Weekly Dose of Optimism #81

Odysseus, Rice, Room Temperature Quantum, Sora + Memory, Tech is Back

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 81st Weekly Dose of Optimism. We’re sending all you lovers a belated Happy Valentine’s Day and all you patriots an early Happy President’s Day.

Let’s get to it.

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(1) SpaceX launches private 'Odysseus' lander on pioneering moon mission

Mike Wall for Space.com

If all goes according to plan, Odysseus will touch down near the moon's south pole on Feb. 22, becoming the first-ever private spacecraft to ace a lunar landing. Success would also be a big deal for the United States, which hasn't been to the lunar surface since NASA's Apollo 17 mission more than half a century ago.

GM. To the moon 🚀

And no, we’re not just speaking in 2021 crypto slang.

Very early yesterday morning, Odysseus lifted off, marking the first step towards what could be the first successful private moon landing. The Odysseus mission is a joint effort from Intuitive Machines, SpaceX, and NASA aiming to touch down a lander near the moon's south pole.

Odysseus is significant for a couple of reasons within the broader context of the Artemis programs. As a reminder, Artemis is a NASA-led international spaceflight initiative aimed at returning humans to the Moon and establishing a sustainable presence there by the end of the decade. Odysseus showcases the private sector’s ability to contribute to this program. Artemis, in contrast to previous NASA-led programs, considers private involvement not only supplemental but crucial to accomplishing its mission.

In addition to the public<>private dynamics at play, Odysseus will validate new precision landing technologies and contribute to further exploration of the south pole of the moon, which is notable for its potential water ice reserves.

In other SpaceX news, Elon tweeted that Starship will fly again in ~3 weeks

(2) Introducing meat–rice: grain with added muscles beefs up protein

Jude Coleman for Nature

Rice has been used as a scaffold to grow beef muscle and fat cells, resulting in an edible, “nutty” rice–beef combo that can be prepared in the same way as normal rice.

Researchers in South Korea have developed a method to grow beef muscle and fat cells on rice grains, creating an edible rice-beef hybrid that can be cooked like normal rice. The process involves coating rice grains with fish gelatin (yum!!) and a food additive to enhance cell attachment, followed by seeding with bovine cells and culturing in a growth medium.

Relevantly, I took m’lady to Risotreria Melotii in the East Village last night for Valentine’s Day. The restaurant basically only serves rice-based dishes: risottos, bruschetta on rice cakes, rice puddings, etc. I think the Melottis own a rice farm in Italy or something. And while the resy landed me like a “B-” boyfriend rating from my girlfriend, it did get my brain thinking about everything we can do with rice at just the right time.

Risotto innovation aside, this new rice could actually have a meaningful impact on the health outcomes of billions of people. In many parts of Asia, rice is the main food. In parts of China, people eat over half a pound of rice per day on average. And while rice is great at feeding billions of people, it’s not overly nutritious in terms of protein. This new rice fixes that.

Admittedly, I have no idea whether or not this will gain mass adoption or if one day I’ll be taking down a bowl of it at Risotteria Melotti, but it seems like a welcomed innovation in a category that is otherwise pretty bland (no offense to the Melottis).

(3) Room-temperature quantum optomechanics using an ultralow noise cavity

Kippenburg et al in Nature

Our work extends the quantum control of solid-state macroscopic oscillators to room temperature.

Room temperature, so hot right now, room temperature.

Last summer, the world stopped for a brief moment when we believed (hoped?) a team of scientists had developed a room temperature superconductor. It turns out, that wasn’t the case. Now, a team of researchers claim to have developed a method to control quantum phenomena at room temperature.

Traditionally, such phenomena could only be observed and manipulated under extremely cold conditions, near absolute zero, limiting the practical applications of quantum technologies. This new research introduces an ultra-low noise optomechanical system that allows for the interaction between light and mechanical motion at room temperature, overcoming the challenge of thermal noise which previously hindered such observations.

This research brings the theoretical concept of Heisenberg’s microscope into reality, demonstrating the feasibility of controlling and observing quantum effects at practical temperatures. This could unlock the development of new hybrid quantum systems, enhance quantum information processing, and facilitate the creation of large, complex quantum states.

Let’s hope this breakthrough holds!

(4) Sora + Memory + Gemini 1.5 + Magic

From OpenAI

Sora: We’re teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction.

Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model. Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt.

Memory: As you chat with ChatGPT, you can ask it to remember something specific or let it pick up details itself. ChatGPT’s memory will get better the more you use it and you'll start to notice the improvements over time.

Big week for OpenAI, and AI generally.

The biggest release of the week for the company was Sora, its text-to-video model. Impressively, the model can generate videos up to a minute long and cannot only generate complex scenes direct by the prompt, but also understands the physical world in which those scenes exists. There are other text-to-video models on the market that are mostly serving enterprise clients and creative studios, but Sora seems on-par if not better and will eventually be available to the masses. For now, follow @sama on X for examples of the latest and greatest coming out of Sora. The next Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan or Walt Disney may get their start on Sora.

And not to RAM another OpenAI story down your throat, but ChatGPT is getting memory. The new feature will incorporate learnings from past conversations and instructions into new outputs, and importantly, will continuously self-improve as you continue to use it.

The feature seems useful — and frankly I was kind of surprised this wasn’t already a thing that ChatGPT did without me even knowing it. And on the individual level, it’s likely just a solid “nice-to-have” feature. But scaled out across hundreds of millions of users and tens of billions of queries, think about the time and energy saved by memory — less context providing, less preference sharing, more personalized answers. That could save billions of hours per year for people.

Not to be outdone, Google introduced Gemini 1.5, which has a stunning 10M token context window. For more context on what that means and enables, check out this thread from Google’s Jeff Dean.

On the startup side, Magic announced that it raised $145 million from Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, Elad Gil, and CapitalG (Alphabet) to build coworkers, not copilots. What’s notable is that Magic claims to also have achieved a multi-million-token context window with an architecture that is not Transformer based like the rest of the LLMs.

The acceleration continues.

(5) Tech Strikes Back

Nadia Asparouhova for The New Atlantis

There is a groundswell of excitement in tech, still rising, that feels like a palate cleanser to the doom and gloom of the post-backlash era. E/acc may not offer the roadmap that definite optimists need, but it signals a shift in tech culture that is long overdue.

Speaking of acceleration… In her latest essay, Nadia Asparouhova extends e/acc’s central critique to the broader tech culture, advocating for a return to a more dynamic, builder-oriented ethos that prioritizes tangible advancements over cautious incrementalism. The essay is part chronology of the last two decades of tech and part look-forward on what tech can be if (at least) parts of the e/acc philosophy are embraced.

In Asparouhova’s view, the issue of the last two decades in tech is not just a battle between optimists and doomers. Rather, the 2010s were an embracement of a certain type of indefinite optimism that led to incrementality and, ultimately, technological stagnation. “Indefinite optimism" is a mindset where individuals believe the future will be better but lack a clear vision or concrete plan for making it so. Indefinite optimist do things like “listen to customers,” “build things people want,” and “run lean startups” — not necessarily bad at face value (or for creating shareholder value) but can lead to incremental outcomes.

Definite Optimists, on the other hand, not only envision a better future but actively work towards it with specific goals and strategies. These are folks working on Hard Startups, that are creating new markets vs. slicing off value from existing ones. These folks are building a new future, not just an incrementally better one. In Asparouhova’s view, after a couple of decades Silicon Valley is just now returning to definite optimism, and we tend to agree.

Bonus: Varda’s Space Factory is Coming Home

Varda on X

Packy here. Back in June, I wrote a piece on one of our portfolio companies, Varda, in anticipation of the launch of its first space factory. At the time, we thought it would be up there for about a month, and land back on earth some time in July. It’s taken a little longer than that to get FAA approval to land.

But the space factory is coming home! On Valentine’s Day, the FAA granted Varda the nation’s first ever Part 450 re-entry license. Varda can now land in Utah, which it plans to do next Wednesday, February 21st.

One small step for Varda, one giant step for manufacturing drugs in space.

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If you have some time this weekend, check out Range Nuclear Renaissance ETF.

We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday.

Thanks for reading,

Dan + Packy