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Greetings from sunny Venice Beach, LA! I'm spending the week here given all of the LA funds are hosting AGMs this week, coupled with the awesome Upfront Summit (for which I don't have a ticket, so if you happen to renounce your spot..).
An important announcement: we're hiring!
It's time for us to add a 5th member of the team, which will be our in-house full-time AI hacker. We're looking for someone that has been building with AI for the past couple of years, and is interested in seeing what widely available super intelligence means for venture investing.
Check out the role description here, we will have generous referral rewards if you send us the perfect candidate!
Thanks to Francesco for writing this edition while I travel!
The disappearance of Italian physicist Ettore Majorana is one of those stories somewhere deeper down in the history iceberg meme, with theories ranging from him fleeing to Venezuela to a conspiracy to kidnap him for his works on the atom (the late '30s were quite the years). Majorana took a ferry from Palermo to Naples in 1938, and was never seen again. He was 31. Majorana left behind foundational works on neutrino physics, theory of the nucleus and mathematical physics. Fermi remembered him as a genius of the level of Newton and Galilei. This week, Microsoft contributed with their share of mystery announcing Majorana I, a quantum processor based on a breakthrough in topoconductors. The key idea is that information is encoded in Majorana Zero Modes, which ensure stability but also have a few challenges that Microsoft claims to have successfully solved. Many have reacted with skepticism, with the TLDR of the last few days' debate being Scott Aaronson's 10 FAQs. FAQ #4 pretty much sums it up: "Did Microsoft create the first topological qubit?" - "Well, they say they did!" Anyways, the Majorana case is open again. Here are some readings to dig into it.
Microsoft's Paper on Nature (2025)
One Older Paper on Topological Superconductivity and MZMs (2023)
One Explanation on Topological QC with Majorana Fermions (2011)
Some Earlier Doubts on Topological Qubits Decoherence (2012)
As for the rest of this newsletter: more AI panic, more humanoids, Arc Institute's EVO 2, AI-scientists doing pretty well, and more. Some geopolitics too, but there's so much going on that we chose to this one lean and keep all the panic for next week.
Demis Hassabis and Dario Amodei share a tiny couch to discuss AGI timelines.
Google Research publishes Titans, redefining AI memory by combining attention's precise short-term focus with a neural module that efficiently recalls long-term context. Titans outperform Transformers and modern recurrent models, setting a new benchmark for long-context AI.
ZeroBench reveals current large multimodal models struggle with complex visual reasoning, scoring 0% on a new benchmark designed to test spatial cognition. With a few interesting examples to prove yourself you're human (just in case).
Meta's new team within its Reality Labs division will be one to keep an eye on. Those hands we saw back in October will have to go on some humanoids after all (or maybe...?).
As AI turns software into services, agents marketplaces will be the new UpWork. What an economy we're heading into.
Agents for Software and Robots
Microsoft's Magma model seems a new leap toward real multimodality with real-world acting capabilities.
Some advice on pricing, partnerships and PMF, for founders building in AI-enabled services.
Scandinavian-design homes with Brian Eno playlists will need their own humanoid - 1X will offer the one that suits them best.
Figure showcases their new Vision-Language-Action model, and offer some insights into what's needed for real zero-shot humanoid control.
How Stripe's Model Context Protocol plugin for Cline simplifies your payments infrastructure. A glimpse into how most of these tasks will be performed soon.
Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code Anthropic
Last but not least, Anthropic released 3.7 and Claude Code, and gained the de-facto coding king crown. There is nothing as good, and we expect all coding model wrappers to be using 3.7 soon. There will be a few casualties for ones that don't offer the rest of the infrastructure as part of their offering. Nice always seeing the tension between the model improving and your product getting better vs being swallowed alive by it.
The Arc Institute presents EVO 2, a new AI model that can read, interpret and design entire genomes. Built on StripedHyena 2, EVO 2 has larger context window capturing wider relationships at lower costs. One interesting use is in the detection of clinically significant, pathogenic BRCA1 variants that are more likely to cause cancer. Here are some sources to look into EVO 2 and dream of the future of biology.
The Arc Institute + NVIDIA Paper
The Architecture EVO 2 was Trained on
And a few more things from the bio + tech world.
Google announces an AI co-scientist "designed to generate novel research hypotheses, a detailed research overview, and experimental protocols" and tests it on repurposing drugs for acute myeloid leukemia (spoiler: it does well). Labs producing great research with just one PI and their co-scientists: coming soon.
The benchmarking we like: how an AI co-scientist successfully rediscovered a novel gene transfer mechanism in bacteria—specifically how capsid-forming phage-inducible chromosomal islands (cf-PICIs) spread across species by hijacking diverse phage tails.
Disease diagnostics using ML of B cell and T cell receptor sequences
Immune receptors sequencing data offers a unique insight of your personal history of vaccinations and infections.
Sonal Pai makes a few predictions on what we can expect in the next few months of TechBio. Just to mention one we've seen a lot in recent dealflow: radioisotopes manufacturing.
Can Europe Afford to Defend Itself Without the US?
The question that is haunting European governments. The answer is yes, but the way to do it in practice is less straightforward.
Technological Progress in Chinese Political Culture
An excellent piece exploring the evolution of Chinese political culture’s approach to technological progress over the past 150 years, tracing an intellectual genealogy from the 19th-century reformers to modern leaders.
Chinese scientists have created “well-crystallised, nearly pure HD” (lonsdaleite) previously only found in asteroids, a “superior alternative” to conventional diamonds.
A great long-ish read by Casey Handmer on a future with Starship.
VCs pondering whether (their) cash should flood data center startups as AI’s appetite grows.
Sequoia profiles RobCo in a piece on risk-taking and industrial robots.
Former Intel bigwigs nabbed $215M for a RISC-V chip venture. Worth watching.
Quantinuum’s Quantum Computer Now Fully Operational at RIKEN
Quantinuum’s “Reimei” ("dawn" in Japanese) has booted up at RIKEN, tangoing with the Fugaku supercomputer to birth a new type of hybrid brain.
Practicalities and Psychology of Expected Value
The Diff Stock Pitch Competition
Aaron Swartz Marble Statue Unveiled at Internet Archive
Deep research tools for a fund that likes to do deep research
The Series A Fund Codex - a16z
Let us know what you think of this format, and if you have anything else we should read!
