Intel has spent the last few years lurching from one misstep to another, and even had to outsource the manufacturing of its latest chips to one of its biggest rivals.
Now, in order to recapture its former glory, the company is betting it can execute a series of tricky manufacturing shifts. But it’s also hoping that a rebranding campaign will convince people that it isn’t so far behind the competition after all.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger laid out a roadmap for several generations of chips at an event Monday. It includes new technologies designed to help the company compete with TSMC, a Taiwanese chipmaker that currently makes the most advanced and high performance computer chips, as well as Samsung in South Korea. The roadmap includes a timeline that will allow executives—and outsiders—to measure Intel’s progress.
In an early sign of success, Intel said Qualcomm and Amazon had agreed to be customers for its new foundry business, where Intel will manufacture chips for other companies; Intel said it will begin making chips for those companies in 2024. Gelsinger had announced plans for the foundry business in March, shortly after he rejoined the company where he was once CTO. However, in an embarrassing measure of how the company has fallen behind, Intel also plans to outsource the manufacturing of its most advanced chips to TSMC.
Gelsinger said Intel will adopt a new naming scheme for coming generations of chips. Currently, chipmakers refer to new chipmaking processes or “nodes” using a nanometer scale, with Intel currently using what’s known as a 10-nanometer process and TSMC using what it calls a 5-nanometer process.
The nanometer scale once referred to the actual size of a transistor gate, with continued shrinkage guaranteeing better performance. (A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter; a human hair is 50,000 to 100,000 nanometers thick.) One of Intel’s founders, Gordon Moore, famously stated in 1965 that progress in chipmaking could be measured by the ability to shrink roughly twice as many transistors onto a chip every two years.
But the nanometer scale no longer refers to actual distances on a chip, and Intel and others say that its current chips perform like those made on TSMC’s 7-nanometer process. It plans to adopt a naming scheme that reflects this, with a new version of its 10 nanometer due this year called “Intel 7” that the company says will deliver 10 to 15 percent better performance per watt of power. The generations beyond that, to come in 2023 and 2024, will be called “Intel 4” and “Intel 3.”
“There’s always the question of where the marketing ends and where the engineering begins, but this is grounded very deeply in engineering reality,” Gelsinger told WIRED ahead of Monday’s announcement.
Stacy Rasgon, an analyst with Bernstein Research, says the technical roadmap presented by Gelsinger seems promising but it will ramp up pressure on the company to execute. “This is all great but the danger is going to be they stick their neck out and it goes wrong again,” he says.
Intel made a series of blunders under its previous leadership. The company was slow to adapt to the shift to mobile computing, which saw it lose market share to Arm, which makes blueprints for energy efficient chips used by companies including Apple, which uses Arm-based chips for the iPhone, the iPad, and some Macs.
Intel was also caught off guard by the rise of artificial intelligence. Nvidia, a “fabless” chip company capitalized on this trend with chips specialized for AI computations. Nvidia overtook Intel by market capitalization in July 2020.
On the manufacturing side, Intel was slower than TSMC to adopt the latest method for etching features into silicon, known as extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV). Monday, the company said it would ramp up use of EUV, and had secured the first next-generation EUV machine from ASML, a Dutch company that is the only maker of EUV machines. The initiative will be costly, because each EUV machine costs around $120 million.
Pierce says he is impressed by the government’s drive. “This government is incredibly entrepreneurial,” he says. “They are like just getting things done at lightning speed.” He says that he is working to organize a “big conference” in the country.
Lauren Bissell, a former Cambridge Analytica employee who later converted to blockchain and Bitcoin entrepreneurship, and was part of Pierce’s delegation, says she was “beyond impressed” by the government figures she met during the trip.
Yet Bissel admits that the road map to Bitcoin adoption looks very ambitious. “There’s going to be a lot of hours of no sleep. There’s a lot of work to do,” she says. “But I think that the launch will go successfully.”
With the countdown to Bitcoin Day down to just 69 days, the nuts and bolts needed to make the cryptocurrency work as legal tender are still a mirage. Athena, a company that had been initially tipped to install 1,000 ATM machines in the country (and challenged by Bukele on Twitter to deploy 1,500) will start with just 14. Going from volcano emoji to reality will also take time. “What you have in El Salvador is, seemingly, an abundance of geothermal energy and, at least for the time being, a friendly jurisdiction,” says Alex Brammer, vice president of business development at Luxor, a cryptocurrency mining company. “Providing the infrastructure there is going to take years.” Even the Bitcoin law looks like unfinished business: Its redrafting of an entirely new monetary system is hastily sketched in two pages and 16 articles, which is why a more detailed regulation is expected to be issued soon.
What is really Bukele’s game? One oft-repeated case for his move is that Bitcoin would be “banking the unbanked.” That fusty mantra is usually balderdash, but it might have some merit here, as 70 percent of El Salvador’s population does not have a bank account or access to easy payment solutions. By this line of thinking, a government-backed Bitcoin wallet, as a smartphone app, could arguably reach more people than existing banking service providers do, and might offer a convenient, low-commission medium for the Salvadoran diaspora to send back remittances. A small-scale Bitcoin project in El Zonte—a seaside town in northern El Salvador—was moderately successful in making the local economy function more efficiently and is credited for inspiring Bukele. In this reading, Bukele is the edgy maverick wielding liberating technology to lift his people from the state of deprivation to which financial institutions have consigned it.
There are problems, however, with that narrative. Some have pointed out that only 45 percent of the country’s population has internet access—and that an internet connection will be required to use the app. Ricardo Barrientos, chief economist at ICEFI, a Guatemala-based research institute focused on fiscal studies, predicts that Bitcoin will be treated as a “weak currency,” with employers keeping their savings in dollars and using the more volatile Bitcoin to pay salaries to their workers. “This class divide could trigger social tensions—that’s a recipe for disaster,” Barrientos says. The report Barrientos cowrote for ICEFI on this subject subtly suggests that by making Bitcoin legal tender without installing any anti-money-laundering checks, the government plans to encourage a “certain kind of acquisitions or investments” by creating a parallel market where “opaque operations” can take place.
Barrientos expects Bukele to backtrack before September 7 under pressure from international financial institutions and of some of his own advisers. Were that not to happen, Barrientos hopes that Bitcoin won’t catch on among the population. “The best-case scenario for it is that no one uses it and everyone keeps using dollars, apart from some narcos,” Barrientos says. “Hopefully there will be a natural debitcoinization.”
A complication of infection known as sepsis is the number one killer in US hospitals. So it’s not surprising that more than 100 health systems use an early warning system offered by Epic Systems, the dominant provider of US electronic health records. The system throws up alerts based on a proprietary formula tirelessly watching for signs of the condition in a patient’s test results.
But a new study using data from nearly 30,000 patients in University of Michigan hospitals suggests Epic’s system performs poorly. The authors say it missed two-thirds of sepsis cases, rarely found cases medical staff did not notice, and frequently issued false alarms.
Karandeep Singh, an assistant professor at University of Michigan who led the study, says the findings illustrate a broader problem with the proprietary algorithms increasingly used in health care. “They’re very widely used, and yet there’s very little published on these models,” Singh says. “To me that’s shocking.”
The study was published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. An Epic spokesperson disputed the study’s conclusions, saying the company’s system has “helped clinicians save thousands of lives.”
Epic’s is not the first widely used health algorithm to trigger concerns that technology supposed to improve health care is not delivering, or even actively harmful. In 2019, a system used on millions of patients to prioritize access to special care for people with complex needs was found to lowball the needs of Black patients compared to white patients. That prompted some Democratic senators to ask federal regulators to investigate bias in health algorithms. A study published in April found that statistical models used to predict suicide risk in mental health patients performed well for white and Asian patients but poorly for Black patients.
The way sepsis stalks hospital wards has made it a special target of algorithmic aids for medical staff. Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to health providers on sepsis encourage use of electronic medical records for surveillance and predictions. Epic has several competitors offering commercial warning systems, and some US research hospitals have built their own tools.
Automated sepsis warnings have huge potential, Singh says, because key symptoms of the condition, such as low blood pressure, can have other causes, making it difficult for staff to spot early. Starting sepsis treatment such as antibiotics just an hour sooner can make a big difference to patient survival. Hospital administrators often take special interest in sepsis response, in part because it contributes to US government hospital ratings.
Singh runs a lab at Michigan researching applications of machine learning to patient care. He got curious about Epic’s sepsis warning system after being asked to chair a committee at the university’s health system created to oversee uses of machine learning.
As Singh learned more about the tools in use at Michigan and other health systems, he became concerned that they mostly came from vendors that disclosed little about how they worked or performed. His own system had a license to use Epic’s sepsis prediction model, which the company told customers was highly accurate. But there had been no independent validation of its performance.
Singh and Michigan colleagues tested Epic’s prediction model on records for nearly 30,000 patients covering almost 40,000 hospitalizations in 2018 and 2019. The researchers noted how often Epic’s algorithm flagged people who developed sepsis as defined by the CDC and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. And they compared the alerts that the system would have triggered with sepsis treatments logged by staff, who did not see Epic sepsis alerts for patients included in the study.
The researchers say their results suggest Epic’s system wouldn’t make a hospital much better at catching sepsis and could burden staff with unnecessary alerts. The company’s algorithm did not identify two-thirds of the roughly 2,500 sepsis cases in the Michigan data. It would have alerted for 183 patients who developed sepsis but had not been given timely treatment by staff.
I’ve been at my job for about three years, and I really like it. The work is always interesting and challenging, my manager pushes me to grow and always has my back, and my work-life balance is the envy of my friends. There’s just one problem: The cliquishness is so intense that I feel like I’m back in high school! The “cool kids” are all pleasant enough to work with, but in meetings they’re always visibly giggling at some inside joke, and now that we’re all vaccinated they’re constantly posting photos on Instagram where they’re all hanging out and none of the rest of us were invited. How do I either get over my jealousy or help change our office culture so it doesn’t feel so much like a popularity contest?
—Melissa
A former boss used to say that people should never be friends with their coworkers. It’s a sensible philosophy—most people need brighter lines between work and life, not more blurring, and separating the two avoids toxic culture issues like the ones you are experiencing. But it also fails to recognize how humans actually operate. Roughly 100 percent of the people I can reasonably call friends were either classmates or coworkers (or the partners or close friends of my classmates or coworkers); I don’t even know how else I’d meet new friends. A highly scientific survey of the people who were active on my Gchat buddies list when I sat down to write this column indicated that most people feel the same way. Even my reluctant boss caved on her principled stand; our entire team became close and remains so to this day.
If we accept the inevitability of workplace friendships, we’re probably stuck with cliques, too. It’s in our nature to form subgroups, and subgroups are by definition exclusionary. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—it’s helpful to have people who are especially loyal to you, even if that means there are others who are especially loyal to people other than you.
But while rationally we know everyone deserves a great circle of friends, it can still hurt to witness everyone else’s. While I don’t doubt the ability of the “cool kids” to create larger culture problems—I’ve been a seventh-grade girl—I do think bruised egos can sometimes lead people to see “cliques” in place of just normal ol’ friend groups. I have drinks with some colleagues but not others, and I’ve definitely been caught giggling in a meeting because of a side-channel DM. This is mostly healthy, particularly when everyone is feeling a bit disconnected a year and a half into a global pandemic. You don’t say whether you have a close work friend, Melissa, but focusing either on finding one or two or on developing inside jokes with them can be a good distraction from understandable jealousy.
Let’s assume, though, that the cool group at your workplace really is creating a toxic environment beyond the occasional envy-inducing laughing fit. There are plenty of things they can do to change their behavior, but your options for changing it are pretty limited. Because they are adults and not seventh-grade girls, I’m inclined to think the clique is clueless, not actively evil, and they don’t understand the effect they’re having on everyone else. With that in mind, I’d recommend that you choose one member you know to be kind and reasonable, and nicely ask them to cool it with [insert problematic behavior here] because it’s hurting other people’s feelings. Also: Invite the clique members to hang out with you and your work friends. Even if you don’t all start hanging out regularly, the occasional summit of different groups can go a long way to making things feel less siloed.
If none of that works, though, you’re going to have to figure out how to manage your own feelings rather than fixing the cause. Step one: Mute or unfollow the cool kids on Instagram. They are fully entitled to post photos of their wild nights, just as you are entitled to avoid seeing said photos. Step two: Send a friend a spicy DM during a work meeting, then watch as she tries to contain her laughter. You’ll be too delighted to care what the clique is doing.
Judging from the press releases filling my inbox and the tweets lighting up my timeline, no one is happy with Facebook right now. On Friday, the company issued its response to the Facebook Oversight Board’s recommendations on the indefinite ban of Donald Trump. We learned that Trump’s account is now frozen for precisely two years from his original January 7 suspension date, at which point Facebook will reassess the risks of letting him back on. The response also includes a number of other policy changes. Opinions on the announcement range from calling it a pointless bit of “accountability theater” to suggesting that it’s cowardly and irresponsible. Republicans are, of course, outraged that Trump hasn’t been reinstated.
I confess to finding myself in a different camp. The Oversight Board is performing a valuable, though very limited, function, and the Trump situation illustrates why.
When the board first published its ruling last month, it issued both a binding command—Facebook must articulate a specific action on Donald Trump’s account and could not continue an indefinite suspension—and nonbinding recommendations, most notably that the platform abandon its policy of treating statements by politicians as inherently “newsworthy” and thus exempt from the rules that apply to everyone else. As I wrote at the time, Facebook’s response to the nonbinding part would probably prove more important. It would apply more broadly than to just Trump’s account, and it would show whether the company is willing to follow the Oversight Board’s advice even when it doesn’t have to.
Now we know that the answer to that last question is yes. In its announcement on Friday, Facebook says it is committed to fully following 15 of the 19 nonbinding recommendations. Of the remaining four, it is rejecting one, partially following another, and doing more research on two.
The most interesting commitments are around the “newsworthiness allowance.” Facebook says it will keep the exception in place, meaning it will still allow some content that violates its Community Standards to stay up if it is “newsworthy or important to the public interest.” The difference is that the platform will no longer treat posts by politicians as more inherently newsworthy than posts by anyone else. It is also increasing transparency by creating a page explaining the rule; beginning next year, it says it will publish an explanation each time the exception is applied to content that otherwise would have been taken down.
Let this sink in for a moment: Facebook took detailed feedback from a group of thoughtful critics, and Mark Zuckerberg signed off on a concrete policy change, plus some increased transparency. This is progress!
Now, please don’t confuse this for a complete endorsement. There is plenty to criticize about Facebook’s announcement. On the Trump ban, while the company has now articulated more detailed policies around “heightened penalties for public figures during times of civil unrest and ongoing violence,” the fact that it came up with a two-year maximum suspension seems suspiciously tailored to potentially allow Trump back on the platform just when he’s getting ready to start running for president again. And Facebook’s new commitments to transparency leave much to be desired. Its new explanation of the newsworthiness allowance, for example, provides zero information about how Facebook defines “newsworthy” in the first place—a pretty important detail. Perhaps the case-by-case explanations beginning next year will shed more light, but until then the policy is about as transparent as a fogged-over bathroom window.
Indeed, as with any announcement from Facebook, this one will be impossible to evaluate fully until we see how the company follows through in practice. In several cases, Facebook claims that it’s already following the Oversight Board’s recommendations. This can strain credulity. For instance, in response to a suggestion that it rely on regional linguistic and political expertise in enforcing policies around the world, the company declares, “We ensure that content reviewers are supported by teams with regional and linguistic expertise, including the context in which the speech is presented.” And yet a Reuters investigation published this week found that posts promoting gay conversion therapy, which Facebook’s rules prohibit, continue to run rampant in Arab countries, “where practitioners post to millions of followers through verified accounts.” As the content moderation scholar Evelyn Douek puts it, with many of its statements “Facebook gives itself a gold star, but they’re really borderline passes at best.”
