The Monthly Beat - March '24 Edition
A recap of the most interesting news from February 2024, plus some extras for the months ahead.
Good daylight savings morning to you, and welcome back to the Monthly Beat! Hopefully, you aren’t too affected by the time change to enjoy this newsletter.
Apologies for the week of lag on this one. Some March news made it a little difficult for me to get the February news rounded up. I’ll have more on that in next month’s post, but for now, let’s talk about what happened in February!
All companies mentioned are local to Pittsburgh, unless otherwise noted.
Here’s what happened in February:
PublicSource published an article exposing the billions in military funding CMU receives for AI and drone technology development. Some students are protesting the university’s acceptance of these funds, as well as its longstanding partnership with Lockheed Martin. It’s an explosive article (military pun intended) and definitely worth a read.
Speaking of the government, Monroeville-based Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s supercomputer has been selected as one of six supercomputers to participate in a project exploring trustworthy AI. The project will be led by the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Pilot (a really long, government name), which is a subsidiary of the U.S. National Science Foundation (a shorter government name). I’ve seen a lot of takes out there saying that the U.S. government is behind on AI research, so it’s encouraging to see a Pittsburgh company getting the ball rolling.
In case you didn’t have enough AI news already, the Pittsburgh Technology Council held their annual Beyond Big Data AI/ML Summit. NEXT Pittsburgh highlighted key takeaways from the event in this article.
Cloud service provider Expedient, which is headquartered at Nova Place on the North Side, is opening a new data center in Ohio. The site can support 33,000 physical servers with 3 Megawatts of power capacity, which will be increased to 7.5 MW in the future, thereby making it the company’s largest and most powerful site in Ohio.
SeeGrid launched its new Autonomous Buffer Management Solution, which essentially helps warehouses move workers and goods around more efficiently, along with a new autonomous lift truck. Reading between the lines on this announcement, one negative side effect of these products is that some warehouse workers could lose their jobs. But it also seems like it could potentially increase warehouse safety, which is great considering some companies are caring less and less about safety.
Remember those PNC layoffs last year? It looks like PNC is now putting $1 billion towards new branches in Austin, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Miami and San Antonio, as well as renovating existing locations. Coincidence? You decide!
On a more fun note, Ansys renewed its partnership with Oracle Red Bull Racing. The racing organization will use Ansys simulation technology to design the most reliable car possible ahead of this year’s F1 season.
Lastly, and somewhat off-topic, I know a good number of folks locally who are advocating for 4-day work weeks. None of them have had success at their companies yet, so it’s pretty funny that the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police has beaten local tech companies to the punch by implementing a 4x10 work schedule. Does your company do a 4-day work week, and if so, do you recommend it? Let me know in the comments!
For the months ahead:
PyCon US will be in Pittsburgh, May 15–23. There will be tons of talks, tutorials, job opportunities, and more for Python programming language users at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. Register here. I’ll be there!
Local frontend dev Brad Frost is throwing Frostapalooza on August 17th, a benefit concert featuring the musical performances of several other local devs. See the full lineup and get tickets here!
I’m looking for guest writers and guest podcasters! Do you have a local Pittsburgh tech topic you’d like to wax poetic about? Hit me up! Spoiler alert: It’s not a paid gig, but I would be more than willing to host or repost your piece if you want to publish it somewhere else as well.
Thanks so much for reading. Hope you have a great rest of your weekend!
—Austin