Weekly Dose of Optimism #95

FIT21, Golden Gate Bridge, Lithium, Promethium, Milei

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 95th Weekly Dose of Optimism.

It was another busy week in our corner of the internet, and we’re going to try to cover it all for you before you head out for the long Memorial Day Weekend.

‘Merica.

Let’s get to it.

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(1) Crypto’s Big Week

From the Financial Services Committee

Today, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 4763, the “Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act,” in a watershed moment for the U.S. digital asset ecosystem. FIT21 provides the robust, time-tested consumer protections and regulatory certainty necessary to allow digital asset innovation to flourish in the United States.

Packy here. It’s been a big week for crypto in the nation’s capitol, the result of the hard and patient work of a lot of people in educating policymakers on the industry.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed the Financial Innovation for the 21st Century Act (FIT21). The bill provides much-needed regulatory clarity for the crypto industry, and pushes crypto out of the weird gray area it’s been forced to operate in. Entrepreneurs trying to build new things should understand the rules of the road going in, and FIT21 is a step in that direction. There’s still a long way to go — it will face headwinds in the Senate — but it’s the second time in two weeks where crypto received bipartisan support from the House. 71 Democrats, including financial whiz kid Nancy Pelosi, voted for the bill. Crypto is becoming bipartisan.

Then yesterday, a double whammy!

First, the SEC approved an Ethereum ETF. More than a financial win, as a16z crypto General Counsel and all around good guy Miles Jennings tweeted, “These approvals enshrine the SEC’s position in 2018 - ETH is not a security. That means the SEC has formally recognized that decentralization moves tokens outside of the US securities law regime. With that beachhead established, all projects now have a path forward.”

Then, the House came back for more, passing Tom Emmer’s CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act, banning the Fed from issuing a Central Bank Digital Currency. This is great, because as North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry explained, “If not open, permissionless, and private, a CBDC is no more than a CCP-style surveillance tool waiting to be weaponized.”

As I wrote this week, crypto provides the best set of tools we have to address challenges with money and finance, and to make capitalism more efficient. It’s been held back, in part, by murky regulation and overzealous regulators. Congress’ about-face on crypto this week is a big step towards unleashing entrepreneurial talent on making sure the whole financial system runs more smoothly. It’s time to BUIDL.

We love to see a little pro-innovation lawmaking heading into Memorial Day Weekend. What a country.

(2) Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model

From Anthropic

Today we report a significant advance in understanding the inner workings of AI models. We have identified how millions of concepts are represented inside Claude Sonnet, one of our deployed large language models. This is the first ever detailed look inside a modern, production-grade large language model. This interpretability discovery could, in future, help us make AI models safer.

Researchers at Anthropic made an interpretability breakthrough, giving us an inside look at how these large language models really work. LLMs work by representing concepts through patterns of neuron activations, where each concept is spread across many neurons, and each neuron contributes to multiple concepts. This allows the model to understand and generate responses based on these internal representations. Anthropic’s work, for the first time, gives us a better mapping of these internal concept representations.

As an example, Anthropic's research showed that amplifying the "Golden Gate Bridge" feature in the model made it obsessively mention the bridge, even in unrelated contexts. This demonstrated that specific features control behavior.

Importantly, identifying the controllable features of a model will mean that LLM builders will be able to influence the model’s behavior. Knowing how the model works means the models can be better monitored, steered, and put to good use doing things for us humans.

Want to see what it means for yourself? The Anthropic team pushed a Golden Gate Bridge Mode. “We found a feature that, when amplified, can make Claude focus intensely on the Golden Gate Bridge. For a limited time, you can talk with this version of the model.”

It’s fun. Go play with it — click the little Golden Gate Bridge icon on the right — and see for yourself that we’re going to be in control of this technology, not the other way around.

No need to Pause, just to understand. Who woulda thunk it?

(3) A Vast, Untapped Source of Lithium Has Just Been Found in The US

Carly Cassella for Science Alert

Over vast stretches of time, deep groundwater has dissolved the lithium in these rocks, essentially "mining the subsurface", according to Justin Mackey, a researcher at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pennsylvania. Mackey and his colleagues have now found that when wastewater is dredged up from the deep by fracking activities, it contains an astonishing amount of lithium.

Packy again, back with maybe my favorite theme: people keep saying we’re running out of a particular resource, or that we can’t mine them profitably or cleanly, and then we just go ahead and discover boatloads of that resource right in our backyard! God bless America 🇺🇸

This time, it’s lithium, the element we need to make all of the batteries we’re going to need to make to electrify our vehicles and stabilize our grid. Currently, there’s just one large lithium mine in the US - we’re net importers. The Department of Energy wants to produce all of our own lithium domestically, but lithium mining is controversial for its environmental impact.

Then last year, as we covered in Weekly Dose #60, researchers discovered what may be the world’s largest lithium deposit in an ancient supervolcano at McDermitt caldera.

Now, we’ve struck Lithium again, in my home state of Pennsylvania, in the most beautiful way possible.

Pennsylvania is home to the Marcellus Shale, a massive source of natural gas from fracking. Injecting high-pressure fluid into shale formations creates fractures — hence fracking — which frees up oil and gas. Just when we thought we were reaching peak oil, humans figured out fracking, and unlocked a huge source of hydrocarbons on our home turf. Fracking is controversial, but it’s awesome.

And now it’s even more awesome. Turns out, deep groundwater has dissolved lithium in the rocks over millennia, and when we dredge up the wastewater from fracking, it contains massive amounts of lithium! The study, published in Science Reports, estimated just how much lithium is in that wastewater, and there’s a lot.

Extracting even a conservative amount of lithium from the Marcellus wastewater could meet 30% of current US lithium demand.

That’s fracking poetic.

(4) Element from the periodic table’s far reaches coaxed into elusive compound

Mark Peplow for Nature

Chemists achieve synthetic feat with radioactive promethium for the first time.

A team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory synthesized the first chemical complex with radioactive promethium, an elusive element in the periodic table. The work exposes promethium's bonding behavior with other atoms in water, bridging what has long been a crucial gap in chemistry knowledge. So what’s promethium and why do we care?

Promethium is a rare radioactive element from the lanthanide series, found in nuclear waste. It’s currently used in products like pacemakers and spacecraft power sources. The new research gives us a better understanding of how promethium bonds to other elements, and thus, gives us a better understanding of how we can extract promethium from those other elements — for example, separating promethium from similar elements in nuclear waste. Beyond better nuclear waste management, the promethium learnings could lead to more efficient methods for separating and purifying other rare-earth elements, enhancing the production of high-tech products like lasers, magnets, and batteries.

(5) Javier Milei’s Radical Plan to Transform Argentina

Vera Bergengruen for Time

We don’t really have a perro in this fight, but thought it was worth sharing this new Time profile of Argentinian President Javier Milei. Milei certainly has his critics and it's frankly is too early to tell if his economic plans will pan out for Argentina in the long run, but the guy is doing what he promised to do and the early results speak for themself. Inflation is down. The currency is devalued by 50%. Spending is down. Argentina ran a surplus in Q1 ‘24, the country's first quarterly surplus since 2008. Milei is delivering on his plan, whether you or the Argentinian people want him to. Milei promised change, and change is what he is delivering.

Whether you agree with or like Milei is besides the point. The point is that real change is possible within democratic governments, and that change can (and in many cases should!) happen quickly.

On this Memorial Day Weekend, the story of Argentina serves as a good reminder. In the early 20th century, it was one of the top 10 wealthiest countries in the world and experienced long periods of political stability. Today it’s the ~75th richest country in the world. What happened? To overgeneralize: socialism and mismanagement.

Capitalism and democracy are worth fighting for. We’re thankful that generations of American men and women, much braver than me, agree with that statement and have paid the highest price protecting those ideals.

Enjoy the long weekend, support the troops, and God Bless America.

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If you miss us too much this weekend and you haven’t read it yet, go read Better Tools, Bigger Companies.

We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday.

Thanks for reading,

Packy + Dan