(Re)Share | #35 - Welcome robotic overlords!
Robotics | Starship launch | Creative AI | Military drones | Carbon capture | BCI
Shameless plug
Investing in: Robotics - As readers will know I’ve been on quite a robotics tear lately. My 2024 personal project has been experimenting with thesis-led investment thinking and I've started with mechanical overlords. This post represents my first foray into that world and while there’s still a lot of WIP at some point I just had to ship. Thanks to the breakthroughs in generative AI and language models a renewed optimism has taken hold in a space that's had multiple false starts. This distillation of my investigation covers lessons from the past, promising areas of investment and some of my favorite research that I've read in the past months. I hope readers enjoy and if anything resonates with a founder you know please send them my way.
Shameless plug (part deux)
Several weeks ago I shared my wife’s US cover for her third book, The Hitchcock Hotel in a not-so-discreet attempt to shill. British readers, your time has come with the UK cover now unveiled. Purchase at your bookstores or global marketplaces near you. It comes out in October and we both know the weather will be shit so you’re going to need something to do indoors.
Stuff Worth Sharing
Constellation prize - Two weeks ago SpaceX broke another PB. Starship, SpaceX’s passenger vehicle, and Super Heavy Booster, the largest rocket ever built, successfully achieved vertical velocity. Like past launches, this third test flight ended in a fiery blaze of glory but it did check off several technical milestones and flew farther than ever before. Beyond reaching suborbital coasting (i.e., achieving insufficient altitude/speed for low Earth orbit) the launch also demonstrated an ability to transfer cryogenic fuel between tanks and reignite engines. SpaceX is on an absolute tear and is reshaping the Overton window surrounding the lunar economy, Mars colonization and interplanetary existence. Artemis 3 here we come! (Launch recording here)
Ghost in the machine - NVIDIA’s GTC developer conference is now behind us and nothing got more buzz than GR00T, a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots. Humanoid robotics is a hilariously divisive topic in VC circles. Just two weeks ago I was at a dinner which erupted into a cordial but animated debate on the category’s future - spoiler alert no one has a f**king clue. Actually this might be a post in itself, so watch this space. Either way, the scale of NVIDIA’s deployment already is extremely impressive. In effect they’ve built a v1 operating system that can already be integrated into most of the leading humanoid manufacturers today. The OS includes a modular chaining system for a range of optical / perception hardware and physical manipulation systems. It also shared details on the Jetson Thor robotics chip, purpose built for generative simulation and workflow modeling. (Additional coverage here)
Creative accounting - Sora is back in the news, this time with the unveiling of several short film collaborations with directors / producers. “Augmented intelligence”, the idea that AI will be an enhancement of human potential, is commonly used to dispel job theft fears but this release is a great example of validity. These shorts were created solely with Sora and in a fraction of time / cost vs. traditional filming. My personal favorites are Air Head and Alex Reben’s sculpture work. Steph and I have a not so long term desire to start a production company and tools like Sora make that feel much more feasible.
Monkey see, monkey do - Covariant, one of the leading companies in applied robotics, specifically pick and pack operations, recently unveiled their RFM-1 model aimed at reasoning capabilities for manipulation. This represents one of the first full-scale commercial platforms to bringing the dynamic adaptability we’ve seen in the research world over the past several months (many listed in my post above). The article suggests there are still capability gaps to overcome due to the drought in training data, but Covariant’s scale of warehouse deployment gives a strong advantage in being able to overcome said hurdle.
Regulate to the party - The EU finally passed its marquee tech regulation effort, the AI Act. We’ve covered this legislation before through it’s multiple proposals and iterations (here, here) but now it’s official and in effect come May. Broadly I’m supportive of the regulation effort - not for the actual effectiveness of the act, which it won’t be - but its spirit of transparency and improved disclosure. Like GDPR, I expect it to take at least a year before companies really get their heads around the impacts to their business, but that provides an opportunity for nimble startups to overtake their slower incumbent rivals. If only there was a system to support that governance…cough…cough…Platformed.
Droning out the noise - If you have trouble sleeping already I suggest you skip this article because the murderbots are coming. Defensetech is having a moment and the DoD has never been more active in its pursuit of new technologies. Among them is a new effort to catalyze a wave of low cost military drones. The battles in Ukraine and the ongoing tension with China has reshaped the relative advantage traditional technological superiority and military leadership is taking note. Among the topics described the most interesting was the Replicator project, an ambitious effort to bring online thousands of low cost drones in order to overcome China’s massive manpower and natural advantages in the Pacific theater. Like most weapons programs, the intent of this investment is to create deterrents for conflict but regardless of your politics a world of (semi)autonomous weapons is a scary one.
Captain Planet - A port-focused geo-engineering startup, Ebb Carbon, is on the brink of launching a new carbon dioxide removal (CDR) pilot plant. The effort, dubbed Project Macoma, is designed to pump hundreds of thousands of liters of seawater and convert them into biocarbonate for long term C02 storage. Like other sequestration projects we’ve discussed, Ebb has leveraged pre-sold carbon credit futures as a monetization strategy, which I find increasingly interesting as a source of alpha. Like all CDR efforts today, scale remains a challenge as does the understandable resistance to environmental risk. Still this is one of the more promising solutions because of the ubiquity of seawater and the general co-location of hydrogen demand.
It’s not Kosher - Massachusetts General Hospital announced the world’s first successful transplant of a genetically-edited pig kidney into a human. 62-year-old ‘Rick’ Slayman, who lives with end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) and had already received a transplanted kidney but began experiencing organ rejection in 2023. For those lucky enough to not be familiar, organ transplants are a massive problem. 100,000 people in the U.S. await an organ for transplant and 17 people die each day waiting for an organ. Kidneys are the most common organ need and it’s a topic close to my heart. My Uncle was the lucky recipient of a kidney transplant a few years ago, which I’m very grateful to say has been a complete success. I shared this article with him, and let’s just say, he was less than interested in the suidae option.
America’s Next Top Model - AI darling and IPO hopeful Databricks unveiled DBRX, a fully open source LLM which outperformed many leading models on a number of benchmarks. Databricks is a long time champion of open source and believes DBRX can be a catalyst for widespread enterprise adoption because companies won’t be forced to share their sensitive data. While the company was tight with details, they suggest that the stellar performance was a result of mixture of expert (MoE) architecture and highly curated, quality data rather than the internet-scale ingestion that larger players have broadly adopted. These approaches have improved utilization of the underlying hardware by a reported 30 - 50%.
Mind games - Neuralink released a heart-warming video with its first BCI patient. Noland Arbaugh, a quadriplegic, was shown playing chess “just by thinking”. The long-term potential of this form of assistive technology is profound—not just for the millions of humans with physical restrictions but also for the untold capabilities we might unlock as partial cyborgs.
Portfolio Flex
Metaview announced a $7 million Seed round led by Plural Platform.
discreet*