Contrary Research

We’re excited to introduce Contrary Research! Our vision is to be the best destination for finding high-quality research and in-depth analysis of private companies. 1/11

Chinese neurotech company Neuracle Medical Technology has been authorized to offer a brain implant for hand control via a robotic glove outside of clinical trials in paralyzed patients.

Princeton researchers report that NVIDIA's Blackwell B200 GPUs suffer from "asymmetric hardware scaling," meaning their raw compute power doubled while their exponential math units and shared memory bandwidth lagged behind, creating severe bottlenecks for standard attention algorithms. FlashAttention-4 bypasses these limitations by mathematically emulating the slow exponential calculations on faster compute units and leveraging the B200's new Tensor Memory (TMEM) to drastically reduce memory traffic. By heavily pipelining these hardware-aware optimizations to ensure no component sits idle, the algorithm unlocks 71% of the GPU's theoretical capacity and delivers up to a 2.7x speedup over standard implementations.

Scientists have built a chip that thinks like a human brain, and it could revolutionize AI hardware. By mimicking the way neurons communicate across brain networks, the device processes information faster and more efficiently than conventional chips, paving the way for a new generation of compact, intelligent machines.

"we ask for long-term financial commitments and deposits and milestones to try and shake out how much of this is real versus how much of it is uh people you know preserving a place in line... about 2/3 of the demand just goes away" youtube.com/watch?v=ynC1uS…

Former Pokémon Go owner Niantic says player data will be used for training Coco Robotics delivery bots.

European AI startups are founded at the same rate as those in the US, but haven't found the same traction. Later-stage VC funding is largely reliant on US investors.

While the largest LLMs are owned and trained by US companies, the majority of users are in the EU.

“It's what this industry has always done, you know, fake it until you make it, fake it until it's legal… ‘Your honor, you can't close this down, you know 20,000 jobs are dependent on this” Victor Rocha, conference chairman for the Indian Gaming Association on online prediction markets straighttothepoint.substack.com/p/episode-78-t…

10% of Meta’s ad revenue comes from banned or fraudulent products (from the Norwegian Consumer Council’s 100-page report on AI-enabled “enshittification” of consumer verticals)

As demand for memory continues to push DRAM wafer prices up. At the same time, new capacity is being increasingly allocated to HBM, with the share available for DRAM dropping each year.

US Solar company Swift Solar acquired the manufacturing assets and intellectual property of Meyer Burger, the Swiss/German solar manufacturing powerhouse. Swift Solar is prioritizing Perovskite solar cells, which have a theoretical efficiency ceiling of 45%, compared to existing silicon cells, which are approaching 30% efficiency.

“light water makes a lot of sense for the Navy—you’re in the ocean—but because most commercial reactors are light‑water reactors, they have to be along a large body of water, either along a big river or along the ocean, something like that. in theory, you could do molten salt, but generally in my opinion things like molten salt are going to be difficult for transportable reactors; those make more sense for bigger, non‑transportable reactors. And so generally what we’ve been seeing from all the microreactor companies coming to us is that they’re gas‑cooled or heat‑pipe designs. robertbryce.substack.com/p/my-talk-with…