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Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Unruly Futures, once again by Francesco who's taking charge of these more and more while I mend a couple of broken bones of my kids — apparently, they won’t be pro skiers after all.
Once again, macro, AI and robotics continue to be the most consequential topics, so they make the bulk of the weekly reading we did, but as usual there's quite a lot of other stuff. We cut down on proper science papers, but let us know if that's something you'd like to see more of.
Last week, Ross Douthat quoted Henry Kissinger on Trump being "one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses". While most countries are quickly finding out what those pretenses were (but they could've just listened instead of acting surprised now), we are living the semi-mystical experience of seeing a new world order. Markets are doing their job, with European defence stocks skyrocket under the pressure of a continent that is now waking up to its lack of military capabilities (just follow Rheinmetall's rally - RHM), while their US counterparts are hesitating. In all of this, we liked reading:
Cultural vibes aren't analysis by Alex Chalmers
On explaining Europe away with vibes, what is culture and what is policy.
Stripe’s 2024 Annual Letter
Insightful as always, with one final section on European prosperity, dynamism, bad policies and allocative efficiency.
Anduril vs. Helsing
Something on marketing and building brand identity in defence tech.
While on the other side of the cold war, things are not slowing down
Ivonescimab v Keytruda
We wrote about it here - China’s biotech sector is surging forward, despite concerns over lax regulations and quality of clinical trial data. This week's spotlight is for Akeso, whose lung cancer drug outperformed Merck’s Keytruda (the world's top selling medicine) in trials.
Beijing to Shanghai in 3 minutes
As for all those things that go fast and can strike hard, Chinese scientists claim to have developed an oblique detonation engine that can operate between Mach 6 and 16 - almost 20,000 km/h.
Updates from AI land
Claude Code
Claude released Sonnet 3.7 and Claude Code, a massive deal that has initially gone relatively quiet. CC has agentic capabilities (read: is a SWE) you have to beg to please stop building. We really enjoyed this interaction on Claude coding in minutes what would've been the result of a fairly sophisticated master's research in the old world.
Anthropic raises series E
It's $3.5 billion at $61.5 billion post, round led by Lightspeed and joined by Bessemer, General Catalyst and others. Anthropic triples its series D valuation but is still way below OpenAI (we'll see where they settle with SoftBank but it was rumoured to be $300m).
Perplexity announces Comet
We're already seeing a rise in agentic browsers, and Perplexity has announced they are joining the race. While waiting for the Browser Company and many others (although we loved using Nayla, hats off to Yannick and team).
Who will watch the watchmen?
Atla releases Selene-1, the model to evaluate models, and releases an alignment platform to steer the model according to the users' scoring parameters.
For more efficient communication
One demo everyone has seen last week shows two agents switching to fast bips to chat faster than human language. Less efficient than how agents will actually communicate in the future, but fun experiment in a post-voice uncanny valley.
Sesame: Conversational speech generation
Another demo we loved, this time from Sesame: low-latency voice generation through real-time context understanding and the use of semantic and acoustic tokens. Best AI conversation we had so far.
Ultra-sensitive electronics
MIT researchers have developed a scalable, chip-based terahertz amplifier that integrates a distributed radiator array to generate high-power terahertz waves without requiring bulky silicon lenses. The tech enables compact, high-resolution applications in radar, communications, and medical imaging.
RNA neoantigen vaccines prime long-lived CD8+ T cells in pancreatic cancer
Really important study exploring the RNA neoantigen vaccines' capacity to induce durable CD8+ T cell responses against tumor-specific antigens. The study demonstrates enhanced immune activation, improved tumor clearance, and prolonged protection, highlighting the potential for personalized RNA-based cancer vaccines.
Amazon announces Ocelot quantum chip
Amazon’s AWS has unveiled Ocelot, its first-generation quantum chip, developed with Caltech, with a scalable architecture that slashes quantum error correction costs by up to 90% through innovative "cat qubit" technology and bosonic error correction. Quantum hardware is gaining momentum, as discussed last week - great to see Amazon joining the competition.
A manufacturable platform for photonic quantum computing
On the same note, PsiQuantum presents a silicon photonics platform with near-perfect fidelities—99.98% for state preparation and measurement, 99.50% for quantum interference, 99.22% for two-qubit fusion, chip-to-chip interconnect fidelity of 99.72%.
Glasses for robots
Georgia Tech’s EgoMimic introduces a full-stack framework using human data from Meta's Project Aria glasses to scale robot manipulation, achieving up to 228% performance gains in tasks like object-in-bowl sorting and grocery packing by co-training on human and robot datasets.
Large biomechanics space structures
Another hardcore DARPA project. If you think the future doesn't look like the future enough, reach out here.
Wayve’s London demo
On why end-to-end models are king (now it's clear to everybody) and the streets of London will soon become much more fun.
How Xpandomers work
Fascinating video by Roche on their new sequencing technology.
Phenformer - a genetic language model
GSK (+ Harvard, Max Planck, Oxford) introduce a model to 100x more base pairs than existing DNA language models. Great thread explaining why it's a big deal and what does it mean for the understanding of diseases.
Perplexity's CEO Aravind Srinivas has started tweeting more and more about venture capitalists as a software. We can't expect it's only going to hit consultants. But we'll keep it light this time around, and promise a longer edition on why we VCs can start freaking out.
General Catalyst’s IPO
Despite all of the above, GC is considering an IPO. Not unsurprising given how wide the firm has gone in recent years, from hospitals to debt financing. It would be the first US fund to go public. A good excuse to look into their returns.
Deepseek’s Revenues
The Craftsman
Fall in love and happily marry
Open-source stellarators
A guide to Cursor
Some takeaways from the AI Engineer Summit
UK battery start-up backed by Britishvolt investors aims for £1bn gigafactory
The end of YC
We're still trying it: GPT-4.5
Let us know what you think of this format, and if you have anything else we should read!
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