Neuralink demo

Following the August 2020 demo, MIT Technology Review viewed Neuralink in a devastating rendition of the presentation as “neuroscientific theater”.

Musk doesn’t have a background in neuroscience or medical devices, but according to a project leader at Neuralink quoted by the New York Times in 2019, he has “actively sought to solve the technical challenges Neuralink is facing”.

On the medical news site StatNews, a neuroethicist and doctor named Anna Wexler wrote in a comment on April 7, 2021:

“In this new world of private neurotech development, corporate demos are streamed live on YouTube and have a taste of techno-optimism that includes proclamations about a future we haven’t seen yet – but one that we’re sure we will Data is sparse; rhetoric about making the world a better place is difficult. “

The next day, in a series of tweets without providing evidence, Musk wrote:

“With the first @Neuralink product, someone with paralysis can use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone who uses their thumbs

“Later versions will be able to route signals from neural links in the brain to neural links in motor / sensory neuron clusters in the body, enabling paraplegics, for example, to walk again

The device is wirelessly implanted flush with the skull and charged so that you look and feel completely normal. “

On Saturday, Hodak was not immediately available for comment.

For Musk, Saturday was undoubtedly a day when he needed to focus more on his aerospace company, SpaceX. After 167 days in space, astronauts with crew, SpaceX and NASA began their return flight home, with a “splashdown” expected around 2:57 am

One of Hodak’s followers on Twitter asked him what was coming next and he replied, “Not Jurassic Park.” The joke was a reference to an earlier fantastic discussion on the microblogging platform in which Hodak thought, “We could probably build a Jurassic Park if we wanted. Wouldn’t be a genetically authentic dinosaur, but maybe 15 years of breeding + engineering.” Get super exotic novel species. “

Neuralink is one of many medical technology companies working on so-called “brain-machine interfaces”.

Competitors include developers of implants and non-invasive devices such as headsets. These include Kernel, Synchron, Neurable and even Facebook in the USA, CereGate in Germany and Mindmaze in Switzerland.

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Business

A Co-Founding father of The Intercept Says She Was Fired for Airing Issues

A Co-Founder of The Intercept Says She Was Fired for Airing Concerns

Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras said in an open letter published Thursday that she was fired from First Look Media for publicly criticizing how the company reacted to its failure to protect the identity of an anonymous source currently in jail is located.

The source, Reality Winner, was working as a linguist for the National Security Agency when she provided top-secret government documents to The Intercept, an investigative website run by First Look Media founded by Ms. Poitras and journalists Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill.

Ms. Winner was arrested on June 3, 2017, two days before The Intercept published an article based on material she posted under the heading “Top Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Efforts Days Before the 2016 Election”. She was sentenced to more than five years in prison in 2018.

Betsy Reed, editor-in-chief of The Intercept, admitted to readers in a July 2017 notice that the publication had not done enough to protect Ms. Winner’s identity.

In the open letter, Ms. Poitras said the company had not responded with sufficient transparency about the aftermath of the story.

Ms. Poitras left The Intercept in 2016 but continued to work on film projects until she was released on November 30, advising for First Look Media. In an interview with the New York Times media, she accused the company of retaliation for criticizing the company from columnist Ben Smith.

In this interview, Ms. Poitras accused First Look Media’s investigation of failing to protect Ms. Winner and accused the company of “covering up and betraying core values”.

She returned to this criticism in the letter she published on Thursday on the website of her production company Praxis Films.

“Instead of conducting an honest, independent and transparent assessment with significant ramifications, First Look Media fired me for speaking out and exposing the gap between the organization’s supposed values ​​and its practice,” she wrote.

Ms. Poitras added that the focus of her criticism was not that a source was exposed – “Journalists make mistakes, sometimes with dire consequences,” she wrote – but that research into the publication into handling the Winner story was inadequate .

First Look Media denied Ms. Poitras’ account, saying it refused to renew her contract because she was working on projects outside the company. It also defended its investigations.

“We did not renew the agreement with Laura Poitras on independent contractors because, despite our financial agreement, she has not worked for our company for more than two years,” First Look Media said in a statement. “This is simply not a sustainable situation for us or a company. For this and only for this reason, her contract was not renewed in 2021. Any implication that our decision was based on her speaking to the press is wrong. “

The Intercept was launched in 2014, with the help of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, after Ms. Poitras and Mr. Greenwald released blockbuster reports on National Security Agency secrets leaked by Edward J. Snowden. Her work won the Pulitzer Public Service Award, and Ms. Poitras won an Oscar for best documentary for Citizenfour, the 2014 film about Mr. Snowden.

Mr Greenwald left The Intercept in October claiming that an article he had written about Joseph R. Biden and his son Hunter had been censored by its editors, an allegation which the publication denied.

Categories
Health

Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn on three most regarding existential dangers

Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn on 3 most concerning existential risks

Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn

Center for the Investigation of Existential Risk

LONDON – Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn has figured out what he believes are the top three threats to human existence this century.

While the climate emergency and coronavirus pandemic are viewed as issues that urgently require global solutions, Tallinn told CNBC that artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and so-called unknown unknowns each pose an existential risk through 2100.

Synthetic biology is the design and construction of new biological parts, devices and systems, while unknown unknowns, according to Tallinn, are “things we may not be able to think about right now”.

The Estonian computer programmer, who helped set up the Kazaa file-sharing platform in the 1990s and the Skype video call service in the 00s, has become increasingly concerned about AI in recent years.

“Climate change will not be an existential risk unless there is an out of control scenario,” he told CNBC over Skype.

Of course, the United Nations has recognized the climate crisis as the “defining issue of our time” and recognized its impact as global and unprecedented. The international group has also warned that there is alarming evidence that “critical turning points leading to irreversible changes in key ecosystems and the planetary climate system may have already been reached or passed”.

Of the three threats Tallinn is most concerned about, AI is at the center and it spends millions of dollars making sure the technology is developed safely. This includes investing early in AI labs like DeepMind (partly so he can keep an eye on their activities) and funding AI security research at universities like Oxford and Cambridge.

Referring to a book by Oxford Professor Toby Ord, Tallinn said there was a one-in-six chance people will not survive this century. Why? One of the biggest potential threats in the short term is AI, according to the book, while the likelihood that climate change will cause human extinction is less than 1%.

Predicting the future of AI

When it comes to AI, nobody knows how smart machines get, and it’s basically impossible to guess how advanced AI will be in the next 10, 20 or 100 years.

Trying to predict the future of AI is made even more difficult by the fact that AI systems are starting to create other AI systems without human input.

“There is a very important parameter in predicting AI and the future,” Tallinn said. “How much and how exactly will AI development give feedback on AI development? We know that AI is currently being used to search for AI architectures.”

If AI turns out to be not good at building other AI, we needn’t be unduly concerned as there will be time to dissipate and use AI skill gains, Tallinn said. (Should this line be in quotes? I think we should rephrase if this is not a literal quote.) However, if AI is able to create other AIs it is “very justified to be concerned … about what happens next, “he said.

Tallinn explained how there are two main scenarios that AI security researchers are looking at.

The first is a laboratory accident in which a research team leaves an AI system in the evening to train on some computer servers and “the world is no longer there in the morning”. The second is where the research team produces a prototechnology which is then adopted and applied to different areas “where it has an unfortunate effect”.

Tallinn said it is focusing more on the former as fewer people think about this scenario.

When asked if he’s more or less concerned about the idea of ​​superintelligence (the hypothetical point where machines reach and then quickly surpass human-level intelligence) than three years ago, Tallinn says his point of view is “muddier” or less has become more “nuanced”. “”

“If you say that it will happen tomorrow or that it won’t happen in the next 50 years, I would say that both of them are cocky,” he said.

Open and closed laboratories

The world’s largest tech companies are investing billions of dollars in advancing the state of AI. While some of their research is openly published, many are not, and this has raised alarm bells in some corners.

“The question of transparency is not at all obvious,” says Tallinn, claiming that it is not necessarily a good idea to reveal the details of a very powerful technology.

Tallinn says some companies take AI security seriously than others. For example, DeepMind is in regular contact with AI security researchers at places like the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford. It also employs dozens of people who focus on AI security.

At the other end of the scale, business centers like Google Brain and Facebook AI Research are less connected to the AI ​​security community, according to Tallinn. We must seek comment from both of them.

If the AI ​​becomes an “arms race,” it will be better if there are fewer participants in the game, according to Tallinn, who recently heard the audiobook for “Making the Atomic Bomb” where we were (typo? Goods?) Great concern about how many research groups worked on science. “I think it’s a similar situation,” he said.

“If it turns out that AI isn’t going to be very disruptive in the near future, it would certainly be useful for companies to actually try to solve some of the problems in a more distributed manner,” he said.