Morning Brew - ☕ Flashy to functional

Is 2022 an inflection point for smart cities?
Morning Brew January 21, 2022

Emerging Tech Brew

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Happy Friday. A year ago, few knew what an NFT was. Nowadays, both Twitter and, reportedly, Facebook are integrating them into their platforms, and, as we wrote a few weeks ago, digital art sales were in the tens of billions last year.

Where we’ll be in a year, no one knows.

In today’s edition:

Future of smart cities
AI jobs
Disease-reversal megadeal

Jordan McDonald, Hayden Field, Dan McCarthy

SMART CITIES

Flashy → functional

Image of a city skyline with futuristic filters overlaid on top Illustration: Dianna "Mick" McDougall, Photo: Getty Images

In recent years, smart cities have received criticism for over-promising and under-delivering—or, in many cases, failing to deliver at all.

However, due to a combination of new government funding and what experts say is a shift in perspective about how to approach these projects—from tech-first to resident-first—smart-city experts told us they’re optimistic about the prospects in 2022.

“What we’re seeing now is that you can have connectivity, electrification, and autonomy. You don’t have to just pick one,” Karen Lightman, executive director of the Metro21 Smart Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, told Emerging Tech Brew. “We can, with some catalyst investment money from the federal government, encourage the private sector to come in and jobs can be created. I really feel like 2022 is the year.”

Click here for the full story on how smart city projects might fare in 2022.

The year ahead

The recently passed infrastructure bill contains $500 million in grants that cities around the country can apply for to pursue their own smart-city efforts, from building out autonomous and connected vehicle infrastructure to kickstarting smart-grid projects.

  • The bill also carves out $65 billion to expand broadband access to underserved areas around the country, including less-connected urban areas.

Lightman called the bill a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to connect people historically left out in infrastructure efforts.

But, but, but…Choosing which projects to fund moving forward—with or without the aid of government cash—is the tricky part.

  • Early smart-city projects, like Sidewalk Toronto or Sidewalk Labs’ spin-off company Replica’s work in Portland, Oregon, were hyper-focused on flashy technologies—like creating autonomous delivery carts or city-wide transportation prediction models—and paid less attention to the needs of city residents.
  • Both projects folded in 2021.

Looking ahead...Experts say that tendency is changing, and that city governments are now working backward from the needs of their residents to figure out which projects to pursue.

“Technology is still an important part of it. It’s one of the ways to improve, but it’s not the sole thing, and we have to use it sustainably,” Debra Lam, former managing director of Georgia Tech’s Smart Cities and Inclusive Innovation team, told us.

“It’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of solution for everyone. You have to really think about what the problem is and what the local context is. And then you have to think about how it’s actually applied,” she said.

Click here to read the full story.JM

        

AI

Machine learning engineers, you’re in luck

Image of a person typing on a laptop computer Unsplash

On Tuesday, LinkedIn released annual data on worldwide trends in hiring, employment, and workplaces.

Spoiler alert: Emerging-tech jobs are on the up-and-up—especially when it comes to AI.

Last year, the role of “artificial intelligence practitioners” came in last (no. 15) on the company’s list of jobs on the rise. But this year’s list, which expanded to 25 roles, ranks machine learning engineer as the fourth fastest-growing job in the US over the past five years.

  • Other tech roles that made the cut: user experience researcher, technical program manager, back-end developer, and site reliability engineer.

We chatted with Romer Rosales, LinkedIn’s senior director of AI, and Souvik Ghosh, a principal staff engineer and director of AI, about why ML engineers are such a hot commodity.

On the rising demand for machine learning engineers

SG: “One of the trends we saw on this year’s broader list was an increase in jobs available to people with fewer years of experience. We’re seeing that machine learning engineer roles are only requiring four years of experience on average, which is great for someone who is just starting out.”

On the future of AI jobs

SG: “I expect that ML, AI, and related roles will increase further and climb in the next few years as demand for talent skilled in ML continues to grow…Over time, I expect ML will become more broadly accessible. As this happens, I believe that a large number of software engineers will be able to take care of basic ML tasks while ML experts will focus on solving the most challenging problems.”

On the AI skills gap

RR: “Given the limited talent in this space, I have seen a trend with more companies either training engineers to be proficient in this space, and/or making it easier for engineers who may not have built that proficiency yet to contribute to ML development.”

Click here to read the full piece.—HF

        

TOGETHER WITH HOPIN

A little FYI on hybrid-event ROI

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BIOTECH

Cold hard cash, for bold hard science

Close-up image of cells Viktor Chebanenko/Getty Images

Altos Labs, a company aiming to “reverse disease” announced what might be the biggest-ever funding round for a biotech company this week. The company has raised $3 billion to begin building and staffing up large, academia-inspired labs that Stat reports “could easily involve hundreds of people.”

It’s unclear if the company’s goal—in part, to “safely reprogram” cells in order to reverse the damage caused by disease—is feasible. Since cell reprogramming involves literally changing the function of a cell from, say, fat to stem, it’s currently viewed as too dangerous to try on humans.

  • As Stat noted, much of the science Altos is based on has been tested only in mice, and at times, the astounding results have been accompanied by ugly outcomes; in one case, mice developed tumors.
  • But Altos has enlisted a star-studded cast of scientists, and marshalled billions of dollars, to try to get to the bottom of what’s possible.

The company is also adamant that it is not focused on turning back the biological clock, as has been suggested by initial reporting examining the desires of some of Altos Labs’ ultra-wealthy backers to combat aging.

  • FWIW, Google created Calico Labs in 2013, a company explicitly dedicated to anti-aging research, and which was also extremely well-capitalized, with a reported $1.5 billion in the bank as of 2016.

"We’re not an aging company,” Richard Klausner, a successful biotech entrepreneur who is CEO and cofounder of Altos Labs, told Stat. “We’re certainly not a longevity company. We’re a disease-reversal company, by programming cells in a variety of ways to have more optimal resilience.”

Big picture: Several biotech companies are already working on cell-reprogramming tech, but only time will tell if they’re able to bring viable products to market.

Click here to read on-site.DM

        

FROM THE CREW

If you don’t already know, Morning Brew is on YouTube! Our shows cover the tech, trends, and companies you care about, but we do it in a way that won’t make your eyes burn from jargon or boredom. If you’re wondering how the world works—well, that makes two of us—but let’s figure it out together. Check out some of our latest videos:

BITS AND BYTES

GIF of a Tesla vehicle rolling in Francis Scialabba

Stat: European EV sales overtook diesel sales for the first time in December. One-fifth of new cars sold were battery-powered, compared to 19% for diesel.

Quote: “The critical opportunity at the dawn of this historic transformation is to address ethical, societal, and legal concerns well before commercialization.”—Kay Firth-Butterfield, head of AI and machine learning at the World Economic Forum, re: new quantum-computing guidelines

Read: Climate-tech startups could have another banner year.

Invest in the Rx revolution: NowRx is disrupting the $480B retail pharmacy industry with free, same-day medication delivery and breakthrough tech that'll change retail pharma forever. As of December 2021, they've achieved $26M+ in annualized revenue. Add NowRx to your portfolio today.*

*This is sponsored advertising content.

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

  • Meta has reportedly filed patents for biometric tech like eye-tracking, which it could eventually integrate into its virtual reality headsets.
  • Google is reportedly working on an augmented reality headset that it hopes to release in 2024.
  • 64x, a company that wants to make it easier to manufacture gene therapies, raised a $55 million Series A.
  • Neuralink is hiring for a clinical trial director and coordinator.
  • Wayve, a UK–based autonomous driving company, raised a $200 million Series B.
  • Phantom Auto, a remote vehicle operation startup, signed major logistics players ArcBest and NFI Industries as both investors and clients. The companies plan to deploy “thousands” of remote-enabled forklifts in the years to come

GOING PHISHING

Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

  • Northwest Arkansas is offering tech workers $10,000 in bitcoin to move there.
  • A new startup claims it has cracked quantum computing—but only if it can build its computer in space.
  • A plan to purchase and transform a Fiji island into a cryptocurrency-themed resort, with planned areas including Crypto Beach and House of Dao, has fallen through.
  • NYC Mayor Eric Adams actually took his first paycheck in crypto, as he said he would.

FROM THE ARXIVES

Researchers may have found a promising new use case for AI: “hallucinating” brand-new proteins that can serve as building blocks for end products like medicines.

A December paper published in Nature found that neural nets designed to predict new proteins can help simplify the protein engineering process.

  • The typical process is labor-intensive, requiring scientists to design templates based on already existing proteins.
  • Using protein-predicting neural nets can eliminate the need for these templates altogether, the researchers claim.

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GOING PHISHING ANSWER

Space may be a red-hot...space...right now, but we've not come across such claims about quantum computing and the final frontier.

Written by Jordan McDonald, Hayden Field, and Dan McCarthy

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