Today is IBM's anniversary... 115 years building the history of computing.
And among the many stories, I couldn't fail to mention the story behind the famous "Janitor memo" written by Thomas Watson Jr., blaming the lack of effort from his research team.
Finally, Nvidia researchers have presented Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model.
arxiv.org/pdf/2606.15007
Nemotron 3 Ultra was pre-trained on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD).
Here is an excellent article from Daniel Reed about this memo, and a clear lesson for us all:
And the next time you see a janitor, or anyone else engaged in a seemingly thankless but important task, stop, smile, and say thank you.
hpcdan.org/2022/02/22/m...
Patent: Systems and methods for mechanosynthesis - CBN Nano Technologies
Methods, systems, and devices are disclosed for performing mechanosynthesis.
More details: www.freepatentsonline.com/11592463.html
Researchers have demonstrated the positionally controlled mechanosynthetic addition of carbon and subtraction of silicon atoms on an atomically clean, crystalline Si(100) surface, enabled by inverted-mode scanning tunneling microscopy.
arxiv.org/pdf/2606.13876
Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ∼6× higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy.
The resulting structures represent the first demonstrations of an emerging ability to manipulate radical chemistry through the positional control of specific atoms and moieties in 3D, paving the way for atomically precise fabrication of complex, covalently assembled products.
[Further reading] Atomically precise mechanosynthesis of carbon structures on hydrogenated Si(100) by inverted-mode STM - CBN Nano Technologies, Inc
arxiv.org/pdf/2605.27250
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The next time you see a janitor, stop, smile, and say thank you. The word will spread, far faster and far more effectively than via any memo.
