Tag Archives: Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley Has Best Genes for Embryos

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In 2025, parents here are paying up to $50,000 for new genetic-testing services that include promises to screen embryos for IQ. The fascination with what some call “genetic optimization” reflects deeper Silicon Valley beliefs about merit and success. “I think they have a perception that they are smart and they are accomplished, and they deserve to be where they are because they have ‘good genes,’” said Sasha Gusev, a statistical geneticist at Harvard Medical School. “Now they have a tool where they think that they can do the same thing in their kids as well, right?”…

The growing IQ fetish is sparking debate, with bioethicists raising alarms about the new genetic-screening services. “Is it fair? This is something a lot of people worry about,” said Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University. “It is a great science fiction plot: The rich people create a genetically super caste that takes over and the rest of us are proles.” Yet in Silicon Valley, where top preschools require IQ tests and openness to novelty runs high, parents aren’t burdened by moral quandaries of using technology to select for their children’s intelligence before birth…

The most unusual motive for making smarter babies is emerging from a brainy group of computer scientists in Berkeley. Known as the rationalists, they fear that AI poses an existential risk to humanity. “They think one of the ways that possibly we could make safe AI is if we had smarter humans building them,” said Hsu, the Genomic Prediction co-founder. “Some of these guys are committed to a long-term eugenics program where they create smarter humans, and the smarter humans are the ones that make AI safe.”  

Excerpt from Zusha Elinson, Inside Silicon Valley’s Growing Obsession With Having Smarter Babies

What does Silicon Valley and the Israeli Army have In Common

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Members of Unit 8200 of the Israeli Army, known for its advanced cybersecurity and cyberwarfare capabilities, have founded dozens of cybersecurity companies in the United States. Others have become influential venture capitalists in their own rights and are mentors to entrepreneurial graduates.  There are at least five tech companies started by Unit 8200 alumni publicly traded in the U.S., together worth around $160 billion. Private companies started by ex-8200 soldiers are worth billions more.  The largest, cloud-security company Wiz, in July 2024 came close to signing a $23 billion deal to be bought by Google. It would have been Google’s biggest acquisition ever. After the talks fell apart, Wiz Chief Executive and 8200 veteran Assaf Rappaport told employees he wants to hit $1 billion in revenue before planning a public-market listing. 

Wiz and the 8200 alumni are targeting a massive business problem—how to keep big companies secure—with skills and an intensity they learned from their time in the military. They and the companies they’ve built have become hot commodities as more industries move huge amounts of business documents to the cloud—which is constantly under attack from opportunistic hackers. While Unit 8200 alumni once talked about their service in hushed tones, they now tout it in press releases to attract clients and investment money for their startups.

Palo Alto Networks, the biggest publicly traded cybersecurity company, and itself a product of the 8200 pipeline, has purchased several companies led by alumni of the unit in recent years. Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital, two of Silicon Valley’s most storied venture-capital firms, have recently hired Israel-based partners…

Elsewhere, alumni of other Israeli military units founded cybersecurity company NSO Group. It created software called Pegasus, which has been used by governments to access the devices of journalists and embassy workers, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. The department put NSO Group on an export prohibition list three years ago, a decision its executives are working to reverse. This means exports from the U.S. to the company of both hardware and software will be blocked, unless the Commerce Department grants a license for a transaction.  

Excerpt from Miles Kruppa and Alex Perry, Silicon Valley in Love with Israeli Army, WSJ, Aug. 31, 2024

Unbeatable Fusion: Big Tech and US Armed Forces

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Big tech equips the armed forces and United States law enforcement with cloud storage, databases, app support, admin tools and logistics. Now it is moving closer to the battlefield. Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle are expected to divvy up the $9bn five-year contract to operate the Pentagon’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC). In 2021 Microsoft was awarded a $22bn contract to supply its HoloLens augmented-reality headset to simulate battles for army training for up to ten years. It is also helping develop the air force’s battle-management system, which aims to integrate data sources from across the battlefield. In June 2022 Alphabet launched a new unit, Google Public Sector, which will compete for the DOD’s battle-networks contracts. In a departure from Google’s earlier wariness of the Pentagon, its cloud chief, Thomas Kurian, has insisted: “We wouldn’t be working on a programme like JWCC purely to do back-office work.”

Except from  Defense Technology: Can Tech Reshape the Pentagon, Economist, Aug. 13, 2022

The Power of Data Pipelines: google, facebook and co.

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The ships that lay electronic cables across the ocean floor look like cargo vessels with a giant fishing reel on one end. They move ponderously across the open water, lowering insulated wire into shallow trenches in the seabed as they go. This low-tech process hasn’t changed much since 1866, when the SS Great Eastern laid the first reliable trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, capable of transmitting eight words per minute. These days, the cables are made of optical fiber, can carry 100 terabits of data or more in a second, and aren’t owned only by telephone companies.

Among the newcomers are a few of the world’s leading internet companies, which have concluded that, given the cost of renting bandwidth, they may as well make their own connections. Facebook and Microsoft have joined with Spanish broadband provider Telefónica to lay a private trans-Atlantic fiber cable known as Marea. The three companies will divide up the cable’s eight fiber strands, with Facebook and Microsoft each getting two. The project, slated to be completed by the end of 2017, marks the first time Facebook has taken an active role in building a cable, rather than investing in existing projects or routing data through pipes controlled by traditional carriers. Marea will be Microsoft’s second private cable; a trans-Pacific one is scheduled to come online in 2017.

In June 2016, Google said it had finished a data pipeline running from Oregon to Taiwan, and it has at least two more coming: one from the U.S. to Brazil; the other, a joint project with Facebook, will connect Los Angeles and Hong Kong. Amazon.com made its first cable investment in May, announcing plans for a link between Australia and New Zealand and the U.S. Worldwide, 33 cable projects worth an estimated $8.1 billion are scheduled to be online by 2018, according to TeleGeography. That’s up from $1.6 billion worth of cables in the previous three years. And bandwidth demand is expected to double every two years. ..

Cables are just one way to increase the supply of bandwidth and cut costs, says Chetan Sharma, an analyst and telecom consultant. Facebook is also working on satellites, lasers, and drones to deliver internet access to remote places, and Google has experimented with hot air balloons. So far, undersea cables remain the best option for crossing oceans—they’re cheaper, far more reliable, and largely unregulated. The United Nations treats ocean cables in much the same manner as boat traffic, meaning companies can lay and repair cables in international waters pretty much wherever they please, provided they don’t damage existing ones.So Silicon Valley will continue to pour money into technology pioneered in the telegraph era. “It’s about taking control of our destiny,” says Mark Russinovich, chief technology officer for Microsoft’s cloud services division, Azure. “We’re nowhere near being built out.”

Excerpt from Bet you Own Broadband, Bloomberg, Oct. 20, 2016