Weekly Dose of Optimism #201
Aalo, Data Centers, American Turbines, OXMAN Ink, Neo Hands + Extra Doses
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 201st Weekly Dose of Optimism.
We’re jam packed again, and you don’t come here for the intro, so…
Let’s get to it.
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(1) Aalo Goes Critical on the 4th of July
On July 4th at 12:20am, Aalo Atomics went critical, becoming the fourth advanced nuclear company to accomplish the mission by the July 4th, 2026 deadline, and the third whose founder we had on Age of Miracles back in 2023. I actually wrote a small personal check into Aalo before the podcast, back when I didn’t think nuclear was fund investable but that it was incredibly important. I was right on the latter but very wrong on the former.
Aalo joins Antares Nuclear, Valar Atomics, and Deployable Energy in hitting the target, with a number of others including Radiant, Oklo, X-Energy, Deep Fission, and Last Energy expected to hit criticality later this year or next, and deploy commercially in the months and couple years ahead. As Abundance Institute’s Chris Koopman put it, “In just over 13 months, the United States of America went from a handful of executive orders to FOUR DIFFERENT advanced nuclear reactors reaching criticality.”
This is an insane state of affairs given where nuclear was just three years ago. Getting any one advanced reactor to criticality by July 4, 2026 would have been considered a minor miracle, but getting four with more to come means that there’s going to be competition. Whoever can deploy most quickly, with a product that customers want, at the best price, will win. The field shifts from science to manufacturing. I think that good ol’ competition is what it’s going to take to make nuclear cheap and abundant.
One of nuclear’s challenges has been that utilities are terrible customers for the product. Fortunately, they are not the main customers for these smaller advanced reactors. Data Centers are, and they will fund whoever gets them something that works fast (and safe, cheap, clean, and eventually affordable).
(2) Data centres are a crucial test of US industrial resolve
Josh Zoffer for The Financial Times
This is the argument that I made in Thank God for Data Centers, and part of the argument that my friend Josh Zoffer made in the Financial Times this week:
The data centre bonanza is a special kind of opportunity: one where deep-pocketed buyers like Silicon Valley’s hyperscalers are willing to open their wallets to pay for fast, reliable access to industrial technology. It offers a chance for the US to get ahead in the next key technologies and to build domestic supply chains based on demand rather than subsidies and tariffs.
I’m glad to see Josh making the case for U.S. data centers (we use er here, FT) in front of the policy and business leaders who read the FT, and making it so eloquently. Data centers are useful in their own right, but they’re also a turbocharged way to turn on that big, beautiful American Demand engine and fund the technology that will carry us into the Age of Miracles.
(3) American Turbine Comes Out of Stealth
John McElhone
Including gas turbines. Lots and lots of gas turbines. If you can make a gas turbine, or retrofit a jet engine to work as a gas turbine, the data centers would like to buy it from you. And this week, American Turbine came out of stealth to sell it to them.
What’s interesting about AT’s approach is that instead of very large, complex turbines that take a long time and a lot of scarce expertise to make, they’re making small, highly manufacturable turbines that they can get to customers quickly. If you need a lot of MW, they’ll just sell you a lot of turbines.
For now, the goal is speed, and buyers are happy to pay for speed in lost efficiency. Over time, though, whether data center demand slows or the supply chain gets worked out and time-to-power is no longer as big an issue, turbines will still have a ton of value.
The beautiful thing about turbines in the American context is that America has bountiful natural gas resources. We have an advantage there, if we have the turbines to turn it into power.
Part of American competitiveness in the century ahead will be beating China at things China currently dominates, but an equally important part will be winning things that we can do uniquely well. Turning natural gas into power to turn ideas into economic activity is one of those things.
(4) Vigils Uses Colors That Are Grown, Not Applied
Neri Oxman for OXMAN
Not everything in the good future will be manufactured or petrochemicals-based, though. Some of it will be grown naturally.
Neri Oxman, the ex-MIT designer, engineer, scientist, and artist working on computational design, synthetic biology and digital fabrication whose 2023 Lex Fridman appearance was one of my favorites, announced a new line of capes from her company, OXMAN, called Vigils, “whose color is not applied but grown. We engineer bacteria to produce indigo and melanin pigments, then let them work directly on the surface of a 3D-knitted silk textile. When the process is complete, the cells are washed away, leaving only the pigment they have grown into the fiber.”
“For a century,” Oxman (the person, not the company) tweeted,
One day, OXMAN might even apply this technology to garments people actually wear.
(5) 1X Gives Neo Alien Hands
Giving robots hands that work like human hands is one of the hardest challenges in robotics. If these videos are real, it looks like 1X may have solved it.
Yesterday, they announced their “25 Degree of Freedom (DOF), tendon-driven hands for the NEO humanoid platform– achieving near human-level dexterity, strength, safety, and reliability.”
Watch the video. Or this one.
1X argues that with these hands, the hardware problem is basically solved and what’s left is gathering the data that drives the robots capabilities. It’s a bit of a self-serving argument, because 1X is selling and deploying tele-operated robots into homes in order to collect data, but any good company argument should be self-serving. And that is, once again, an absurdly impressive hand.
One thing I particularly like is that they call the hand an “API to the Physical World,” which is a catchy way to express that our hands are how we interact with the world. Our legs can walk us up to a door, but our hands push it open. Our eyes can locate a glass in space, but our hand picks it up.
The new 1X hand can pick up a wine glass with ease. It can do LEGOs. It can even screw in a lightbulb. If you want to learn more about what it does, and how it works, check out their blog post.
Over the past couple of days, OpenAI released a new voice model that talks more like a human and 1X released hands that are more human, and in both cases, unexpectedly, it feels that the more human-like features we give the machine, the clearer it is that they are not becoming human but will be very useful to us.
Long humans.
EXTRA DOSES: Science Breakthroughs, Aleph Speech, Levin, Quantum
I know you’re probably overdosed on optimism at this point, but I do think the Science Breakthroughs are worth reading as an Ulkar-vetted glimpse into the future. This is the stuff that’s not on X yet. Check ‘em out.
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