What we’re reading (2/23)
“Meet The $10,000 Nvidia Chip Powering The Race For A.I.” (CNBC). “Companies like Microsoft and Google are fighting to integrate cutting-edge AI into their search engines, as billion-dollar competitors such as OpenAI and Stable Diffusion race ahead and release their software to the public. Powering many of these applications is a roughly $10,000 chip that’s become one of the most critical tools in the artificial intelligence industry: The Nvidia A100.”
“Wall Street Backs New Class Of Psychedelic Drugs” (Wall Street Journal). “Wall Street is betting tens of millions of dollars on psychedelic drugs that backers say could treat mental illness for a fraction of what it costs to do therapy with better-known treatments. Transcend Therapeutics Inc. raised $40 million from venture-capital investors in January to develop a post-traumatic stress disorder treatment that its 29-year-old CEO Blake Mandell says would require about half the amount of therapy as MDMA, or ecstasy, a popular hallucinogen. Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Lusaris Therapeutics Inc. have announced capital raises of about $100 million since November for similar products addressing depression.”
“Google Changed Work Culture. Its Former Hype Woman Has Regrets.” (New York Times). “Claire Stapleton joined Google in 2007, during the height of the techno-optimism boom, and fell in love with the company. Over the next 12 years, she created corporate messaging and managed the company’s image, internally and externally. But during this time, she also witnessed it fall painfully short of its utopian promises, and as the world soured on Big Tech, she did, too. Stapleton left Google in 2019.”
“Sam Bankman-Fried’s Bond Guarantors Reveal The Surprisingly Lucrative World Of Legal Academia” (Dealbreaker). “The case of Sam Bankman-Fried has been a fascinating one for the legal industry. Sure, the collapse of FTX is a potential harbinger of doom for the crypto market (and a potential boon for the Biglaw litigators that count crypto clients in their book of business). But the way SBF has continually spoken to the media — despite the advice of counsel — has been riveting. Add in that SBF is the child of two legal academics — Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, both of Stanford Law School — and you can see there’s plenty to hold the industry’s attention. Now that Southern District of New York judge Lewis Kaplan has unsealed the names of the two anonymous sureties who supplemented the $250 million personal recognizance bond (co-signed by SBF’s parents), it’s even more intriguing.”
“The SEC Is Starting A Massive Database Of Every Stock Trade” (CATO Institute). “The Consolidated Audit Trail is intended to collect and accurately identify every order, cancellation, modification, and trade execution for all exchange‐listed equities and options across all U.S. markets, allowing the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to track orders and identify who made them. The SEC ordered the CAT to be created in 2012 after regulators had difficulty identifying the causes of the 2010 ‘flash crash.’ At the time, then‐SEC Chair Mary Schapiro described the CAT as providing regulators with the ‘data and means to exponentially enhance [their] abilities to oversee a highly complex market structure.’ And in years since, the CAT has been championed as necessary for the SEC’s enforcement efforts.”
