Apologies for missing a week, which feels like a geological era in this new warp-speed moving technological times. Francesco pulled this one off while I’m stuck in France waiting for an alternator part for my car. The decentralized production model we push will someday enable the car repair shop to instantly print what’s needed to get us back on the road, but not just yet apparently!
In any case, we’re extremely excited to reveal that we’re doing another one of our Unplug events! A 3 day retreat in the Dolomites, including a nice hike to a secluded mountain-top refuge where we’ll sleep and wake up in the middle of the least developed mountain range in the Dolomites. This is an invite-only event, and a very limited space retreat as the mountain hut can only host 45 people, but we’re opening up a few spots to the wider Unruly Futures readership.
Apply here: https://lu.ma/unplug25 !
Now back to the regularly scheduled future-infused programming:
That the tariffs scenario analysis would’ve been more intricate than Zerohedge’s aged-like-fine-milk post was fairly clear. But wishful thinking moves mountains and what will happen is still unclear anyways. In all the chaos, we found comfort and reason in virtually every single thing that the Captain Harlock of supply chains Ryan Petersen has said. Here’s one thread on what’s going to happen to American small businesses, and here a great interview with Prof Galloway on why Trump will have to back down.
Nobody knows what strategies are being played on either side of the Pacific, so we’ll just compile a few things we found useful. Starting with the US.
The US government is looking to implement changes to Biden's AI chip export rules Remember the three-tier system that ranks friendly to less-friendly countries for chip export purposes? It might be gone soon.
US Space Policy: The Next Frontier A long-form by the Manhattan Institute on the new Space Age, the role the US is playing in it, what private companies are building and the need for reforms in the public sector.
We already mentioned it would’ve happened soon, but now Trump has signed an executive order to expedite permits to mine in international waters.
Startups & Sea Power On the challenges startups face to work with the US Navy, the cultural overhaul and contracting methods needed to get new tech adopted faster.
Silicon Valley’s Military Drone Companies Have A Serious Chinese Parts Problem On the difficulty of running a drone war while relying on your enemy’s hardware - like airframes, batteries, and cameras.
And moving to China.
Will this be the Chinese Century? Noah Smith’s take on what we already called, and what type of century we should expect.
Chip wars. A great analysis of “China’s answer to the GB200 NVL72” Huawei's new CloudMatrix 384 AI accelerator boasts impressive performances, while all in regime of export controls. On the manufacturing side, it’s not entirely clear what capabilities Chinese companies already possess and at what scale, so we’ll wait to declare that Moore’s Law has moved to Shanghai. But the trajectory seems clear and it’s always fun to go dig in the archive of takes that didn’t age so well.
Alibaba unveils Qwen3, a family of 'hybrid' AI models ranging from 0.6B to 235B parameters trained on 36 trillion tokens. The largest model, Qwen-3-235B-A22B, outperforms OpenAI’s o3-mini and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro on benchmarks like Codeforces, AIME, and BFCL.
China has the world’s first operational thorium nuclear reactor. “The US left its research publicly available, waiting for the right successor. We were that successor.”
A few more long-ish pieces from the Economist on how things are changing:
And something on the rest of the world
Models Aren't Moats. We’ve written about the AI bubble in the previous edition of Unruly Futures. The question around moats plays a big role here. But moats of talent acquisition, brand strength, and effective feedback loops are alive and well.
Duolingo joins Shopify and many others in the AI-first, HR-later philosophy.
Thrive Capital’s Vehicle to deploy AI in legacy industries Thrive has launched Thrive Holdings to create and acquire AI-powered companies, joining other firms like GC and 8VC with strategies to invest in AI rollups.
Engineering AGI for Physical Systems P-1 AI has emerged from stealth with a $23 million seed to develop Archie, an AI agent designed to automate cognitive tasks in engineering by performing quantitative and spatial reasoning for physical system design, starting with data center cooling systems. Phase 2: engineering AGI.
Agency Is Eating the World We’ve heard a lot about when the first one-person $B companies will happen. A piece by Gian Segato on how AI has “eroded the value of specialization”.
From vertical services to a self-replicating robot economy The future of physical AI and all its pieces from actuators to world models.
Investors are agreeing to deals that would have seemed unthinkable a few years back. Mira Murati’s new $2B Series A at a $10B val, includes a mathematic automatic majority for her on every board decision. A16Z must believe they can get us AGI fast.
Hugging Face releases a $100 3D-printed robotic arm The commoditization of hardware is bringing robotic building in the no-excuse region, and Hugging Face is leading the charge. Our decentralized production thesis is happening before our eyes.
The price of staying alive Pfizer has received FDA approval for Beqvez (study here), its first gene therapy for hemophilia B, with the single-dose treatment priced at $3.5 million. Gene therapies are expensive, it reminds us of when Goldman asked if curing patients was a sustainable business model.
Learning Universal Representations of Intermolecular Interactions Harvard researchers introduce ATOMICA, a cross-modal AI model for molecular interactions between small molecules, metal ions, amino acids, nucleic acids.
Would you let an AI-driven euthanized spider perform eye surgery on you? It might become a real question somewhere soon.
Maybe First Light’s downround doesn’t deserve an article on the Telegraph, but doing fusion is hard.
The State of Photonic Computing Amid an industry-wide pivot to networking and datacenters, Lawrence Lundy-Bryan takes stock of where the photonic market is going.
ABB to spin off world's second biggest robotics business ABB reported gleaming results in Q1, and announced plans to spin off its robotics business, valued between $2.7 to $3.3 billion.
The Case for Commodity Markets On why (re)industrialization cannot happen without securing commodities.
Other things we liked
What happened to the revolution? - A writeup on the crypto industry's shift to enhanced traditional finance, the lack of advanced monetary features in BTC and ETH, the reliance on stablecoins and institutional adoption, and what can be done next.
A Network Model of Money On how the topology of monetary networks reveals that the shape and structure of these systems dictate how value flows and is extracted. And the implications of this model for understanding monetary dynamics and enhancing resource allocation. By our friend Luca of M0.
The Rise of Production Capital On capital orchestration in infrastructure building, and production capitalists.
The Network Effects of Where You Build On the old question of where to build a company (remember Cities and Ambition?)
Let us know what you think of this format, and if you have anything else we should read!
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