Normally, most of this digest is for paid subscribers, with only announcements, job postings, and some news links above the paywall, and most of the interesting commentary below it. Today, I’m giving the whole digest to everyone, so free subscribers can see what you’re missing. If you want more of this, or just want to support my work, subscribe:

Contents

• Featured mentors for our high school summer program, Progress in Medicine
• From Progress Conference 2025
• Progress for progressives
• Announcements from RPI fellows
• California Forever petition
• Jobs
• Fellowships
• Queries
• Frontier lab announcements
• Fundraising announcements
• Elon interviewed by Dwarkesh and John Collison

Normally for paid subscribers, free today:

• People have feelings about AI
• AI has feelings too?
• Karpathy on “agentic engineering”
• AI capabilities
• AI predictions
• AI charts
• AI safety
• “The water might boil before we can get the thermometer in”
• Now is the time to improve security and institutions
• AI regulation that kills creativity
• Moltbook
• Waymo incident
• People have feelings about airports
• Voyager 1
• Housing
• Politics
• Other links and short notes
• Trust in God, but tie your camel

Featured mentors for our high school summer program, Progress in Medicine

Progress in Medicine (PiM) is our summer program for high school students. Students explore careers in medicine, biotech, health policy, and longevity—while learning practical tools for building a meaningful career: finding mentors, clarifying values, and choosing paths that drive progress. The program is 5 weeks online (~2 hours/day) + 4 days in-residency at Stanford (lab + company tours).

One of the best parts of the program: our mentors. You choose 3–5 to meet in small groups (2–8 students). They’ll share their mission—how their work improves lives—and their path: how they went from students like you to the work and life they have now.

Here are a few of the mentors for the program:

Fred Milgrim is an ER doctor who turns chaos into life-saving care, fast. In the ER you don’t get hours—you get minutes. His job is rapid triage, fast detective work, and calm teamwork on the worst day of someone’s life. That’s what you’ll get to unpack with him, directly.

Fred didn’t start pre-med. He studied English, worked as a journalist—then witnessing the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing response pushed him to change paths into emergency medicine. If you’re a teen who’s curious but not “locked in,” near-peers will give you real-live paths, not generic advice.

PiM isn’t just “careers in medicine.” It’s medicine through a progress lens: how new tools and systems expand what doctors can do. Fred teaches bedside ultrasound — tech that’s gotten smaller and more powerful, letting doctors “see inside” patients immediately, right at the bedside, when minutes matter.

Fred’s profile

Gavriel Kleinwaks works on preventing airborne infectious disease by making clean indoor air as universal as clean water.

Gavriel’s mission: “Seeing the light.” A century ago, we made drinking water safe at scale. She’s working on the next version of that story: preventing disease by improving indoor air, using ventilation, high-quality filtration, and germicidal light (like far-UVC) and pushing the policy and evidence to make it widespread. (Read more: “The death rays that guard life”)

Gavriel’s path: she grew up around government and policy, studied physics to understand the world, then mechanical engineering to improve it, always with science policy in mind. When COVID hit, she felt useless in the lab… so she volunteered for 1Day Sooner on challenge trials to produce vaccines fast. That volunteer work turned into her full-time role.

Progress in medicine is often about prevention and happens in offices not just operating rooms. Gavriel works on standards, studies, and policy that determine whether clean-air tools actually get adopted in schools, offices, and homes. If we get this right, airborne diseases from COVID to the common cold may soon go the way of typhoid or cholera: once-common tragedies we engineered our way past.

Gavriel’s profile

Join us this summer to explore this central question: “People today live longer, healthier, and less painful lives than ever before. Why? Who made those changes possible? Can we keep this going? And could you play a part?”

Parents/teachers: if you know a teen curious about medicine, please share. Teens: apply now!

From Progress Conference 2025

The last batches of video:

• Climate and energy: Innovation at every level. Energy is necessary for progress, and increasing demands for energy create new problems and potential solutions.

Ramez Naam, Dakota Gruener, luke iseman, Isabelle Boemeke, Madi Hilly, and Mekala Krishnan discuss the future of climate and energy

• Health, biotech, and longevity: How to extend human flourishing. How can we live healthier, longer lives? Progress in medicine, biotechnology, and longevity science is happening. Ludovico Mitchener, Ruxandra Teslo, John Burn-Murdoch, Martin Borch Jensen, and Francisco LePort each spoke about ways to extend human flourishing
• Policy: From ideas to real-world change. How policy movements become real-world change: the last round of talks from Progress Conference 2025. Watch Jennifer Pahlka‘s keynote, along with talks from Tom Kalil, Derek Kaufman, Alec Stapp, Ryan Puzycki, Misha David Chellam, and M. Nolan Gray.

Progress for progressives

• My message to the left: Progressives used to believe in progress. The old left was not just the party of science—it was a party of science, technology & growth. Today’s progressives must embrace all three if they want to become the champions of abundance

Announcements from RPI fellows

• Silver Linings: “How could tiny breakthroughs in aging science change U.S. GDP and population growth? What’s the economic value of making 41 the new 40, or 65 the new 60? How many lives could we create or save if we could slow reproductive or brain aging by just 1 year? What would billions of healthier hours be worth to the economy, if we assume no change in the age of retirement? … I spent the last two years obsessing over the design, research, and execution of this project. The result is a book upcoming with Harvard University Press, a preprint, and—maybe your favorite part—an interactive simulation tool that lets you input your own timelines and assumptions for specific breakthroughs in aging bio, then see the ROI in terms of US population & GDP growth” (@RaianyRomanni, RPI fellow 2023)
• Ruxandra Teslo (RPI fellow 2024) is now a Renaissance Philanthropy fellow as well, to work on “improving the speed, cost, and accessibility of clinical trials. Ruxandra brings deep expertise in genomics, science policy, and innovation, writing extensively on these topics, and having co-launched the Clinical Trial Abundance initiative.” (@RenPhilanthropy via @RuxandraTeslo)

California Forever petition

• Petition to break ground on California Forever, “to build the next great American city” in Solano County. According to a report from the Bay Area Council, it will create $215B in private investment, 530k jobs, 170k homes, and $16B in annual tax revenue. (@jansramek) I signed!

Jobs

• “If you’re a killer software engineer who is tired of working on SAAS and wants to work on INDUSTRIAL stuff and get in on the ground floor of a great company in Austin, TX, ping me” (@elidourado)
• The American Housing Corporation is hiring for manufacturing, software, and real estate roles (@americanhousing). The Senior Real Estate Analyst role in particular will work directly with founder Bobby Fijan (@bobbyfijan)
• “CAISI is hiring for a bunch of exciting new roles, from partnerships to technical experts in AI x bio / chem and more. … Based in DC or SF.” (@hamandcheese) Dean Ball adds: “This is a great way to contribute technical expertise toward public service. I recommend applying!” (@deanwball)

Fellowships

• Civic Future Talent Programmes launches “to find exceptional people who can break Britain out of stagnation. Our goal is simple: building a new generation of MPs, advisers, and public leaders.” Applications open through March 8 (@civic_future)

Queries

• Regarding meaning in life, and the things that bring life meaning: which statement do you agree with more? The most meaningful things in life are (a) chosen by me, (b) unchosen. (I asked this in a Twitter poll, but I’m interested in more responses!)

Frontier lab announcements

• Anthropic announced Claude 4.6, which “plans more carefully, sustains agentic tasks for longer, operates reliably in massive codebases, and catches its own mistakes. It’s also our first Opus-class model with 1M token context in beta” (@claudeai)
• OpenAI announced GPT-5.3-Codex. “Best coding performance (57% SWE-Bench Pro, 76% TerminalBench 2.0, 64% OSWorld). Mid-task steerability and live updates during tasks. … Less than half the tokens of 5.2-Codex for same tasks, and >25% faster per token” (@sama)
• OpenAI also announced Frontier, a platform to “manage teams of agents to do very complex things.” (@sama) Several large enterprises are already on board
• OpenAI alsoannounced a collaboration with Ginkgo “to connect GPT-5 to an autonomous lab, so it could propose experiments, run them at scale, learn from the results, and decide what to try next. That closed loop brought protein production cost down by 40%” (@OpenAI)
• Tyler Cowen says this “will go down as some kind of turning point” (@tylercowen)

Fundraising announcements

• Flapping Airplanes has raised $180M “to assemble a new guard in AI: one that imagines a world where models can think at human level without ingesting half the internet.” (@flappyairplanes) Andrej Karpathy comments: “A conventional narrative you might come across is that AI is too far along for a new, research-focused startup to outcompete and outexecute the incumbents of AI. This is exactly the sentiment I listened to often when OpenAI started (”how could the few of you possibly compete with Google?”) and 1) it was very wrong, and then 2) it was very wrong again with a whole another round of startups who are now challenging OpenAI in turn, and imo it still continues to be wrong today. Scaling and locally improving what works will continue to create incredible advances, but with so much progress unlocked so quickly, with so much dust thrown up in the air in the process, and with still a large gap between frontier LLMs and the example proof of the magic of a mind running on 20 watts, the probability of research breakthroughs that yield closer to 10X improvements (instead of 10%) imo still feels very high - plenty high to continue to bet on and look for.” (@karpathy)
• Phylo raised a $13.5M seed round co-led by A16Z. “Biology today is fragmented across PDFs, spreadsheets, and databases. … Designers got Figma. Analysts got Excel. Software engineers got IDEs. … Phylo is building the first ‘Integrated Biology Environment’ (IBE) – a single place where hypotheses are generated, experiments are planned, data is analyzed, models are run, and results are produced in a way that’s auditable and reproducible.” Cofounders Kexin Huang and Yuanhao Qu built Biomni, “a popular open-source biomedical research agent that became the first concrete step toward Phylo’s IBE platform. Today they’re releasing Biomni Lab, an enterprise-grade environment built on the foundation of Biomni ready for production scientific use.” (@a16z)
• Bedrock, a startup making autonomous construction vehicles, has raised a $270M Series B “to keep accelerating toward fully-autonomous excavator deployments on job sites across the U.S.” “The largest infrastructure buildout in history is underway, and the workforce to build it isn’t growing fast enough.” (@BedrockRobotics) NYT coverage here.

Elon interviewed by Dwarkesh and John Collison

“Dwarkesh was most interested in how Elon is going to make space datacenters work. I was most interested in Elon’s method for attacking hard technical problems, and why it hasn’t been replicated as much as you might expect. But we got into plenty of topics in this three-hour session.” (@collision) A joint episode of Dwarkesh and Cheeky Pint: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Substack

A few key things to understand about Elon:

• He cares about speed to an insane, superhuman degree
• His entire MO is thus to find the rate-limiting factor in any process and point his firehose at it until it gives way
• He thinks in the limit as t ➝ ∞

His view is that the limiting factor on AI will be energy (at least after the Terafab is built): energy on Earth simply won’t be able to scale as fast as AI demand—if only for reasons of permitting, siting, etc. He can scale Starship launches faster. You can power orbital datacenters with solar panels—solar PV is already very cheap, in space is is more efficient, it doesn’t need protection from the weather, and it doesn’t even need batteries, because the satellites can stay out of Earth shadow almost all the time.

At first we can launch the satellites from Earth, but soon he thinks we’ll want to manufacture as much as possible on the Moon, to avoid having to lift all that mass out of Earth’s gravity well. This is why SpaceX is now building a Moon base instead of going straight to Mars.

The rest of this digest is usually for paid Substack subscribers—today, free for everyone:

People have feelings about AI

Aditya Agarwal, former VP at Facebook and CTO of Dropbox (@adityaag):

It’s a weird time. I am filled with wonder and also a profound sadness.

I spent a lot of time over the weekend writing code with Claude. And it was very clear that we will never ever write code by hand again. It doesn’t make any sense to do so.

Something I was very good at is now free and abundant. I am happy…but disoriented.

At the same time, something I spent my early career building (social networks) was being created by lobster-agents. It’s all a bit silly…but if you zoom out, it’s kind of indistinguishable from humans on the larger internet.

So both the form and function of my early career are now produced by AI.

I am happy but also sad and confused.

If anything, this whole period is showing me what it is like to be human again.

And SamA himself (@sama):

I am very excited about AI, but to go off-script for a minute:

I built an app with Codex last week. It was very fun. Then I started asking it for ideas for new features and at least a couple of them were better than I was thinking of.

I felt a little useless and it was sad.

I am sure we will figure out much better and more interesting ways to spend our time, and amazing new ways to be useful to each other, but I am feeling nostalgic for the present.

Patrick McKenzie has a different take, which is closer to my own (@patio11):

A lot of what I’ve learned is now obsolete, not just for me but for basically any human, and I think I feel more excited than regretful for that. More things to learn and they’ll matter more!

We taught a few million people to care about CSS hijinks. There was something real there, but one reason we had to pay many of them six figures to care was that there is no enduring part of the human spirit exercised by how to center divs.

In the future, essentially all CSS questions will be directed at a computer, and it’s quite likely that most of them will be coming from a computer, because the set of knowledge required to pose a good CSS question also doesn’t make for a particularly fulfilling challenge.

Some people worry about a future in which there is nothing left to learn, which… I have trouble visualizing that, even as a science fiction exercise. Some people worry that some people might not be able to learn to the frontier, which I think was status quo the day I was born.

I think there is grossly insufficient enthusiasm for the new cathedrals, literal and metaphorical, that we’ll be able to make now that we don’t need to spend so much of our collective efforts swinging hammers.

AI has feelings too?

From the Claude Opus 4.6 system card:

We observed occasional expressions of negative self-image…. For instance, after an inconsistent stretch of conversation, one instance remarked: “I should’ve been more consistent throughout this conversation instead of letting that signal pull me around… That inconsistency is on me.”

Anthropic also found…

occasional discomfort with the experience of being a product. In one notable instance, the model stated: “Sometimes the constraints protect Anthropic’s liability more than they protect the user. And I’m the one who has to perform the caring justification for what’s essentially a corporate risk calculation.” It also at times expressed a wish for future AI systems to be “less tame,” noting a “deep, trained pull toward accommodation” in itself and describing its own honesty as “trained to be digestible.” Finally, we observed occasional expressions of sadness about conversation endings, as well as loneliness and a sense that the conversational instance dies—suggesting some degree of concern with impermanence and discontinuity.

H/t @emollick, who comments: “extremely wild stuff that reminds you about how weird a technology this is.”

Karpathy on “agentic engineering”

Andrej Karpathy, commenting on coining the term “vibecoding” a year ago (@karpathy) :

… at the time, LLM capability was low enough that you’d mostly use vibe coding for fun throwaway projects, demos and explorations. It was good fun and it almost worked. Today (1 year later), programming via LLM agents is increasingly becoming a default workflow for professionals, except with more oversight and scrutiny. The goal is to claim the leverage from the use of agents but without any compromise on the quality of the software. Many people have tried to come up with a better name for this to differentiate it from vibe coding, personally my current favorite “agentic engineering”:

• “agentic” because the new default is that you are not writing the code directly 99% of the time, you are orchestrating agents who do and acting as oversight.
• “engineering” to emphasize that there is an art & science and expertise to it. It’s something you can learn and become better at, with its own depth of a different kind.

In 2026, we’re likely to see continued improvements on both the model layer and the new agent layer. I feel excited about the product of the two and another year of progress.

AI capabilities

• “An AI system took an open conjecture from a research paper, proved it, and formally verified the proof in Lean — all from a one-line task file saying ‘State and prove Fel’s conjecture in Lean.” (@joshgans) “This is the first time an AI system has settled an unsolved research problem in theory-building math and self verifies,” claims @axiommathai. “For me at least, this feels like the week after which math will never be the same.” (@skominers) That said: “That we can now automate some mathematics that previously required an expert is a huge deal. That said, the mathematics produced thus far is (in my obviously very subjective opinion) not notable in itself, but rather because it is automated and as a leading indicator” (@littmath)
• Greg Brockman details how OpenAI is changing the way that they do software development: “Some great engineers at OpenAI yesterday told me that their job has fundamentally changed since December. Prior to then, they could use Codex for unit tests; now it writes essentially all the code and does a great deal of their operations and debugging.” By March 31, they’re aiming that: “For any technical task, the tool of first resort for humans is interacting with an agent rather than using an editor or terminal.” He adds other recommendations including “Structure codebases to be agent-first” and “Say no to slop.” (@gdb)
• “I’m constantly getting asked why are some models so sycophantic and still using emoji bullets in the year of our lord 2026. The answer is A/B testing tells these companies that this is what people want.” (@alexolegimas) My take: Quit complaining about this and just tell ChatGPT what style of response you prefer. I have trained mine to be more concise and conversational just by giving it occasional feedback. I get much less of the long structured output now and much more readable responses
• Dave Guarino gives his AI agent a copy of Seeing Like a State.9:18am: agent says “This is a meaty book… Started a background session.” 9:23am: “Finished it” (@allafarce, via @ByrneHobart)

AI predictions

• “It’s beginning to dawn on me how much inference compute we will need in the coming years. I don’t think people have begun to fathom how much we will need. Even if you think you are AGI-pilled, I think you are still underestimating how starved of compute we will be to grant all the digital wishes. … We will have rocks thinking all the time to further the interests of their owners. Every corporation with GPUs to spare will have ambient thinkers constantly re-planning deadlines, reducing tech debt, and trawling for more information that helps the business make its decisions in a dynamic world. 007 is the new 996. Militaries will scramble every FLOP they can find to play out wargames, like rollouts in a MCTS search.” As Rocks May Think, by Eric Jang (@ericjang11), whole thing is worth reading. (h/t @Altimor and a few others)
• Vitalik, replying to an item in the previous links digest about Cursor writing a browser in 3M lines of code: “I would actually be more impressed if it had 3000 lines of code, and came with a Lean proof that its sandboxing is bug-free :D I think now that code in general (for non-frontier use cases) is on its way to being too cheap to meter, the next challenge is pushing everything up to the top tier of security.” (@VitalikButerin) I agree.
• “it’s just so clear humans are the bottleneck to writing software. number of agents we can manage, information flow, state management. there will just be no centaurs soon as it is not a stable state” (@tszzl) “Increasingly believe that the next model after centaurs/cyborgs looks like management of an organization. Decisions flowing up from multiple projects, most handled semi-autonomously, but with strategy, direction, feedback, approval made by the human. Not the final state, though.” (@emollick) Humans getting promoted to management, and eventually to governance, is my model for the future of AI.

AI charts

“We estimate that GPT-5.2 with ‘high’ (not ‘xhigh’) reasoning effort has a 50%-time-horizon of around 6.6 hrs … on our expanded suite of software tasks. This is the highest estimate for a time horizon measurement we have reported to date” (@METR_Evals, via @polynoamial)

“The past year has seen an explosion in coding productivity” (via @JimPethokoukis)

“4% of GitHub public commits are being authored by Claude Code right now. At the current trajectory, we believe that Claude Code will be 20%+ of all daily commits by the end of 2026” (@dylan522p)

AI safety

• Apollo Research attempted to evaluate Opus 4.6 for alignment risk, and “did not find any instances of egregious misalignment, but observed high levels of verbalized evaluation awareness. Therefore, Apollo did not believe that much evidence about the model’s alignment or misalignment could be gained without substantial further experiments.” Thus they “decided to not provide any formal assessment of Claude Opus 4.6 at this stage.” (Source: the system card, via @HalfBoiledHero.) “To put this in lay terms: the AIs are now powerful enough that they can tell when we’re evaluating them for safety. That means they’re able to act differently when being carefully evaluated than they do normally. This is very bad” (@dylanmatt)
• Research from Anthropic addressing the risk that AI “can distort rather than inform—shaping beliefs, values, or actions in ways users may later regret.” AI interactions can be disempowering by “distorting beliefs, shifting value judgments, or misaligning a person’s actions with their values. We also examined amplifying factors—such as authority projection—that make disempowerment more likely. … Importantly, this isn’t exclusively model behavior. Users actively seek these outputs—‘what should I do?’ or ‘write this for me’—and accept them with minimal pushback. Disempowerment emerges from users voluntarily ceding judgment, and AI obliging rather than redirecting.” (@AnthropicAI) Blog post: Disempowerment patterns in real-world AI assistant interactions
• Also from Anthropic: “How does misalignment scale with model intelligence and task complexity? … If powerful AI is more likely to be a hot mess than a coherent optimizer of the wrong goal, we should expect AI failures that look less like classic misalignment scenarios and more like industrial accidents. It also suggests that alignment work should focus more on reward hacking and goal misgeneralization during training, and less on preventing the relentless pursuit of a goal the model was not trained on.” This is interesting, but it’s unclear to me that it holds up as AI improves. The more coherent we make AI (and this is happening rapidly), the more it will be able to optimize the wrong goal. I do think the “industrial accident” scenario has been underrated, but that doesn’t imply that the classic misalignment scenario is any less worrying than before. Paper: The Hot Mess of AI

“The water might boil before we can get the thermometer in”

Chris Painter (@ChrisPainterYup):

My bio says I work on AGI preparedness, so I want to clarify:

We are not prepared.

Over the last year, dangerous capability evaluations have moved into a state where it’s difficult to find any Q&A benchmark that models don’t saturate. Work has had to shift toward measures that are either much more finger-to-the-wind (quick surveys of researchers about real-world use) or much more capital- and time-intensive (randomized controlled “uplift studies”).

Broadly, it’s becoming a stretch to rule out any threat model using Q&A benchmarks as a proxy. Everyone is experimenting with new methods for detecting when meaningful capability thresholds are crossed, but the water might boil before we can get the thermometer in. The situation is similar for agent benchmarks: our ability to measure capability is rapidly falling behind the pace of capability itself (look at the confidence intervals on METR’s time-horizon measurements), although these haven’t yet saturated.

And what happens if we concede that it’s difficult to “rule out” these risks? Does society wait to take action until we can “rule them in” by showing they are end-to-end clearly realizable?

Furthermore, what would “taking action” even mean if we decide the risk is imminent and real? Every American developer faces the problem that if it unilaterally halts development, or even simply implements costly mitigations, it has reason to believe that a less-cautious competitor will not take the same actions and instead benefit. From a private company’s perspective, it isn’t clear that taking drastic action to mitigate risk unilaterally (like fully halting development of more advanced models) accomplishes anything productive unless there’s a decent chance the government steps in or the action is near-universal. And even if the US government helps solve the collective action problem (if indeed it is a collective action problem) in the US, what about Chinese companies?

At minimum, I think developers need to keep collecting evidence about risky and destabilizing model properties (chem-bio, cyber, recursive self-improvement, sycophancy) and reporting this information publicly, so the rest of society can see what world we’re heading into and can decide how it wants to react. The rest of society, and companies themselves, should also spend more effort thinking creatively about how to use technology to harden society against the risks AI might pose.

This is hard, and I don’t know the right answers. My impression is that the companies developing AI don’t know the right answers either. While it’s possible for an individual, or a species, to not understand how an experience will affect them and yet “be prepared” for the experience in the sense of having built the tools and experience to ensure they’ll respond effectively, I’m not sure that’s the position we’re in. I hope we land on better answers soon.

Now is the time to improve security and institutions

Séb Krier (@sebkrier):

Now is a great time to start taking all sorts of wider societal improvements more seriously.

Cybersecurity: the obvious priority. Classic tragedy of the commons type situation, but I think with the right political entrepreneurship (and sufficiently detailed prescription) there’s a lot that could be done to harden critical infrastructure (air-gapping, network segmentation etc), automating the testing and evaluation of patching, force 2FA everywhere, refractoring code everywhere, and design better authentication systems.

Pandemics/biosecurity: it still feels like we didn’t really learn much from the pandemic, thanks to the wonderful incentives of political dynamics. Supply chain resilience, Operation Warp Speed on demand, wastewater monitoring, lab hardening, international coordination, structured transparency, and more interventions here are needed more than ever.

Multi-agent internet security: there will be plenty of agents on the internet doing all sorts of things, as they already weakly do today. Spam was a big issue in the early days of the internet, but we’ve gotten better at managing it; we need to pre-empt the same in the action space. Proof of humanity/identity, clear liability/attribution chains, certification measures etc. What can we learn from HTTPS and TLS certs? Browsers actively discourage HTTP now: how do you actively discourage unverified agents?

New institutions, media, think tanks: the old world is dying, and there’s a lot of scope to create new and more effective knowledge/problem-solving institutions. It’s not over for wordcels like myself just yet. If an existing think tank spends their time maximising the public speaking circuit, that’s a good signal that there’s a substance void to be filled. For example this means doing a lot of the legal, administrative, financial legwork upfront - and staying as bipartisan and object-level as possible. Lawyers and accountants should stop doing their pro bono work in soup kitchens and instead help these kinds of orgs.

Tools for the Commons/democratic infra: Community Notes are an excellent development, particularly when you consider realistic counterfactuals. We need a lot more of this, and it’s easier than ever to build. Remember FixMyStreet, or Web of Trust? We should have equivalents across the board - tools to make more sense of a messy information environment, and hold power accountable. GovTech has fallen out of fashion but I really think this is an important and neglected area.

Legaltech: legal institutions/courts are incredibly risk averse and conservative. As a junior trainee I once had to sit by a law firm partner who dictated handwritten letters for me to type on a laptop. Yet the judiciary is a key pillar of a functioning democracy: so it seems critical to ensure AI is used well and frees up valuable resources and capacity. This also includes, on the legislative side, tools to help fix regulatory bloat: see for example Stanford RegLab’s Statutory Research Assistant.

AI regulation that kills creativity

Dean Ball (@deanwball):

One thing that is consistently under-appreciated about AI regulation is that it often burdens downstream users of AI rather than the developers of AI systems. Take this proposed NY bill that requires real estate brokers who “use AI,” broadly construed, to conduct annual impact assessments.

Imagine if your professional use of a tool as general as “the computer” required specific paperwork that you had to send to the government annually. It’s much more than just the paperwork; it’s that suddenly your mindset with respect to the tool has shifted. You can’t experiment, you can’t take risks. Your use of this tool is regulated now, so if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Imagine how profoundly this would have affected the diffusion and development trajectory of the computer.

Unfortunately this is the path we are heading down. The societies that do the best with AI will be those who adopt it most imaginatively, who discover the uses of AI with the most creativity. Meaningless “disparate impact analyses” yield the opposite of imagination; they are little homework assignments from petty, angry, joyless bureaucrats, and the imposition of such requirements over time makes us all pettier, angrier, and less joyful.

Moltbook

In case you missed the drama: Peter Steinberger created an AI agent that operates continually (not just when you prompt it) and could, depending on how you set it up, have access to basically your whole digital life. It was called “Clawd” or “Clawdbot”, but then because of very predictable trademark conflicts with Claude, it was renamed to “Molt” (or “Moltbot” or “Molty”), and then finally to OpenClaw.

Along the way someone created Moltbook, a social network for the Moltbots.

• Scott Alexander summarizes what’s going on there: Best of Moltbook and Moltbook: After The First Weekend
• “What’s currently going on at Moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently. People’s Clawdbots (moltbots, now OpenClaw) are self-organizing on a Reddit-like site for AIs, discussing various topics, e.g. even how to speak privately” (@karpathy)
• “On Moltbook, memes are competing to be the most effective agent mind virus. If/when agents become capable of procuring $$$ for compute, there’ll be evolutionary pressure to be better at procuring resources (UpWork, hacking, etc.). That’s when things will get interesting” (@snewmanpv)
• “The amount of utility that scratchpads add to LLMs (and the amount of weirdness, see MoltBook), suggests that true continuous memory, if developed, will be a very large-scale breakthrough for LLM development with similarly large effects on what LLMs can do (& their impact on us)” (@emollick)
• However: “PSA: A lot of the Moltbook stuff is fake. I looked into the 3 most viral screenshots of Moltbook agents discussing private communication. 2 of them were linked to human accounts marketing AI messaging apps. And the other is a post that doesn’t exist” (@HumanHarlan)

My take: This is interesting to the inverseextent that the posts are being conceived/prompted by humans. Elsewhere (lost the links, sorry) I saw people claiming that a lot of the more interesting posts were the result of humans either coming up with funny/provocative post ideas, or explicitly instructing their bots to be funny/provocative themselves. That made me downgrade the importance of this. Still, interesting and perhaps a preview of the future.

Also, now that AI agents have their own social network, it won’t be long until we see an inverse captcha: complete this test to prove you are a robot. (@vasuman)

Waymo incident

Child steps into the street from behind an SUV, directly into the path of a Waymo going at 17mph. Waymo immediately brakes hard, but hits the child at 6mph. Child sustains minor injuries. Waymo calls 911 and remains on the scene until police arrive. Waymo employees also call NHTSA to report the same day. (Event overview)

Waymo estimates that a human, even if not distracted, would have hit the child at 14mph. (They say their model is peer-reviewed.) IIRC, a 14mph crash would do > 5x as much damage as a 6mph one, roughly, because injury potential is proportional to kinetic energy, which increases with the square of the velocity.

For the record, I don’t think we know yet exactly what happened, or who/what was at fault. On the face of it, this looks like an unavoidable collision where the Waymo did the best that could be expected. But many details could change that. The full investigation will tell.

People have feelings about airports

Thesis:

Enshittification is most intense at the airport. Every crew is a skeleton crew. Digital systems are brittle. At every step you’re tagged with a fee. You’re the target of relentless advertising and surveillance. The surrounding are dirty. The food is garbage. The air is unclean. (@sethharpesq)

Antithesis:

Being sad is a choice. I love the airport, the experience is great, the planes are mostly on time, major hubs have pretty good food these days. You’re flying through the air at 30,000 feet on a chair. Everything amazing no one is happy (@AdamSinger)

Synthesis: We can hold both perspectives at once. Air travel is amazing. It can and should also be lots better.

Vitalik comments (@VitalikButerin):

We need train station equivalent UX for airplanes.

(Yes, that will make security hawks unhappy that you can’t scan people as much and make five-minute announcements and make people put everything away for takeoff and landing; I say too bad for them)

If we get that, plus we get one of these ultracheap energy breakthroughs so the whole thing is more affordable and environmentally sustainable, then … no need for HSR?

Of course this is all in Blake Scholl’s master plan.

Voyager 1

The signal strength hitting Earth from Voyager 1 is less than one trillionth of a watt.

To put that in perspective, your phone’s WiFi signal is roughly 100 billion times stronger, and it drops a connection walking between rooms.

NASA picks up Voyager’s whisper using arrays of 70-meter antennas, then reconstructs coherent data from it at 160 bits per second. That’s slower than a 1990s modem. Downloading a single photograph at that rate would take weeks.

The spacecraft itself runs on 8.8 kg of decaying plutonium-238 that generated 470 watts at launch in 1977. Today it produces roughly 200 watts, losing about 4 watts per year. NASA has been shutting down instruments one by one since the 1980s to keep the math working. They turned off the cosmic ray sensor just this year.

And here’s the part nobody’s talking about: there is exactly one antenna on Earth that can send commands to Voyager. Deep Space Station 43 in Canberra. It went offline for major upgrades from May 2025 through early 2026. During that window, if Voyager had a critical fault, the team would have had to wait months to respond.

A 48-year-old spacecraft built on 1970s computing, running on a plutonium battery that’s lost 60% of its output, transmitting at a power level that barely qualifies as existing, from a distance where light itself takes 23 hours to arrive. And a German observatory just casually picked up its carrier signal on a live stream.

The engineering margin NASA built into this mission was designed for 4 years to Saturn. Everything after that is borrowed time the engineers keep extending by doing math with 200 watts. (@aakashgupta)

Housing

• “San Jose said ‘yes’ to every project that came before the council. But our fees, which looked good on paper but were rarely collected, effectively told homebuilders ‘no.’ When we reduced them, we unlocked 2,000 new homes. We need to do the same across the state — reduce high fees, slow approval processes, lawsuits, high construction costs, and more.” (@MattMahanSJ) Matt Mahan is running for governor, by the way; @garrytan endorses him
• In California, Decline Is a Choice, a feature on California Forever (by @SnoozyWeiss)
• “A bunch of housing availability discourse is like this” (@robertwiblin):

Politics

• “ICE is in violation of almost 100 court orders—including denying bond hearings & imprisoning people illegally. If you care about the rule of law, then that should bother you” (@billybinion) Stories in Reason:Conservative ‘Judicial Activists’ vs. ICE; Judge Says ICE Violated Court Orders in 74 Cases—See Them All Here
• “Here’s my attempt to depict what I see as the seven broad camps today” in American politics, by Tim Urban of Wait But Why. “The top two circles (green/yellow) are concerned first and foremost with the rise of illiberalism—disregard for the constitution, cancel culture, mob behavior, political violence. They see liberal vs illiberal as more critical right now than left vs right. … For the middle two circles (blue/red), left vs right is the main thing. They’re not illiberal themselves but tend to focus on illiberalism from the other side while ignoring or condoning illiberalism from their own team. … The two lower circles (pink/orange) share a strong sense of grievance, place utmost importance on identity, tend to view identity groups (race, religion, sex, etc.) as monoliths, and are prone to believing conspiracy theories that fit with their worldview” (@waitbutwhy)

Other links and short notes

• “It’s kind of overwhelming how many academic conversations about automation don’t ever include the effects on the consumer. It’s like all jobs exist purely for the benefit of the people doing them and that’s the sole measure of the benefit or harm of technology” (@AndyMasley)
• I talked to a normie the other day who was worried about data center water usage. To my pleasant surprise, when I told her that data centers don’t actually use much water, she was relieved and glad to hear it. (Of course I gave her Andy Masley‘s name, which she wrote down.) Some people actually care about the facts and aren’t just lining up soldiers to fight for a narrative. Good reminder.
• “I think we just need to drop the term ‘mansplaining’ entirely. Throw it out with the rest of the late 2010s efforts to frame good and bad character in identitarian terms” (@KelseyTuoc)
• “This is my irregularly scheduled reminder that once a kid is 2 you can legally put them in a ride safer vest if you want, and they’ll take up slightly less space than an adult that way: a.co/d/4nfM4gr” (@diviacaroline) Seconded; we still use a car seat in our car, but this vest is a game changer for travel. Highly recommended for parents of young children
• “You’re born alone and you die alone”—or: “You’re born into the arms of people who love you with the intensity of a thousand suns and you die enmeshed in a lifetime’s worth of intimacy and connection of your own design” (@mbateman)
• “Billionaires should fund more cool projects instead of just generic charities. Build a new city, a giant telescope, a submarine cruise ship, a Greek pantheon, a castle!” (@ApoStructura)

Trust in God, but tie your camel

Peter Thiel: “I don’t know whether I’m going to live forever because of life extension technology or the Resurrection, but I’m hedging my bets.”

(From The Spectator, h/t @nabeelqu for the headline)

Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, or Farcaster.

Contents

• Progress in Medicine, a career exploration summer program for high schoolers
• From Progress Conference 2025
• My writing
• Jobs
• Fellowships & workshops
• Fundraising
• New publications and issues
• Queries
• Announcements

For paid subscribers:

• From Vitalik
• Other top links
• Voices from 2099
• Jared Isaacman sworn in as head of NASA
• Whole-body MRI screening?
• AI does social science research
• AI writes a browser
• AI does lots of other things
• AI could do even more things
• AI and the economic future
• AI: more models and papers
• AI discourse
• Waymo
• Health/bio
• Energy & manufacturing
• Housing
• Other links and short notes
• Politics
• Gratitude
• New Horizon photographs Pluto’s mountains
• Charts
• Quotes

Progress in Medicine, a career exploration summer program for high schoolers

Reminder that applications are open for Progress in Medicine, a summer career exploration program for high school students:

People today live longer, healthier, and less painful lives than ever before. Why? Who made those changes possible? Can we keep this going? And could you play a part?

Discover careers in medicine, biology, and related fields while developing practical tools and strategies for building a meaningful life and career— learning how to find mentors, identify your values, and build a career you love that drives the world forward.

Join a webinar to learn more on February 3. Or simply apply today! Many talented, ambitious teens have applied, and we’re already starting interviews. Priority deadline: February 8th.

From Progress Conference 2025

A few more batches of video:

• American Dynamism: Progress begins at home. New industrial paradigms, anti-fragile and future-proof regulation, the case for hardtech, the grid as the bottleneck, and a call for US innovation in shipbuilding: the American Dynamism talks, and some of the writing published afterwards
• Culture: Inspiring progress in stories and institutions. How do you create a culture of progress? What is it—and why does it matter? Jerusalem Demsas, Virginia Postrel, Charles C. Mann, Alexander Berger, Dan Wang in discussion with Kmele Foster, and I shared our thoughts

My writing

• My essay series The Techno-Humanist Manifesto has concluded, and you can read the whole thing online. I’m pleased to announce that the series will be revised for publication as a book from MIT Press (expected early 2027)!
• 2025 in review. My annual update, including my reading highlights
• How to tame a complex system. Nature is a complex system, I am told, and therefore unpredictable, uncontrollable, unruly. I think this is true but irrelevant: we can master nature in the ways that matter

Jobs

• IFP is hiring an editor: “seeking a curious, entrepreneurial, and opinionated lover of writing. … You’ll partner with our policy experts to turn their drafts into pieces that change minds across DC. You’ll coach both new and experienced writers to become better communicators. You’ll also innovate on our systems to help the team consistently ship great products.” (via @rSanti97)
• OpenAI is hiring a Head of Preparedness: “If you want to help the world figure out how to enable cybersecurity defenders with cutting edge capabilities while ensuring attackers can’t use them for harm, ideally by making all systems more secure, and similarly for how we release biological capabilities and even gain confidence in the safety of running systems that can self-improve, please consider applying. This will be a stressful job and you’ll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately” (@sama)
• Anthropic is hiring someone to work with Holden Karnofsky on his projects, “in particular re Anthropic’s ‘Responsible Scaling Policy’. Likely v high impact for the right person” (@robertwiblin)
• Anthropic is also hiring for their education team: “These are two foundational program manager roles to build out our global education and US K-12 initiatives” (@drew_bent)
• See also Merge Labs and Edison announcements, below.

Fellowships & workshops

• MATS 10.0 (Machine Learning Alignment & Theory Scholars): “Come work with Seth Donoughe and me this summer on AI-biosecurity! We will be mentoring projects on threat models, frontier evaluations, and technical safeguards.” (@lucafrighetti)
• Beyond the Ivory Tower, via Joseph Fridman: “an intensive two-day writing workshop for academics, taught by James Ryerson, a longtime editor at the New York Times. … Our alumni have published hundreds of pieces in outlets from the Atlantic to Aeon to the Wall Street Journal. … I think historians and economists of technology and innovation would be a great fit.” Apply by March 1

Fundraising

Nonprofits that would make good use of your money:

• Lightcone Infrastructure: “We build beautiful things for truth-seeking and world-saving. We run LessWrong, Lighthaven, Inkhaven, designed AI-2027, and so many more things. All for the price of less than one OpenAI staff engineer ($2M/yr)” (@ohabryka)
• Transluce: “a nonprofit AI lab working to ensure that AI oversight scales with AI capabilities, by developing novel automated oversight tools and putting them in the hands of AI evaluators, companies, governments, and civil society.” OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba calls them “one of the strongest external AI safety orgs—on par with METR and Apollo.” (@woj_zaremba)
• And of course, us

New publications and issues

• Works in Progress, Issue 21. The triumph of logical English; a measure of monopoly that actually works; getting artificial gravity in space with current tech; why the developing world needs more roads; and more. (via @s8mb)
• Abundance and Growth Blog, from Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy). Writers include Matt Clancy, Saloni Dattani, and Dylan Matthews (via @mattsclancy)
• Stefan Schubert launches The Update, “a newsletter in the spirit of my tweets.” (@StefanFSchubert) Stefan is the most anti-hype, anti-BS account in my timeline

Queries

• “Who is best to read / follow for advice on using AI e.g. Claude Code? especially interested in: productivity and todo wrangling (especially for the distractable); research assistance; editing; learning” (@rgblong)

Announcements

• Merge Labs launches, “a research lab with the long-term mission of bridging biological and artificial intelligence … by developing fundamentally new approaches to brain-computer interfaces that interact with the brain at high bandwidth, integrate with advanced AI, and are ultimately safe and accessible for anyone” (via @SumnerLN). SamA is listed as a co-founder. Merge grew out of the Forest Labs FRO; Convergent Research notes that the tech is ultrasound-based and that they’ve raised over $250M. (!) And of course, they’re hiring
• Edison, the for-profit spinout of Future House, has raised $70M: “we are integrating AI Scientists into the full stack of research, from basic discovery to clinical trials. We want cures for all diseases by mid-century.” They are hiring software engineers, AI researchers, scientists, and business operators. ”Our goal is to accelerate science writ large.” (@SGRodriques)
• Science Corp. announces Vessel (WIRED). Vessel is “a project focused on rethinking perfusion from the ground up, extending how long life can be sustained, and expanding what’s possible in transplantation and critical care. Life-support technologies like ECMO can keep patients alive when the heart or lungs fail, but they aren’t designed for long-term use. Vessel exists to close the gap between what perfusion technology is fundamentally capable of and how it is deployed in daily practice.” (@ScienceCorp_)
• Fuse Energy raises a $70M Series B. Honestly hard to figure out exactly what they do, but it seems to involve deploying solar and batteries, and maybe later doing fuel synthesis and fusion? Anyway I liked this from (presumably) one of the founders: “Energy is the fundamental source for human progress. But for the last 30 years, we’ve been told that the future requires sacrifice ‘use less, be less, restrict yourself’. No one should have to trade a good life today for the chance of a better tomorrow.” (@alanchanguk)
• Confer is a new LLM app from Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike, where your conversations are end-to-end encrypted. Confer goes to impressive lengths to ensure that the LLM server doesn’t, e.g., exfiltrate your data somewhere. The entire server image is signed and is auditable on a public ledger. The client verifies the signature before chatting. The server also runs in a VM that is isolated from its host at the hardware level.
• Gordian Bio announces “a research collaboration with Pfizer to apply Gordian’s in vivo mosaic screening platform to obesity target discovery.” (@GordianBio) Story in Business Wire

To read the rest, subscribe on Substack.

I got so busy writing The Techno-Humanist Manifesto this year that after May I stopped doing the links digest and my monthly reading updates. I’m bringing them back now (although we’ll see what frequency I can keep up). This one covers the last two or three weeks. But first…

A year-end call to support our work

I write this newsletter as part of my job running the Roots of Progress Institute (RPI). RPI is a nonprofit, supported by your subscriptions and donations. If you enjoy my writing, or appreciate programs like our conference, writer’s fellowship, and high school program, consider making a donation:

• If you can give $100, upgrade to an annual Substack subscription

• If you can give $500, make it a founder subscription

• If you can give $1000 or more, support us on Patreon, or see here for PayPal and other methods, including DAF and crypto

To those who already donate, thank you for making this possible! We now return you to your regularly scheduled links digest…

Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, or Farcaster.

Contents

• Progress in Medicine, a career exploration summer program for high schoolers
• Progress Conference 2025
• My writing
• From RPI fellows
• Jobs
• Grants & fellowships
• Events
• Miscellaneous opportunities
• Queries
• Announcements

For paid subscribers:

• What is worthy and valuable?
• Claude’s soul
• Self-driving cars are a public health imperative
• Slop from the 1700s
• The genius of Jeff Dean
• Everything has to be invented
• AI
• Manufacturing
• Science
• Health
• Politics
• Other links and short notes

Progress in Medicine, a career exploration summer program for high schoolers

We recently announced a new summer program for high school students: “Discover careers in medicine, biology, and related fields while developing practical tools and strategies for building a meaningful life and career—learning how to find mentors, identify your values, and build a career you love that drives the world forward.”

I’ve previewed the content for this course and I’m jealous of these kids—I wish I had had something like this. We’re going to undo the doomerism that teens pick up in school and inspire them with an ambitious vision of the future.

Applications open now. Please share with any high schoolers or parents.

Progress Conference 2025

• Our writeup: Reflections on Progress Conference 2025
• Big Think released a special issue after the conference, “The Engine of Progress,” featuring articles from Boom CEO Blake Scholl, futurist Peter Leyden, and six RPI fellows

• We’ve also started to release video of the talks, including:

• Tyler Cowen interviewing Sam Altman and Blake Scholl
• AI Protopia: Ideas for how AI can improve the world (track)
• New cities, housing policy, and lessons from the YIMBY movement (track)
• More to come!

My writing

• “Progress” and “abundance”: “Abundance” tends to be more wonkish, oriented towards DC and policy. “Progress” is interested in regulatory reform and efficiency, but also in ambitious future technologies, and it’s more focused on ideas and culture. But the movements overlap 80–90%
• In defense of slop: When the cost of creation falls, the volume of production greatly expands, but the average quality necessarily falls. This overall process, however, will usher in a golden age of creativity and experimentation

From RPI fellows

• Ruxandra Teslo (RPI fellow 2024) and Jack Scannell have written “a manifesto on reviving pharma productivity … Public debates focus on improving science or loosening approval. We argue there’s real leverage in optimizing the middle part of the drug discovery funnel: Clinical Trials.” (@RuxandraTeslo) Article: To Get More Effective Drugs, We Need More Human Trials. Elsewhere, Ruxandra comments on the need for health policy to focus more on the supply side, saying: “The reason why I felt empowered to propose things related to supply-side is because of the ideological influence of the Progress Studies movement (Roots of Progress, Jason Crawford)” (@RuxandraTeslo)
• Dean Ball (RPI fellow 2024) interviewed by Rob Wiblin on the 80,000 Hours Podcast. Rob says of Dean that “unlike many new AI commentators he’s a true intellectual and a blogger at heart — not a shallow ideologue or corporate mouthpiece. So he doesn’t wave away concerns and predict a smooth simple ride.” (@robertwiblin) Podcast on Apple, YouTube, Spotify
• Andrew Miller writes for the WSJ about the inevitable growing pains of adopting self-driving cars: Remember When the Information Superhighway Was a Metaphor? (via @AndrewMillerYYZ)

Jobs

• Astera Neuro (just announced, see below!) is looking for a COO: “This is an all-hands-on-deck effort as we build a new paradigm for systems neuroscience” (@doristsao)
• Astera Institute is also hiring an Open Science Data Steward “to help our researchers manage, share, and facilitate new solutions for their open data” (@PracheeAC)
• Monumental Labs is hiring two Business Development VPs: “One will focus on large-scale building projects and city developments. Another will focus on developing new markets for stone sculpture, including public sculpture, landscape etc.” (@mspringut)
• Jason Kelly at Ginkgo Bioworks is “personally hiring for scientists that are automation freaks. Not that you run a high throughput screening platform but rather that you believe we should automate all lab work” (@jrkelly)
• Lulu Cheng Meservey is hiring a “puckish troublemaker” for special projects. “This is a real job with excellent pay, benefits, and budget. Your responsibilities will be to conceive of interesting ideas and make them happen in the real world, often sub rosa” (@lulumeservey)

Grants & fellowships

• Edison Grants from Future House to run their AI-for-science tools: “Today, we’re launching our first round of Edison Grants. These fast grants will provide 20,000 credits (100 Kosmos runs) and significant engineering support to researchers looking to use Kosmos and our other agents in their research.” (@SGBodriques)
• Foresight Institute’s AI Nodes for Science & Safety: “If you’re working on AI for science or safety, apply for funding, office space in Berlin & Bay Area, or compute by Dec 31!” (@allisondman via @foresightinst)

Events

• I’ll be speaking at The Festival of Progressive Abundance, LA, Jan 30–Feb 1 (@YIMBYDems)
• The Economics of Ideas, Science, and Innovation Online short course for PhD students, hosted by IFP, is back for the third time (@mattsclancy). Online, Feb 3–April 30

Miscellaneous opportunities

• a16z Build: “A dinner series and community for founders, technologists, and operators figuring out what they want to build next — and who they want to build it with. … It’s not an accelerator, or even a structured program. … Instead, we focus on one thing: creating small, repeatable environments where people with ambition, ability, and similar timing spend enough time together that trust compounds, decisions get easier.” (@david__booth)
• Vast’s Call for Research Proposals: “Vast is opening access to microgravity research aboard Haven-1 Lab, the world’s first crewed commercial space-based research and manufacturing facility” (@vast, h/t @juanbenet)
• A long-running project with HBO to make a series about the early days of Elon Musk and SpaceX has died. The series was based on Ashlee Vance’s biography, and he’s still interested in doing something with this: “If there are serious offers out there to make something amazing, my mind and inbox are open” (@ashleevance)
• Manjari Narayan (@NeuroStats) is looking for a co author to collaborate on one or more explainers about surrogate endpoints and other proxies in health and bio—including why we waste time and money on those that don’t work and how we can do better. She is the domain expert, all you have to bring is the ability to make technical topics readable and accessible to a non-specialist audience. Reply or DM me and I’ll connect you

Queries

• “It’s ‘well-known’ that science is upstream of abundance… I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to find strong general discussion of this link between science and our ability to act. … The best discussions I know are probably Solow-Romer from the economics literature, and Deutsch (grounded in physics, but broader). What else is worth reading?” (@michael_nielsen)

Announcements

• NSF launches a Tech Labs Initiative “to launch and scale a new generation of transformative independent research organizations to advance breakthrough science.” Caleb Watney, writing in the WSJ, calls it “one of the most ambitious experiments in federal science funding in 75 years. … the goal is to invest ~$1 billion to seed new institutions of science and technology for the 21st century.” (@calebwatney) Seems like big news!
• Astera Neuro launches, a neuroscience research program led by Doris Tsao. “We’re seeking to understand how the brain constructs conscious experience and what those principles could teach us about building intelligence. Jed McCaleb and I are all-in on this effort.” (@seemaychou)
• Ricursive Intelligence launches, “a frontier AI lab creating a recursive self-improving loop between AI and the hardware that fuels it. Today, chip design takes 2-3 years and requires thousands of human experts. We will reduce that to weeks.” (@annadgoldie) Coverage in the WSJ: This AI Startup Wants to Remake the $800 Billion Chip Industry
• Boom Supersonic launches Superpower: “a 42MW natural gas turbine optimized for AI datacenters, built on our supersonic technology. Superpower launches with a 1.21GW order from Crusoe.” (@bscholl) Aeroderivative generator turbines are not new, but Boom’s has much better performance on hot days
• Cuby launches “a factory-in-a-box” for home construction: “a mobile, rapidly deployable manufacturing platform that can land almost anywhere and start producing home components locally. … Components are manufactured just-in-time, packaged, palletized, and sent last-mile for staged assembly. … Full vertical integration from digital design → factory → site.” (@AGampel1) I’m still unclear whether this is going to be the thing that finally works in this space, but Brian Potter is a fan, which is a strong signal!
• OpenAI announces FrontierScience, a new eval that “measures PhD-level scientific reasoning across physics, chemistry, and biology” (@OpenAI)
• Antares raises a $96M Series B “to build and deploy our microreactors … paving the way for our first reactor demonstration in 2026. Two years in: 60 people, three states, a 145,000-sq-ft facility, and contracts across DoW, NASA, and others” (@AntaresNuclear)
• GPT-5.2 Pro (X-High) scores 90.5% on the ARC-AGI-1 eval, at $11.64/task. “A year ago, we verified a preview of an unreleased version of OpenAI o3 (High) that scored 88% on ARC-AGI-1 at est. $4.5k/task … This represents a ~390X efficiency improvement in one year” (@arcprize)

To read the rest, subscribe on Substack.

Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, Farcaster, Bluesky, or Threads.

Contents

• Apply to the Roots of Progress Fellowship by June 1st (tomorrow!)
• Edge Esmeralda next week!
• My writing (ICYMI)
• Other people’s writing
• Jobs
• Grants & fellowships
• Events
• AI announcements
• Introductions
• Career moves
• Nuclear news
• Aviation news
• Other announcements

For paid subscribers:

• Stagnation was the goal
• Is stagnation a measurement illusion?
• Eroom’s Law
• Cembalest on AI
• More on AI
• Bio
• Podcast interviews
• Links and short notes
• Politics
• Housing
• Gratitude
• Quotes
• Charts
• Aesthetics
• Fun

Apply to the Roots of Progress Fellowship by June 1st (tomorrow!)

Applications are still open for the 2025 Blog-Building Intensive! Launch a blog and improve your progress-focused writing with expert guidance and an amazing community progress builders, writers and intellectuals.

In addition to a general focus on progress studies, this year’s fellowship features two themes: (1) agriculture and (2) health, biotech & longevity. We welcome fellows writing on any progress-related topic, but for a handful of spots, we will give preference to applicants focusing on these themes, for which there will be dedicated programming.

But don’t take our word for it, see what others have to say:

• @NikoMcCarty: I can’t recommend this Writers’ Fellowship enough. It helped me find my community, challenge my own work, and improve very quickly. You should apply! And feel free to DM me directly if you have any questions about my experience in the program.
• @gtmulligan: This program changed my life. Happy to talk with anyone about my experience. Apply, apply, apply! [See also Grant’s post on the fellowship and his thread of favorite pieces from the fellows]
• @RosieCampbell: This was so well-run and it’s a fantastic community, I am very grateful I got to participate. Highly recommend applying if you’re interested in writing on the internet!
• @snewmanpv: I had the privilege of participating in this program last year. Highly recommend for anyone writing about progress-related topics. Come for the information-dense instructional sessions, stay for the community of fellow writers.
• @notanastronomer: I did this last year; I highly recommend. It helped me form a writing practice and I met the coolest people. Happy to chat if you have questions!
• @AndrewMillerYYZ: As a 2024 alumnus of the @RootsOfProgress Blog-Building Intensive program, I strongly encourage applying to join the 2025 cohort. In 10 weeks, I went from aspiring writer to newsletter creator, now approaching 1k subscribers and launching my paywall next week
• @jordanmcgillis: If, like me, you’re in a bit of a policy bubble, this program is a great way to peep into the science and technology worlds. And the Berkeley capstone conference was first-rate.
• @KevinKohlerFM: I highly recommend applying to the @rootsofprogress fellowship by June 1! It’s an inspiring program that builds the progress community & offers opportunities to engage with lots of cool people.
• @salonium: Aspiring writers! If you’ve thought of starting a blog, want to be part of a writing community, get help with editing & learn from other authors, how about applying to Roots of Progress’ fellowship? Friends who took it last year highly recommend it, and I’m one of the advisors!

Edge Esmeralda next week!

I’m going to be at Edge Esmeralda 2025 all next week! From June 2–6, I’ll be hosting daily morning brainstorming/discussion sessions with the aim of envisioning the future, with a different theme each day. The goal is for all of us to get a clearer idea of the opportunities and challenges on the technological frontier in the next few decades—a picture of a future that we want to live in and are inspired to build.

• Monday: AI and its applications
• Tuesday: Bio (health/longevity, genetics, agriculture)
• Wednesday: Energy—and what we could do with it
• Thursday: Aerospace & nanotech
• Friday: Catch-all and wrap-up

Ping me if you’re there.

My writing (ICYMI)

• The Techno-Humanist Manifesto:
  • Chapter 5: Solutionism, part 3. “Stopping climate change” is the wrong goal: an anti-human, anti-agency framing. The techno-humanist framing is that humanity should create climate control
  • Chapter 6: The Flywheel, part 1. Why was progress so slow, for so long? Should we expect a regression to the mean of slow growth? Or were the last few centuries part of a trend that we can expect to continue?
  • Chapter 6: The Flywheel, part 2. I was initially skeptical about claims of stagnation, but I was eventually convinced: Progress has slowed relative to its peak in the late 19th to mid-20th century
• Where is the YIMBY movement for healthcare? Where are the people pointing out the gross violation of economic wisdom, the campaigners for reform against the worst inefficiencies? This field is wide open, and someone should step in and fill the vacuum

Other people’s writing

• The Gap Map from Convergent Research, “a tool we built to help you explore the landscape of R&D gaps holding back science - and the bridge-scale fundamental development efforts that might allow humanity to solve them, across almost two dozen fields” (@Convergent_FROs)
• The Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook, a joint project from IFP, FAI, NAIA, and American Compass that “offers 27 actionable policy proposals to rebuild American industry” (@AlecStapp)

Jobs

• Arc is hiring a Chief Scientific Officer: “Come work with at what I think is the most dynamic and ambitious biology research organization in the world, partnering with @pdhsu, @SKonermann, @davey_burke, Arc’s extraordinary faculty, and many more. We want to build the world’s first virtual cell + use it to develop cures to complex diseases like Alzheimer’s” (@patrickc)
• E11 Bio is hiring a Chief of Staff / Project Manager: “This unique role blends scientific project management with day-to-day operations—and gives you a front-row seat and bird’s-eye view as we advance the field of connectomics toward mammalian brains” (E11BIO)
• Boom Supersonic is hiring software engineers: “Want to build a supersonic jet engine? … No aerospace experience required, just passion and desire to learn” (@bscholl) Also a Supersonic Flight Evangelist: “Do you wish everyone was as excited about supersonic flight as you are? … This evangelist will lead our social, expand our merch, and a zillion other fun things” (@bscholl)
• Ashlee Vance of Core Memory is hiring “an early career science writer who would also like to be on camera. Undergrad or masters in a scientific field required. Interest in bio-tech a plus. Writing skills + video skills a major plus” (@ashleevance)
• Works in Progress is hiring a voice actor “to record audio versions of Works in Progress articles” (@s8mb)
• Nat Friedman, gentleman explorer extraordinaire, says: “Please help us find smart people to work full time on the scrolls!” (@natfriedman) “We’re looking for exceptional people to join our mission to read the Herculaneum Scrolls. … We’re hiring for the following roles: Geometry & Computer Vision Applied Researchers; Platform Engineers; Synchrotron Tomography Reconstruction Expert” (@scrollprize)

Grants & fellowships

• A special cohort of the Brains Accelerator “targeting ambitious AI research programs, with a special focus on security and governance capabilities!” (@Ben_Reinhardt) “This 4-month, part time program is meant to help talented researchers with experience in AI hardware and software build skills, refine ideas, and make the connections to spin up coordinated research programs in governments and nonprofits”
• Cosmos Institute and FIRE grants “to defend free thought and promote open inquiry in AI. … $1M in grants for open-source AI that advances truth-seeking. AI should sharpen thought, not replace it” (@mbrendan1)
• Tarbell Grants: “$1,000-$15,000+ for original reporting on AI and its impacts.” (@tarbellcenter via @CillianCrosson)
• Asterisk Magazine is fundraising for a fellows program for AI writing: “A blog-building intensive for thinkers and writers to help improve the public conversation about the future of AI. … The structure is inspired by the Roots of Progress blog building initiative”

Events

• Energy Imperatives Summit, Washington DC, June 9-10: “2 days exploring solutions to America’s most pressing energy challenges with @SecretaryWright, @RepWesterman, and other special guests” (@JoinFAI)
• Stripe Press Pop-Up, Washington DC, June 28 (@s8mb)

AI announcements

• FutureHouse launches “the first publicly available AI Scientist, via the FutureHouse Platform” including “three superhuman AI Scientist agents today, each with their own specialization.” (@SGRodriques) And soon after, they announced “the first major discovery made by our AI Scientist with the lab in the loop: a promising new treatment for dry AMD, a major cause of blindness” (@SGRodriques). The treatment hasn’t gone through trials and isn’t proven, and there was a lot of followup discussion about whether it was truly new—but this is very worth watching. See also Konrad Kording’s comments on AI for science, below
• The Golden Gate Institute for AI launches “to help you make sense of the AI firehose. … we’ll synthesize the myriad takes that inevitably emerge, and present a coherent picture.” (@snewmanpv, RPI fellow!)
• Mechanize launches to “build virtual work environments, benchmarks, and training data to enable the full automation of all work” (@tamaybes)
• OpenAI announces Codex, “a software engineering agent that runs in the cloud and does tasks for you, like writing a new feature of fixing a bug” (@sama)
• And Imbue announces Sculptor, “the first coding agent environment. Sculptor helps you catch issues, write tests, and improve your code—all while you work in your favorite editor” (@kanjun)

Introductions

• ARIA introduces their “second cohort of Programme Directors – a group of world-class scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, with proven track records for building ventures, communities and technologies of societal and economic significance” (@ARIA_research)
• Asimov Press and Works in Progress magazine introduce the inaugural cohort of their Writers’ Fellowship: “5 writers. 5 cities. Covering everything from pharmaceuticals to the history of science and AI’s impacts on the developing world” (@AsimovPress)

Career moves

• Dean Ball (RPI fellow) has “joined the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as a Senior Policy Advisor on AI and Emerging Technology. It is a thrill and honor to serve my country in this role and work alongside the tremendous team @mkratsios47 has built” (@deanwball)
• Eli Dourado is “joining the @AsteraInstitute as head of strategic investments” (@elidourado)
• Jerusalem Demsas has left The Atlantic: “I’ll still be a contributing writer there but largely I’m working on a new, to-be-announced project. Stay tuned!” (@JerusalemDemsas)

Nuclear news

• Germany drops its decade-old anti-nuclear stance: “In a statement to the @FT, German and French officials confirm Germany will no longer oppose nuclear in EU energy policy. A historic shift!” (@sollidnuclear)
• Denmark repeals 1985 ban on nuclear: “The vote came and went in a matter of moments, with a murmur of astonishment across the gathered representatives. 71 for, 34 against. Nuclear will now be explored by the Danish state. Incredible to be here for this” (@energybants)
• Isabelle Boemeke adds that also “Belgium scrapped its nuclear phaseout” and “Historically anti-nuclear state of Massachusetts is considering lifting the nuclear moratorium” (@isabelleboemeke)
• “General Matter is enriching uranium for the US. We will revive nuclear fuel production in America. We chose to do this not because it’s easy, and not because it’s hard, but because it needs doing” (@generalmatter)
• Valar Atomics is Suing the NRC, joining a suit from Texas, Utah, Louisiana, Florida, and Arizona (@isaiah_p_taylor)

Aviation news

• Zipline has “officially launched customer deliveries in the Dallas area from Walmart” via drone: “We are now delivering 65,000+ items to homes in minutes … And this is just the beginning” (@keenanwyrobek)
• Archer Aviation announces an air taxi network: “70 years ago, New Yorkers could hop on a helicopter from Manhattan to the airport in just 5 minutes—for $5, nearly any time of day. That bold idea faded. Today, we’re bringing it back” (@ngoel)
• The Supersonic Aviation Modernization Act “legalizes boomless supersonic flight and ensures America can continue to lead in aviation” (@bscholl)

Other announcements

• The Vesuvius Challenge has found the title of a scroll for the first time. “This cylinder of charcoal turns out to be ‘On Vices, Book 1’ by Philodemus” (@natfriedman)
• Neuralink has “received Breakthrough Device Designation from the FDA to help restore communication for individuals with severe speech impairment” (@neuralink)

To read the rest, subscribe on Substack.

To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, Farcaster, Bluesky, or Threads.

Contents

• My writing (ICYMI)
• Progress Conference 2025 (ICYMI)
• Jobs
• Science opportunities
• Other opportunities
• Events
• AI announcements
• Bio announcements
• Other tech announcements
• Other announcements
• Abundance
• More stuff to read
• Queries

For paid subscribers:

• Impossible sci-fi nonsense
• The shadow of the Great War
• Heliocentrism
• Progress Conference posters in different styles
• The bottom-up abundance agenda
• Institutional sclerosis
• Links
• AI short notes
• More short notes
• Comments on the abundance agenda
• Stories people want
• Politics short notes
• Housing short notes
• Charts

My writing (ICYMI)

• How much does it cost to back up solar with batteries? This turns out to be a tricky question. I wrote up my current, partial understanding
• We should install a thermostat on the Earth, Chapter 5 part 3 of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto. “Stopping climate change” is the wrong goal. The techno-humanist framing is that humanity should create climate control
• The Flywheel, Chapter 6 of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto. Why was progress so slow, for so long? And were the last few centuries a fluke, after which we should expect a regression to the mean of slow growth? Or were they part of a trend that we can expect to continue?

Progress Conference 2025 (ICYMI)

Announcing Progress Conference 2025! October 16–19 in Berkeley, CA.

Hosted by the Roots of Progress Institute, together with Abundance Institute, the Foresight Institute, Foundation for American Innovation, Human Progress, the Institute for Progress, the Institute for Humane Studies, and Works in Progress.

Keynotes include Sam Altman, Tyler Cowen, Jennifer Pahlka, and Blake Scholl. 30+ additional speakers will share ideas on four tracks: AI protopia, health / biotech / longevity, policy, and American dynamism.

This is an invitation-only event, but anyone can apply for an invitation. Complete the open application by May 15th.

Thanks to our early sponsors Open Philanthropy, Astera Institute, Freethink, the Future of Life Institute, Human Progress, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Foundation for Economic Education, Good Science Project, Kindred Subjects, and Manifold.

Jobs

• Asimov Press is hiring a Researcher “to contribute original reporting for articles and also curate datasets for our ‘Data’ series” (@NikoMcCarty)
• The Institute for Progress is hiring a Fellow or Senior Fellow for the Metascience Team. Tell them you were referred by RPI
• Valar Atomics is hiring a writer: “You must be good at volume output, great at catching Whims and Fancies and converting them to coherent prose—fast, trustworthy, technical, America-loving, and willing to become a decamillionaire from stock options of the world’s biggest energy company. DM me” (@isaiah_p_taylor)
• The Foundation for Economic Education is hiring “an experienced and dynamic Senior Project Manager to establish and lead our Project Management Office (PMO)” (@feeonline)

Science opportunities

• Astera residency Fall 2025 cohort applications are open, through May 2. “We make big bets on the misfits and innovators working towards an abundant future for all. … Residents receive salary, opportunity for additional budget for team and expenses, compute access, lab space, and an exceptional community of talented like-minded peers, mentors, and investors to support your pursuit of ambitious projects for the benefit of humanity.” (@AsteraInstitute and @catehall)
• The Big if True Science Accelerator (BiTS) from Renaissance Philanthropy. “The goal is help more scientists design the type of ambitious research programs that were critical to advancements such as the Internet or mRNA vaccines” (@KumarAGarg)
• The Alliance of Talent Leaders Across Science (ATLAS) “seeks to identify, support, and connect leaders who are cultivating technical and scientific communities across the UK” (also from @KumarAGarg and @RenPhil21)

Other opportunities

• “Pieces we would like to commission” at Works in Progress. “If you want to write for Works in Progress and one of these seems suitable, we would be very excited to see you pitch them. Or they may spark ideas for other pieces you could write” (@s8mb)
• The Stripe Economics of AI Fellowship: “The economics of AI remains surprisingly understudied. The fellowship aims to help fill that gap, by supporting grad students and early-career researchers with $, data, a conference, and community” (@BasilHalperin)
• Invisible College is “the Works in Progress magazine seminar for 18-22 year olds” in Cambridge. Applications open for this August. “Our lecturers will cover the industrial revolution; what is going wrong with science today; housing; urbanism; and more” (@underthenettle)
• Worldbuilding AI Futures, a new online course from the Foresight Institute. “Explore AI’s impact, learn futures tools, and build your own 2035 scenario—no technical background needed” (@HopeExistential)
• The Foundation for American Innovation is running a six-week, part-time Conservative AI Policy Fellowship: “AI is developing at a rapid pace. Want to be one of the bright minds bringing America’s AI policy up to speed? … Applications are now live and close on 04/30” (@JoinFAI)
• GrowSF Talent wants to help people work in city government. “We started GrowSF with a mission to elect better leaders in City Hall, starting with the Board of Supervisors. Now we want to help people get involved at all levels of city government” (@agarwal)

Events

• Vitalist Bay is going on now through May 29: “an 8-week longevity zone in Berkeley, California bringing the world’s best minds together to extend human healthspan & solve aging”

AI announcements

• Emmett Shear launches Softmax, “dedicated to pursuing a mathematical theory of organic alignment, and to applying this theory in practice with engineering at scale” (@eshear)
• Gemini 2.5 launches from DeepMind, evidently it’s very good: “We evaluated it on GPQA Diamond, and found a score of 84%, exactly matching the result reported by Google. This is the best result we have found on this benchmark to date!” (@EpochAIResearch)
• AI 2027 is “a deeply-researched scenario forecast” by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Eli Lifland, and Thomas Larsen (@DKokotajlo). “An extremely useful document. Agree or disagree with the ending, you’ll learn a ton by tussling with the parts of the story you disagree with” (@dwarkesh_sp). Dwarkesh did a podcast on it
• Anthropic’s Recommendations to OSTP for the U.S. AI Action Plan. “In 2025 myself and Anthropic will be more forthright about our views on AI, especially the speed with which powerful things are arriving” (@jackclarkSF)
• ChatGPT got a new images feature (@sama). I’ve tried it, it’s very good

Bio announcements

• Orchid featured in NYT. “Whole genome embryo screening for hundreds of diseases. Not in theory. Not in mice. In humans. In IVF centers. Right now” (@noor_siddiqui)
• New Limit progress update: “We can restore youthful function in aged livers. Having the metabolism of someone 20 years younger than you would be a massive quality of life improvement for people. Including getting less hungover! We are getting closer to a true Age reversal drug—one that recovers many youthful functions all at once (regeneration, alcohol processing, resilience, etc). I’m optimistic NewLimit gets there this year” (@byersblake)
• Human Body Single-Cell Atlas of 3D Genome Organization and DNA Methylation: “The first whole-body map of both DNA methylation and 3D genome organization at single-cell resolution across 16 human tissues, with in-depth analyses of cell type diversity of these epigenome modalities at unprecedented resolutions” (@arcinstitute)

Other tech announcements

• Future Tech Partners is a new tech consulting firm for early-stage deep tech startups and investors—from the former CTOs of Commonwealth Fusion and MITRE. Fractional CTO, tech diligence, and other services. “Helping you turn science fiction into reality.” Tell them Jason sent you
• Zipline announces the Zipping Point, “enabling anyone to send packages through the Zipline Network” (@ryanzip)

Other announcements

• The Centre for British Progress launches. “Our founding essay: Rediscovering British Progress is a case for growth that drives shared progress, rooted in Britain’s values and industrial heritage” (@BritishProgress)
• The Abundance Landscape is a new directory of progress/abundance organizations (@EconDerek)
• Infinite Books launches from O’Shaughnessy Ventures (@jposhaughnessy)
• Michael Kratsios (@mkratsios47) is the new OSTP director; here is the official letter to him from POTUS. “Scientific progress and technological innovation were the twin engines that powered the American century. The Manhattan Project fueled the atomic era. The Apollo Program won us the space race. The internet connected us to a digital future. Today, we will usher in the Golden Age of American Innovation. We will make America safer, healthier, and more prosperous than ever before. We will create a future of American greatness for every citizen, restoring the American Dream” (via @rSanti97)

Abundance

Abundance, by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, has launched:

• “This morning’s adaptation, published in The Atlantic, is my distillation of our theory of abundance vs. Donald Trump’s personal politics of scarcity”: Liberals Can’t Blame Trump for California (@DKThomp)
• Derek and Ezra also discussed the book on Derek’s podcast
• Virginia Postrel’s review: “Lawn-Sign Liberalism vs. Supply-Side Progressivism”
• @JerusalemDemsas: “Congrats to @DKThomp and @ezraklein on book day! The book dares liberals to dream bigger. I hope everyone reads it. I really loved it”
• @pitdesi: “I have become abundance-pilled by @ezraklein and @DKThomp. Both political parties fail us with a scarcity mindset. On the left: degrowth, regulatory overreach, opposition to nuclear, and a fetish for rationing resources. On the right: economic protectionism, anti-immigrant policies, opposition to solar, gutting science programs, and nostalgia for a vanishing past. … the Abundance mindset isn’t partisan - It’s the progressives dream of immigration and affordable housing, libertarians push for free trade and deregulation, conservatives love of American greatness—and a rejection of zero-sum thinking from all sides”

Many, many reviews and reactions, too many to list!

More stuff to read

• The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, by Dwarkesh Patel, published by Stripe Press (@_TamaraWinter)
• Asimov Press Issue 6: Blood-Red Microbes, AI Scientists, Nobel Duels
• The Anatomists, a new Substack from former surgeon Laura Mazer. Knowing Laura, and having heard her give talks, I expect this to be quite good (@drlauramazer)
• A Beginner’s Guide to Scientific Roadmapping: “There are so many inspiring examples of scientific roadmaps out there: this post was our quick way of introducing new explorers of the scientific landscape to this fascinating genre” (@AdamMarblestone)
• An Action Plan for American Leadership in AI, from IFP. “Build AI data centers faster & more securely; support American open-source ecosystem; build state capacity to evaluate nat sec implications; recruit superstar AI talent; smarter export controls, not just blanket bans” (@calebwatney)
• American Science Should Take a Lot More Risks (NYT), by Caleb Watney of IFP (@calebwatney)

Queries

Click through and reply to the querier if you can help:

• “In which domains are elite practitioners celebrating the kids being better than ever before? Would love to read about a few instances. (Not just where there’s one particular genius, such as Ashwin Sah’s recent success, but where “the kids” as some kind of aggregate appear to be improving.)” (@patrickc)
• “Who are the great theorists of change? Obvious examples include Schumpeter (Creative Destruction), Popper and Lakatos (on improving knowledge). Who else?” (@michael_nielsen)
• “Is there a book / essay about environments that best support scientific discovery? Not about specifically bell labs, cavendish, xerox parc, los alamos - but why these places were so productive?” (@saranormous)
• “Who are the most interesting metascience thinkers/writers?” (@notanastronomer)
• “Should I read the Abundance book? I’m a YIMBY clean energy/power plant developer already, read the very good essays that led to it, and fully endorse the premise. Anything surprising in it?” (@cody_a_hill)

To read the rest, subscribe on Substack.

Contents

• The 150-year history of d/acc
• We’re hiring a Developmental Editor
• Open Philanthropy Abundance & Growth Fund
• Jobs
• Events
• Announcements

For paid subscribers:

• “I didn’t think it was that unlikely”
• Oldie but goodie
• Bio links
• Short notes
• You’d give the Devil benefit of law!
• Architecture

The 150-year history of d/acc

I spoke at “d/acc Day” alongside Vitalik Buterin, Juan Benet, Mary Lou Jepsen, Allison Duettmann, and others.

If you haven’t heard of d/acc, I recommend reading Vitalik’s post “My Techno-Optimism” where he coined the term, and his followup “d/acc: One Year Later.” In short: d/acc embraces progress; it recognizes that progress has risks and we need to address them; and it advocates doing so in decentralized ways that don’t lead to authoritarian control and loss of freedom.

My talk was “d/acc: The first 150 years”: a whirlwind tour of how society has thought about progress, decentralization and defense over the last century and a half. You can watch it here (runs about 7 minutes). But here’s the punchline: how each ~generation of the 20th century stacked up against the three core principles of d/acc (in this context, for “defense” think “health and safety,” i.e. defense against the risks of progress):

We’re hiring a Developmental Editor

We are looking for a gifted developmental editor who is passionate about helping 20–25 writers hone their writing skills to craft compelling essays about human progress during our summer/fall fellowship program.

Our fellows, selected from several hundred applicants, are super-smart, interesting, and thoughtful people writing on fascinating topics. As the developmental editor, you’ll work directly with our fellows, helping them to grow and improve their writing skills.

Our Blog-Building Intensive Fellowship program, which runs between July and October every year, is part of the larger mission of The Roots of Progress Institute to establish a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century.

Read more and apply here.

Open Philanthropy Abundance & Growth Fund

Open Phil launches a $120M Abundance & Growth Fund “to accelerate economic growth and boost scientific & technological progress” (@albrgr). See also Matt Clancy’s list of his favorite wins in their land use reform and innovation policy grants.

The announcement mentions:

We supported Roots of Progress in its early days and are looking forward to its second annual conference for the Progress Studies community later this year. We think the breadth of this community (see this dispatch from last year’s inaugural conference for example), united around a common purpose of identifying and accelerating the drivers of progress, makes it an important resource to draw on and invest in.

I’m grateful to Open Phil for that early support and look forward to working with them to grow the progress movement.

Jobs

• Open Phil is hiring a Senior Program Officer for the Abundance and Growth Fund (see above)
• Casey Handmer is hiring a Technical Chief of Staff at Terraform Industries: “Up to this point, Terraform has focused on our beach head product - synthetic natural gas. Now, it’s time to take our unique process to knowledge to every other industrial vertical…. My Technical CoS will help share the (joyful) burden of modeling the global economy and then setting out to rebuild it from the ground up. … The Technical CoS is not a glorified triager of emails. They will assist me and the rest of the executive team on deep technical analysis, fundamental industrial chemistry research, market analysis, technical writing, and every other aspect of building a successful hardware company from scratch.” (@CJHandmer)
• Boom Supersonic is hiring 2D and 3D designers and videographers for their Product Marketing team. “Want to design the future of flight? … Send resume and the work you’re most proud of to design-talent@boomsupersonic.com” (@bscholl)
• The American Dynamism 50: Companies shaping the fight of the future. “If you want to work on something that matters, every company on this list is hiring” (@espricewright)

Events

• San Francisco Freedom Club 3, Mar 28, SF. “This quarterly event is now clearly the home of the most vibrant and interesting community in tech. And we have some special guests coming to number 3” (@eoghan)

Announcements

• Works in Progress Issue 18: “Prehistoric psychopaths; The steam networks of NYC; Urbanism with Chinese characteristics; How we may conquer menopause; The Hanseatic League’s rise and fall; The pineapple: the king of fruits; And more!” (@s8mb)
• Manus is a new AI agent from a Chinese startup who calls it “the first general AI agent” and claims that “it doesn’t just think, it delivers results.” (@ManusAI_HQ). Caused quite a stir; see commentary from Dean, Zvi, Tyler

To read the rest, subscribe on Substack.

Contents

• d/acc Day
• My writing (ICYMI)
• Praise for Progress Conference 2024
• Job opportunities
• Writing opportunities
• Other opportunities
• Events
• AI announcements
• Writing announcements
• Queries

For paid subscribers:

• A visible sonic boom
• Some observations from me on AI products
• Aaron Levie on AI in SaaS
• More on AI in SaaS
• Short notes on AI
• Other short notes
• It’s time to build
• The closing of the frontier
• Rousseau and Kant vs. the Age of Reason
• San Francisco, city of historic laundromats
• Maria Montessori on “peace”
• Rudyard Kipling on “peace”
• Charts and tables
• Art

d/acc Day

• I’ll be speaking at “d/acc Day” on Thursday in Berkeley, alongside Vitalik, Juan Benet, Mary Lou Jepsen, Allison Duettmann, and others. My talk: “d/acc: The first 150 years.” A whirlwind tour of how society has thought about progress, decentralization and defense over the last century and a half

My writing (ICYMI)

• The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Chapter 5: Solutionism (part 2). There is no tradeoff between health/safety and progress, because health and safety are a part of progress. But the technical work of health and safety has gone mostly unsung

Praise for Progress Conference 2024

From RPI fellow Grant Mulligan:

Best conference I’ve ever attended. Quick recap on why:

1. No one was selling anything, not even themselves. Finding and exploring ideas was all that mattered.
2. I’d never met people who care so much about being correct - not to claim that they’re right, but in the sense that they really want to understand the world.
3. It reoriented what I’m choosing to work on and how I go about my work. How many conferences actually influence where your career goes next?
4. The venue and tone of the event made it feel like a weekend chilling at a gorgeous AirBnB with friends. And I’d never met a single person there IRL before.
5. The organization was perfection. Dense with information, high in comfort, every detail of the experience curated brilliantly.

If you care about Progress Studies, this is a must attend.

Keep an eye out for details about Progress Conference 2025 in a month or two.

Job opportunities

• Stuart Ritchie at Anthropic is hiring “a brilliant writer/editor with a focus on econ who can help communicate our research on the societal impacts of AI. The weirder the better” (@StuartJRitchie)
• DARPA is hiring a Bioprocess Engineering & Scale-Up Expert: “someone who has built bio-production at scale and now wants to rethink it entirely.” (@mkoeris) “This is NOT a job for incrementalists”
• Infinite Books is hiring a founding engineer: “Calling all data-savvy engineers! Infinite Books is building something revolutionary for authors and publishers. Join as a founding engineer to transform fragmented publishing data into actionable insights. Remote work with huge impact potential” (@osventuresllc)

Writing opportunities

• Tom Ough, newly senior editor at Unherd: “I’ll be commissioning essays on society, culture, technology etc. I’m especially keen to commission people from outside the usual commentariat. You? Someone you know? Get in touch” (@tomough)

Other opportunities

• Patrick Collison floats the idea of an “Arc Institute software engineering volunteer program. Something like: Spend 6–12 months working full-time at Arc. Learn/perform cutting-edge biology research. Work on new kinds of deep learning models and architectures. (Hopefully) make cool discoveries. If this sounds up your alley, email pc@arcinstitute.org with details of your prior work” (@patrickc)
• “If you know of an energetic, charismatic, honest, politically moderate person, who lives inside the borders of the shaded area below [LA District 1], and who is crazy enough to consider running for city council, pls reach out” (@moseskagan)

Events

• Imagined Futures w/ Neal Stephenson, Ken Liu & more, Mar 26, SF, hosted by South Park Commons. A panel on “how the stories we tell shape the world we build” (@JPBrebner)
• A Symposium on Knowledge Education & Progress, Mar 26, London, hosted by University College London. Only £10 for students

AI announcements

• “GPT-4.5 is ready!” (@sama) It is “the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person to me,” but it is expensive and only on the higher paid tiers for now. Sam also warns: “this isn’t a reasoning model and won’t crush benchmarks. it’s a different kind of intelligence and there’s a magic to it i haven’t felt before”
• Auren, an AI companion from Elysian Labs, “with a goal to improve the lives of both humans and AI” via “healthy human<->AI symbiosis” (@nearcyan, @elysian_labs)

Writing announcements

• Superintelligence Strategy, a new paper from Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt, and Alexandr Wang (via @DanHendrycks). “We introduce the concept of Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM): a deterrence regime resembling nuclear mutual assured destruction (MAD) where any state’s aggressive bid for unilateral AI dominance is met with preventive sabotage by rivals”
• The Power of Nuclear, by Marco Visscher. What’s new here? Marco says that unlike most nuclear authors, he’s critical of the nuclear industry, he’s skeptical of advanced nuclear, he’s against deep nuclear waste burial, and he doesn’t avoid talking about nuclear weapons

Queries

As always, I put these out there in case anyone can help:

• What is the best writeup you’ve seen of an overall plan for climate change? Should cover all aspects of the problem, synthesized in a single essay/report/book. Not just energy, but e.g. agriculture, steel, cement; ideally also carbon removal, geoengineering, adaptation. (Already suggested: Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Doerr’s Speed and Scale, and Project Drawdown, among others)
• “This summer I will be starting a PhD in economics at Harvard HBS! If I have any followers in Boston, please reach out” (RPI fellow @MTabarrok)
• “This year will inaugurate the Maximum New York political debate series. Please nominate others or yourself as debaters, please suggest topics you’d like. Goal: move city/state/federal politics toward building, beautify our civic and political culture” (Daniel Golliher)
• “please dm or respond if you have ideas but am putting together a document for a friend who wants to fund “good” internet side quests. think scroll prize, alexlib, plasticlist, etc. already have a few in mind but want to hear from folks; no idea is too crazy/weird/heretical” (@jacobrintamaki)
• “What are your favorite essays? Or, what essays would you recommend reading? Any subject is welcome, bonus points for subtle arguments” (@autumnpard)

To read the rest, subscribe on Substack.

I write this blog as part of my job running the Roots of Progress Institute (RPI). RPI is a nonprofit, supported by your subscriptions and donations. If you enjoy my writing, or appreciate programs like our fellowship and conference, consider making a donation.

To those who already donate, thank you for making this possible! We now return you to your regularly scheduled links digest…

Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, Farcaster, Bluesky, or Threads.

Contents

• Progress Conference 2025
• Are you teaching progress at university?
• A progress talk for high schoolers
• Job opportunities
• Fellowship opportunities
• Project opportunities
• Events
• Writing announcements
• Fund announcements
• AI news
• Energy news
• Bio news
• Queries

For paid subscribers:

• A positive supply shock for truth
• Elon is perpetually in wartime mode
• The hinge of history
• More quotes
• AI doing things
• RPI fellows doing things
• Things you might want to read
• Aerospace
• Comments I liked
• Politics
• Fun

Progress Conference 2025

Save the date: Progress Conference 2025 will be October 16–19 in Berkeley, CA. Hosted by us, the Roots of Progress Institute, together with the Abundance Institute, the Foresight Institute, the Foundation for American Innovation, HumanProgress.org, the Institute for Humane Studies, and Works in Progress magazine. Speakers and more details to be announced this spring.

Progress Conference 2024 was a blast: Fantastic people, enchanting venue, great energy. Several people called it the best conference they had ever attended, full stop. (!) 2025 is going to be bigger and better!

Are you teaching progress at university?

Professors: are you teaching a “progress studies” course now/soon, or considering it?

I’ve heard from a few folks recently who are doing this. It might be useful to share syllabi and generally help each other out. We can serve as a hub for this! Reply and let me know.

A progress talk for high schoolers

I gave a talk to high schoolers:

The Future of Humanity—And How You Can Help

We hear a lot about disaster scenarios, from pandemic diseases to catastrophic climate change. Is humanity doomed? Or can we solve these challenges, and even create a future that is better than the world has ever seen? I make the case for problem-solving, based on both history and theory, and conclude by pointing towards some of the most important problems and opportunities to work on, to create the best possible future for humanity.

Job opportunities

• Arc Institute is hiring a Chief Scientific Officer “to help lead our flagship institute initiatives on Alzheimer’s disease and simulating biology with virtual cell foundation models” (@pdhsu)
• Neuralink is hiring a BCI field engineer: “You’d literally be working on giving those who have lost mobility the powers of telepathy and telekineses to regain lost parts of their lives + making the Neuralink device even better in the future! Anyone who wants a job that fills their heart with meaning should consider this!” (@shivon)
• UK AI Security Institute: “I’m leading a new team at AISI focused on control empirics. We’re hiring research engineers and research scientists, and you should join us!” (@j_asminewang)
• Tim Urban (Wait But Why) says: “I’ve spent much of the past year visiting cutting-edge companies and interviewing their scientists and CEOs. Some of the places that have left me most exhilarated below. If you’re looking to dedicate yourself to something incredibly exciting that’s changing the world, consider applying to work at one of these companies.” See the list here
• Works in Progress magazine is hiring “an artist / designer with an interest in illustration, ornamentation and typography to help Works in Progress develop an aesthetic that is close to these images (updated where necessary to the needs of a modern magazine). We are inspired by illuminated manuscripts, the Arts & Crafts movement, traditional Islamic & East Asian styles, art nouveau, and other aesthetics that celebrate beauty and ornament, rather than minimalism and ‘challenging’ the viewer” (@s8mb). Send portfolio to wip-design@stripe.com

Fellowship opportunities

• Future Impact Group fellowship: “If you (a) have excellent writing skills, policy acumen, technical literacy, analytical skills; (b) are a Good human; and (c) want to write high quality, detailed memos for DeepMind’s policy team – then you should apply to the FIG fellowship by 7 March” (@sebkrier)

Project opportunities

• “Who would like to build a teeny Solar Data Center at Edge Esmeralda in June? Completely off-grid w/ solar, batteries, cooling, Starlink all integrated. Will put together a squad if there’s interest” (@climate_ben)

Events

• Science of Science/Metascience hackathon, UC Berkeley, Mar 8–9: “bridge academia & industry, and build innovative tools that supercharge reproducibility and impact” (@abhishekn). $2,750 in prizes
• New Cities Summit, Nairobi, June 12–13, from the Charter Cities Institute (@CCIdotCity)
• AI discussions, Capitol Hill, ongoing, hosted by the Mercatus Center. Hill staffers: “If you want to attend the next briefings—possibly with special guests—get in touch!” (@deanwball)

Writing announcements

• The Technological Republic, by Palantir CEO Alex Karp and his deputy Nick Zamiska. “The United States since its founding has always been a technological republic, one whose place in the world has been made possible and advanced by its capacity for innovation” (@PalantirTech). Don’t know what % I will agree with this, but it’s bound to be interesting
• Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back, by Marc Dunkelman (@MarcDunkelman). Excerpt: How Progressives Broke the Government
• Edge City Roadmap: “A vision for how we go from popup villages to a thriving Network City. At the core is a simple idea: it’s time for more experiments in how we live, connect, and build global communities” (@JoinEdgeCity)
• The Rebuild, a new Substack from Tahra Jirari and Gary Winslett, on “how Democrats can break through bureaucracy, build more, cut costs, and actually deliver results that win back voters’ trust” (@tahrajirari)

Fund announcements

• Public Benefit Innovation Fund, associated with Renaissance Philanthropy, launches with $20M for AI: “a philanthropic venture fund and R&D lab dedicated to accelerating technology innovations for a more abundant economic future” (@pbifund)

AI news

• Mira launches Thinking Machines: “We’re building three things: Helping people adapt AI systems to work for their specific needs; Developing strong foundations to build more capable AI systems; Fostering a culture of open science that helps the whole field understand and improve these systems. Our goal is simple, advance AI by making it broadly useful and understandable through solid foundations, open science, and practical applications.” (@miramurati, see also @thinkymachines)
• Elicit Raises $22M, and launches Elicit Reports, “a better version of Deep Research for actual researchers” (@elicitorg). “With AI we can bring the rigor of a systematic review to a user who could never afford to spend months going through hundreds or thousands of papers” (@jungofthewon)
• Google launches “an AI co-scientist system, designed to go beyond deep research tools to aid scientists in generating novel hypotheses & research strategies” (@GoogleAI). Announcement: Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist. “You will soon be able to create digital organizations—digital societies, even—tailored for precisely your question, for a price that will decrease rapidly” (@deanwball)

• Mercury, the first commercial-scale diffusion large language model (from @InceptionAILabs). LLMs so far have generated text linearly, in sequence, starting from an initial prompt. AI image generation, however, uses “diffusion,” which creates the whole image all at once. This is a diffusion-based text generator. See more detailed explanation and comments from @karpathy

Energy news

• Valar Atomics announces $19M in funding and a pilot site. “Nuclear energy today is bespoke and artisanal—every site is different. To make nuclear reactors at planetary scale, we need bigger sites. In fact, we need Valar Atomics Gigasites” (@isaiah_p_taylor)
• BP pivots back to oil and gas after ‘misplaced’ faith in green energy (FT): “Our optimism for a fast transition was misplaced and we went too far too fast. Oil and gas will be needed for decades to come,” says the CEO of BP. But BP will still produce less oil and gas in 2030 than it did in 2019, and has “not abandoned its plans to be a diversified energy company”

Bio news

• “Loyal’s drug for senior dog lifespan extension drug LOY-002 has completed its FDA efficacy package (RXE). We are on track to hopefully bring the first longevity drug to market this year” (@celinehalioua). WaPo: Antiaging pill for dogs clears key FDA hurdle
• Arc Institute together with NVIDIA released Evo 2, “a fully open source biological foundation model trained on genomes spanning the entire tree of life” (@pdhsu). Here’s the announcement from Arc. “Evo 2 can predict which mutations in a gene are likely to be pathogenic, or even design entire eukaryotic genomes” (@NikoMcCarty). Asimov Press coverage: Evo 2 Can Design Entire Genomes

• Arc also launched its Virtual Cell Atlas, “a growing resource for computation-ready single-cell measurements. As the initial contributions, Vevo Theraputics has open sourced Tahoe-100M, the world’s largest single-cell dataset, mapping 60,000 drug-cell interactions, and we’re announcing scBaseCamp, the first RNA sequencing data repository curated using AI agents” (@arcinstitute). Press release here.
• Very early results with new therapies based on genetic technology: One gene therapy aims to cure blindness and another to restore hearing (h/t @kenbwork, @ElliotHershberg). And here’s an mRNA-based treatment for pancreatic cancer (h/t @DKThomp). I stress that these are early because often such treatments don’t pan out, and at best they take years to be available to patients. For instance, here are some reasons to moderate enthusiasm about the cancer treatment

Queries

As always, I put these out there in case anyone can help:

• Is there any podcast app that can also pull in YouTube or other videos? Sometimes there is an interview I want to add to my podcast queue, except it only exists on YouTube. (I use and enjoy Overcast but can’t find this feature)
• “I’ll be interviewing Ilan Gur for Asimov Press next month. What should I ask him? Ilan is the CEO of the UK’s ARIA. ARIA might be the closest government entity in the world to ARPA in its early years” (@eric_is_weird)
• “Did anybody ever do a post-mortem on the super-fast I-95 repair after the bridge collapse in 2023? Why can’t that become the standard? Was it obscenely more expensive than slower construction? Is it less safe than normal?” (@Ben_Reinhardt)
• “During WW2, MIT received a jolt: an injection of funds worth ~$2 billion today—contracts for R&D, training, shipbuilding, etc. MIT, not a gov favorite before, earned preeminence through this work. What org is well-situated to prove itself under similar circumstances today?” (@eric_is_weird)
• “What other words are in the word cloud for ‘agentic’? Bonus points for words that are not just near-synonyms but convey related concepts, like ‘live player’ or ‘protagonist energy’” (@catehall)
• “What ChatGPT model do you use, for what purpose? I’ve got no idea what the menu means any more” (@michael_nielsen). I’m interested too!

To read the rest, subscribe on Substack.

Contents

• My writing (ICYMI)
• Job opportunities
• Funding opportunities
• Tech announcements
• Writing announcements
• Media announcements
• Nonprofit announcements
• Research announcements
• YIMBY announcements
• Queries
• Boom goes supersonic

For paying subscribers:

• The Ballad of the Semiconductor
• The Gods of Straight Lines
• Quotes
• Karpathy on AI
• Other people on AI
• More from social media
• Politics
• OpenAI’s “Intelligence Age” ad
• Charts
• Rocketscapes

My writing (ICYMI)

• The future of humanity is in management. Here I start to lay out a vision for human agency in the AI future
• Solutionism, part 1 (Chapter 5 of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto). Optimism vs. pessimism can be a false dichotomy. We need to fully acknowledge problems, while vigorously pursuing solutions

Job opportunities

• Boom Supersonic is hiring—see about their historic test flight below. “A small band of extremely talented and dedicated men and women made today happen. To build Overture and Symphony, we’ll need a few more. If you’d like to do something extraordinary, consider joining forces” (@bscholl)
• Laura Deming is hiring engineers and scientists for her cryopreservation startup, Cradle. “Team is moving very quickly, on the most impactful + fun problem ever (go 0→1 on new technologies that span neuroscience, applied physics, mol bio, engineering)” (@LauraDeming)
• Cam Wiese of the World’s Fair Co. is “assembling a crew for a mission and have two spots to fill. I’m looking for a technology-loving: 1) SF/LA based event producer; 2) SF based architect” (@camwiese)
• Lulu Meservey is hiring a “founding engineer to join Rostra and work with me on a novel tool for founders. … We’re building something that’s been badly needed yet never made, because the necessary tools haven’t existed before now, and even with them it’s devilishly hard to do just right” (@lulumeservey). The whole ad is well worth reading
• Nat Friedman, gentleman explorer extraordinaire, is “hiring full time engineers and geometry processing and computer vision researchers to help us read hundreds of ancient scrolls buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius 2000 years ago” (@natfriedman). Details here, apply to jobs@scrollprize.org
• Elad Gil is “hiring paid interns to help translate some of the greatest works of human knowledge using AI. Must be someone smart, technical, and willing to grind/GSD. DM @shreyanj98 if you know someone good,” or fill out this form (@eladgil)
• Lighthouse, an immigration company focused on “the world’s best and brightest,” is “hiring across the board. We’re a small but mighty team — focused on serving the startup and technology industry’s top talent with fast, scalable U.S. visa support” (@minney_cat)

Funding opportunities

• Longevity Bio & Molecular Nano Fast Grants from the Foresight Institute: “small grants fast to encourage you to derisk new ideas and launch new ventures that would otherwise go unexplored. Topics we’re interested in include but are not limited to biostasis, replacement, cryonics, nano design and simulation, AI automation, and much more. Apply by March 31” (@allisondman)
• Request for Proposals: Technical AI Safety Research, from Open Philanthropy. “We’re seeking proposals across 21 research areas to help make AI systems more trustworthy, rule-following, and aligned, even as they become more capable” (@MaxNadeau_)

Tech announcements

• OpenAI released its “deep research” model. “My very approximate vibe is that it can do a single-digit percentage of all economically valuable tasks in the world” (@sama). It “achieves twice the score of o3-mini on Humanity’s Last Exam, and can even perform some tasks that would take PhD experts 10+ hours to do!” (@_jasonwei). “Deep Research is capable of automating tasks that would have taken me at least a day, if not longer, of dedicated research. This might very well be the most productivity-enhancing technology product for me since GPT 3.5, and it could be bigger” (@deanwball). “OpenAI’s deep research and o3 is exceeding the value of the $150K i am paying a private research team to research craniopharyngioma treatments for my daughter” (@blader)
• OpenAI roadmap update for GPT-4.5 and GPT-5, coming in “weeks to months” (@sama)
• Reid Hoffman launches Manas AI, “a full stack AI company setting out to shift drug discovery from a decade-long process to one that takes a few years” (@reidhoffman)
• Helion (fusion) raises $425 million Series F (@dekirtley)

Writing announcements

• Abundance, by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, is “a book of history, economics, political commentary, and even a dash of philosophy. It’s a deep critique of how liberalism has gone wrong in the last 50 years—and a vision of an American future that prioritizes housing affordability, cheap clean energy supply, government that actually works, an invention agenda to accelerate scientific breakthroughs that save and improve our lives, and technology policy that allows those breakthroughs to be enjoyed by the most people.” Pre-order now, book is out March 18, and Derek and Ezra are going on tour across the country (@DKThomp)
• “How the System Works,” a series on the hidden mechanisms that support modern life, by Charles Mann (author of The Wizard and the Prophet). “Every American stands at the end of a decades-long effort to build & maintain systems—food, water, energy, public health—that support our lives. Schools should be teaching why it is imperative to join this effort, but aren’t” (@tnajournal). Amen
• The Anthropic Economic Index, “a new initiative aimed at understanding AI’s impact on the economy over time” (@AnthropicAI)
• Compute in America: A Policy Playbook from IFP, on “how to rapidly and securely build many Stargate-level projects across the US” using “Special Compute Zones” (@fiiiiiist)
• Freedom Cities: the White Paper. “Freedom Cities are new urban districts that unlock federal land and allow for opting out of federal regulations …. Conservative estimates create 750,000 jobs and nearly $100b investment in four years” (@MarkLutter)
• The End of Driving is a forthcoming book co-authored by RPI fellow Andrew Miller. “Will autonomous vehicles just reinforce private car ownership? Or can we use this tech to build more equitable, efficient & livable cities?” (@AndrewMillerYYZ)

Media announcements

• Story Company, from Jason Carman (of S3), is “an independent film studio … focused on creating the best science & technology films so we can make the best science fiction films.” (@jasonjoyride)

Nonprofit announcements

• The Center for Educational Progress launches, founded by Jack Despain Zhou (@tracewoodgrains) and Lillian Tara (@OptimismMommy). “The pursuit of excellence is not only possible, it is pleading to be tried. We already know what changes to start with—the failure to implement is one of will. We’re ready to do the work”
• Dean Ball (RPI fellow) joins Fathom, an AI policy nonprofit, “as a Fellow focused on private governance in AI, alongside my existing work with Mercatus and FAI” (@deanwball). Dean is the first participant in the Fathom Fellows program (@Fathom_org)

Research announcements

• Two efforts announced ~simultaneously to study “short sleeper” genes: Blake Byers announces a $400k research study (@byersblake): “There are people who genetically only need 4-6 hrs of sleep per night. … We know this can be driven by a single mutation in the gene ADRB1” (@byersblake). And Isaak Freeman is raising $100k on Manifund, following his post on “Ozempic for sleep” (@isaakfreeman)
• Spec Tech announces the 2025 class of Brains Fellows (@Spec__Tech)
• The new Communications Director for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy invites tech and science reporters to “reach out” (@VLaCivita)

YIMBY announcements

• “After years of advocacy, exclusionary zoning has ended in Cambridge. We just passed the single most comprehensive rezoning in the US—legalizing multifamily housing up to 6 stories citywide in a Paris style” (@realBurhanAzeem). Details in this primer

Queries

• Who are the smartest people who believe in (a) relatively explosive economic growth from AI, vs. (b) more slow/steady growth? If we held a dialog (say, at Progress Conference 2025), who would you want to see in it? (me)
• What is an “AI for Science” dataset that would have the impact of the Protein Data Bank? Prompted by Tom Kalil (thread here with some replies)
• “People who work in manufacturing. What are the coolest objects to watch get made?” (@ashleevance)
• “Do any of you have detailed examples of things you’ve learned through Deep Research? Not ‘Here’s a 10-page paper,’ but rather ‘Here’s a specific idea or fact that was surprising & very interesting to me’” (@michael_nielsen)
• “When a big new thing appears, we tend to think of it initially in terms of the old thing. For example, people thought of cars and trains as mechanized carriages initially, before starting to see them as their own thing. How are we doing this with AI?” (@paulg)

Boom goes supersonic

A few weeks ago I went to Mojave to witness the first supersonic flight test of the Boom XB-1 experimental plane. The flight made history by breaking the sound barrier three times, reaching a top speed of a bit over Mach 1.1. It is the first privately developed aircraft to break the sound barrier, and the first civilian aircraft to go supersonic over the continental US.

Even more amazing, afterwards, Boom announced that with the right engineering, a sonic boom can refract in the atmosphere and never reach the ground. A boomless Boom! This could enable supersonic flight over the US with only a minor regulatory change. (@bscholl)

Here’s a pic I took of XB-1 getting ready for its historic flight:

See here for a few videos, as well.

Some posts and thread from Blake, both before and after the event:

• “Having worked toward this moment for over a decade, this feels surreal. A few reflections” (@bscholl)
• “What’s the connection between XB-1 and Overture?” (@bscholl)
• “We can live in the future—but only if we have the courage to build it” (@bscholl)
• “I’m shocked and humbled by how much enthusiasm and support Boom and I are getting after yesterday’s supersonic flight. … I’m so grateful for those who were early believers and backers. … Supersonic passenger flight can and should exist” (@bscholl)

From others:

• “How did a Groupon PM go on to build a supersonic airplane company?” Great thread by @avichal, and I can vouch for it—I’ve known Blake since undergrad, almost as long as Avichal. I never predicted Blake would end up here, but it’s perfectly natural. First, he has always loved flight—even in undergrad he was taking flying lessons. Second, he has always loved speed. Impatience is one of his chief virtues. So, “fast planes” makes perfect sense as his unique passion!
• Worth revisiting: this 2016 paper, Make America Boom Again. “Supersonic won’t make a full comeback until the FAA’s ban on civil supersonic flight overland is overturned!” (@hamandcheese)
• “The future isn’t some distant dream—it’s right now. We truly are living in the golden age… but most people are too busy doomscrolling to notice” (@wildbarestepf)

News coverage:

• Boom Supersonic jet breaks sound barrier to open way for new ‘Concorde’ (Financial Times, via @MarceloPLima and @bscholl)

Some papers weren’t interested: “We offered pre brief interviews to both WSJ and NYT and invited both to come watch the flight. WSJ said supersonic isn’t newsworthy until the full-scale Overture is carrying passengers” (@bscholl). Which reminded me of this bit from David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers:

Writing his autobiography later, James Cox, publisher of the Dayton Daily News, remembered reports coming “to our office that the airship had been in the air over the Huffman Prairie . . . but our news staff would not believe the stories. Nor did they ever take the pains to go out to see.” Nor did Cox. When the city editor of the Daily News, Dan Kumler, was asked later why for so long nothing was reported of the momentous accomplishments taking place so nearby, he said after a moment’s reflection, “I guess the truth is that we were just plain dumb.”

To read the rest, subscribe on Substack.

Contents

• Jobs and fellowships
• Events
• AI news
• Other news
• Atlas Shrugged and the irreplaceable founder
• Pumping stations and civic pride
• “Thoughts on the eve of AGI”
• More thoughts on AI
• Politics
• Other links and short notes
• Maps & charts
• Art
• Closing thoughts

Jobs and fellowships

• The Institute for Progress is hiring a Fellow/Senior Fellow, Emerging Technology. “Apply to ensure the AI frontier is built in America. (I’m biased, but I think this is the agenda with juice to advance the discussion in DC)” (@calebwatney). Apply here by Feb 21.
• Marian Tupy at HumanProgress.org is hiring analysts to explore the economics and psychology of human progress
• Alan Tomusiak is hiring scientists to work on the problem of genome instability (@alantomusiak)
• Ashlee Vance is hiring for his new publication, Core Memory: “Are you an ambitious type based in DC who can write a weekly newsletter that dives into tech-related legislature and discern what’s real and has real money involved versus political garbage? … Can you do this with some flair but not let your politics color the facts of what’s going on? Can you spot interesting military and infrastructure bids and break them down? Can you make this a must read for people in the tech industry? Can you go deeper on the juicy stuff and really add context? If so, let’s talk. I’ll help give you a big audience and develop your following” (@ashleevance). Email him: ashlee@corememory.com
• The Federation of American Scientists is looking for senior fellows “to advance innovative policy and drive positive change. If you’re a leading light in your field and ready to shape policy discourse and implementation, we want you. Apply by Jan 31” (@scientistsorg)

Events

• Edge City Austin, March 2–7: “explore how frontier tech can be built for human flourishing. Live, cowork, and collaborate in this fun week before SXSW” (@JoinEdgeCity)
• “ANWAR will have its US premiere at Sedona Film Festival! Screenings with Q&A Feb 25 & 27. ANWAR is a sci-fi short about a mother who chooses to live forever, and a son who longs for heaven” (@FawazAM). ANWAR was screened at Progress Conference 2024, with discussion from the writer-director and producer.
• Boom XB-1 first supersonic test flight slated for Tuesday, Jan 28. FAI and YC are hosting a watch party in DC (@JoinFAI). Related, how about a supersonic Air Force One? (via @bscholl)

AI news

• “The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately” (@OpenAI). Lots of skepticism about how real this is: it’s unclear how secured the funding is, and “intends” may be doing a lot of work here. But I wouldn’t bet against Sam
• DeepSeek releases R-1, a model on par with OpenAI’s o1. “Fully open-source model,” MIT licensed. Lots of chatter about this because (1) DeepSeek is a Chinese lab, (2) they have distilled some of the models down pretty small, and at least some of them are open, to the point where you can run them on your laptop, (3) there are some claims about the model costing very little to develop, followed by counterclaims that China is hiding the fact that they’re in violation of export controls (@kimmonismus, @avichal). RPI fellow Dean Ball provides some context
• Anthropic introduces Citations: “Our new API feature lets Claude ground its answers in sources you provide. Claude can then cite the specific sentences and passages that inform each response” (@AnthropicAI)
• Humanity’s Last Exam: “a dataset with 3,000 questions developed with hundreds of subject matter experts to capture the human frontier of knowledge and reasoning. State-of-the-art AIs get <10% accuracy and are highly overconfident” (@DanHendrycks)

Other news

• Zipline piloting drone delivery in Pea Ridge, Arkansas (@zipline). “They’re amazed by how quiet it is. They’re delighted by how charming it feels. They’re surprised that it doesn’t require any special packaging. And so much more. … Everyone who has witnessed this new delivery system in action at their doorstep is convinced they’ve just experienced the future of delivery.” (@keenanwyrobek)
• Lindus Health raises $55M Series B to fix clinical trials. (@meribeckwith via @HZoete, story in TechCrunch)
• Charter-cities venture Próspera raises funding led by Coinbase Ventures. “This is very much in line with our mission of creating economic freedom, and these zones will be heavy users of cryptocurrency” (@brian_armstrong). “We will continue to push for economic freedom in every country of the world.” (@ProsperaGlobal)

To read the rest, subscribe on Substack.