Breakthrough Solid State Battery

Breakthrough Solid State Battery

Battery technology has come a long way and has an even longer way to go.

Subject Zero Science explains a recent innovation from Samsung.

Samsung research was led by Yong-Gun Lee for an All-Solid-State-Battery (ASSBs). Their goal was to eliminate dendrites formation and increase coulombic efficiency. To do that they sandwiched layers of Lithium Nickel-Cobalt-Manganese-Oxide (NMC for short) mixed with a Sulfide Solid Electrolytes (SSE, show formula on screen), on top of nanocomposite-layer of Silver-Carbon.All of this is located in between a foil of Aluminum and Stainless steel as the current collectors.The idea behind this was to remove lithium foil from the mix and have all lithium atoms part of the NMC and SSE. This approach diminishes the costs of the overall battery manufacturing since handling lithium usually needs an oxygen free environment due to its high reactivity. This is important for a few reasons, in conventional lithium batteries, the anode comprised of lithium moves freely towards the positive electrode during discharge.Dendrites are formed during the charging process when lithium moves back to its initial location thanks to the free movement enabled by liquid or gel electrolyte.This is the main limiting factor of how much energy can be store in these batteries since to control this, the amount of lithium available in the system has to be caped, limiting the energy density.

 

Anca Dragan on Human-Robot Interaction and Reward Engineering

Anca Dragan on Human-Robot Interaction and Reward Engineering

Lex Fridman interviews Anca Dragan, a professor at Berkeley, working on human-robot interaction — algorithms that look beyond the robot’s function in isolation, and generate robot behavior that accounts for interaction and coordination with human beings.

OUTLINE:
0:00 – Introduction
2:26 – Interest in robotics
5:32 – Computer science
7:32 – Favorite robot
13:25 – How difficult is human-robot interaction?
32:01 – HRI application domains
34:24 – Optimizing the beliefs of humans
45:59 – Difficulty of driving when humans are involved
1:05:02 – Semi-autonomous driving
1:10:39 – How do we specify good rewards?
1:17:30 – Leaked information from human behavior
1:21:59 – Three laws of robotics
1:26:31 – Book recommendation
1:29:02 – If a doctor gave you 5 years to live…
1:32:48 – Small act of kindness
1:34:31 – Meaning of life

Is Tesla Dumping Python For This Programming Language?

Is Tesla Dumping Python For This Programming Language?

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, in a series of tweets, has announced how serious Tesla is to bring in great minds together to work on their AI-related projects.

Although the neural networks for computer vision models were written in Python, he added, the Tesla team would need people with excellent coding skills, especially in C and C++.

This emphasis on C and C++ has raised a few eyebrows, since Python right now sits atop the AI world and suggesting any other language in an AI focused environment amounts to heresy.

While some folks will read much into this, I think the answer boils down to two words: embedded systems. 

In order for Tesla to make the kinds of cars it wants to, they are going to need build embedded systems. This is the type of environment where C/C++ still reigns supreme.

  • AI
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  • 1 min read

Jim Keller on Moore’s Law, Microprocessors, Abstractions, and First Principles

Jim Keller on Moore’s Law, Microprocessors, Abstractions, and First Principles

Lex Fridman interviews Jim Keller as part of his AI Podcast series.

Jim Keller is a legendary microprocessor engineer, having worked at AMD, Apple, Tesla, and now Intel. He’s known for his work on the AMD K7, K8, K12 and Zen microarchitectures, Apple A4, A5 processors, and co-author of the specifications for the x86-64 instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast.

OUTLINE:
0:00 – Introduction
2:12 – Difference between a computer and a human brain
3:43 – Computer abstraction layers and parallelism
17:53 – If you run a program multiple times, do you always get the same answer?
20:43 – Building computers and teams of people
22:41 – Start from scratch every 5 years
30:05 – Moore’s law is not dead
55:47 – Is superintelligence the next layer of abstraction?
1:00:02 – Is the universe a computer?
1:03:00 – Ray Kurzweil and exponential improvement in technology
1:04:33 – Elon Musk and Tesla Autopilot
1:20:51 – Lessons from working with Elon Musk
1:28:33 – Existential threats from AI
1:32:38 – Happiness and the meaning of life

The State of Self-Driving Cars

The State of Self-Driving Cars

As millions of Americans hit the roads today for Thanksgiving travel, I wonder how different it would be if self-driving cars were the norm.

CNBC explores the current state of self-driving cars.

More companies are trying to bring self-driving cars to the masses than ever before, but a truly autonomous vehicle still doesn’t exist. It’s not clear if, or when, our driverless future will arrive. Where exactly are we with self-driving cars, and when can we expect them to be a part of our daily lives?