Why Was Silicon Valley So Obsessed with LK-99 Superconductor Claims? (msn.com) 78
What to make of the news that early research appears unable to duplicate the much-ballyhooed claims for the LK99 superconductor?
"The episode revealed the intense appetite in Silicon Valley for finding the next big thing," argues the Washington Post, "after years of hand-wringing that the tech world has lost its ability to come up with big, world-changing innovations, instead channeling all its money and energy into building new variations of social media apps and business software..." [M]any tech leaders are nervous that the current focus on consumer and business software has led to stagnation. A decade ago, investors prophesied that self-driving cars would take over the roads by the mid-2020s — but they are still firmly in the testing phase, despite billions of dollars of investment. Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology have had multiple hype cycles of their own, but have yet to fundamentally change any industry, besides crime and money laundering. Tech meant to help mitigate climate change, like carbon capture and storage, has lagged without major advances in years. Meanwhile, Big Tech companies used their huge cash hoards to snap up smaller competitors, with antitrust regulators only recently beginning to clamp down on consolidation. Over the last year, as higher interest rates have cut into the amount of venture capital and slowing growth has caused companies to pull back spending, a massive wave of layoffs has swept the industry, and companies such as Google that previously said they'd invest some of their profits in big, risky ideas have turned away from such "moonshots..."
Room-temperature superconductors would be especially relevant to the tech industry right now, which is busy burning billions of dollars on new computer chips and the energy costs to run them to train the AI models behind tools like ChatGPT and Google's Bard. For years, computer chips have gotten smaller and more efficient, but that progress has run up against the limits of the physical world as transistors get so small some are now just one atom thick.
"The episode revealed the intense appetite in Silicon Valley for finding the next big thing," argues the Washington Post, "after years of hand-wringing that the tech world has lost its ability to come up with big, world-changing innovations, instead channeling all its money and energy into building new variations of social media apps and business software..." [M]any tech leaders are nervous that the current focus on consumer and business software has led to stagnation. A decade ago, investors prophesied that self-driving cars would take over the roads by the mid-2020s — but they are still firmly in the testing phase, despite billions of dollars of investment. Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology have had multiple hype cycles of their own, but have yet to fundamentally change any industry, besides crime and money laundering. Tech meant to help mitigate climate change, like carbon capture and storage, has lagged without major advances in years. Meanwhile, Big Tech companies used their huge cash hoards to snap up smaller competitors, with antitrust regulators only recently beginning to clamp down on consolidation. Over the last year, as higher interest rates have cut into the amount of venture capital and slowing growth has caused companies to pull back spending, a massive wave of layoffs has swept the industry, and companies such as Google that previously said they'd invest some of their profits in big, risky ideas have turned away from such "moonshots..."
Room-temperature superconductors would be especially relevant to the tech industry right now, which is busy burning billions of dollars on new computer chips and the energy costs to run them to train the AI models behind tools like ChatGPT and Google's Bard. For years, computer chips have gotten smaller and more efficient, but that progress has run up against the limits of the physical world as transistors get so small some are now just one atom thick.
Because (Score:5, Interesting)
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would you like to invest in my teleportation company? we're working on an AMAZING advance in technology!
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The Korean had a preprint with apparently credible results, and a recipe for everyone to reproduce the material elsewhere. What do you have?
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Look on B-I-Z-X's site under "press releases". They tell you what they are doing!
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Is slashdot under new ownership? I thought it was weird that they removed one of my posts. In the history of slashdot I've never had a post removed before.
Re: Because (Score:3)
Yea, they've switched hands from dice to b-i-z-x. For a long time the owning corporation didn't know what to do with it, but small changes over the last few years are becoming more noticeable. The only good thing left on Slashdot are its users. And that's kind of a low bar when you think about it.
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That's capitalism, and something we generally accept in America and the West. If you don't like it then people are ready to brand you a traitor. The extreme opposite of what we have would be no marketing and no capitalism. Not that I am suggesting swinging to extremes is healthy for us, but I feel like we are bad at finding a middle ground without eventually sliding to either extreme.
Re: Because (Score:2)
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a recipe for everyone to reproduce the material elsewhere.
Many labs have tried that recipe and none have reproduced the claimed result.
Re: Because (Score:2)
Which still explains why people were excited. If reproduction attempts can happen so fast, there's reason to have thought they weren't at least deliberately conning the world.
When people made these claims, but being coy about viable reproduction methods or the reproduction efforts being unfeasibly exotic, then there's a lot of room for it to be a con. The world basically shrugged off crockpot or deceitful claims of superconductors. This time, however...
With this, there wasn't much room for it to be a con,
Re:Because (Score:4, Interesting)
The Korean group said that they used the stress in the molecule to produce a similar effect. The idea of chemically stressed materials is not new, and has been used in other applications. For example polarized photocathodes make use internal material stresses to produce the equivalent of a huge mechanical pressure. So the idea of using chemical / crystal structure stress rather than mechanical stress is completely plausible, and might still lead to a working room temperature superconductor at some time in the future.
So the announcement was not crazy, it didn't claim anything unbelievable. If true it would have been extremely valuable. It looks like is wasn't correct - probably due to experimental error by the research team. But its not at all surprising that people were interested.
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No reason to believe teleportation is possible? What are you talking about, I've seen it on Star Trek a hundred times!
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Not really the same. There is no technological path to teleportation, no reason to believe its even possible.
Depends on how you define and scope teleportation. Teleportation of particles is quite feasible, and has been done. Star Trek style instant teleportation of living human beings...maybe not.
https://now.northropgrumman.co... [northropgrumman.com]
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This is the first I have heard of a superconductor that operates at temps as high as -24 degrees C
Why isn't this being further explored? Keeping a data center cooled to -24 degrees is absolutely trivial in many parts of the world (close to the poles), and if the computation gains were significant enough it would outweigh the latency needed to communicate to it.
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It was on Slashdot not too long ago, because it is being explored. The problem with that one is that it requires an unsustainable amount of pressure so the test article is a tiny speck of material inside a diamond anvil. It's an interesting direction for research that could eventually lead to something useful, but that's all it is right now.
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Because a room-temperature superconductor would be an AMAZING advance in technology?
False. A highly brittle room temperature superconductor with a low critical magnetic field strength and low critical current density would be nearly worthless even if it was cheap and easy to manufacture. Only if it’s able to get around those limitations would it have any uses. Even still, conductivity of metals is quite low without much loss and therefore there isn’t much room for improvement in many things like computation or motors.
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False. A highly brittle room temperature superconductor with a low critical magnetic field strength and low critical current density would be nearly worthless even if it was cheap and easy to manufacture.
Premature at this point to speculate what the properties of the material would end up being.
Even still, conductivity of metals is quite low without much loss and therefore there isnâ(TM)t much room for improvement in many things like computation or motors.
Potential energy savings in switching datacenters to superconducting ICs is about two orders of magnitude including energy costs associated with running cryopumps.
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remature at this point to speculate what the properties of the material would end up being.
Not really, the material and similar ones are well known in terms of material properties. The only difference being the exact arrangement and crystal structure tested for superconductiob which if anything would make it more brittle due to stresses.
Potential energy savings in switching datacenters to superconducting ICs is about two orders of magnitude including energy costs associated with running cryopumps.
Data center power consumption would likely only be helped by low single digit percentage wise, it’s the transistors that consume the vast majority of energy, not traces.
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Not really, the material and similar ones are well known in terms of material properties. The only difference being the exact arrangement and crystal structure tested for superconductiob which if anything would make it more brittle due to stresses.
Nobody knows jack about the contours of the enabling superconducting effects if it exists at all. This means nobody knows jack about the avenues available to improve it.
Data center power consumption would likely only be helped by low single digit percentage wise, itâ(TM)s the transistors that consume the vast majority of energy, not traces.
Technologies like ERSFQ enable orders of magnitude reductions in power consumption.
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A brittle room-temperature superconductor would be useless for flexible wiring.
But it could be very useful for traces on integrated circuits.
ICs are rigid. So flexibility would not matter. The currents are minuscule, so there would be very little magnetism.
As ICs shrink, the width of traces decreases and the resistance goes up. Interconnects are a major source of heat. Superconducting traces could eliminate that heat, leaving only the energy to switch the transistors.
Result: Cooler devices and longer batter
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A brittle room-temperature superconductor would be useless for flexible wiring.
It would be useless for any wiring, minuscule temperature differences alone would add cracks and it wouldn’t be easy to even connect it. There have been achievements with a single molecule or so thick films on a substrate, but even this will not work with most high temperature ceramic superconductors.
But it could be very useful for traces on integrated circuits
Nope, for the above reasons including copper is quite conductive. Even power circuits like motor controllers or amplifiers have very little loss in the wiring and superconducting traces would likely on
Re: Because (Score:2)
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Not really. This is precursor research. One thing that many people do not understand is that superconductors are not magic. They all have a maximum field strengt and that means above a certain amount of current, the superconduction collapses. Hence actually getting a room-temperature superconductor is nice from a theoretical point of view, but does in no way imply practical usability.
The reason why Silicon Valley jumped on this is because Silicon Valley has been running out of steam for quite some time and
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There are chances no one is thinking about.
E.g. a sensor that is losing its superconductor quality under certain situations and then triggers: we have this situation.
I'm pretty sure, if we had such a material, the usages would be endless. Ofc. if it is so limited as some in this thread suggest, then it wont be useable for a mag lev train or in a fusion reactor.
But I guess some people would find some application in a phone.
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Not really it wouldn't. Ceramics like that are not useful to make wires from, also their method of production (like vapour deposition or extreme pressure cooking) are very expensive so it is all pointless for something that needs to be mass produced to be of real value. Also if a ceramic like that cracks at any point, it needs to be replaced entirely, so forget about real large scale levitation applications. A superconductor really needs to be easy to manufacture and work with, it has to be similar to a
was it? (Score:4)
Headline assumes facts not in evidence.
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Headline assumes facts not in evidence.
Meanwhile, a gullible audience provides considerable clickbait revenue.
In case you were wondering how we lied our way here, and liked it.
onboarding... (Score:1)
You answered your own question (Score:4, Interesting)
"The episode revealed the intense appetite in Silicon Valley for finding the next big thing,"
With the collapse of businesses such as blood testing [cnn.com], renting office space [cbsnews.com], and anti-woke banks [businessinsider.com], something, anything, is needed to keep the money flowing. It doesn't have to be anything useful at the moment, or even able to produce a profit. So long as the investors make out is what matters.
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It's not just "anti-woke" banks, but banks generally are having trouble. Don't forget the much larger and very woke Silicon Valley bank folded too....
I don't care much about woke or unwoke banks, but I can tell you most banks are doing great now, largely because of high interest rates combined with good economic conditions.
SVB was a real outlier there, managing to off themselves because of AAA bonds actually returning more money than before.
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If you think "banks are doing great now" you have no idea what is going on in the banking system.
We are just talking about different things. I'm talking more about this: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/0... [nytimes.com]
Or if you think that's a one-of, here's Q1, that had SVB falling: https://www.ft.com/content/972... [ft.com]
You are talking about risk, and I'm talking about banks raking in solid profit numbers right now. I agree with you about risk, in my opinion especially in regards to their longer term vulnerability to real estate and inflated stocks. On the other hand, banks making good profits and their stocks doing well
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You don't understand ANYTHING about the banking sector as I said.
I always love it when people have lost a discussion and start flinging insults about people. So when you were talking about the banking sector having a problem, you were just talking about small banks? You get that small banks are massively diverse, right? There is no such thing as 'all small banks are in trouble'. Yes there are some small banks that have problems, there have always been banks with problems and there will always be. You are predicting that at some point in the future problems will come for
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I would argue the opposite. The money has been flowing for tech companies that didn't seem to bring any use at all for years now. The only game-changing advance we had since the internet was the LLM fad, and we really look into it, it's not even that much of a game changer.
All we have been getting, for years now, are advances in how to sell worse junk better, with the occasional 0.1% efficiency increase to whatever was actually making our lives better, like renewables.
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Agreed. The only impressive thing about LLMs is the language interface, not the utterly dumb "reasoning engine" behind it. And that language interface is the result of half a century of slow research.
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Agreed. The only impressive thing about LLMs is the language interface, not the utterly dumb "reasoning engine" behind it. And that language interface is the result of half a century of slow research.
This is embarrassing to even read.
Re: You answered your own question (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s not really enough to âoemaintain operationsâ, though, is it? They have to show a net profit at some point, notherwise they arenâ(TM)t a business, theyâ(TM)re a hobby. And itâ(TM)s hard to make a profit when youâ(TM)re scaring away your advertisers and resorting to bribing your users to stay.
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Indeed. When you are basically selling hot air, producing more hot air is what keeps you in business.
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Anything! Anything at all instead of investing in manufacturing capability inside this country.
Re: You answered your own question (Score:2)
Big Money for Small Thinking (Score:4, Interesting)
Tesla offering the future, but all they made is an alternate status symbol to clog the passing lane, a more comfortable way to be stuck in traffic.
Social media designs that takes all the dynamics of human interaction, then strip it down to a liner info trough.
Microsoft doing the same thing anyone else has been doing for a long time, but more expensively and less securely.
Cars beep and honk just to spam noises I can't unsubscribe from, but there's no clever way to negotiate overtaking a slower vehicle.
Ruining landscapes for mass solar power when we've had reliable nuclear power for generations.
People, "Big Tech", or whatever social movements need to start rejecting trash ideas and concepts and look at what delivers genuine value. Maybe they can start with affordable housing or clean water. Do you have an app for that?
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Maybe they can start with affordable housing or clean water.
If you live in the developed world you have the latter, outside of the rare pathological case like Flint, MI. You just refuse to use it, and instead prefer drinking water from plastic bottles that have been shipped from motherfucking Fiji, an environmental travesty ignored by Green Peace, who love their bullshit Fiji water.
As for the former, not everybody can live where everybody wants to live. Housing is plenty affordable. Unaffordable housing is a uniquely coastal problem caused by humans trying to be
i would venture to guess (Score:2)
Begging the question (Score:5, Insightful)
No Silicon Valley was not "so obsessed" with LK-99. *EVERYONE* was obsessed with it, and for damn good reason. Such a discovery if true would change the world.
This stupid Washington Post article was written by someone who only ever reads silicon valley news and was suddenly surprised that they weren't immune from talking about world changing discoveries.
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No Silicon Valley was not "so obsessed" with LK-99. *EVERYONE* was obsessed with it, and for damn good reason. Such a discovery if true would change the world.
No, not everyone was obsessed with it. It's not like we haven't had claims about room-temperature superconductivity before, which have later proven to be false. We've also seen claims about other world-chainging technological breaktrhoughs not pan out, many times (*cough* fusion *cough*).
Some people were obsessed; some people were quite interested; some people just noted it and filed it away (that's the camp I was in). And a lot of people probably weren't even aware of it at all.
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No, not everyone was obsessed with it.
You're right, a few people had no idea about what is going on.
It's not like we haven't had claims about room-temperature superconductivity before
And none of them posted videos of actual material levitation. We've had many claims before. This one had significantly more promise than those which came before.
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And none of them posted videos of actual material levitation.
Which really doesn't mean much if its just a little chip floating above a magnet. Many potential superconductors have broken down at low current densities and/or magnetic field strengths. At levels which made them curiosities but not suitable for engineering applications.
According to the Wikipedia entry, LK-99 was announced back in 1999. It appears that all the excitement was generated by a preprint (erroneously) released to arXiv. Crap gets published. Crap gets retracted. We're more than 20 years into try
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Uhm, Fusion is panning out just fine. yeah, not in a timeframe people would like it to be, but technology needed for practical Fusion is still being developed. Just the other day there was a second test which was energy positive. But we've still have quite a way to go to make it practical (financially) as we still haven't got a continuous containmentfield, but even that is getting solved pretty soon (as they are already working on a prototype).
Re: Begging the question (Score:2)
While not literally everybody, the point stands that this article declaring "Silicon Valley" was interested implies that only they were interested or they were more interested. I don't think "Silicon Valley" was any more interested as a group than other folks.
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No Silicon Valley was not "so obsessed" with LK-99. *EVERYONE* was obsessed with it, and for damn good reason. Such a discovery if true would change the world.
IF a discovery like that were allowed to happen and not be choked out by Greed N. Corruption, THEN it would change the world.
Until then, stop lying about human behavior you already know is true. The Disease of Greed hasn't changed humans in thousands of years. From patent wars to actual wars, I can think of a few trillion reasons EVERYONE would warmonger over securing such a discovery. For profit.
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The material in question was openly published, synthesized without any significant special effort. There is no greed and corruption to be found for something as trivial as what was presented. Yes it very much would have changed the world if it were an actual superconductor, and no corporation could have changed that.
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The material in question was openly published, synthesized without any significant special effort. There is no greed and corruption to be found for something as trivial as what was presented. Yes it very much would have changed the world if it were an actual superconductor, and no corporation could have changed that.
Corporations control entire governments now. How else do you think tools get elected to lead.
As far as what happens when the next change-the-world discovery happens? Last time we had one, we split the atom. And look at the directions we took that "friendly" discovery between all those who carved up this planet into Yours and Mine; perpetually 30 minutes away from global annihilation with far too many having a Fuck It button at the ready.
Let's just see how this plays out. Sadly, History can't find any ex
What kind of question is that? (Score:2)
The one you should be asking is why would anyone NOT be obsessed with LK-99 claims?
Stop asking Why. You already know. (Score:2)
"The episode revealed the intense appetite in Silicon Valley for finding the next big thing," argues the Washington Post...
Yeah, I'll bet a clickbait pimp would argue that, to avoid anyone looking at the intense appetite for profit by any lie necessary. Also known as that clickbait shit marketing now values that helps spread half-truths like soft butter on warm bread these days.
That said, a gullible audience, should eventually learn. Right?
Right?
Meh, who am I kidding. PT Barnum would be a trillionaire today.
mehhh.... (Score:1)
This Might Be A Good Thing (Score:2)
At least it would keep ChatGPT et al semi-constrained until we figure out how to deal with these things. Imagine these thing taking off in the unconstrained world of processors being built from superconducting materials. Quantum computing might also benefit but I think most people won't even think about those for a good while with the speed boosts even conventional architecture would create. Hundreds of cores on a chip super computers in a home gaming system; maybe.
Because it's not entirely wishful thinking, (Score:2)
... and it would mean an enormous leap forward in many areas of engineering and science.
And it's at least within the possibilities of contemporary physics.
Unlike such nonsense as the EM drive et al.
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EM Drive is far from nonsense. the earth being round was also deemed nonsense and even could get you killed for saying it, but now we know different.
anti-catholic propaganda (Score:2)
The myth that people in the Middle Ages thought the Earth is flat appears to date from the 17th century as part of the campaign by Protestants against Catholic teaching. But it gained currency in the 19th century, thanks to inaccurate histories such as John William Draper's History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Atheists and agnostics championed the conflict thesis for their own purposes, but historical research gradually demonstrated that Draper and White had propagated more fantasy than fact in their efforts to prove that science and religion are locked in eternal conflict
— James Hannam. "Science Versus Christianity?"
Silly Season (Score:2)
In August, nothing is happening, half the planet is on vacation, so the news are different:
"World's Largest Tomato Found in Local Garden!"
"Scientific Study Reveals Cats Prefer Laser Pointers over Feather Toys"
"Breaking News: Local Squirrel Takes Up Painting!"
and in the UK:
"Unicorn Sightings on the Rise: Experts Weigh In"
Because they're idiots and know-nothings. (Score:2)
They've been dumping myth and BS into their heads.
If they do come up with a (Score:2)
Clock speed (Score:2)