Essentialtechnology

This is a preliminary post on the NSF X-Labs Quantum Interconnect and Integrated Photonics topic. We're writing this as a provocation directed towards expert researchers, PMs and others in this field - we'd like your help to continue this very early inves

Last week, NSF announced $1.5 billion for the NSF X-Labs initiative - independent, mission-driven research teams pursuing platform technologies that traditional institutions aren't built to tackle. The first two topics are Scientific Instrumentation for S

We're very excited to announce the launch of two new Focused Research Organizations in the UK powered by ARIA: Meridial and Echo Labs!These two organizations represent a new way to build scientific institutions around specific technical bottlenecks that a

We recently wrote about why we're excited about the NSF Tech Labs initiative and how it could become a landmark moment for Focused Research Organizations. Today we're sharing our full response to the NSF's Request for Information.We submitted a Program De

How does a child learn about the world so much, from so little, so quickly? Why does it take so much more data to train today's leading AI models? How do you grow a mind?One answer might come from probabilistic programming.Probabilistic programs are gener

Today, Merge Labs announced its launch as a new research lab pursuing long-horizon R&D in ultrasound-based neural technology, with $252 million in funding from OpenAI, Bain Capital, Gabe Newell, and others.Merge Labs' new team and initial technical direct

It's been an incredibly exciting year in metascience at large, and for us at Convergent. Last week, the National Science Foundation announced their Tech Labs Initiative. The week before, we joined teams from our UK FRO Founder Residency (powered by ) in L

tl;dr: If you're drafting an NSF Tech Labs RFI response around a team-built public good that removes a major bottleneck in a field, we're happy to talk. Convergent has incubated 10+ FROs (and learned a lot in the process) and can help pressure-test whethe

Read part one of this series here:You can think of any cyber-physical system as consisting ofthe hardware that is running the computation or infrastructure,the software that is controlling the hardware, andthe people who are running, operating, or communi

AI capabilities are growing quickly, spurring us to grow our AI resilience efforts.Evan Miyazono joined us earlier this year as a research fellow at Convergent. Evan is a physicist, metascientist and founder of Atlas Computing, which has been building the