SVRGN Weekly Digest #41 💫
Autonomy is everything
🤼 People
Jonas Lejon - critically acclaimed expert in cybersecurity
Jonas is one of Sweden’s most well-known cybersecurity experts, with a history of building companies and consulting others on how to avoid cyber-incidents. We chatted about crypto, GTM in cybersecurity (it’s harder than elsewhere), and how AI will change cybersecurity.
💼 Portfolio jobs board
This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:
🚀 Companies
[REDACTED] - Underwater drone systems
Status: pre-seed
Source: EDTH
Founders: Physicist, Mech. Eng., CS, EE
Why it’s cool:
Subsea cables are cut left and right, Russian submarines loiter (maybe) everywhere, the Arctic is opening up as a new trade or naval route, and our general understanding of the oceans will need to improve if we want to continue living next to them. [REDACTED] is building support systems for autonomous underwater vehicles, aka drones, such as charging stations and ways to get navigational information without surfacing.
[Redacted] - General autonomy SW for manipulation
Status: Pre-seed
Source: CAVI
Founders: ex NASA/JPL, ex Field AI
Why it’s cool:
Physical intelligence seem to be doing insanely well in the robotics SW/foundation model space, so knowing where to play in robotics/embodied intelligence is hard. But [REDACTED] have a special edge in so-called locomanipulation, meaning manipulating things from a moving platform. And even physical intelligence is using multiple models and fine-tuning on special things.
P-1.ai - Autonomous mechanical engineer
Status: Raised pre-seed
Source: CAVI
Founders: ex CTO of Airbus, ex Deepmind, ex Universe technologies
Why it’s cool:
A surprising amount of mechanical engineering work is digital today, mostly things like checking requirements, calculating stresses, running thermal or electrical simulations, etc. That means we can automate it and have agents do it for us. Paul and his team have been working on some interesting tech in the last couple of months. With their experience from running many large scale complex hardware engineering projects they should understand the customer.
💡 Ideas & Science
Top Value Added Chemicals from Biomass and Life support for long duration missions
The chart above is amazing. It was published in 2004 in a study to find alternatives to toxic or expensive to produce petroleum-based chemicals like adhesives, paint, etc. It’s also part of a 2021 presentation by John Hogan, Director of Bioengineering at NASA Ames Research Center on long duration life support - aka how to build a semi-permanent station on Mars.
Gwern Branwen - How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI's Trajectory
I feel like I’m posting every new Dwarkesh podcast here, but they’re just so good compared to other long-form interviews! OK, sometimes they fall into the SF-AGI-tech-bro caricature, but more often than not, they keep a good balance between approaching the person and maintaining a grand view of their topic at hand. This interview is with long-time internet writer and thinker Gwern Branwen (pseudonym) and covers everything from predicting scaling laws, wikipedia editor culture in the 00’s to rabbitholes.
Now that bitcoin is nearing $100,000 a piece, it might be time to take a refresher on why bitcoin wins, from Gwern in 2011. Bitcoin is an example of “worse is better” in that it’s an inelegant design, horribly inefficient cryptographers said already back then, in fact, but it still survives other solutions.
Meanwhile in memecoin-land and on the list of amusing, frustrating and generally degenerate things: A large fund launches a framework for building conversational agents that connect to twitter and discord, ok, nice. Then the “community” launches a token for an instantiation of said framework, called “eliza”. Big fund proceeds to launch own token with a “fairer” distribution under “ELIZA”. eliza proceeds to tank in value and ELIZA has $80M market cap. The new memecoin farming strategy is to scrape github for any forks of the ai16z repo and then watch pump.fun for launches... Not financial advice, or even advice on what to spend your time on, honestly. This is the energy drink of your informational diet.
