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The Financial Times and Wall Street Journal going panic mode in the span of a few days is always interesting. China has secured a prime position in the global drug development space and is poised to become even more dominant, from discovery to clinical development. It adds to the vibes we're feeling all around. Calling it a "Deepseek moment" is maybe too much, as the signals were there all along and the trend has been steady. Two years ago, 12% of drugs licensed by big pharma was from China. Today, it's nearing 30%. Alex Telford also asked in a blog post if all our drugs will eventually come from China. We've made a selection of readings to get an idea of what's going on.
Rapid Trials Prompt Deals Rush for Chinese ‘Super me-too’ Drugs
Financial Times, 06 February 2025
The Drug Industry is Having its Own Deepseek Moment
The Wall Street Journal, 02 February 2025
Big Pharma’s Bet on China Biotech Is a Rare Trade Bright Spot
Bloomberg, 02 December 2024
AstraZeneca defies geopolitics to bet on China
Financial Times, 03 June 2023
Mistral was quietly watching everyone write them off in the AI race and decided it was time to drop their own pro chat model. You can try it for free. They also announced a partnership with Helsing to develop defence focused foundation models. Paris is in full fibrillation today for the AI summit, so new stuff could come out at any time. I've also been using a Chinese one that dropped this week called Kimi. Starting to get hard to keep track of them all. Some insane stuff on video as well with Goku.
Why Did Elon Musk Just Offer to Buy Control of OpenAI for $100 Billion?
You really can't sleep soundly if you're sama. Elon is bidding almost $100B for OpenAI, in a move that seems more of a wrench in the wheels than an interested attempt. Good explanation here.
A pretty good counter to the main narrative that hardware is not needed. Long read but summary here: - The future of AI belongs to those who can keep innovating novel topologies. - The speed of innovation is determined by the rate of experimentation. - The rate of experimentation is compute-bound. - Deploying more hardware is hitting resource limits at global scale & developing better hardware is hitting dimension limits at atomic scale.
the end of zero-marginal costs + the end of your ai fund
Pretty pessimistic take on VC in the AI era. TL;DR
AI investing is closer to deep tech than Internet/SaaS investing over the past 20 years. The shift to reasoning-heavy AI models introduces significant operating expenses at scale, challenging the traditional software valuation playbook. While higher revenues may offset some costs as agents replace human labor, startups face massive challenges: higher opex, lower margins, and intense competition from incumbents. VCs (we) need to adapt or risk suboptimal returns. But considering the amount already invested, it’s likely the returns are already in the post. I tend to not see it as dark, but it's hard to go against each point made here.
No longer hiring junior or even mid-level software engineers.
Gumroad is no longer hiring junior or even mid-level software engineers. New process: 1. Sit and chat about what we need to build, doing research with Deep Research as we go. 2. Have AI record everything and turn it into a spec. 3. Clean up the spec, adding any design requirements / other nuances. 4. Have Devin code it up. 5. QA, merge, (auto-)deploy to prod. A lot of people will thrive in this new world, but to think that a lot of mid CS graduates won't have work is quite incredible.
Time to value in AI is honestly hard to grasp. These use cases show just how much traditional software companies have to gain from implementing already available AI without having to develop anything revolutionary internally.
Physical Intelligence - Open Sourcing Pi0
Code and weight released for the first general-purpose robotic foundation model that can be fine-tuned to a diverse range of tasks (folding laundry, cleaning a table, scooping coffee beans, etc) and that can control a variety of different robot type (robots with two arms, single-arm platforms, mobile robots, etc). You can check it out in Hugging Face as well.
- Do robotic foundation models make sense? - How should we think about vertical robotic solutions? - How important are LLMs for robotics? - How far can the sim-to-real gap be closed? - Does form factor matter? - What do customers care about? - Do you need to be an end-to-end solution provider? - Sense, think, act – what matters most? - Unbundling or rebundling of the stack? - Are there any novel business models that make sense? Worth a read
Figure leaves Collaboration Agreement with OpenAI
One of the big news of the week. Figure is going at it by themselves on the AI front. At the same time, OpenAI didn't waste any time and is looking for people to build robotic hardware and filed a trademark for it as well. The race is on!
The superconductivity of layered graphene is surprisingly strange
Graphene keeps on surprising. The surprise here lies not only in the occurrence of superconductivity itself, but also in evidence that these systems exhibit a “strange metal” phase, which is often linked to high-temperature superconductivity in other materials. This suggests that the interactions between electrons in graphene are far more nuanced than expected, providing a simpler platform to test theories originally developed for more complex superconductors.
Commercializing Autonomous Science
"Generation 4 Bio AI: As we integrate advanced ML models, microfluidics, and robotics into our experimental workflows, we edge closer to a future where autonomous science doesn’t just support human-led research but transforms it and pushes it into new modalities and use-cases."
AI chip smaller than a grain of salt uses light to decode data
Classic science work, and hard to actually grasp how it could be used, but nonetheless wild. Photonics is clearly having a moment, and it seems clear that AI will push for more and more photonics chips, to get gains in energy efficiency and real-time data processing.
Scientists Just Found a Way to Starve Cancer Using Fat Cells
Sort of goes like this: - cold therapy can kill cancer cells - not everyone can do cold therapy - so let's liposuct the fat cells - CRISPR them to repogram them to use more calories - put them back in the body Seems like something that'd be useful even in non-cancer patients, essentially turning beige fat into brown fat
Breakthrough as Oxford scientists achieve teleportation with quantum supercomputer
We've seen and cited quite a few quantum teleportation papers, but now scientists at Oxford seem to have been able to use teleportation on full quantum logical gates.
Gene editing or 2000s' internet stocks
And a short reminder by Paul Graham that you're not building for the hype. Just keep building, the future will come.
Fixing Europe's broken patent system.
From one of our portfolio founders! Europe's rigid patent system stifles creativity and collaboration. Josef advocates for reforms similar to those in the US and China, proposing a provisional patent system and a grace period to empower inventors and researchers.
Which came first, the neuron or the feeling?
Does consciousness arise from neural processes or is it a fundamental aspect of reality itself? Can we understand the universe just thanks to consciousness?
In case someone missed it, we're one year into the telepathy age. Neuralink made a good summary with the stories of Noland, Alex, and Brad, the first (?) three humans with telepathy.
50Y - The deeptech company builder with a ‘flavour of YC’ coming to the UK
Sifted is showcasing our friends at 50 Years as they expand to Europe bringing their 5050 program to various universities ultimately trying to get many more young academics to launch startups.
Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian power systems synchronised with the rest of Europe
Pretty big deal: the successful synchronization of the Baltic states' electrical systems with the Continental European grid marks a significant milestone in energy independence, effectively severing ties with the Russian-controlled networks.
Andreessen Horowitz Defends Hiring Daniel Penny
Pretty unexplainable move from A16Z, other than attracting attention and wanting to be seen/positioned as extreme right in the market. Mr. Penny, who was acquitted after choking a mentally ill subway passenger to death, was hired to join the firm’s American Dynamism investment team with no previous experience. Let's see what this yields.
Estimating SpaceX’s 2024 Revenue
Payload estimates SpaceX's revenue to have reached $13.1B in 2024, up from $8.7B in 2023. And they're not even on Mars.
The Story Company - Science fiction films
Cool new science-focused film company.
Vesuvius Challenge - News from Scroll 5
Epic progress on the Vesuvius Challenge (trying to read ancient scrolls from Pompei with AI). Really exciting, and just goes to show you can just do things. Researchers are fermenting with the possibility that they'll have the biggest influx of data in their field since the Renaissance.
Futurehouse AI-for-Science Postdoctoral Fellowship
Compute, wet labs, resources, and a $125k/yr stipend to work on how AI will change biology and chemistry. Deadline on February 14.
Universities are failing to boost economic growth
Pretty damning piece on the Economist about universities, saying they "too often they generate ideas that no one knows how to use"
Collect this post as an NFT.
