Holiday wishes and Google news

Q4 makes everyone launch their projects...

Author

Roope Ripatti
December 17, 2024

Hey everyone!

I’m taking a couple week break for the holidays. You should expect the next Founders Fuel in your inbox again on Monday the 6th of January!

But before that, I have some cool news from Google, which launches a lot of projects to hit its Q4 OKRs…

Enjoy your holidays!
- Roope Ripatti

Exciting news 

Google Quantum news

Everyone seems to be super hyped about the new quantum chip Google announced last week.

While I’m not too knowledgeable about the quantum computer world, from conversations with people knowledgeable I’ve understood that the big difference is the error correcting nature of the chip. Long story short, before this chip, the bigger the chip (more qubits) the more errors you would get. With this chip (through quantum magic?) that is reversed and the more qubits it has, the better the error correction.

It managed to complete a calculation that would require a traditional supercomputer septillions of years only in minutes. This was of course a notoriously good case for a quantum computer, but the fact remains that future quantum computers can revolutionize some industries.

Google AI news

Google unveiled their newest version of the Gemini models. So what else would I do than make the new models make a summary about the launching blogpost:

Bullet points

  • Google DeepMind introduces Gemini 2.0, a new AI model designed for the "agentic era."

  • Gemini 2.0 is more capable than previous versions, with native image and audio output and tool use.

  • Gemini 2.0 Flash is available to developers and trusted testers, with wider availability planned for early next year.

  • Google is exploring agentic experiences with Gemini 2.0, including Project Astra, Project Mariner, and Jules.

Finnish Blimps Make NATO go BRR

The Miltech accelerator Diana (by NATO) took 3 Finnish civilian technology companies that had potential also in the military technology space to refine their startups for the miltech space.

One of those companies was a blimp company from Joensuu called Kelluu.

I’m overall hyped about the airship/blimp industry and I felt super dumb not knowing we had a company working on the tech in Finland. Go check out Kelluu and their autonomous airships from HERE

Upcoming stuff

Tue 17.12.

Wed 18.12.

Weekend

Help needed

We were talking about problems in the Finnish startup ecosystem with a friend of mine and ended up talking about the shortage of builders in the startup circles of Aalto. Would love to hear from any builders what problems you are seeing in the startup ecosystem and if there should be some other format you’d be interested in engaging with!

You can send me suggestions by replying to this email or sending a message to @ripatti on telegram

Your weekly read

I was listening to the social radars during the weekend and they had an amazing 2 episode podcast story about the whistle blowing experience of Tyler Shultz who is one of the main whistleblowers of the Theranos fraud. I had dug into the fraud of Theranos before, but Jessica and Carolynn managed to dive super deep into the human aspect of the story, which I found fascinating.

Happy holidays for eveyone!

-Roope