This week was a good one for tech startups. For a decade, almost all VC risk capital was poured into software applications. This was a great strategy for generating turns, but didn’t make a radically better world. This week, there were signs of that changing. Billions of dollars have been poured into companies embracing real-world inventions like robotics, scientific research, and new chips. Hell yeah! This is what makes tech great—all of us trying to invent a better future.
MY RESEARCH
So, is AI gonna kill us? Nate Soares and his co-author Eliezer Yudokowsky have spent over a decade arguing that we are all going to die because of artificial superintelligence. Their belief that an AI smarter than humans is so dangerous that if just one person makes it, we all go the way of Jeff Bezos’ hairline (extinct). They have a new book out called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies in which they argue their case to the general public. In this interview with Nate, I spend a decent amount of time poking around their argument, but we also time on why AI concerns have spawned at least four cults, whether we should bother to have kids, the temptation of hard drugs in light of thinking the apocalypse is nigh, and how to stop this potential calamity from occurring.
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Politics should be part of your corporate strategy. I am not a politics writer, but government lobbying is becoming an increasingly important part of Silicon Valley. Spearheaded by a16z, more and more players in Silicon Valley are utilizing connections to the federal government to accumulate power for their portfolios. While I don’t like that this is happening (free markets, corruption concerns, just build a better product, etc) it is happening now. The best example of this is TikTok, which is being handed over to Trump allies.
DATA YOU’LL DIG
Incestous growth. Nvidia announced an agreement to purchase $6.3 billion in cloud computing capacity from Coreweave. This cloud computing capacity will, of course, be done on Nvidia chips. Nvidia also owns about 7% of Coreweave’s equity. Nvidia’s goal here is to make sure that their revenue base isn’t overly reliant on OpenAI or other hyperscalers. Each of hyperscalers are in the process of developing their own chip ecosystem, so Nvidia wants a pure play, Nvidia chip alternative to offer to applications to use. Comically, Coreweave’s stock jumped 8% on the news of this. Based on where Coreweave’s stock is trading now, the value of its position in Coreweave improved by about $340 million.
Machines making machines. Lila Sciences announced a Series A funding round of $235 million at a $1.2 billion pre-money valuation. The company’s product is very cool. They have “an end-to-end platform—[where] AI agents can conduct every step of the scientific method and bring scientific superintelligence to life.” In practice, this looks like AI models being able to “generate hypotheses, design experiments, run them, learn from the results, and iterate” while also controlling the hardware. This is robots doing the thinking and robots doing the actual methods of experimentation. It is a wildly ambitious mandate that strikes me as something that sounds good, but is challenging to implement, but still, this is the sort of vision that makes me excited about startups and technology. More of this please! (And if you know anyone at Lila, I would love to write a longer profile about the company, please put me in touch!)
It’s robot time. One trend I’ve been closely tracking is the rise in robotics. There is a real excitement among investors in Silicon Valley for the category—despite nearly every company in the category having very little revenue. The previous generation of robotics companies struggled with cash management on at least three fronts: Robots are expensive to build upfront, and have long sales cycles and use-case customization. Plus, robots break all the time! But they are so technically advanced that your customer support needs to have a PhD from Stanford (i.e. is incredibly expensive). The bet with all these companies is that large language models and their associated training techniques remove the second class of problems. The models should allow the robots to flex from use-case to use-case relatively easily.
Two companies announced rounds this week as embodiments of that vision. Dyna Robotics raised a $120 million Series A, while Figure raised over $1 billion at a $39 billion valuation. Ironically, both companies have essentially identical use-cases on their websites (doing the laundry and factory work). I’ve heard of multiple other rounds of similar size that are not reported yet for other robotics companies. Again, more of this please! Humanity should be freed of manual, dangerous labor and I’d rather see VC dollars go towards this sort of big risk.
TASTEMAKER
Last week, I recommend staying off social media and losing yourself in some pulpy, easy reading, listening, and watching. To be honest, nothing has changed here. Our world is NUTS right now. Here’s what I’m escaping myself in:
Why are we eating slop food? Good Work is one of my favorite Youtube channels to turn on when I need a laugh. This week he takes a look at the rise of bowl-based restaurants like Sweetgreen, Cava, and Chipotle. Americans are addicted to fast-casual restaurants and this video does an entertaining job of explaining why.
The Brutal Business of Texas BBQ Keeping on our food theme, I loved this video from Modern MBA that explains the extreme competitive dynamics of smoked BBQ. The creator goes as far as scrapping the internet, performing his unique analysis, and goes into the field to interview various owners. It's a reminder that the only business worse than an email newsletter company is a restaurant. (It did make me excited for my Austin trip next year.)
These Delivery Drones Will Beat Amazon To Your Doorstep: Zipline is one of my favorite startups in the world. They’ve been using drones to deliver urgent medical supplies in Africa since 2016, and have now expanded into the U.S. to do commercial deliveries of (on theme) stores like Chipotle. They’ve done over a million deliveries and have a 99.9% reliability. Whenever I use Doordash, I force myself to say, “I’m making an immigrant be a burrito taxi.” Having a drone saves people from that tedious, dangerous work sounds like a win to me!
Stay safe, hug your loved ones.
Evan
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