Google’s DeepConsensus Algorithm Uses Language Tools to Improve the Accuracy of DNA Sequencing Data
By Simon Barnett
Analyst
Last week, scientists at Google (GOOGL) and Pacific Biosciences (PacBio, PACB) published a deep learning algorithm called DeepConsensus (v0.1) that improves PacBio’s high-fidelity (HiFi) sequencing data for both research and clinical applications. Notably, DeepConsensus incorporates machine learning principles adapted from natural language processing (NLP).
Since even single-letter mistakes can cause a misdiagnosis, downstream research and clinical bioinformatics pipelines require inputs of high-quality sequencing data. DNA sequencing itself is error prone. To minimize errors, sequencers read the same DNA letters many times over, averaging the signals into a consensus—an agreement.
DeepConsensus operates alongside a PacBio algorithm (pbcss) during the first step of DNA sequence processing called primary analysis. The model treats streams of sequenced DNA letters much like a speech recognition algorithm interprets meaning in a sentence. An NLP model, for example, might focus its attention in a sentence on nouns to assign meaning to an ambiguous, mid-sentence word like “it”. Similarly, DeepConsensus compares small sections of sequence reads along with the associated metadata* to eliminate sequencing errors during the generation of data.
Eliminating errors, DeepConsensus generates faster, more cost-effective, and more accurate HiFi reads. In our view, their deep understanding of HiFi’s weaknesses was key to the researchers’ success. Specifically, the authors trained DeepConsensus with a “gap-aware” method that accounted for systematic “gaps” in HiFi sequencing data that occur near repetitive sections of DNA.
In future DeepConsensus iterations, the teams aim to accelerate the algorithm and enable broad-based adoption. Future long-read sequencing systems are likely to feature onboard GPUs for the acceleration of AI inference.
According to the authors, DeepConsensus heuristics also might boost Oxford Nanopore Duplex long reads as well as algorithms used for decoupling mixed DNA samples batched together during a sequencing run. Both these applications involve aligning many similar sequences together to look for small differences. We look forward to seeing how scientists apply DeepConsensus principles to other challenges in biology.
Chairman Gary Gensler Says the SEC Might Ban Payment for Order Flow
By Nishita Jain & Maximilian Friedrich
Analyst
Last week, Gary Gensler stated in an interview that the SEC is considering banning payment-for-order-flow (PFOF). Many commission-free retail brokers like Robinhood, Schwab, and Interactive Brokers route trade orders to market makers in exchange for compensation on a per-share basis. Market makers then take their piece of the action from the spread, the difference between bid and ask, and add to the liquidity of the overall market.
US regulators have criticized PFOF in the past, with concerns that retail brokers will route orders to maximize their compensation instead of optimizing trade execution for retail investors. In recent comments, Gensler added that he believes market makers access trading data not available to other investors.
Today, retail brokers must disclose their PFOF publicly. Robinhood, for example, receives roughly $0.23 per 100 equity shares and $0.60 per options contract, and it executes 95% of trades equal to or better than the best available exchange price, or NBBO (National Best Bid and Offer). In comparison, Schwab executes 92.4% of its trades in S&P 500 stocks at prices equal to or better than NBBO.
In ARK’s view, on balance PFOF results in lower prices and better execution for retail investors. Alternatives like commissions have not worked well. That said, we always will welcome the SEC’s efforts to protect investors, hoping they will continue to encourage innovation and competition, ultimately serving retail investors well.
In August non-fungible token (NFT) trading volume surged as decentralized marketplace OpenSea crossed a record-breaking $3 billion in monthly volume, up more than 12-fold from $248 million during July, its second-best month.
At this time, three NFT categories are driving this explosion in growth:
One-of-One Pieces: unique creations that can span multiple mediums including digital and generative artwork, music, and 3D renderings
Avatars: one-of-N collections such as CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club which purchasers use to represent their digital personas in social media profile pictures
In-Game Assets: NFT-based items that purchasers can trade across platforms in play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity, as ARK featured last month.
Despite the staggering growth in trading volume, many investors find the intrinsic value of NFTs difficult to grasp. The launch of a new collection dubbed “Loot” illustrates the challenge. Created by Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann, the project includes 8,000 NFTs, each of which contains a plain-text list of “randomized adventurer gear” but no images, no stats, no rules, no roadmap of any kind. Instead, the community claiming the NFTs will create their own use cases for the NFTs in a build-your-own-adventure game. In little more than a week since its launch, Loot spurred a frenzy of products built around the original text, generating more than $200 million in volume on OpenSea.
In addition to the rise of play-to-earn gaming and the democratization of art, Loot illustrates how NFTs are enabling new forms of social collaboration and community engagement, all centered around digital asset ownership. Already, brands ranging from Budweiser to the US Open are experimenting with this new technology to increase their customer engagement.
Wood referenced research that suggests the bull market in stocks may extend to 2038 as millennials build out their portfolios.
So always BTFD? I did that for TDOC, number two in the high conviction list. Very red now. Please don’t tell me I have to wait 7 years.
To be sure, many of Wood’s investments through her various ETFs have a millennial vibe as they are focused on companies leading in high-profile technologies.
Notice that. Park $10k per ARK ETF to support Cathie’s open style.
For example, Wood owns shares of Robinhood (HOOD) and Coinbase (COIN) — two companies at the leading-edge of the rise in cryptocurrencies. The same could be said for Square (SQ), which is also morphing into a super app as it expands deeper into crypto.
From a risk management point of view, safer to invest in HOOD, COIN and SQ then mess with crypto directly. SQ and HOOD would be safer than COIN since if governments go all out ban on crypto, those twos would still be in business.
Well, she always said her time frame is 5 years. So one would expect a great 5-year return, not much better than a slow growth matured company like AAPL, what gives?
JB Straubel Offers a Sneak Peek into Redwood Materials’ Master Plan
By Sam Korus
Analyst
Founded by Tesla Co-Founder JB Straubel who also served as its Chief Technology Officer for 15 years, Redwood Materials is a battery recycling company. In an article this week, Straubel revealed that, in addition to battery recycling, Redwood Materials plans to build battery cathode factories that also will manufacture copper foils for anodes in the US. The 100 gigawatt-hour cathode factory should be able to accommodate the production of more than one million electric vehicles. For perspective, Tesla manufactured roughly 500,000 electric vehicles last year.
Thus far, China has dominated the world’s battery supply chain including raw material processing. ARK believes that battery production in the US will solve the supply chain issues facing EV manufacturing today, obviating the logistical burden of shipping materials to Asia. At Musk’s side for nearly 15 years, we believe Straubel clearly understands the concept of exponential growth opportunities and is likely to attract more capital to recycling batteries. In his words, “Somebody’s got to do this. In fact, we need at least four companies doing similarly aggressive, crazy things all in the same timeline.”
Facebook Develops a Speech-to-Speech Natural Language Processing (NLP) Model
By William Summerlin
Analyst
While NLP models like GTP-3 typically have been trained on large corpora of text data, Facebook has created a different type of language model. Instead of text data, Facebook created a model trained entirely with audio data. With 6,000 hours of audiobook recordings, Facebook used an encoder to convert speech into sound units, creating a language model to predict the next sound and a decoder to convert sound into words.
Among its benefits, the model can learn any language because audio data is more pervasive than text data. Moreover, the model can encode emotions like anger and excitement as well as non-word vocalizations like laughter. In our view, speech-to-speech NLP is an exciting step forward in human-computer interfaces. We look forward to sharing many exciting downstream use cases in the months and years ahead.
A smart contract blockchain focused on high throughput and low fees, Solana faced a major production issue this week as a surge in transactions overwhelmed validating nodes and halted block production. On Tuesday, unable to produce new blocks Solana froze, preventing token holders from moving funds and Solana-based decentralized apps from functioning. Responding to the emergency, core developers and node operators coordinated with a software patch and a full restart of the network.
In August, Solana attracted significant media attention as its token price tripled amid a broad-based altcoin rally. Founder Anatoly Yakovenko, who had scaled networks at Qualcomm, has proposed eight innovations to allow Solana to function at 50,000 transactions per seconds (TPS), more than 3,000 times faster than Ethereum’s 13 TPS and 10,000 times faster than Bitcoin’s 5 TPS. Now critics are pointing out that Solana’s validator requirements are too high and will cause too much centralization, compromising the network’s security.
Despite centralization concerns, users have given Solana a try. Total DeFi (Decentralized Finance) value locked on Solana crossed $10 billion, and its NFT ecosystem has heated up. Notable among Solana’s supporters are cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which created both a decentralized exchange and an NFT marketplace on its platform, as well as venture capital investors including Multicoin Capital, Polychain Capital, and Andreesen Horowitz.
Tuesday provided an important reminder of the scalability trilemma that blockchains face: while decentralization, scalability, and security all are important, only two of the three can be optimized for at a given time. While ease of use might top users’ priorities in the short term, ARK believes that ultimately decentralization and security will create the most value for blockchain technologies.
I think a few things people need to know is that Solana and Openseas are both invested by A16z. They also have a huge chunk in Coinbase ($10+ bil) last time I checked. I wouldn’t be surprised if a16z also has a huge chunk of cryptocurrency directly/indirectly via various mechanisms. When NFT was taking off earlier, some big transactions shocked few people but it also kicked off NFT craziness. I also wouldn’t be surprised if a16z initiated some of those large transactions directly/indirectly. Just connecting some dots.
Short Cathie wind gather steam… blogosphere is full of posts that are laughing at Cathie… last year Cathie has all the limelight, now professional investors e.g. Beth and Puru, are having a good time laughing… even @manch is disassociating from Cathie…
In our view, Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) vendors like Five9 are unlikely to be viable on a standalone basis over the medium term. Instead, enterprises will continue to automate, using AI to handle high-volume, low-value queries, relegating the contribution of CCaaS players to more labor-intensive high-touch interactions. Addressing a total available market five times that of CCaaS, Zoom is likely to improve Five9’s go-to-market pipeline substantially.[13] Meanwhile, according to our estimates, Five9 will add modestly to our expected returns for Zoom under various penetration assumptions shown below.
So it sounds like Five9 needs Zoom to survive, but Zoom doesn’t really need Five9.
Help your god mother, buy ARK funds. At this rate of outflow, ARK funds might have to close down and professionals can’t hedge their growth portfolio by shorting ARKK.
Best response? No substance. Worse than voodoo. SMH.
A portfolio of stocks of high growth disruptive companies carefully selected by a group of industry experts/ analysts can’t beat a matured slow growing stock. The 5 year timeframe is what Cathie said is what her portfolio should be measured against. What does it tell you?
Ytd return of ARKK is worse than a boring S&P index fund. What does it tell you?
Twitter Announces Bitcoin Tipping and NFT Verification
By Frank Downing
Analyst
This week, Twitter announced two exciting cryptonetwork integrations.
The first announcement, to which CEO Jack Dorsey hinted last month, is a bitcoin tipping function. Mobile iOS users now can add their bitcoin lightning wallets or bitcoin addresses to their Twitter profiles to send and receive tips in bitcoin, turning Twitter, in our opinion, into one of the best global micropayment experiences in the world. Enabling free, instant, global payments for its users in the absence of centralized financial institutions, we believe Twitter is accelerating Bitcoin’s interoperability, pushing it one step closer to the internet’s native monetary standard.
Second, Twitter announced the impending addition of a non-fungible token (NFT) verification feature. With no details on its implementation or timing, we are excited about the possibilities. As the NFT market boomed during the past year, traditional social media sites like Twitter have been showcasing NFT ownership through user avatars. The problem that Twitter will address is that users today can change their avatars without owning the underlying NFTs. A verification feature could help NFT holders prove ownership and signal status, much like Twitter’s current verification badge system.
Apparently Beth is into meme stocks too and and and… China stocks. According to @manch, Americans won’t buy Chinese stocks. What’s give? Cathie bought. Beth bought.
Btw, Beth didn’t publish a full list of her investment.
