How Nvidia became the world's most valuable company: Tech & Science Daily podcast

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The Standard’s Business & Technology Correspondent, Simon Hunt, explains how Nvidia overtook Microsoft and Apple to become the world's most valuable company.

Dr Katie Burnham, Senior Staff Scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, discusses their new study which suggests that sepsis patients ‘could get the right treatment faster, based on their genes’.

Also in this episode:

• Self-driving cars found to be safer - except at dawn, dusk, or when turning, according to study

• Prince Charles Cinema cancels screening of film which was written by AI following backlash

• McDonald’s AI mishaps with bacon ice cream and chicken nugget overload

Find our Tech & Science Daily podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or, wherever you stream.

Here’s an automated transcript:

Hi, I'm Rochelle Travers, and this is The Standard's Tech and Science Daily podcast.

Coming up, are autonomous cars safer than those driven by humans?

Now, let's get into it.

Nvidia has officially become the world's most valuable company.

Shares in Nvidia rose 3.5% yesterday to give it a share price of $136, and to give it a market cap of $3.3 trillion, meaning it's now overtaken Apple and Microsoft to become the world's most valuable company.

That's Simon Hunt, The Standard's Business and Technology Correspondent.

And its shares have really skyrocketed.

They're up 3,500% over the past five years.

And I'm struggling to think of any company that's seen share price growth anything close to that.

And that growth is being led by AI.

Nvidia makes what are called graphics processing units, GPUs or chips, which are the dominant GPUs used in the AI space now.

The American firm's value has nearly doubled since the start of 2023.

And just eight years ago, its stock was worth less than 1% of its current price.

However, there are mixed opinions from analysts about how long the company can maintain these levels of growth.

But Nvidia says there's more still to come.

It doesn't think its growth is over yet.

The company has talked about how it might soon be able to reach a market cap of $4 trillion.

Not everyone is convinced by that, incidentally.

Some analysts say that competition is hotting up and there are quite a few different players in the chip making space.

It raises questions about how much of this is down to the hype around AI and whether it can be sustained long term.

And if that hype dies down, either because some new wave of technology comes along that steals the limelight away from AI, or because perhaps people start to realize that the range of applications for AI isn't quite as wide as initially hoped.

Well, that would mean that Nvidia won't be the most valuable company in the world for very long.

But it's hard to see at the moment how they're not gonna stop growing.

New research suggests that sepsis patients could get the right treatment faster based on their genes.

Sepsis occurs when your body's immune response infection gets out of control and actually ends up injuring its own tissues and organs.

And it's highly variable, which is a big challenge when it comes to trying to develop new treatments.

There's a drug that works in one patient, might not work at all in someone else.

That's Dr Katie Burnham, Senior Staff Scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and first author of the study.

We'd previously identified two subgroups of patients with different immune gene activity.

And one of these groups is at higher risk and we think would respond better to different treatments.

So we then explored how a patient's genetic background was associated with their response to sepsis.

And from this, we were able to highlight some key control genes or regulated genes that seem to be driving some people into that high risk sepsis response pathway.

In the study, the team analyzed data from the UK Genomic Advances in Sepsis Study that contained 1,400 patients with sepsis.

They found that genetic variation in groups of patients is associated with differences in immune response, how the body recognizes and defends itself against bacteria, viruses and harmful substances during sepsis.

They then used this information to describe what biological networks, cells and mechanisms are involved in each response.

The next steps would be to further investigate the immune response to find targeted treatments.

Yeah, so it's at a really exciting stage because there have been some recent technological advances that mean that we can measure immune gene activity in the hospital setting really quickly so that it could actually be used to inform the treatment of individual patients.

So we want to take our gene activity test into a clinical trial so that we can then investigate which drugs should be given to which particular subset of patients.

A new study suggests self-driving cars are safer than those driven by humans.

Well, except at dawn, at dusk or when turning, that is.

Research from the University of Central Florida in the US found autonomous vehicles to be involved in fewer accidents except for in certain situations.

During low-light conditions, self-driving cars were over five times more likely to have an accident than those with a human.

Also, while turning, self-driving cars were nearly two times more likely to have an accident.

After a new law passed last month, self-driving cars could be on UK roads by 2026.

Let's go to the ads.

Coming up, backlash against a film written by ChatGPT and McDonald's viral AI drive-through mishaps.

Welcome back.

The Prince Charles Cinema in London has canceled the screening of a film which was written by artificial intelligence following a public backlash.

The venue in Soho was due to host the world premiere of The Last Screenwriter this weekend, a movie created by ChatGPT.

But when concerns were raised over the use of AI in place of a writer, the cinema announced that the screening had been axed.

Created by Peter Luizzi, the movie had been marketed as the first feature film written entirely by AI.

And finally, now on Tech and Science Daily, we often talk about the huge advancements happening with artificial intelligence.

But it is still having teething problems in some areas, as US McDonald's restaurants have been finding out.

The fast food giant is removing its AI-powered ordering technology from its drive-throughs in the States, after a number of its comical mishaps have gone viral on social media.

Videos have been circulating, ranging from one customer receiving bacon-topped ice cream, to another mistakenly getting hundreds of dollars worth of chicken nuggets.

In a statement, McDonald's said, We have decided to end our current global partnership with IBM on AOT beyond this year.

However, it added, it remained confident the tech would still be part of its restaurant's future.

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