An Interview witch Marjorie Hamelin, Founder & CEO - US Outreach

Marjorie has been an advocate for European excellence in the San Francisco Bay Area for 30 years both as a Director at Greater Geneva Bern area and the founder of U.S. Outreach in 2017, a consulting boutique specialized in B2B strategic matchmaking for European brands. Marjorie has graciously agreed to answer our interview questions. Read more about Marjorie here, and don't miss her panel: How to reach a new international market from Luxembourg on June 26th at 12:30 PM on the PureTech District Stage.

What has, so far in 2024, been the biggest surprise to you in technology?

My biggest surprise has been riding in a driverless car in San Francisco in total confidence. That car has a total of 19 cameras, providing 360 degree vision, LIDAR sensors, radar and amazing computational power.

What do you expect will be announced in 2024, and by whom?

I expect a wider rollout of self-driving cars by Waymo, and a comeback of GM’s Cruise.  I also expect a ChatGPT 5 model by OpenAI.

Which five companies should we watch in 2024, and why?

I would recommend watching these 5 Silicon Valley based companies:

1.Waymo: leading the charge in autonomous driving technology. Their self-driving cars are transforming the future of transportation by providing safer, more efficient, and accessible mobility solutions through advanced AI and ML.  There are about 200 cars in circulation in San Francisco today.

2.Groq: Groq offers fast LLM inference for Gen AI, and is transforming AI and ML with its revolutionary tensor streaming processor, which delivers unmatched speed and efficiency in AI computation, significantly outpacing traditional GPUs. Their cutting-edge technology accelerates complex data processing tasks, enabling breakthroughs in various high-performance computing applications.

3.Cerebras: designs the largest chip in the world.  It contains 2.6 trillion transistors and covers more than 46,225 square millimeters of silicon.  As a result, neural networks that in the past took months to train, can now train in minutes.

4.Scale AI: just raised 1 billion, valued at 14 billion, is the data engine for OpenAi.  Scale AI plays a key role in creating LLM and accurately labeling text, images, video and voice data. The startup also creates and fine-tunes data sets.

5.Stem: Since “artificial intelligence will consume 10 times as much power in 2026 as it did in 2023” (as predicted by the International Energy Agency) Stem is a distributed energy resource optimization software. It helps take advantage of the full potential of clean energy assets at scale. 

What do you know about Luxembourg?

I look forward to returning to Luxembourg, my childhood playground. You could say I am an Arcelor Mittal baby since I was born in the region (Metz) and my Dad’s entire career has been in the steel industry (Sollac, Usinor and then Arcelor). I have now lived in San Francisco for the past 30 years and I know that SF based companies like Wells Fargo (being the first US bank to establish a presence in Luxembourg in 1968) but also Paypal and Airbnb have chosen Luxembourg as their European HQ.