SVRGN Weekly Digest #10 💫
Blast hack, nuclear backing, pyramids and other great things this week!
There’s too much happening to cover everything this week. We have new models emerging from nowhere, $62M worth of funds stolen on blast, AND THEN RETURNED by a North Korean hacker. Everyone was wondering if pac-man (yes that’s def the founder’s legal name, look it up) should revert the state and point out the obvious - that Blast, and Base for that matter, are not trustless in any way. The state of Michigan decided to lend $1.5B to restart a nuclear plant ❤️ ⚛️ ❤️ and we know more about how cracks w
Also, in case you missed it, we put out our thoughts on what is interesting in crypto today. Please have a read and let us know what you think!
🤼 People
Raphaël Millet - Co-founder at Mithril Security
Mithril Security started out as the confidential AI company chosen by OpenAI as the first recipient of their cyber grant. Then one of the co-founders decided to do a weekend hack project, and it blew up!
Tong Pow - Founder of Hologram Labs (portfolio)
We caught up with Tong just after the team had had their off-site at NVIDIA’s GTC. Hologram is leading 3D character generation and activation, starting in the crypto space with collabs with the most renowned NFT projects. Not only are they a lot of fun, and creative, but smart like hell. Smart attrac smort, so they have been able to attract some really strong AI talent.
🚀 Companies
Brightside - psychological anti-virus
Status: Pre-seed
Source: Network
Why it’s cool:
Data privacy will become indistinguishable from cybersecurity on a consumer level. We will be manipulated across every channel by superhuman agents and the only protection is other agents with our best interest in mind.
OpenInterpreter - Open-source interactions with anything
Status: Bootstrapped
Source: Discord
Founders: Killian Lucas and potentially some others
Why it’s cool:
This changes how we interact with our devices. I know, speech has a way lower bandwidth than the visual system of the brain, but some of us are so overclocked it’s not a bad thing to have to wait a little. Seriously though, this is worth 10x Humane AI pin or Vision Pro. And it costs $99. Do anything through a voice interface.
Stealth - Robotic arms in space
Status: Bootstrapped
Source: Secret slack group
Founders: Stealth
Why it’s cool:
Humans are very expensive to maintain. Especially in space. They need space (with air preferably), safe transport and all kinds of things. Robots are much better! They can be used to refuel, maintain, assemble and pinch stuff really hard, in space potentially. There is a real case for this, I promise. Apparently some states are hiding their spy satellites in other large constellations, and so the other side needs to go up really close and have a look at the satellite, and maybe even do stuff to it with a robot arm.
💡 Ideas & Science
LLM agents are better at fact checking than humans
Hah, take that encyclopedia-wielding boomers!
Eth-creator and general good guy Vitalik (though he donated 600m+ worth of dogcoins to a decel society) makes an effort to put the memecoin powers to good use. What if we fund something actually good with the stupid fun stuff that is memecoins, instead of horrible racist ideas? Just a thought.
Backdoor in libraries leading to SSH server compromise (this is bad)
This is for the deep cyber nerds out there. The rest of us can just cross our fingers and stop running Alpine, TalosOS, or NixOS I guess 🤷
It’s a fairly reasonable question to ask yourself “why are we building all this” and “why am I taping tin foil to my windows and walls, creating a Faraday cage, running a noise machine at 110% volume and writing down 24 random words on a piece of paper with my life’s saving attached to them only to burn it and eat the ashes”. Or you know, just store your money under the mattress. Polynya, the long-time ethereum philosopher has has enough with the nihilism and casino-machine that is crypto.
See Alex’s piece at the top for our thoughts.