Not Boring by Packy McCormick - Weekly Dose of Optimism #42
Weekly Dose of Optimism #42Helion, Nuclear Power, Google Search, Sohn Conference, Pancreatic Cancer VaccinesHi friends 👋, Happy Friday and welcome back to our 42nd Weekly Dose of Optimism. It was honestly hard to choose what to include and what to cut this week because so much good/big/optimistic news dropped over the past few days. Energy. AI. Cancer Vaccines. The important stuff that makes our lives better and helps our civilization progress. Let’s get to it. Today’s Not Boring is brought to you by… Axios Axios Pro is your personal deals analyst, helping you navigate the fast-paced world of VC, PE and M&A. Each day, Axios’ industry-leading journalists deliver exclusive reporting sourced from insider connections that other news outlets just don't have. All that, plus a daily deals list, in just 5 minutes. Not Boring subscribers can take 50% off Axios Pro by using code NOTBORING at checkout. Start your free trial now. (1) Microsoft Bets That Fusion Power Is Closer Than Many Think Jennifer Hiller for The Wall Street Journal
Sam Altman. So hot right now. Sam Altman. As if leading the generative AI renaissance wasn’t enough, Altman’s nuclear fusion company, Helion, just inked the first ever commercial nuclear fusion deal. The deal between Helion and Microsoft is a bold one: it’s based on Helion’s commitment to start producing and providing electricity through fusion in the next 5 years. The main hurdle is, of course, that neither Helion nor any other organization in the world has ever produced commercial-scale electricity through fusion. Fusion is the Holy Grail of energy. As Altman put it, the promise of fusion is that it will “power the world and to do it extremely cheaply.” Such abundant, cheap energy would have second and third order effects on progress that are hard to predict. However, nuclear fusion has been one of those technologies that’s always, as Fran Fraschilla* would say, “a couple years away from being a couple years away.” When scientists at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory finally achieved net energy gain in December 2022, the excitement was matched with reminders that commercialization of fusion might still be decades away. Welp, at least on paper, the commercialization of fusion is upon us. Whether Helion hits the 2028 goal or not — and it has to pay financial penalties to Microsoft if it doesn’t — absurdly ambitious timelines can be useful in accelerating entire industries. See: Tesla and SpaceX. *Yes, we just quoted basketball scout Fran Fraschilla in our analysis of nuclear fusion. (2) US support for nuclear power soars to highest level in a decade Akielly Hu for Grist
Not be outdone by its nuclear brother, nuclear fission is also having a bit of a moment. The oft-misunderstood energy source, which produces about ~20% of electricity in the U.S., reached its highest level of support in the US since 2012. As we wait for truly commercially available nuclear fusion, increased nuclear fission energy output presents one of the best paths towards a cleaner energy future. Despite its current output and future potential, nuclear fission struggles from a pretty bad stigma that prevents it from gaining widespread support. The public stigma stems from two primary sources:
But when you peel back the stigma, it becomes quite obvious that the promise of nuclear far outweighs the negative. Or at least, that’s an opinion, according to this Gallup survey that more and more Americans are starting to adopt. That’s a good backdrop for nuclear startups. A couple weeks ago, a16z’s American Dynamism practice announced that it’s leading the Series B for Radiant Industries, which “is building portable 1-megawatt nuclear reactors, the size of a shipping container, that can reliably produce power for 20 years.” We’re pretty excited about Aalo Atomics, too. (Relevant Generative AI Search section starts at here)
So, Google came out swinging this week with the full reveal of how it is infusing AI across its suite of products. Admittedly, we haven’t done a deep-dive on how the keynote was received (other than just watching smashups of Sundar saying AI repeatedly) but at first glance: this was a strong response from Google. In “The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Positioned,” Packy argued that Google was so deeply Positioned in search, which it monetizes through links, that it was susceptible to a potentially superior search product that delivered answers, like ChatGPT. It’s obviously too early to tell, but based on the demo this week, it seems like Google may have found a nice middle ground. Build AI-powered search that provides answers and build monetizable links/modules into those answers. Ultimately, competition is good for consumers and, in generative AI, we’re getting that in spades right now. Google vs. OpenAI vs. Meta vs. any number of smaller, fast-moving startups. It’s going to push innovation, force companies to really build for users, and ultimately result in better products. (4) Sohn 2023 | Patrick Collison in conversation Sam Altman The Sohn Conference was held virtually this last Tuesday, and it was filled with heavy hitters and cross over interviews that nerds us like dream about (all of which you can find here). O’Shaughnessy x Karniol-Tambour. Sokoloff x Druckenmiller. And of course, Collison x Altman. It’s not super often that you get to watch the CEO of one tech darling (Stripe) interview the CEO of another (OpenAI). Aside from Altman’s insights on the current and future landscape of AI and some great discussion across a number of progress-related topics, it’s kind of cool to watch Collison jab Altman with jokes about SBF and Worldcoin. Maybe these guys aren’t that different from us, after all. And like most of us, Altman mostly uses ChatGPT for summarizing stuff and hasn’t fully adopted the other uses cases or plugins. So the next time you see some dumb thread about all of the 10x productivity hacks you’re missing out on by not using AI properly, just remember Sam Altman basically just uses it to read emails more quickly. (5) Pancreatic Cancer Vaccine Shows Promise in Small Trial Benjamin Mueller for The New York Times
Abstracting away much of the scientific complexity, here’s what happened: a team of researchers at BioNtech developed personalized vaccines that successfully provoked an autoimmune response in pancreatic cancer patients and those people showed no relapse of their cancer during the course of the study. While the study was small and the commercialization of the vaccines is still early, this was a milestone for personalized cancer vaccines. The team was able to develop and deliver personalized and efficacious vaccines to patients within roughly 9 weeks of having their tumors removed. It’s not hard to imagine a world in which there is almost instantaneous development and delivery of highly personalized vaccines that treat all kinds of diseases. Here’s to a world in which nuclear fusion is providing abundantly cheap energy to power endless AI search and instantaneously personalized and delivered vaccines. Bonuses: Humans did more amazing stuff this week than we could fit, so if you want a little extra, check out how generative AI is building better antibodies, smelling things in the metaverse, and some space porn via James Webb. That’s all for this week. We’ll be back in your inbox on Monday. Thanks for reading, Dan |
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