What I Read This Week...

School absences have exploded since the pandemic, work from home is bad for burglars, and Meta is deploying custom chips for AI across its datacenters

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Caught My Eye…

• School absences have exploded since the pandemic. Recent data shows that an estimated 26% of public school students were considered ‘chronically absent’ last school year, up from 15% before the pandemic - meaning that more than a quarter of students missed +10% of a given school year. Across the country, students are choosing to stay home when sick with routine colds and viruses, and more students are struggling with mental health. According to education experts, student absenteeism is a leading factor hindering the U.S. recovery from pandemic-driven learning losses.

• The work from home era is bad for burglars. According to the quarterly crime report released last month, the number of burglaries in the U.S. declined by 9.8%, marking the 12th consecutive annual decline. While much of this improvement is due to improved home security and a decline in the value of assets held at home, the era of work from home is repelling burglars from home residences and shifting crime to nonresidential addresses and cybercrime.

• Meta, the parent company of Facebook and WhatsApp, is set to deploy a series of custom-designed AI chips across its datacenters this year in an effort to reduce the company’s reliance on Nvidia GPUs. A transition, if successful, would allow Meta to free its Nvidia H100 processors for training AI models instead of inference, and optimize power costs across the company’s datacenters. Other hyperscalers including Amazon, Google and Microsoft are developing their own custom silicon in an effort to reduce hardware costs and power consumption. We will be publishing a deep-dive into the future of silicon later this month.

Other Reading…

• Microsoft Says Windows 11 File Explorer Ads Were ‘Not Intended to be Published Externally’ (The Verge)

• Costco Selling As Much As $200 million in Gold Bars Monthly (CNBC)

• Old MRI, New Tricks: Q Bio Puts Forward Quantifiable, Reproducible Scanning Approach (Fierce Biotech)

• SpaceX Launches Starlink Satellites on Record 20th Reflight of a Falcon 9 Rocket First Stage (Space)

• Microsoft Pitched OpenAI’s DALL-E as Battlefield Tool For U.S. Military (The Intercept)

• Adobe’s ‘Ethical’ Firefly AI Was Trained on Midjourney Images (Bloomberg)

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