(Re)Share | #31 - My actually better, better half
Clinic Trial Pathways | Solar Flares | Vision Pro | Robotic Training | Deep Fakes
Another big week of exciting product releases, inspiring research and the long tail of weird / wonderful / terrible applications of technology - let’s get to it.
Shameless Plug
Keeping you in suspense - But before we get to our normal deep tech coverage, please allow me a brief moment to shamelessly shill my family’s wares. The cover of my far more talented wife's third book is out and it's a doozy. Fans of thrillers, Hitchcock, unreliable narrators or indirectly supporting me financially should pre-order ASAP. You can find the exclusive cover release on Entertainment Weekly and you can pre-order in the US or UK.
Stuff Worth Sharing
Betting the pharm - One of the more interesting areas of personal education over the last few years has been getting my head around the distribution realities of pharmaceuticals and biotechs. Despite loads of incredible innovation (protein folding, CRISPR/CAS9, etc.) the go-to-market pathway is extremely static. This interview provides a really solid overview, not just of regulatory constraints that drive it, but also where the viability of many of the more hyped up modalities actually sit, at least in the near term. For my investor friends that are bio-curious this is a very good use of time.
Bi-polar - Fun fact #1, the sun has magnetic poles just like Earth. Fun fact #2, magnetic poles can flip! On Earth it occurs every few hundred thousand years but for the sun it’s 11. At its core, the sun fuses together hydrogen atoms, forming helium and releasing a massive amount of energy in the forms of light, heat and plasma (gas so hot it has an electrical charge). It’s theorized that this plasma moves around the interior of the sun via currents similar to our oceans so when the poles flip havoc ensues. More specifically solar flares and coronal mass ejections. I’ll spare you the scientific detail but the article does a great job summarizing for those interested. We may have a flip this year and that could seriously f**k up our more critical equipment - communications satellites and energy grid to the tune of, and I’m quoting Lloyd’s of London here, trillions.
Eye candy - Apple released the Vision Pro into the wild and it struck quite an optic nerve(😏). Regardless of your Apple fanboy status the device itself is beautiful and the capabilities are impressive. There are loads of reviews across Twitter but I liked journalist Joanna Stern’s from WSJ and from Stratechery writer Ben Thompson’s . I see(😏) a lot of productivity potential, though Ben’s pretty dismissive of that in the v1. But most interesting question is whether this release will reinvigorate the AR/VR investment appetite. Some think this could be the catalyst for a new category summer but I’m not that blind confident(😏). Apologies for all the cornea puns(😏).
Need more input! - I know a went a little heavy last week with the robotics research but just this last one please. While it a bit academically dense, this wide-ranging research overview covers the leading methodologies, challenges and open questions of applying foundational within the robotics domain. The leading examples of success in Language-conditioned learning and model-chained task planning (pages 9-13) were among the most interesting as was the potential solutions to data scarcity and performance latency obstacles. Takes a good 90 minutes to get through but a good investment to be sure.
Now we’ve got bad blood - Deepfakes are not a new topic here, nor is my continued (though still unallocated) investment interest in AI authentication and content safety systems. Deepfake / revenge porn is a particularly terrible manifestation of Gen AI that are broadly unable to mitigate. Last week a flurry of AI-generated, sexually explicit images of the world’s biggest pop star proliferated the internet and shit went down. Some times it takes massive zeitgeist moments to unblock our collective will to action and if Taylor Swift doesn’t make that cut what will?
Oh, the places you’ll go! - This was a fun read if you nerd out to market analysis. Doug O’Laughlin of Fabricated Knowledge attempted to estimate the relative potential of LLMs if you believe the narrative that AI is the new internet. It took 27 years to go from 0% to ~70% in global penetration with the web so if comparing to Gen AI today we’re in the very early days. Approximately ~21 million ChatGPT users this year, which he roughly doubles to include Microsoft enterprise and the collection of smaller (though still very relevant) tools like Anthropic, Perplexity, and Gemini, etc. Of course real adoption is anyone’s guess but it’s pieces like this that make those $100M+ “pre-seed” rounds somewhat tolerable.
For the crater good - A Seattle-based company, Interlune, raised ~$15M to "harvest natural resources from space to benefit Earth and establish an in-space economy.” They’re mining the moon to lay the foundations of a lunar economy! I’m a very proud European deep tech investor but when investors ask me the difference in the geos, this is my new answer.
Standards and practices - OpenAI announced that they will be adhering to the C2PA watermarking standard for all images generated starting next week. We covered this authentication movement in past issues (see: Don’t touch my stuff) but the distribution that’s gained with OpenAI signing on is massive. This could have a transformational impact on the global AI safety discussion (especially political election influence) and the macro Gen AI community at large.
Portfolio Flex
Getting to second base - It's easy to find ambitious claims of how AI is going to save lives but it's much more rare to hear from real people who actually proved that claim true. This is an incredibly uplifting story of a UK woman who's life was saved because Kheiron Medical Technologies identified her breast cancer when radiologists missed in. Because of Kheiron she was able to detect and treat her disease years before she would have otherwise.