SVRGN Weekly Digest #8 š«
Starship coasts in space, Figure fills the dishwasher and crypto launches a cat wif a bag, what a time to be alive
Starship takes to the skies, in its third test, a silent witness to humanity reaching for expansion. It's not just technology that propels it into the night, but a collective dream, a shared aspiration for flight. Beyond the earth, beyond the air, into the cosmic sea, it sailsāa beacon of hope that tells a tale. A tale of reaching out to the unknown, of touching the stars, of making the universe our own. Donāt let media reports on failure trick you, weāll get there.
š¤¼Ā People
PB - CEO and founder at ACME
Engineer to the core, and the type who likes to blow stuff up, this founder is not your average lifestyle business b2b SaaS, dogwalking app builder. He built hypersonics, and is now on to his next adventure to build manufacturing capability in space. We spent 2h together whiteboarding propulsion systems, re-entry vehicle airbags and Brayton cycles.
RS - CEO and founder at Tech corp
We had amazing discussions internally and with RS on the morality of technology, and the responsibility we have as multipliers of the good and bad in governments, companies and individuals. Technology should be neutral, but in practice the implications of sufficiently powerful technology ends up having negative consequences. Weighing the good against the bad is an incredible fine line. If you want to debate philosophy of technology - hit us up anytime.
šĀ Companies
Fora - Niche marketplaces
Status: Stealth
Source: Referral
Founders: Connor Martin
Why itās cool:
There are thousands of niche marketplaces who don't have a native and efficient place to transact, e.g., dog breeders, vinyl collectors, stylish menswear enthusiasts. Mostly they resort to general platforms like eBay and similar, which doesn't serve them natively and doesn't do the community and expertise-aspect justice. Connor (ex-Uniswap and Medallion) set out to solve this problem.
A platform that generates marketplaces, Fora is a home for the hyper-niche, sensitive, valuable, or otherwise unusual.
Modulus labs (Portco) - Accountable magic/provable AI
Status: Seed
Source: Inflection portfolio since >1y
Founders: Daniel Shorr, Ryan Cao, Nick Cosby
Why itās cool:
Modulus just proved the world first LLM and settled it onchain! Check out this incredibly well vibing video here (sound on) where they explain what they did.
š”Ā Ideas & Science
New SUAVE docs dropped for alpha testnet
āSUAVE, the Single Unifying Auction for Value Expression, is a decentralized platform for fast and private off-chain computation.ā
AI hacking and why all models will leak
Looking at this paper from Google Deepmind, ETH Zurich, U of Wa, OpenAI and McGill, itās likely that keeping your model hidden behind an API is impossible. Not that there arenāt defenses against the attack in the paper, but because it just seems likely that models are very hard to control, and people (+ AI) are very creative when it comes to breaking things. The question is if there will be any value left in hiding your model long term anyway š¤·
Actual humanoid robots are coming
Weāre 95%+ sure there will be in-action usage of humanoid robots in the next 5 years. The inflection points to look out for are:
Stochastic AI is good enough to generalize across untrainable scenarios (soon there)
or
Training in simulation gets us close enough to cover 99% of the domain
Control systems and mechanics of gripping, moving and handling are cheap and integrated with AI system
For them to become really widespread, and actually increase productivity of humanity at scale, weād need the paradigm of Figure, 1X, Tesla, Sanctuary (who does a great pod btw) to switch from high-end, filled to the literal ears with sensors, >$100k per robot, hydraulics driven to lower-cost, roomba-costing, physics heuristics-driven robots. Thereās a great thesis in Sanctuary on why we need embodied AI to reach AGI, maybe theyāre right, maybe we only need superhuman language understanding generalized to get to AGI.
Guess who the voice of the robot is - a hint: itās not Rob Lowe, and not Ashton Kutcher.
Happy weekend, happy pi-day retroactively!