Not Boring by Packy McCormick - Weekly Dose of Optimism #90
Weekly Dose of Optimism #90Geothermal Energy Matters, Bacterial Motors, Cancer AI, Natural Disasters AI, Zuckaissance, AmericaHi friends 👋, Happy Friday and welcome back to our 90th Weekly Dose of Optimism. It’s been a marathon of week over here at Not Boring HQ. Big permitting reform, AI doing a bunch of stuff better than humans, and Zuck droppin’ something. Speaking of marathons, Packy is running his first this weekend in London. Good luck big bro! Let’s get to it. Today’s Weekly Dose is brought to you by… Percent. Stocks have been on a record run, which means portfolio diversification is more important now than ever. Thousands of investors are turning to private credit as a potential hedge against downturns and volatility. Private credit are loans negotiated privately and not by banks - that means they could have potentially higher yields that are typically less correlated to public markets. On Percent, everyday accredited investors can access hundreds of private deals that generate recurring monthly income and diversify their portfolios. Percent offers investors:
Earn up to a $500 bonus on your first investment from Percent. (1) BLM adopts categorical exclusions to expedite geothermal energy permitting From the Bureau of Land Management
I do not usually follow announcements from the Bureau of Land Management, but when Alec Stapp posted this on X it caught my attention. In a refreshing display of permitting reform, the agency adopted two categorical exclusions that would streamline approvals for geothermal projects. Essentially, geothermal projects will not be subject to the same level of NEPA environmental review scrutiny as other large building projects. The exclusions also represent a important shift in how NEPA views geothermal, as such exclusions are only granted for “activities that as a whole have been determined to pose no significant risk to the quality of the human environment.” As a reminder, Geothermal energy is an abundant, clean renewable energy source derived from our planet’s internal heat, which is harnessed by extracting hot water or steam from underground reservoirs in order to generate electricity. Geothermal does not produce much electricity in the U.S. today, due to high upfront costs, lack of land availability, and general environmental concerns (whether founded or not), but there’s been a renewed focus on its potential over the past couple of years from both the government and private industry. Google and Microsoft are making bets on geothermal which could eventually help power the insatiable demand for energy from their data centers. Back in November, we covered Fervo, a startup partnered with Google, that is making a big swing at geothermal and is already operational. Geothermal is hot right now (ha) and probably the best thing the federal government can do to support it is to just get out of the way. We’re all for the inclusion of more exclusions. (2) CryoEM structures reveal how the bacterial flagellum rotates and switches direction
With a better understanding of how bacteria move and orient themselves, we can develop new ways to prevent and treat infections. This new research from Prash and team, shows how a bacterial component called the C-ring functions in flagellar movement. The team used a technique called cryo-electron microscopy to observe the C-ring in two states, clockwise (CW) and counterclockwise (CCW), which are crucial for how bacteria move towards favorable environments. Understanding this mechanism is crucial because bacterial movement (chemotaxis) is closely related to their ability to cause diseases (pathogenicity). The work could be used to developed targeted antibiotics, new vaccines, and better diagnostic tools. And that video is just mesmerizing to watch. (3) AI traces mysterious metastatic cancers to their source Smriti Mallapaty for Nature
We don’t think AI will fully replace doctors, but it will certainly make the best doctors even better at doing their jobs. Research published this week describes an AI tool that effectively identifies the origins of metastatic cancer cells, which are cancers that have spread from their initial location to other parts of the body. About 5% of cancers today are metastatic cancers whose origins are unknown. Understanding the origin helps doctors determine proper treatment plans. The AI had an 83% chance of accurately predicting the source of the tumor based on the images tested. Additionally, the AI model included the correct source of the tumor in its top three predictions 99% of the time. These results are a significant improvement over human pathologists. Accuracy improvement is not only important because, uhh accuracy is important, but also because positive identification upfront prevents the need for additional and potentially invasive diagnostic tests. Fuck cancer. Long live AI. (4) Alphabet X’s Bellwether harnesses AI to help predict natural disasters Brian Heater for Tech Crunch
First cancer. And now natural disasters. This AI can’t stop, won’t stop. Alphabet's moonshot factory, X, launched Project Bellwether, a new initiative that uses AI to predict natural disasters such as wildfires and floods. Project Bellwether aims to improve disaster response times by enabling quicker and more accurate predictions, improving first responder times and potentially saving lives and property. As some one who has yet to experience a big natural disaster (unless you count the New York City Earthquake of 2024!), I’m thankful Google is getting ahead of this. The climate is becoming more extreme and less predictable, so having AI carefully watching 24/7 for what might happen next is only going to become more important. But those poor meteorologists may have to learn to code or something! (5) Mark Zuckerberg - Llama 3, Open Sourcing $10b Models, & Caesar Augustus When you get past this guy’s boyish good looks, you realize he’s actually saying some pretty profound stuff: The Zuckaissance marched on this week, as a surfer-haired, chained-up Zuck went on Dwarkesh’s podcast to discuss the release of Meta AI, Llama 3, abundant energy and capex budgets, and the future of the metaverse. On top of its multi-hundred billion dollar core social media business and its infamous work on the metaverse, Meta is also quietly the potential leader in AI — at least from a strategic perspective. And with Meta’s core business humming, Zuck’s once-hated big bets starting to look in-the-money, and his personal approval skyrocketing, there’s likely not a more trending figure in the country right now than Zuck. But why include this in the Weekly Dose? Does Zuck really need our praise, too? Well, I’ve shared this line of thinking before but I like when our biggest builders are feeling themselves. It allows them to take bigger swings — with their money, resources, and reputations. And these are the types of bets that can actually move the needle for humanity in a meaningful way. Zuck is suddenly cool? Awesome, maybe he’ll parlay those vibes into curing all diseases while also doubling down on that metaverse vision. (Actually, that’s exactly the goal of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative’s BioHub.) Tesla stock up 10x in 5 years? Epic, Elon’s going to dump some of those gains into space exploration, brain machine interfaces, and freedom of speech. Larry & Sergey have more money than they know what to do with? Perfecto, why don’t they sink that cash into moonshots like geothermal and weather-predicting AI. You get the idea. We want our Worldbuilders out there world building. Or at least that’s how I think about it. Building hard things is good. We’re happy Zuck is getting the shine he deserves. Bonus: Five things to be optimistic about in America today From Noah Smith Quick Spark Notes:
U.S.A 🇺🇸 U.S.A 🇺🇸 U.S.A Double Bonus: SynBioBeta Elliot here. I'm excited to be going back to the SynBioBeta Conference in May with Packy. Founded back in 2012 by John Cumbers, SynBioBeta has grown into the largest conference dedicated to synthetic biology in the world. Part of the secret behind it's growth is the unabashed optimism for people taking on big challenges with bioengineering. Sustainable food production, new materials and medicines, space travel, you name it. We're big fans of that kind of bio-optimism here at Not Boring. This year's speakers include Stephen Wolfram, legendary investor Vinod Khosla, the Mayor of San Jose, a literal astronaut, and... Packy! If you want to join us for the festivities in California this year, you can use the code notboring for a discount when registering. We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday. If you have some time this weekend, check out Percent. Thanks for reading, Packy + Dan |
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Nueralink, Pig Liver, Intel, Saudi AI Fund, Direct File,Unitree ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
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