Happy Bitcoin Halving Day! (to those who celebrate) This week was a whirlwind, internally, with a tonne of meetings with interesting people, preparing for our next big event, and also, today I saw tanks and plasma, not in combination though. Good times.
š¤¼Ā People
Sherman Williams - Managing Partner at AIN ventures
Sherman is a mission driven (tm) naval academy grad, intelligence veteran, ex-IB and deep tech investor out of NYC. We had a great conversation about what makes a great founder, crypto investing and the dual use sector. AIN Ventures authors annual dual use reports, hereās the 2023 one.
Robert Fink - CTO at Helsing AI
We are preparing a not yet announced but awesome thing. AI on cheap hardware is cool, letās see what we can do.
šĀ Companies
Stealth - bimodal wheelbase robots
Status: not yet incorporated
Source: secret discord server of supreme ppl quality - ask for an invite
Founders: secret
Why itās cool:
One of the top robotics researchers in the world gives it a second go. This time with the learnings of the previous company he was forced to shut down. He drew the scale of economic sense of robotics in warehouse-situations for us as: low mobility, high activity (e.g., robot standing still moving picking stuff) to high mobility, low activity (like an autonomous forklift). Iām pretty sure thereās an optimum somewhere in between where humans just arenāt fast enough walking but also not willing to do detailed picking work.
ASTROLAB - Future of research and manufacturing in space
Status: Founded in 2023
Source: CAVI
Founders: Mathieu Chaize, Emeric Lhomme
Why itās cool:
In space manufacturing is not only cool (as in cooled by the lack of surrounding heat), itās also starting to become economically feasible, for some verticals. We need to figure out exactly what, and bet on Starship working out probably. Astrolab is founded by former Ariane group directors.
Index network - the semantic discovery layer
Status: pre-seed (just out of Tachyon)
Source: from our hackathon
Why itās cool:
Just like how we decoupled the social graph from the social media platform (monolith) with farcaster and DeSo, we can decouple discovery from individual content and recommendation engines through Index network. We met Seren and Seref at the hackathon we organized at EthCC last summer and were immediately struck by their sense for aesthetics in designing a better internet.
š”Ā Ideas & Science
More humanoid robots from Boston Dynamics
Itās happening, Iām telling you!
Llama 3 8B and 70B have been set free and theyāre GPT-4 level
Also, it seems Zuck didnāt think very very deeply about AI safety? While admirable to make the best models available to anyone for free, if we continue down this path, itās probably going to end badly very quickly, shortly after AGI is reached. Zuckerberg says āif everyone has access to it, and power isnāt concentrated, then weāre better offā, but doesnāt expand on how this helps with the problem of more people now having the power to do really bad things with AI in their hands, like bioweapons manufacturing. The same argument can be (should have been) applied in the interview with Emad Mostaque (ex CEO of Stability AI) who says āwe canāt beat centralized AI with more centralized AIā. How does decentralization automatically solve alignment?
Groq + Llama 3 70B does 240 tokens
This is insanely fast. And speed of generation matters for a bunch of use cases like CoT reasoning, not having to interrupt a response, not having to switch tabs for a millisecond to do something else while waiting, etc.
Nasa and Artemis nations are preparing for the Moon
Weāre going to the moon again, in case you missed it. Nasa is building a robodog to jump around and presumably be such a good boy, on the moon. SpaceX is building or at least Elon is talking about a Moonbase Alpha. Varda space industries also raised a $90B roundā¦