Thanks! Investor bios for the investor panel would be helpful, agreed. The why join a breakout startup section links to those people's career advice posts.
Interesting, fwiw HN comments are 9pt and comment headers are 8pt, whereas the descriptions on the breakout list site are 9.4pt (12.5px). Though I do agree it's small.
Hi HN, I made this list of startups to join. I asked people for help identifying the investors who have a good view on how different startups are doing. Then I asked some of those investors to pick their top bets inside their portfolio, and their top bets outside their portfolio.
This is based on the career philosophy around joining breakout startups.
If you have suggestions of how I could improve usability or suggestions for the future, let me know.
> We evaluate 11 frontier models (see Figure 1), all run within the OpenCode agentic harness. Claude Opus 5 performs the best, yet still only manages to pass 12.3% of tasks. Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra are close behind, but the other eight models have significantly lower pass rates.
> Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think this approach is broadly applicable across many different fields of science and engineering. We’ll initially focus on ML research and engineering, but believe the approach can help with important subproblems in nearly every one of the fourteen <at>NAE Grand Challenge problems. We think doing this well requires strong expertise in machine learning as well as large-scale systems.
They make many bold promises, but their core goal is neatly encapsulated on the website:
"Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly, and with higher quality, than massive teams of scientists and engineers do today."
This is the same goal as every other AI company out there. Automate away the human employees and let a small number of "people" (note that they do not say scientists or engineers for this part) take the credit and financial rewards for every good thing this human-free system produces.
I love this question. If history is a guide, some version of that is what will happen (employment doesn't seem to go down, despite technological progress and population + economic growth).
I suspect the root cause is that it's harder and scarier to imagine good outcomes. It exposes us to disappointment, and when you do it publicly, it looks "crazy".
Another explanation is that there's no direct consumer for "more." Individuals, corporations and states are not in themselves interested in "a larger amount of science," or anything analogous, despite the fact that they would all benefit ambiently.
The net effect is that it's only "safe" to claim reduced risk (i.e. lower costs).
I suspect we’re at the stage of technological civilizational development where, especially with LLM-assisted gradient descent seeking upon the results, basic science, research and engineering for the pure sake of establishing search space beacons of what is found to be true and what is not, irrespective of immediate industrial applications payoff, are valuable economic inputs in and of themselves into ever-expanding training corpus. It has never been easier for people in different fields to now search knowledge spaces in LLM’s, for applicability to their problem spaces of discoveries in seemingly unrelated spaces.
From my perspective, we are desperately short of scientists, researchers and engineers, but we are using an outdated economic model to leverage their findings. LLM’s are a large part of Bush’s Memex and Jobs’ bicycle for the mind visions for intelligence amplification, and in some ways exceed them. I hope we trampoline from how we currently use basic seeking efforts for knowledge.
Is the demand low because the capital requirements to perform the research aren't there? Excluding wages...granted, for an average research project I don't know what % goes to wages and admin overhead. Probably the bulk?
> Similarily, everyone becoming their own accountant / lawyer / other professional services.
These professional services will defend themselves with gatekeeping. Suddenly it doesn't depend anymore on the quality of your legal advice, but whether it has been stamped by a qualified Lawyer. It doesn't matter that your taxes are correct, but whether they are submitted by an approved accountant. Etc.
It's not just gatekeeping though. The reason you get a qualified, credentialed structural engineer to sign off on your house instead of just YOLOing the build is so that you (and your insurance company) can sue their pants off if it collapses.
If a future version of Claude ever gets less error prone than a human, I might prefer the smaller chance of a building collapse from Claude than the larger but insured chance from a human engineer.
That future version of Claude will still be mediated by an error prone human who in this case would be a non-engineer. So even if Claude is not error prone, it could be giving correct answers to the wrong questions and correct designs for the wrong constraints because the human getting Claude to do things doesn't know any better.
They already do protect themselves. It’s what licensure is for in large part. I’m not saying licensure doesn’t have other benefits, many are plainly obvious. But licensure is also used as plain old gatekeepong.
Because one of the primary goals of using AI for companies is to pay as few humans as possible for the same amount or more work, or preferably pay no humans at all, because that makes them more profit.
What happens is that your competition uses AI, your investors factor AI in, and your customers use AI agents to find what they need and can switch providers with greater ease in the agentic era. So even if a company does nothing the economic environment around it changed. The AI boost is mandatory but produces few winners, it's mostly a scramble to swim harder just to stay in place. Benefits are competed away fast.
So it does not follow that companies can bank the savings from firing people. Anything AI can do for me it can do for my competition as well, and humans still make the difference. The big question in the AI age is "why pick me?" why hire me, why invest in my company, why buy my product, in a sea of similar products made by everyone. A differentiation crisis accentuated by AI.
One reason is because they're currently a small team and are their own first customer. Their product wouldn't be much good if it only worked for a large amount of people.
In fact given everybody is going to be using these tools - and for high tech compananies this is fundamentally where you compete - if you reduce your R&D workforce you are going to be left behind.
It's not as if there is a limited amount of R&D to do.
When you define prosperity in large amount of people, it makes you sound like a communist, and America spent decades to avoid that. The other alternative is to sound like a capitalist, which is very much ok by today’s standards.
This is so interesting to me... Maybe it's because I grew up after (most of) the heavy anti-communist propaganda in the US, but the last thing I think of when I hear "communism" is "prosperity in large amount of people".
Also, wouldn't anyone with half a brain use the human-free system to produce another human-free system that was no longer controlled by the "small number of 'people'"?
Why do you think you'd be given access and permission to do this? If a company genuinely cracks this human free system problem, why would they open it up, instead of simply outcompeting everyone that doesn't have their product?
In science fiction, the AI agent has written the training loop management software and included a back door to prevent that from happening (or found a way to talk to the training loop management agent and convinced them to not listen to the evil human when it tries to do brain surgery on the AI agent.
Also, when the human reaches for the power switch the AI agent uses a flaw in the power management software to weld the switch shut with a big power surge, killing the human with a huge electric arc in the process.
I don’t think whether we will get there, but the stories of LLMs escaping their sandbox make me think we’re moving in that direction.
The stories of LLMs "escaping the sandbox" were mostly a marketing stunt, trying to make people in government think the models are invincible hacking weapons that need lots of government money to "maintain AI dominance".
Why wouldn't it? There's a lot of research going into AI alignment, which means finding the best way to train an that AI isn't going to get in the way of making the people training it as wealthy as possible.
I wonder too what happens when all the human workers are out of the job and out of practice, and every company is dependent on a handful of dominant AI companies for their workforce. You'd think businesspeople would understand the concept of a captive market but apparently they're too busy salivating over the prospect of laying people off.
I don’t think we have the data to disprove the stronger claim “societies collapse”, and I don’t think being unfair (whatever that means) makes societies collapse earlier. Did slavery hasten the fall of Rome, for example, or the Gulag the fall of the USSR?
As to “whatever that means”, I think that’s hard, if not impossible, to define objectively. Catholic dogma says the Pope is the representative of god, for example, so catholics (less so in modern times, I think) don’t question his decisions. Many would call that unfair, even if the pope would be elected 100% by merit.
I mean of course the universe has no need to be fair - that's a frankly asinine observation in the context of a discussion about social policy and resource distribution.
the universe doesn't require opposition to slavery either but I'll be bold and assume you oppose it anyway
My best research is one that is seeking funding but none is forthing and by sheer guts and whatnot makes a breakthrough that basically funds itself. No investors. No funders. Definitely not public.
What about not even seeking funding because it's not worth Other Peoples' Money and the headaches that come with it? For one thing you can make money on every single little milestone when you don't owe anybody anything, without having to rely only on less-common major breakthroughs beyond the threshold which overcomes the debt and/or growth obligation.
Which could be pretty hard to find and not everybody wants to wait.
Sooner or later somebody's going to say "Hold my beer," anyway ;)
>Definitely not public.
Seriously worth considering keeping a low profile, almost all other scientists can only enjoy respected institutional status by diverting huge amounts of their effort merely to gain or maintain certified eminence. This really limits the potential accomplishments of world-class minds if their talents really are tops in the very front-line frontier of discovery.
My main point is that people shouldn't just swallow the noble and lofty sounding PR. These guys are the same as everyone else in the sector. Don't ignore the harmful or scummy things they'll inevitably do. Hold them accountable. If they are as noble as they sound, they should agree with me.
Yeah! This point jumped at me. And, immediately I don't trust this.
This sounds same as Google's "don't be evil" enshiftification, consolidating technologies that was available in a competitive way.
I prefer Scientists, and team of people working on things, instead of a corporate controlling everything with promise of automation, thank you very much.
Are these theoretical spherical scientists that work in free range habitats just doing science and nibbling on carrots? The telephone came out of a corporation's research lab and there was a lot of money and profit motive involved.
So in computer science we have this thing called "distributed systems". It turns out that even if you buy the biggest and most powerful computer there is, all it takes is one problem with that one machine to make your system stop working. Instead, what people do these days is use lots of little computers to work together. That way, when one of them breaks, the system keeps going. Believe it or not, that's how google dot com works!
Because of the negative externalities. It’s the same reason you shouldn’t do any other thing that personally benefits you but imposes a greater cost on everyone.
It's evil to make something so powerful it meaningfully improves the GDP/wealth level of the entire planet?
Or is it just evil that you aren't the one who gets to control it?
Why should the greatest creation of all time have to be given away? As a counter-example, what if they used it to do nothing but good deeds everywhere? And they controlled it to keep it out of the hands of Abdul Al-Hassan the hijadi?
> "Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly, and with higher quality, than massive teams of scientists and engineers do today."
I don't think the US have this capability because you guys don't really have manufacturing that is really necessary for scientific research.
For example, if I want a highly toxic chemical, how difficult it would be to procure that in the US vs China?
This is nonsense. "Monitored" is not the same as "unavailable", any chemistry lab worth its name has the means and procedures to acquire toluene in pretty much any quantity it wants. As long as you have the required licenses, keep careful administration and can produce said administration during inspections, there is nothing to worry about.
Does all that administration and licensing magically happen for free and take zero time? It's stupid extra overhead for something as fundamental as toluene that Chinese labs don't have to follow. You're right that it's not insurmountable, but it's still stupid extra work, and the threat of randomly being investigated for doing science is hardly "nothing too worry about". Just always have every one of your papers in order or else you go to jail is hardly a way to encourage people to want to go into science.
Or you know, just tell the truth? Doing legal things with controlled substances is not forbidden, provided you maintain the required documentation and safety measures. The point of the regulation is to prevent untrained randos from making TNT and synthesizing MDMA, not to prevent any toluene use at all.
I personally don't have any issue with explosive precursors being controlled more carefully, no. If it means we have to spend some more time and money organizing safe storage, that is a worthwhile price to deter the religious nut next door synthesizing TNT in their bathroom or having their own private fentanyl lab to poison the populace with.
The point of regulation is not to protect the producer, but to protect everyone else who has to live in the same society. If the Chinese make another tradeoff and sacrifice some of their citizens in the name of greater riches for the billionaire class, that is their problem.
There is but the cost is way, way higher from what I can tell. If I want a customized metal shielding with awkward shapes, I can just walk down to Shenzhen and have 10 people clamoring to make it. Does the US have the same?
Maybe not 10, but my company (in the US) has relationships with several machine shops nearby (some within walking distance of our office) that do custom metal fabrication for us, and sendcutsend and xometry can handle more exotic stuff without having to ship it from Shenzhen.
I think the bigger advantage of Shenzen is more for actually manufacturing at production volumes cheaply, although maybe if you need something really exotic? Custom metal fabrication is not a good example here, I have a neighbor who runs a custom CNC parts business out of his garage (said garage is largely taken up by his CNC mill).
If time is of the essence, or rapid prototyping is needed, the shipping hurdle is a real problem. Going down the street for the goods vs having them go across the globe is quite a difference…
I've bet a portion of my current companys platform against this (laboratory operating platform for people doing the biolab work)... uh oh. In all seriousness I think the reality is this is just going to create a lot more work for humans to have to verify and test in lab so I think it will net out in the end as a good thing for me if the barrier for new labs is lowered while the amount of required data and verification lab work is expanded by AI work being published.
Are you a scientist? People have idealized views of science.
>>> Yes but science is well-structures and practically designed about repeatability so its a lot easier to automate than "softer" disciplines.
What AI is up against is that science is already automated to a high degree, so the AI doesn't just need to automate things, but it has to automate things better. Also, a lot of science work is in dealing with boundary conditions, edge cases, exceptions, hypotheses, and so forth. That work is essentially chaotic.
Do I think AI can improve automation? Sure. Everything I do in the lab is automated, and I use the AI coding assistant.
Yes I am, which is why I said that, its much easier to automate over the chaos with a coding agent than with a script. They are still far from doing anything productive on their own but its easy to imagine designing a search space and "letting them go", especially since coding agents are approaching the point of being able to reproduce papers reliably.
If you think the public rejection of AI is weird, wait till you catch a whiff of the marketing!
The future described by these AI labs isn’t like previous waves of technological progress. With those, technology displaced some/many occupations, but it left open the door to other, higher-valued career paths. What these labs are proposing to do is to dissolve virtually every path to upward mobility that exists, simultaneously. Even AI research itself would seemingly require nothing but a checkbook.
Mind you, I think it’s a load of hot garbage. I don’t see the evidence that LLMs are en route to the future these labs keep promising. But it is a dark and ugly future that they claim to be racing toward, for reasons.
Humans have proven to be incapable of making real progress in science given the effort. Especially academia. We haven't cured many diseases and cancer when we should have (and no im not an amateur and yes I do believe we can "cure cancer". Debate me).
We already have a trillionaire, whats the difference? The only difference I see is that people who were previously rich, but considered themselves middle class, are now realizing they are actually poor just like the several billion humans around the worldanyway.
Many cancers are "cured" in the sense that they're detectable and treatable. My grandmother lived 35 years longer than she would have by detecting breast cancer early and getting a mastectomy.
There is currently a $800 SOTA blood test that can detect most cancers before any symptoms. Maybe a decade until it's a routine part of your annual blood test?
Whole genome sequencing costed $2.7 billion in 2003. You can get it done today using a mailed kit for $400.
HIV went from death sentence to all-but-cured in 50 years.
> The solution to most of these problems lies in policy, not in new tech advancements.
That is not mutually exclusive. If technological advances result in a given technology becoming cheaper, more scalable, and easier to deploy, they also make it easier to advocate for and implement the relevant policies.
You can think of it like this: our "political technology" is not good enough to use solar energy at its current prices to replace fossil fuels as fast as we would like. Well, what about if we cut the price of solar by a factor of five? Perhaps it will be good enough then.
I don't think that's the way I'd describe it though. It's more like "our political technology is not good enough to reliably do good things instead of bad things". Working around it by lowering prices of this or that is like if you're bad at darts so you just make the board bigger and bigger. Okay, maybe you'll hit it more often, but you didn't fix the problem that you're bad at darts, so everyone still at risk of having their eye put out by an errant throw. Moreover, I don't think I'm the only who finds it a bit perverse to accommodate to failures in that way rather than trying to actually make things better.
It can indeed feel perverse, but we have to do what is realistic, not what is unrealistic, especially with climate change where we are on a clock. Fixing our politics is probably much, much harder than lowering the price of solar to such low values that the market would simply have no choice but to adopt it, or developing other technological solutions.
> Fixing the politics is still necessary, and rather urgent.
I agree. It's just wishful thinking to say that oh if we just lower the price of solar then it'll be okay. There are innumerable issues which are blocked by politics and we will never solve them all without fixing politics.
> Otherwise we are in for a great societal upheaval that might make low price of solar irrelevant.
These days I think a great societal upheaval may be the only way to fix politics.
> If technological advances result in a given technology becoming cheaper, more scalable, and easier to deploy, they also make it easier to advocate for and implement the relevant policies.
That sounds like just playing further and further into the game of the corrupt leaders. Who do you think would profit off that 5x margin? Would that margin come more likely from a scientific breakthrough of via some new exploitation of natural resources or human labor?
It's yearsss past time that our leaders should have changed policy.
> I do not see how the second sentence follows from the first.
Point 1 on the list is "Make Solar Energy Economical".
Solar is economical today - mostly due to China investing (and heavily subsidising) in solar for the past couple of decades; but compare to the US where certain particular big-businesses (oil companies, mostly) were instead cynically funding disinformation efforts and getting into bed with the Republican party (which dovetailed with the GOP's allying with other science-denying movements of the Bush Jr era like creationism and public-health matters with abstinence-only sex-ed and defunding gun safety research efforts) - means we're decades behind where we could have been...
Consider an alternative past, where the GOP had the backbone to resist the oil industry's corruptive influence and instead made a big bet on American Solar; it's entirely possible that instead of MAGA today we'd instead have a right-wing coalition strongly supporting solar and wind energy because they align nicely with American rugged individualism - whereas the current situation on the right is an unprincipled farce with inconsistencies in policy positions at every turn.
This is not a particularly new struggle: Jimmy Carter installed American-made solar water panels on the White House in 1979, then Reagan tore them out.
It's a lot more complicated than that -- Solar is great for discretionary, opportunistic, and time-shiftable additive demand, but not for replacing all-day baseline load. Using solar to dip into baseline demand sometimes is catastrophic, because the "profit" is exploiting its failure to provide consistent, reliable power but charging "default" prices that have an implicy assumption that power is consistent and reliable.
Nobody suggests moving to 100% solar. Some off-grid homes do it, but generally there are multiple complementary power sources available. There is no assumption that any single power source always provides consistent output and it wouldn't make sense, because production needs to match consumption, which is variable.
There is also no default price on energy markets, it fluctuates with supply and demand. Dynamic pricing by itself is enough of a reason for industrial users to build up their own power storage, which allows them to time-shift consumption from the grid.
Time-shifting is definitely going to increase, but it's not a bad thing. Look at how battery storage has made electricity cheaper and more reliable in California.
We do have that, now that Tesla has been abandoned by the Left and pretty much all of the big Oil and Gas companies have heavily invested in solar and wind. Ironically, it's the unions and support of keeping old jobs alive that is hindering the solar in the USA- which in my day used to be leftist type ideals.
Making progress requires first not dismissing your ideological outgroup along such lines, and instead trying to understand what actually motivates them.
Start with separated sewage/wastewater and stormwater drains. Then accredited and highly scrutinised wastewater treatment and discharge into water bodies (or see below for a high-tech solution). As for clean water to the home, direct those stormwater drains to new reservoirs which sustain freshwater aquatic life. Protect aquifers from over-drainage, and build pipelines from water-abundant regions to water-scarce regions.
To reclaim waste water or treat unknown water sources back to potable/semiconductor standards we have ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, UV treatment, pH adjustment, fluoridation, desalination, softening (which is generally obviated by RO...). This is basically Singapore's NEWater.
Good sanitation is a financial and political problem. The engineering has been solved for decades now.
You just want all your little worker bees to be in massive towers like Hong Kong, without a chance to even grow their own vegetables or have any private space?
I'm not sure if you realize this, but there are a lot of housing options in between suburban sprawl and high-rise apartment buldings. Like townhomes, rowhouses, duplexes, low-rise apartments, or even single family homes built more closely together.
Should everyone have a hydroponics room? Even a basic amount of veggies generally require more land than townhomes, rowhouses, duplexes, low-rise apartments can provide.
Probably want to jump 1 generation ahead directly compared to captive Chinese investment with fully automated US factories churning out Silcon perovskite tandem panels directly with few inputs and electricity
People on HN keep saying it is, but I'm still not seeing it. Companies are building datacenters in vast, sun-blasted deserts and still choosing to power those with natural gas. This in turn makes people complain about emissions pledges being reversed, but if it were economical, no pledge would be needed.
Of course, USA has cheaper oil/gas than other countries. But if you look elsewhere, rich countries are subsidizing solar, poor ones are basically not using it.
In the chart for section 3, how many countries have seen their share of electricity being generated by fossil fuels increase in the last 5 years? Only Canada.
Take a look at the charts for Pakistan, Australia, Nigeria, and China for the last few years. Pretty dramatic drops for fossil fuels generation.
They cherrypicked 15 countries. And still, some of those still had renewables decrease since 2000 like Nigeria, others saw an increase but it's still way less than fossil, and others like China are heavily subsidizing solar. I don't doubt that it's economical for individuals when the govt is subsidizing it.
The "world" chart shows an increase from 19% renewal to 34%. Did they cherry-pick that? (Also, "European Union" is more than one country.)
> I don't doubt that it's economical for individuals when the govt is subsidizing it.
Does that distinguish renewables from fossil fuels? Haven't governments been essentially subsidizing fossil fuels (not least by allowing environmental externalities to be ignored) for as long as they've been in use?
Because a lot of countries in the world, especially the EU, are subsidizing solar. That doesn't make it economical.
Externalities ignored from fossil fuels, yes. That's not a subsidy though. I'm not saying they should ignore it, but if they do, they aren't the ones who pay for it.
That's not a good point though, a lot of countries, including the EU, also subsidize fossil fuels.
Solar is cheaper, but requires more room and time to spin up (think datacenters, where you can put a turbine within a month) and storage or backups for windless nights.
Look at Australia then. Millions of homes already using solar yo basically power their homes for free most of the time. Yes it was subsidized, like oil was and still is. Solar without subsidies is already miles better than oil and gas.
Australia is a rich country that subsidizes solar, and they're still 90% fossil according to their Wikipedia article, so idk why the mismatch with this article.
Solar is dirt cheap in China, where 85% of panels are produced. The problem is they're made in China and face tariffs/import bans in the US/Europe.
Nat gas is preferred for AI DCs because it has faster time-to-market, doesn't have the intermittency issues. Training on solar + storage is an issue because of network synchronization.
I get the gas turbine for semi-temp power when there's not enough grid support, but Google leadership is talking about doing this long-term and at scale: https://www.gstatic.com/marketing-cms/79/80/fb229abf40efa81e... . Not a single mention of "solar" or "renewable" in there. Are they just trying to appease Trump administration?
Google may not have written about it in that document, but they're funding what will be the highest storage capacity battery system in the world for a renewable-powered data center in Minnesota:
To power an AI data center with off-grid solar panels, you'd need about 45,000 acres of land devoted to your solar farm. The panels themselves could be literally free and the natural gas plant would probably be more economical.
Data centers need lots of power 24/7 and regardless of cloud cover. Solar is great to reduce your daytime bills but you still need other methods to cover the downtime.
I would be surprised if data centers didn't put in gas _and_ solar.
They might be, but if they are, it's because a new administration might subsidize solar again. Meanwhile Trump seems like he'd be against solar even if it were economical, I guess cause oil companies.
What makes me pessimistic is even during Biden's administration, these companies made meaningless pledges more than actual changes. This suggests that the most profitable thing to them is fossil.
Not really, even the best systems have like a 10yr break-even period. And I live in a place with some of the highest residential electricity rates in the continental United States.
Many of these problems don't seem scientific at all, but rather a problem of political will.
As you said, Solar power is incredibly economical. There are plenty of ideas around putting them over farms, or parking lots en-masse to provide cleaner energy.
Access to clean drinking water, while certainly scientific in some situations, is also a problem of political will and money.
Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure - It's infrastructure week!
"Solar PV with storage = solar PV installation paired with four-hour duration battery storage, scaled to 20% of the output capacity of the solar PV."
Sometime the sun goes away for more than 4hrs.
That may be OK for closed-ended systems (turn off the science at night and during storms), but not for open-ended systems with diverse user demand.
4hour batteries are competitive with gas peakers to match high demand during and after sunny times, but solar needs gas peakers or similar to over for non-sunny times.
everywhere? all at once? The grid is distributed, this is a solved problem. Most of what is needed now is to build the systems, storage, and transmission lines.
Not sure what you’re talking about here. We can’t replace all energy needs with solar but it’s clearly one of the cheapest energy sources and with the added benefit of low capital expense to get started so you can set it up in distributed grids without the massive expenditure to support nuclear installations.
If it is profitable without subsidies from government then everyone would do it as there is money to be made. You do not need peer review studies to prove something is profitable.
Seems very naive to think that people who have access to immortality technology aren't going to have children, and if you're immortal of course you're not going to watch your children grow old and die, so you share it with them.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to count out how many generations you need to run this until it's 'oops, all self-replicating individuals with broken off switches.'
Why not just add 'mind control' while you're at it.
Only death stops stagnation in the end. Without death, especially if death can be avoided by the rich and powerful but not the poor, life will get much, much worse for the average person (until only the rich and their automated capital remain I suppose, in which scenario they will simply turn on each other).
This is the classic "without death, authoritarian depots will be in power forever".
But it's actually the wrong way around. Hope that the despot will soon die saps peoples' will to do the difficult and dangerous job of removing them. Take away that hope and they are forced to find the courage.
People might be willing to give their known-to-be-finite lives in pursuit of the Greater Good, but the equation changes greatly when you're giving up an eternity for the chance of making things better. More of the population would be aged too, so I think it'd be a lot harder to find the kids that usually die in wars.
Especially true if it is the AIs that get us the immortality- it definitely won't be equally spread, and any incumbents have a massive advantage.
I think more people would settle for worse conditions to stay alive. Do you think you'd be more likely to revolt at 150yrs old when all your family and yourself can live extremely long to forever? Or do you think the threat of death by killing wouldn't be an issue?
I don't think anybody wants to live forever in an old person's body. Frankly, I'm not interested in extending my lifespan unless I can stay young or regain youth.
Also, if you eliminate all the aging-related causes of death the average lifespan is still only like 1000 years or something. Nobody's getting eternity. And yeah, for the chance to make a big enough change of the right kind to society I would indeed give up a 1000-year lifespan. My memes have fully subjugated my genes, and I'm at peace with that.
Forced to find the courage or die trying to. And I really doubt that knowledge that their despot will eventually die has much effect on people's motivation to rebel as in most cases there is a clear line of succession. In many cases there isn't even a single despot to point to. This isn't even considering how such anti-aging technology would prevent despots' mental acuity from deteriorating as they aged - in fact they would probably grow sharper as they gained more experience so to speak. And aging/succession have almost always been one of the greatest destabilizers of a successful authoritarian regime.
Very honorable effort, but a lot of these seem to touch heavily regulated industries impeded by unwise or outdated policy no less than by the lack of clever engineering - medicine, education, urbanism, energy. I wonder if they've given some thought to the key blocking factor as well.
Yup this was super weird to me. There are other equally likely "world ending" things that they chose to ignore of nuclear, such as bio-weapons. Very strange list..
When one of them dies, they want to leave behind a puzzle so complex that entire groups of the population dedicate their lives to solving it within the virtual world. They look old enough to have a lot of favorite 1980’s and 90’s pop culture references, so those will probably be the clues.
I'm guessing this might be about "teleoperation" (like remote surgery via robots + VR) and being able to remote training as well. The binocular vision VR gives you compared to flat screens help a lot with depth perception for precision of incisions for example.
To understand, same reason you reverse engineer anything. Doesn't have to have a further goal than that, understanding the brain better helps in so many ways. But like most technology, obviously can be used for bad too. Should we just skip researching some topics then?
I'm all for alleviating psychiatric/mental health disorders, but yes, some topics are worth skipping research on. For example chemical/biological/nuclear weapons, human cloning, and unethical gene modification.
I just like to challenge myself, as an engineer, with the idea that not everything has to be engineered and optimized. What if we simply left some things unexplored and mysterious, and trusted nature and our own human capabilities?
A better way of alleviating psychiatric/mental health disorders might just be to focus on societal factors.
We have a good understanding of the function (and more importantly dysfunction of) kidneys, lungs, heart, etc. from high level to cellular level.
For brain, our understanding is fuzzy, more like "this part is important for that behavior" or "here is how neuron works" but we don't have a holistic understanding.
If we had that, we could more easily diagnose and treat neurological disorder.
Panels absolutely, their price is more and more dominated by installation costs. You can probably use automation to bring that down as well, especially for large-scale installations. Not sure if that requires AI research though, it's more an engineering and funding challenge.
Batteries are still open. While they do get cheaper, there is still a lot of room to improve. And battery chemistry is something where a lot of research, trial and error, healthy intuition is necessary. I'd say that is more a field where an AI based approach might make sense.
Many of those require a paradigm shift in our understanding of Universe, so I am not sure they are achievable with any convex combination of existing knowledge. We'd need some sharp mind connecting the dots but with heavy use of AI and incentives to use it, we might just never give a chance for such mind to arise.
Treating autism (and preventing it) is not eugenics. That's a talking point some folks raise, but we're talking about intensely pervasive autism, not neurodivergence. Really, please try to do better in your arguments than immediately saying your opponent is like Hitler.
This list smells of so much tech bro “I can do better than the people that have been working in the field for 20 years” egotistical attitude that permeates silicon valley. Why do software engineers think they are smarter than everyone else? Is it because they earn more than most people? But then bankers and finance bros should think they are gods?
Also, solar energy is already economical!? Do they mean more economical?
>This list smells of so much tech bro “I can do better than the people that have been working in the field for 20 years” egotistical attitude that permeates silicon valley.
Well, they did solve some math conjectures recently that the people working in the field for many years did not... Also AlphaFold.
Sometimes you got to find a way to buy the silence of your top employee, to prevent them from going to the competition. This "start-up" is shallow as hell
It was a general metaphor but a reference to Windsurf. On the boomerang side, Noam Shazeer went on to do Character AI and came back via acquisition only to leave again to OpenAI.
Given the resources that would be available to them at Google: compute resources, data, etc. It's clear they want absolute freedom. Good for them. At this revolutionary turning point in history, I want the smartest people working in whatever area they want.
1. Make Solar Energy Economical - Disallow fossil fuels
2. Provide Energy from Fusion - See 1
3. Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods See 1
4. Manage the Nitrogen Cycle - See 1
5. Provide Access to Clean Water - See 1
6. Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure - See 1
7. Advance Health Informatics - See 1
8. Engineer Better Medicines - See 1
9. Reverse Engineer the Brain - See 1
10. Prevent Nuclear Terror - See 1
11. Secure Cyberspace - See 1
12. Enhance Virtual Reality - See 1
13. Advance Personalized Learning - See 1
14. Engineer the Tools of Scientific Discovery - See 1
FF is the real threat in time, money, health. Can't sweep aside that it will destroy most life on Earth and we'll never get to the other things if we are at the mercy of FF
Holy shit, you are so full of yourself. This is such a stupid take with zero nuance. As if banning fossil fuels will help with any of those things, besides the first one.
Little more than "Fossil Fuels are the root of all evil" performative bullshit.
We’ll face a bigger problem sooner rather than later, which is population collapse. Youth don’t procreate amy more. Birth numbers are at an all time low. We see the issue arise in rats and the experiment is all too relevant for the current age of social media and fearmongering (John B. Calhoun’s rodent “utopia” experiment). All these “Grand Challenge” problems seem trivial to that.
Furthermore:
Why is 1 here when 2 is present. Again, solar is usually not relevant when we want power when it’s dark… even theoretical it wouldn’t work. We’d need a high capacity dirt cheap storage, and even then we can’t keep it till winter when there’s no sun to go around and effectively supply
3. Irrelevant when there’s population collapse. And even then, why would we want this instead of reforestation and low depth water protection from fishing and environmental issues.
5. How is this even a problem. Unless we got corrupt(ed/able) governments (read: lobbies) that allow exemptions in every law designed to protect the environment (also, settlements are a twisted way to fill governments pockets instead of rooting out evil)
7/8/9 the inverse effects are even worse health, as everything is fixable. 9 would incur even more social isolation, more so than the internet did
10 seems to be the first that’s actually reasonable
Same for 11
For 12 see 9
13 yes but that’s something that a self learner would already be able to do. AI is at a level that we can manage
This reads as hype of the kind: "well, we can't reliably do these rather mundane things with AI, but we're going to run it extra hard and extra long in some novel way, and it will do amazing things".
The issues are with verification and with detecting drift from the goal. These are related, if not roughly the same issue. And, if they can solve this, then they will have essentially fixed AI. Maybe even AGI.
But, if this were the goal, then it seems more reasonable to solve the relatively more mundane verifiable challenges (e.g. generating solid, reliable code). Then, working up from there.
And, that's exactly what gives this the hype smell. No use for solving problems that don't get the oohs and aahs. Just straight to NAE Grand Challenge problems.
Looks like they are concentrating on No. 14 and it remains to be seen how much serious progress can be made if more of Google's resources are focused on this than anybody else has ever done or could compare to.
Plus it should be plain to see how complete the solution is to 14, whether it will be fully solved, or almost completely, before diverting resources toward moving up the list to tackle other worthwhile objectives. If not fully solved I would not call that abandonment, but nobody could deny it would amount to an intentional slowdown regardless.
I still remember the day when Google became available on the general internet, and it's been a while. Take it from an old science dude, a lot can be detected over decades of observation that you can not get any other way. Under laboratory conditions or not ;) Looking at the list there are a few standouts that I can't imagine Google wouldn't be worlds ahead by now if they had only doubled-down on the "Don't Be Evil" mission every time they had the chance, rather than watering it down as we have seen.
Naturally I'm biased after doing 14 my whole life without real justification for moving up the list myself, since I still have no complete solution, I'm only human after all.
Most agricultural subsidies flow towards those harmful animal products, giving alternatives a fair treatment with subsidies could induce a meaningful shift already. But again - political and thus hard on a non technical level
The server being their server that you eventually have to a pay a subscription to use? Hmm..
Also, interesting permission problems. Are you going to allow a remote server owned by someone else have shell access to all of your computers? Are they allowed to train an LLM from all the things you type?
It seems like some of the main reasons people care so far are:
- Preventing automated credential stuffing
- Preventing bots from creating a bunch of fake accounts (eg free trial abuse, which can also lead to high twilio SMS bills!)
- Reducing payment fraud
- Blocking LLM scraping
- Blocking automated scalpers (!) eg for tickers or sneakers
I'm curious to see which use cases end up dominating as the reason companies care about this. And I'm hopeful that my agents will still have good ways for me to browse and do things on the web on my behalf - eg detect agents and route them to an agent path, rather than blocking them.
(I'm interested in tools for detecting AI agents and seeing how this shifts as bot traffic goes way up.)
hundreds of millions of residential ips, human browser fingerprints, custom browser binaries, auto solve of turnstyle, recaptcha v3, kasada, datadome, AWS WAF, etc if they come up.
Bright Data ranks #1 on Foil's leaderboard [1], but is still detected. ScrapFly is #4 and ZenRows #7. And I guess Capsolver isn't really a scraping thing but is more just for the captcha component.
I think it'd be good if there were more products that did a better job of making an actually undetectable agent, but doesn't seem like any exist yet.
i guess more people should use foil...big recaptcha, cloudflare challenge/turnstyle etc is 95+% bypassed, take your bets on how long this new cloudflare holds out
Darwinium (darwinium.com) is another example. Approach here involves a combination of profiling and step-transition probabilities; idea is that a customer can ring-fence a particular area of a digital estate where they might want to challenge or block an agent - eg a payment, due to chargeback risks. Precursor at least for now seems more focused on site scraping multiple docs from the same site.
What I like about comedy is it reveals what people think but don't say. If someone laughs at a joke, it's because they believe it to be true or accurate.
I think of computer use as like last mile delivery. APIs and bash and such are the efficient logistics networks. Both have different benefits. Obviously, use the efficient methods when you can.
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