Weekly Dose of Optimism #86
Nueralink, Pig Liver, Intel, Saudi AI Fund, Direct File,Unitree
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 86th Weekly Dose of Optimism.
Dan here — after a week exploring Mexico City and a week slinging creatine gummies at Expo West (wild experience), I am back to cover all of the big, ambitious things we humans are accomplishing each week. And what a warm welcome back it has been. Sometimes this job is too easy.
Let’s get to it.
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(1) Elon Musk’s Neuralink Shows First Patient Using Its Brain Implant
Rolfe Winkler and Alexa Corse for The Wall Street Journal
Nueralink introduced its first patient to the world yesterday. 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, who lost all movement beneath his shoulders after a 2016 accident, received Nueralink’s first brain-computer chip implant a few months ago.
In the live video, Noland played chess on his computer and moved his cursor around, notably while talking to the interviewer and engaging the audience on other topics. Arbaugh described the sensation by saying it felt like “using the force on a cursor.”
Brain-computer chips have been around for over 20 years, but Nueralink’s display was novel for two main reasons. First, Nueralink’s device transmits data wirelessly, meaning its mobile and not clunked down by wires. Second, Neuralink’s chip allows for a certain level of multi-tasking (playing chess telekinetically while speaking about surgery for example) that is indistinguishable from how a “normal” brain works.
Say what you want about Musk, but the guy delivers. For those taking notes at home, over the past two weeks, he:
Launched the largest flying object ever into orbit with SpaceX,
Introduced the most sophisticated brain-computer interface ever with Neuralink,
Released Full Self Driving v12.3 in Tesla cars,
Open sourced xAI’s foundation model, Grok,
Continued to shitpost on his public square toy, X.
Elon tweeted that Blindsight is next for Neuralink after Telepathy, and that it’s already working in monkeys.
There will always be Elon haters, but at some point, you’ve just got to acknowledge how incredible this string of accomplishments is.
What did you get done this week?
Brandon Chase for Massachusetts General Hospital
The pig kidney was provided by eGenesis of Cambridge, Mass., from a pig donor that was genetically-edited using CRISPR-Cas9 technology to remove harmful pig genes and add certain human genes to improve its compatibility with humans.
Big week for the pigs.
Last night, I had pork sausage for dinner. It was delicious. It was spicy. It was made from pigs…probably many different parts of a pig. I purchased it at Whole Foods.
On Wedensday, Nature reported that a pig liver transplanted into a clinically dead man in China lasted for ten days. “With consent from the man’s family, researchers stitched the organ, from a genetically engineered miniature pig, to the man’s blood vessels, where it remained for ten days.”
Xenotransplantation — transplanting organs, tissues, or cells from one species to another — is important because there’s a dramatic shortage of human organs needed for transplant across the world. In China alone, hundreds of thousands of people suffer liver failure each year but only 6,000 received a liver transplant in 2022. More than 100,000 people in the U.S. await an organ for transplant and 17 people die each day waiting for an organ.
Well fans of xenotransplantation must be like pigs in mud right now, because yesterday, the porkies did it again!
Mass General announced that it successfully performed the first transplant of a genetically-edited pig kidney into a living patient. It’s the most recent in a string of wins for CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing.
As you might imagine, transplanting an organ from one species to another presents complications, from immune rejection to cross-species virus transmission. In 2022, doctors at the University of Maryland performed the first successful xenotransplantation of a pig heart into a human patient, who remained alive for two months before passing.
eGenesis, the company behind the kidney, is betting that it can overcome those challenges by editing the genes in the organs to remove harmful pig genes and add human genes in order to improve compatibility.
We’ll have to wait to see if this transplant sticks, but just the fact that humans are editing pig genes to potentially save human lives is pretty porking magical. Can we get an oink oink?!
(3) Intel Receives $8.5 Billion in Grants to Build Chip Plants
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Madeleine Ngo and Don Clark for The New York Times
President Biden on Wednesday awarded $8.5 billion in grants to Intel, a major investment to bolster the nation’s semiconductor production, during a tour of battleground states meant to sell his economic agenda.
The Biden Administration awarded an $8.5 billion grant to Intel as part of the CHIPS Act to boost domestic semiconductor production. At the press conference, President Biden asked:
“Where the hell is it written saying that we’re not going to be the manufacturing capital of the world again?”
Where the hell is it written, indeed, Mr. President.
Whether federal dollars can bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the US of A and reverse overreliance on Taiwan is another question.
It’s not that the intention is wrong — bolstering U.S. chip manufacturing is probably one of the highest ROI things the federal government can do — it’s that awarding $8.5 billion to a company that has been relatively stagnant for a few decades may not be the most effective way to achieve that ROI.
And there are bigger structural issues: it’s slower and more expensive to get fabs built here, we have a shortage of trained labor, and as Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner pointed out on BG2, our workforce may be too comfortable to stick with a company long enough and put in the long hours required to build technical expertise.
That said, Biden has $39 billion to play with thanks the the CHIPS Act and we’re happy to see those dollars getting put to work. Now, does it just so happen that at least $8.5 billion of those dollars are being injected into the state of Arizona, creating new, high-paying jobs the same year that a Presidential election is occurring in which Arizona is a key battleground state. Yes, that does seem to be the case.
Either way, it’s an acknowledgment that technology is important, that the US needs to get back to building, and a step towards training the workforce to build chips. Who controls the chips controls the universe.
(4) This Startup Is One Step Closer To Making Drugs In Space
Alex Knapp for Forbes
With its first demonstration mission a success, Asparouhov said the company is ready to start making products for customers on its orbital manufacturing platform. These wouldn’t necessarily be small batches, either.
Packy here. I’m a simple man. Varda announces something that takes us one step closer to making space drugs, and opening up the space economy, I share it.
In June 2023, before Varda’s first launch, I wrote about what they were hoping to prove:
This first flight is mainly a test. Varda needs to prove, primarily, that it can send a factory to space, orbit it around the earth, and send a capsule with a payload safely back down to the planet’s surface.
If things go really well, Varda will also showcase its ability to manufacture drugs in space. It will crystallize ritonavir in microgravity in order to explore how gravity influences the resulting crystal structure.
A couple of weeks ago, they achieved the primary objective when its W-1 capsule landed safely in the Utah desert.
This week, Varda announced that things had indeed gone really well. They successfully crystallized ritonavir in microgravity.
“That Varda’s ritonavir was created exactly as predicted, and remained stable through its return to Earth, is particularly promising,” Knapp wrote in Forbes. “The version of the drug the company attempted is one of its least stable forms.”
With the successful test run under its belt, Varda is now a go to begin making drugs for pharma customers in space. Maybe even more importantly, as Delian explained, it paves the path to Varda being “the first company to actually show that there’s value to atoms being moved back and forth from space.”
When the space supply chain is booming one day, you can tell your grandkids (over tightbeam) that you were there at its birth.
P.S. I almost wrote this in Tuesday’s piece on Techno-Optimistic Media, but Varda has been an exception to the rule that startups aren’t a great fit for journalists. They’ve gotten great coverage from the WSJ, CNN, CNBC, The New York Times, and more. I thought Knapp’s piece in Forbes was great. Do compelling things and bring proof, and there are plenty of techno-optimistic journalists willing and ready to cover them.
(5) The IRS Finally Has an Answer to TurboTax
Saahil Desai for The Atlantic
Direct File isn’t perfect—the program is available in only 12 states, and it isn’t able to handle anything beyond the simplest tax situations—but it’s a glimpse of a world where government tech benefits millions of Americans. In turn, it is also an agonizing realization of how far we are from that reality.
Fun little reminder here: Tax Day is 24 days away.
Tax Day is important because its the day during which the government compels its citizens to pay (always surprisingly high) taxes in order to fund things like the aforementioned $8.5 billion Intel/Arizona grant. For years, it’s been even more fun thanks to services like TurboTax. TurboTax is a product from Intuit, a private corporation that offers a variety of individual and SMB financial products and for years has been lobbying Washington to keep the process of filing taxes asininely complex. Why would Intuit do such a thing?
Because if it’s hard and scary to file taxes, then the 150M+ Americans that need to file taxes each year will turn to TurboTax to help them do it. Let’s say the average TurboTax customer pays $100 per year. That $15 billion of sweet, high margin government-forced ARR up for grabs. And if it’s even harder and scarier, then customers will be convinced into purchasing upsell products and consultations.
The other fun part comes a few weeks later, when the IRS tells you that you actually messed up and didn’t pay the right amount, which it turns out they knew all along, but Intuit’s lobbyists asked them to make you try to guess anyway just for funsies.
The thing is…filing taxes shouldn’t be that hard and complex. If the IRS knows, you should be able to work directly with the IRS, online, if you so choose.
Enter Direct File. Direct File is a new pilot tax filing service introduced by the IRS to allow eligible taxpayers to file their taxes online for free, directly with the IRS. It’s designed for simplicity, is offered in English and Spanish, and supported by mobile-first real-time online support from IRS customer service representatives…who don’t have the incentive to upsell you on a bunch of products. It’s now available in 12 states.
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for private businesses offering services that complement government services — that’s in part what makes the American economy so dynamic — but not when incentives are totally out of whack. The incentives around tax filing have been totally out of whack thanks to regulatory capture. So it’s great to see the government step up and offer a modern alternative.
Bonus
Just in case you thought we were going to go a week without a humanoid robotics update, here’s Unitree’s H1 doing the first humanoid robot backflip without hydraulics.
Now let’s get backflipping into a March Madness weekend.
We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday. If you have some time this weekend, check out Sidebar.
Thanks for reading,
Packy + Dan
Think Neuralink is spelled as Nueralink a few times at the beginning of the article just as a small note :)
Thanks for that great article! It went well with my morning coffee :)