Hey friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome to our 207th Weekly Dose of Optimism.
It’s Puja’s birthday — happy birthday Puj! — and I’m taking the day off, so today is both late and light on commentary. Thankfully, the good guys didn’t take the day off - lots to report.
Let’s get to it.
In lieu of a sponsor, some of my favorites…
Matic Robots - a home cleaning robot you can talk to (right link this time!).
Quince - high quality … everything at affordable prices. half my wardrobe.
Notion - not boring’s everything hub.
Ramp - Time is money. Save both.
Create - you should be taking creatine (and supporting Dan) - 30% off brother discount.
(1) Merck-Moderna mRNA Cancer Vaccine Successful in Phase III
Over here at the Weekly Dose, we are half-Irish, we hate cancer, we love mRNA, so imagine our excitement when we saw the news that Merck and Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine prevented melanoma (skin cancer) from recurring.
Given with Keytruda after surgery in high‑risk melanoma patients, the vaccine significantly reduced the risk that cancer would return or spread compared with Keytruda alone. It’s the first successful late‑stage trial for a personalized mRNA cancer therapy and could lead to approval and launch around 2027.
Melanoma is just one kind of cancer, we’d rather no one get it in the first place, and the vaccine is still expensive and complicated, but cmon. We have promising personalized cancer vaccines.
Say it with us… get fucked, Cancer.
(2) Voluntary attention regulates acute immune responses in humans
Nofar Mizrachi, Menachem Rottem & Liron Rozenkrantz in Nature Human Behavior
In Means and Meaning, I argued that attention is the thing we are, and where we deliberately direct it is how we create meaning for ourselves. Apparently, it’s also how we regulate immune function. From the study:
These results establish attention as a cognitive mechanism capable of regulating immune function in vivo. Situated within predictive and allostatic models of brain–body control, our results reframe perception as biologically consequential rather than merely experiential.
Attention really is all you need.
(3) Generalist… Generalizes?
The holy grail in robotics are robots who you can train on a bunch of specific data, then ask them to do something that’s not in the training data and they just do it.
According to robotics company Generalist, their GEN-1.5 is a one-shot learner: show it a few seconds of data, and it figures it out. It can learn from simulation, from watching humans, and even by chaining together smaller tasks. The thread has a number of good examples.
Robotics is really hard, and there are certainly a lot of things to figure out between this demonstration and billions of useful robots, but this is genuinely impressive and it seems like robots are going to happen sooner than later.
(4) Big Week for Routers
Routers help companies and developers … route their work to the right AI models for the job. Sometimes, you need frontier capabilities and are willing to pay for them. Others, cheap and fast is perfect. Ben Thompson has a characteristically good breakdown in Stratechery.
In early June, Markie Wagner told us that companies were going to start caring about Return on Tokens (ROT), and she was right. Routers are one way to do that, and they have been ripping.
On Wednesday, leading router provider OpenRouter confirmed it’s being acquired by Stripe. The NYT reports they paid $7.5 billion. OpenRouter was founded by the founder of NFT marketplace OpenSea, Alex Atallah.
In the very same week, two of our not boring capital portfolio companies announced routers of their own. On Tuesday, Merge launched Merge for Workforce, which lets companies spend 75x fewer tokens for better results. The next day, Ramp announced that it purchased the domain router.com and to house its own Router product, intended, of course, to save companies time and money, this time on intelligence.
Figuring out how to get the right intelligence at the lowest price automatically is going to be a huge market if the pace of AI adoption keeps up (and giving people better value may accelerate adoption further), so there will be a bunch of winners. What will be fascinating from a strategy nerd perspective is to see which of these companies’, and others’, set of assets lend themselves best to, and benefit the most from, routing.
(5) Big Week for Drones
Zipline x Uber and Amazon
On Monday, Zipline and Uber announced a partnership through which Uber will invest in the drone company and together make 1 million deliveries a day by 2019.
On Wednesday, TechCrunch reported that Amazon is expanding its Prime Air delivery service to reach 500 cities by the end of the year.
These announcements come on the heels of DoorDash launching its DoorDash Air in-house drone program.
And yesterday, a Texas woman shared a video of Amazon Prime Air dropping her package in the pool.
I am incredibly bullish on flight and think these bits of news are just the beginning.
EXTRA DOSES: Science Breakthroughs, Dog Cancer, TRISO, Dan & José