Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 99th Weekly Dose of Optimism.

Packy and I, who both live in New York, left the city around 2pm yesterday to travel to Philadelphia to celebrate our dad’s birthday. By the time we sat down together for dinner at 6pm, this edition of the Weekly Dose had completely changed.

New AI models. Big Economist drop. Things move quickly here. Head on a swivel.

Let’s get to it.

Today’s Not Boring is brought to you by… Composer

Packy here. I keep telling you how much I love Composer, that it’s where I do all of my equities investing, and that I really don’t see a reason to use any other product. Let me show you why.

My biggest position in Composer is a Symphony that basically switches between TQQQ (triple-long Nasdaq) and UVXY (1.5x VIX) depending on certain conditions. My optimism that Tech is Going to Get Much Bigger isn’t just a schtick, but going turbolong TQQQ with no downside protection is too risky, even for me. The Symphony mostly stays long TQQQ, but switches out when it’s been running a little too hot.

Yesterday, I checked my account, and noticed that the Symphony was up about 4%. That was weird, because TQQQ was down over 2%, and the Symphony is usually in TQQQ. When I clicked in, I saw that it had switched me from TQQQ to UVXY the night before. Instead of being down 2%, I was up 4%. That’s huge.

I’m a terrible trader. I never would have done that. But Composer did it automatically. That happens a few times a year, and it has a huge impact on my ability to compound.

More and more people are waking up to Composer. They just passed $115 million in Assets Under Management, after crossing $100 million just a couple weeks before.

Join us. To celebrate surpassing $115 million in AUM, Composer is offering an extra free week of their trial exclusively for Not Boring users. Enter “Not Boring” in the “Where did you hear about us?” section. This special offer is available until Friday 7/5 at 11:59pm EST.

Check out Composer and see the benefits of automated, data-driven investing, like I have.

Check Out Composer

(1) Ilya Sutskever Has a New Plan for Safe Superintelligence

Ashlee Vance for Bloomberg Businessweek

Now Sutskever is introducing that project, a venture called Safe Superintelligence Inc. aiming to create a safe, powerful artificial intelligence system within a pure research organization that has no near-term intention of selling AI products or services. In other words, he’s attempting to continue his work without many of the distractions that rivals such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic face.

Here’s Ilya!

On Wednesday, Ashlee Vance of Bloomberg profiled the former OpenAI cofounder’s next project, Safe Superintelligence (SSI). SSI is a research-focused lab with the objective of introducing “safe superintelligence” to the world. Notably, the company plans to not release any near-term, potentially profitable products on the road to safe superintelligence. It’s SSI or bust!

The SSI team is predictably stacked, with Sutskever leading the charge, joined by AI entrepreneur-turned-investor Daniel Gross and former OpenAI young gun Member of the Technical Staff Daniel Levy. With this bench and mission, the company won’t have any trouble attracting talent or capital.

We’re all for it. The more supergeniuses we have competing to deliver humans more and more capable assistants, the better, as Packy wrote on Tuesday.

Whether or not this approach towards developing safe superintelligence will work is still very much TBD. It seems to me that much of the momentum around AI over the last couple of years is due to the fact that products are being launched quickly, customers are giving feedback, there’s competitive pressure to up product quality, and, of course, there is real revenue involved. SSI is fully checking out of that rat race.

I guess we’ll see them on the other side.

Packy Note: Not to be outdone, Anthropic, which is trying to make some money before achieving Superintelligence, released its newest model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, yesterday. Claude 3 Opus has been my favorite writing assistant, it’s much nicer to talk to than ChatGPT and gives better feedback on essays. After playing around with 3.5 Sonnet for a bit, it’s even better and faster. If you’ve only played with ChatGPT, I highly recommend trying out Claude.

(2) Congress votes to advance nuclear energy development in the US

Justine Calma for The Verge

The ADVANCE Act directs the Department of Energy (DOE) to streamline its process for approving the international export of American nuclear energy technology and cut down regulatory costs for companies trying to license advanced nuclear reactors. It creates incentives for successfully deploying those technologies, and tasks the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) with creating a “timely” pathway for licensing small reactors at brownfields and former fossil fuel generator sites. It also seeks to accelerate licensing review for new reactors at existing nuclear sites and streamline the environmental review process.

Congress just passed the ADVANCE Act, which aims to supercharge nuclear energy development in the US. Fewer restrictions, less delays, more building. The bill, now awaiting Biden's signature, is designed to speed up the approval of next-gen reactors and keep old ones running, like Diablo Canyon pictured above. The bill also makes it easier and cheaper for companies to get licenses for advanced nuclear reactors and export American nuclear tech.

As the world (hopefully) continues its march towards a nuclear future, the bill is designed to ensure that the U.S. is the leader in nuclear. At home, we need to actually start building nuclear plants and encouraging (or at least not killing on arrival) innovative approaches to nuclear. And abroad, the U.S. should be the leading exporter of nuclear energy and technologies.

Importantly, the Act contains language that changes the NRC’s mission from essentially avoiding risks at all costs to making nuclear as safe as possible while considering the risk of not deploying nuclear. Thousands of people die every year from fossil fuels; nuclear saves lives.

(2a) DOE doles out $900 million for next-gen small modular reactor deployment

Sean Wolfe for Power Engineering

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) issued a Notice of Intent (NOI) to fund up to $900 million to support the initial U.S. deployments of Generation III+ small modular reactor (SMR) technologies.

Speaking of American nuclear leadership, the Department of Energy just announced $900 million in funding to support to development and deployment of small modular reactors (SMRs). As a reminder, a SMR is a compact, often a little more factory-built nuclear power plant designed for smaller-scale electricity generation. Unlike traditional large reactors, SMRs can offer greater flexibility, lower upfront costs, and enhanced safety features, making them suitable for remote locations and scalable power needs.

The funding is being doled out across two stages:

1. An initial $800M will be awarded to two first-mover teams that are committed to deploying a first plant.

2. An additional $100M will be awarded to fast-follower teams to spur additional SMR deployments.

The DoE has been leading the charge on promoting nuclear since before the rest of the US Government realized it was cool. Someone give Jigar what he wants!

(3) The Dawn of the Solar Age

From The Economist

Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today.

Here comes the sun… Lest you’re tempted to accuse us of being nuclear maxis, we love catching energy by catching rays, too. So too, now, does The Economist, which put out a special issue yesterday titled, The Dawn of the Solar Age.

If you’ve been reading the Weekly Dose, you’ve known all about solar’s stellar ascent, thanks to pieces from Not Boring’s favorite sun-worshippers, Casey Handmer and Noah Smith. But it’s cool to see it in one place.

And it’s particularly cool to see a chart like this one:

Experts just keep underestimating’s solar’s potential, on average by three times, even in the very near future.

Exponentials are hard to grok, but sometimes, you just gotta trust the curve.

(4) Boom Supersonic Completes Construction of the Overture Superfactory

From Boom

Boom Supersonic marked the completion of construction on its Overture Superfactory with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on June 17, 2024. Located at the Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Overture Superfactory is the first supersonic airliner factory in the United States. The state-of-the-art assembly line is where Boom will build its supersonic airliner, Overture.

Elon often reminds us: manufacturing is actually the hard thing.

Boom, the supersonic airline, is doing hard things.

The company completed the construction of its new Overture Superfactory, where it will build its supersonic airliner. Overture should be capable of traveling at Mach 1.7 (1,122 mph) and carrying 64-80 passengers over a range of 4,250 nautical miles. It’s the new age Concorde. New York to London is 3.5 hours. Totally changes the game for transatlantic flight.

The new superfactory, located at Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro, North Carolina, is the first supersonic airliner factory in the U.S. With a production capacity of 33 aircraft annually and plans to double, it is expected to contribute over $32 billion to the local economy and create 2,400 jobs over the next 20 years.

Cannot wait to go Booming across the world.

(5) JC Btaiche: CEO and Founder of Fuse

From Plymouth

While working in the aforementioned physics lab JC couldn’t help but to dream bigger. He wanted to explore the universe, so he asked his professor “I want to build fusion powered rockets, how do I start?". The professor put it bluntly "you need to immigrate". It was in this short exchange that JC learned in order to build something big it was going to require a move out west.

Packy here. Earlier this week, I got to meet Lisa Wehden, the founder of Plymouth. I’d seen Lisa all over Twitter — it seems like any time a talented immigrant announces that they got their visa, they’re thanking her for making it happen.

I love America and I love technology. I want to see America recruit the world’s most talented technologists as hard as an SEC booster recruits a 6’2” Texan high schooler with a cannon for a right arm. Instead, we make the process of high-skilled immigration as hard and painful as possible.

Plymouth is making it easier with the Plymouth O-1A Accelerated Pathway. They help the world’s best prepare, finalize, and submit their application in just four weeks. So far, they’ve received 115 approvals, with a 99% approval rate.

This isn’t an ad for Plymouth, I just want every talented international engineer or potential founder reading this to know that Plymouth exists, so that you can get over here and help build the future.

One of the people Plymouth helped bring to America is Not Boring favorite, recent Deep Dive and Weekly Dose star, JC Btaiche, the founder of Fuse Energy. This week, Plymouth dropped a profile on JC’s journey.

America is obviously better off for having people like JC working here. Here’s to Plymouth 100x’ing the number of JC’s in America in the coming years.

Have a great weekend y’all.

We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday.

Share

Thanks for reading,

Packy + Dan