Hope you enjoy this weeks selection of our explorations!
🤼 People
Aaron Mandell - Water and Energy serial founder at Polpis systems, Wacomet, Quidnet Energy, AltaRock Energy, GreatPoint Ventures
Aaron is currently working on a Nicaraguan desalination plant, an open source data initiative for geothermal sites, and a novel way to do deep geothermal wells without the need for multiple wells. According to Aaron, the cheapest way to do desalination is with solar energy, plus heat as a second cycle to get higher efficiency out of the brine. Geothermal is at an inflection point of potentially becoming irrelevant with decreasing costs across most other renewable energy sources, and the reason is cost of wells. If we can be more sure of where to drill, and that we need fewer wells, the economics change.
Satyam Goel - Product engineer and co-organizer of the European Defense Tech Hackathon in Copenhagen
Satyam was one of the 150+ participants at the Munich edition of the defense tech hackathon we organized in June this year. He was inspired to organize the same thing for his home town, Copenhagen. Denmark is set to invest double digit billion Euro worth of danish crowns in defense tech in the coming years and has set the priorities for defense as high at par with sustainability.
💼 Portfolio jobs board
This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:
Senior engineer at Ora → email founder[at]ora.so
🚀 Companies
Stealth - distributed aperture radar
Status: bootstrapped
Source: stealth
Founders: stealth
Why it’s cool:
Getting better high resolution at the physical level is paramount for safety protocols in autonomous systems. By putting the radar sensors in a distributed fashion, you get a synthetically high aperture, which increases the resolution (it’s physics, ya know).
Privsov - Survival companion for extreme conditions
Status: Stealth
Source: CAVI
Founders: Stealth
Why it’s cool:
If we see phones as extensions of ourselves, and experience loss, or phantom pains, when not having access to e.g., maps, communications or translation software, imagine not having access to super intelligence once the apocalypse hits. Or when you meet a bear (brown or black?) and don’t have reception.
💡 Ideas & Science
Quantum Punks by Alex Obadia and Nicola Greco <3
Our friend Alex has been going deep into quantum lately with his colleague Nicola, and they think it’s time to form a new movement - like cypherpunks, but quantum. There are so many unexplored use cases of pretty achievable quantum cryptography that break everything we thought we knew about how the internet works. Check out the “resource” page for more. If you’re building something in this realm → you know what to do
“Synthetic data is nearly as effective as real data…”
Getting synthetic data right is crucial for scaling intelligence at this point. We simply either don’t have the data we need for foundation models, or it’s already been used. This paper on a math-solving 7B parameter model comes to the conclusion that synthetic data is nearly as good as the real thing. Andrej Karpathy said something similar in the podcast below when talking about how we can make better intelligence.
Andrej Karpathy interviewed at “No priors pod”
Andrej is always worth listening to! He gives a small insight into his next venture - “Eureka” - an education platform for learning AI. Some tidbits that hit home for us:
Tesla is a robotics company, not a car company
“I rode a Waymo 10 years ago! It was really good. But it still took us 10 years to get the streets because of the amount of edge cases and complexity.”
Education in the future will be for entertainment
“Learning is like going to the gym for the brain”
The educations that he’d recommend today’s kids to attend are those that teach you to manipulate symbols, not train the memory - i.e., maths, physics, CS
“How to save the world” Palmer Luckey interview at Pirate Wires
This is after the recent $1.5B raise by Anduril, led by Founders Fund. It features a lot of uncomfortable truths, some pearl-clutching opinions, but mostly also US nationalism. Especially the fact that Luckey says cost-plus contracts would benefit Anduril more, yet they STILL need to do things differently to show that it can be done, is an example of nationalism over capitalism. They’d probably kill the incumbents, but choose not to to.