Weekly Dose of Optimism #91

Anduril, TikTok, OpenCRISPR-1, Space Economies, Stripe Crypto & Sculpture

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 91st Weekly Dose of Optimism.

Been a busy week here at Not Boring HQ: Packy ran a 2:58 in his first ever marathon on Sunday, then dropped a 15K word essay on the future of mining on Tuesday, and I have been dealing with insatiable demand for Create’s new Sour Green Apple creatine gummies (code: notboring30 for 30% off). But amid all of that busyness, the world kept marching onwards and upwards. Solid national policy decisions, AI powering more of modern medicine and defense, and much more. We’re here to cover it.

Let’s get to it.

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(1) Anduril Selected for U.S. Air Force Collaborative Combat Aircraft Program

From Anduril

Today, the United States Air Force announced that Anduril has been selected as one of two vendors to move forward on the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program. Over the next phase, Anduril will design, manufacture, and test production-representative CCAs.

In a very serious nod of recognition, The U.S. Air Force has selected Anduril as one of two vendors to design, manufacture, and test production-representative Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA). You might think, what’s the big deal…isn’t this exactly what Anduril was designed to do? You’re right and that’s true — Anduril is competing in exactly the ways it was designed to, but is doing so just 7 years after launching. It beat out Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman for the deal. As Anduril’s founder, Palmer Luckey, posted, “Anduril is proving that with the right team and business model, a seven-year-old company can go toe-to-toe with players that have been around for 70+. The real winner? The United States of America.”

Anduril’s success is evidence that new companies and approaches can take on even the most regulatorily captured of industries. That disruption is not only going to force existing primes to up their game, but also encourage other startups to enter the market. To them, what was previously impossible now seems feasible. There’s a playbook for it.

But what’s a CCA anyway? It’s an unmanned aircraft designed to work alongside crewed planes, enhancing capabilities through teaming. It utilizes automation and AI to do reconnaissance, targeting, and supporting manned aircraft in complex operations. Anduril’s current CCA offering is called Fury, although it is still unclear what changes will be made to the existing craft as part of the Air Force’s procurement process. Ultimately, the USAF will make a final, multibillion-dollar production decision in two years from now — it said that it wants ~1,000 craft — with the goal of having fully operational crafts by the end of the decade.

We’re big believers that Techno-Industrialists will create much bigger businesses than people expect by taking on large old industries with better products and margins. We used Anduril as example A1 in The Techno-Industrial Revolution. This win is a big step in that direction, showing that startups don’t need to nibble around the edges but can attack the incumbents head-on. Nothing more optimistic than that.

To learn more about Anduril’s strategy, check out our deep dive:

For more Anduril fun, Madeline Renbarger at Newcomer has a great profile on Anduril co-founder and Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens (paywalled 🔒).

The Investor Who Called Defense Tech’s Big Moment

(2) President Biden signs law to ban TikTok nationwide unless it is sold

From NPR

President Biden on Wednesday signed a law that would ban Chinese-owned TikTok unless it is sold within a year. It is the most serious threat yet to the video-streaming app's future in the U.S., intensifying America's tech war with China.

You know what else Palmer Luckey was right about before everyone else? Banning TikTok. His rationale was simple: they ban our apps, it makes no economic sense not to fight back.

We’re not China hawks here and generally are skeptical of governments banning apps, but this one just seemed too obvious not to root for. Based on the evidence available, TikTok in its current form is both an agent of the CCP and one of the most popular sources of information in the United States. Those two realities just could not coexist much longer. We’re not the first to make this analogy, but it would be like allowing the USSR to own CBS during the Cold War. There are plenty of other platforms for free speech whose algorithms aren’t controlled by a foreign adversary, and in new hands, TikTok could be one of them! To me, this is less an escalation of U.S. <> China relations and more just good national policy hygiene.

So why is this an optimistic story? It’s a solid signal that bipartisanship and common sense policy can still prevail, even in the face of special interests and even during a hyper-polarized period in American politics. Congress can still come together and do what needs to be done for the betterment of the nation. Sure, it was tucked into a much larger $95B foreign aid package, but ultimately The House, Senate, and Biden Administration came together to make it happen.

Who knows how this all plays out — ByteDance will certainly fight this in court (as they should and is their right!) and if they lose you’d imagine they’ll be some pretty interested U.S. buyers. But a world in which TikTok is not owned by ByteDance (and therefore controlled by the CCP), is likely a slightly safer and more stable world.

(3) Astribot S1 Hello World

h/t to Martin Prince-Parrott for surfacing

Now for some very cool news out of China!

Y’all have to let us sleep. We had the Weekly Dose all wrapped up and ready to go when, overnight, the Chinese robotics company Stardust Intelligence (Astribot) dropped maybe the most impressive robot video we’ve seen yet.

Its humanoid-ish robot opens beer and wine, flips bread in a pan, sorts a bunch of things on a table, peels a cucumber, folds a shirt, makes a step stool, waters a plant, vacuums, throws something into a wastebasket, and even dances and paints.

For the same reasons TikTok was banned, we probably won’t see Astribots in every American home, but the video showed a glimpse into the very near future where general purpose robots do more of the housework while humans do human stuff. With so much capital and competition in robotics, it’s a matter of when (and how much?), not if.

(4) Profluent Successfully Edits Human Genome with OpenCRISPR-1, the World’s First AI-Created and Open-Source Gene Editor

Profluent, the AI-first protein design company, today debuted the OpenCRISPR^TM initiative, releasing the world’s first open-source, AI-generated gene editor. With this launch, Profluent demonstrates the first successful precision editing of the human genome with customizable gene editors designed from scratch with AI.

Profluent released OpenCRISPR-1, the first AI-designed gene editor. And not only that, the company announced it would be open sourcing the molecules so others can build on top of their work.

OpenCRISPR-1 is a Cas9-like protein and guide RNA gene editor entirely developed using the company’s proprietary LLMs, which were trained to produce novel CRISPR-like proteins that expand the known CRISPR families. OpenCRISPR didn't just replicate existing CRISPR systems; it generated new, diverse CRISPR-like proteins. Ultimately, the new toolkit could allow for more sophisticated, precise, and accessible gene editing methodologies.

I say this every week, but with new companies like Profluent constantly popping up, I just think it’s a really bad time to be a disease in this world.

(5) Crypto is back. Stripe will start supporting global stablecoin payments.

Packy here. Yesterday at Stripe Sessions, co-founder John Collison gave a presentation called The Future of Payments. The future? Crypto. More specifically: stablecoins.

In a live demo, John checks out, chooses to pay in crypto with Stripe, and shows off the surprisingly low fees and fast speed of paying in USDC on Solana via the Phantom wallet. It settled in less than a second instead of the days it would take via credit card and cost $0.0037 in network fees on a $99 transaction, 800x less than the 3% you’d pay if you were using a credit card.

What happens to the GDP of the internet when everything gets 3% cheaper?

It’s a win for consumers (who pay lower fees), for merchants (who get paid instantly), and for Stripe (which expands its margins, circumvents the credit card companies, and potentially lays more groundwork to compete with the credit card networks).

This is a great example of crypto simply making capitalism more effective, and winning by providing a much better solution. How’s that for a use case?

Bonus: Stripe Sculpture

From the future to the past.

The team at Monumental Labs, which builds AI-enabled robotic stone carving factories, unveiled its Stripe sculpture at Stripe Sessions. We actually covered this team in our January essay on the companies leading the Techno-Industrial Revolution. Supposedly the team went from initial design to robot sculpting to hand finishing the sculpture in just one month.

Imagine how much beauty Monumental will bring into the world in the years ahead.

I just wish they had asked before using Packy’s NIL.

Double Bonus!: Affordable, rapid bootstrapping of space industry and solar system civilization

NASA via David Holz

It has become feasible to bootstrap a self-sustaining, self-expanding industry at reasonably low cost. Simple modeling was developed to identify the main parameters of successful bootstrapping. This indicates that bootstrapping can be achieved with as little as 12 metric tons (MT) landed on the Moon during a period of about 20 years.

Link to Tweet

In 2016, NASA wrote a paper describing what it would take to bootstrap self-replicating robot space economies within a century. We don’t normally cover eight-year-old papers here, but David Holz surfaced this one yesterday and it’s an awesome read.

The paper shows that due to advances in robotics and additive manufacturing (3D printing), it would be possible to send 12 metric tons of material to the moon and build robotic systems that build bigger robotic systems that harvest the resources of the moon and then the solar system to ultimately provide orders of magnitude more industrial output in space than we can achieve on earth.

First, it’s just awesome that there are rocket scientists at NASA crunching the numbers on self-replicating robotic space industries. Second, with the advances in launch capabilities, robotics, and 3D printing since the paper was written, it looks like the authors were on to something. As Holz points out, they may have been conservative: they didn’t factor in lower launch costs with Starship, the ability to grow anything with synthetic biology, or the intelligence with which entrepreneurs are beginning to infuse robots.

This will happen. We have companies like General Fabrication working on it here on earth, and no physical reason we won’t be able to tap into the vast resources of space.

The near future will be abundant if we let it. To that end, we were pumped to see the launch of the Abundance Institute by some Not Boring favorites like Eli Dourado and J. Storrs Hall this week to make sure we let it.

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We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday.

Thanks for reading,

Packy + Dan