Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: finance

The “Quantum Glass” Battery Hype

There is a new battery type being hyped, with terms such as “Quantum Glass” battery or even “The Jesus Battery” and a claim that “It Will Ignite the Global $3 Trillion Electric Car Revolution.” Go and see it for yourself at investorplace.com (video transcript available from me), Forbes, and other financial information services.

This touted breakthrough in battery technology is the latest in a slew of innovative ideas that include “batteries made with sand,” “stretchable batteries,” “foam batteries,” “pee powered batteries,” “laser-made micro-super-capacitors” and more (13 Amazing Battery Innovations That Could Change The World).

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AI Course with Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig: Udacity Course

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a field that has a long history but is still constantly and actively growing and changing. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is increasingly prevalent in our everyday lives. It has uses in a variety of industries from gaming, journalism/media, to finance, as well as in the state-of-the-art research fields from robotics, medical diagnosis, and quantum science.

Udacity was born out of a Stanford University experiment in which Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig offered their “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course online to anyone, for free. Over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled and not much later, Udacity was born.

Udacity, a pioneer in online education, is building “University by Silicon Valley”, a new type of online university that: – teaches the actual programming skills that industry employers need today; – delivers credentials endorsed by employers, because they built them; – provides education at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional schools.

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Bill Gates, NEO, Gigafund backing Luminous in photonics supercomputer moonshot

Luminous Computing, a one-year-old startup, is aiming to build a photonics chip that will handle workloads needed for AI at the speed of light. It’s a moonshot and yet, the young company already has a number of high-profile investors willing to bet on the prospect.

The company has raised $9 million in a seed round led by Bill Gates, NEO’s Ali Partovi and Luke Nosek and Steve Oskoui of Gigafund.

The round also attracted other new investors, including Travis Kalanick’s fund 10100, BoxGroup, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, and Emil Michael as well as pre-seed investors Class 5 Global, Joshua Browder, Ozmen Ventures, Schox Investments and Third Kind Venture Capital.

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Luba Greenwood, J.D., Head of Strategic Business Development and Corporate Ventures at Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences) — ideaXme show — Ira Pastor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfRJMABvNK4

SpaceX Starlink Will Equal Launch Revenue in 2020 and Will Make Elon the World’s Richest Person by 2023

SpaceX has successfully deployed sixty production versions of the Starlink Satellite. They are targeting six Starlink launches through the next six months. Those six launches will place 360 Starlink satellites into orbit. The pace of Starlink launches will increase with six more launches by the end of April 2020. This will enable SpaceX to generate a lot of revenue for service to North America, Europe and Asia. The revenue will be from reducing latency in financial trading communication.

SpaceX and Elon Musk will be made financially secure by 2023 and will have the $20 billion per year budget of NASA. If Elon has a 30X on his 54% share of SpaceX, then with Elon would have 30 times $10 billion in 2024 (50% of $20 billion in 2024). This means Elon would be worth over $300 billion without including any valuation for Tesla.

If Tesla still had any financial issues, Elon would be able to lend money from SpaceX to Tesla by late 2020 or 2021. Elon used Tesla to buyout Solarcity. In 2018, financial analysts speculated that Elon could his SpaceX stake as collateral in a buyout of Tesla. If SpaceX is worth $100 billion late in 2020 and then $200 billion in 2021, Elon would easily be able to fund a Tesla buyout with his $54 billion and then $108 billion of SpaceX (versus about $15 billion today).

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Computers will be like humans by 2029: Google’s Ray Kurzweil

In less than two decades, you won’t just use your computers, you will have relationships with them.

Because of artificial intelligence, computers will be able to read at human levels by 2029 and will also begin to have different human characteristics, said Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google.

“My timeline is computers will be at human levels, such as you can have a human relationship with them, 15 years from now,” he said. Kurzweil’s comments came at the Exponential Finance conference in New York on Wednesday.

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Dr. Matthew Roberts, CSO and SVP Innovation, Chromadex — ideaXme — Ira Pastor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZdGAVtUlWk

Repair Biotechnologies Raises a $2.15M Seed Round

Great news for Repair Biotechnologies a new startup company developing solutions to age-related immune system decline and heart disease.

In 2018, Reason and Bill Cherman founded Repair Biotechnologies, which, as its name suggests, is a rejuvenation biotechnology company focused on damage repair approaches to aging. The company has recently completed a seed round of investment funding, with a total of $2.15 million being put into the company’s coffers to bolster research and development. Reason described this seed round as follows:

We are very pleased to have the support of noted investors such as Jim Mellon. They are the people who are presently providing the fuel and publicity for ever faster progress in the longevity biotechnology industry.

We are also very pleased to have the support of important non-profit organizations such as the SENS Research Foundation. Non-profit groups are just as important as the venture community when it comes to accelerating progress in this field: they are the ones who establish the path and point the way for each new class of therapy.

Non-profit groups are the ones who undertake the hard work of coordinating and funding overlooked research programs in order to create the conditions necessary for venture capital to pay attention to rejuvenation biotechnology.

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