Nebular

investing in things. @finnmurphy12

[Finn Murphy @FinnMurphy12]

Apple made China into a Superpower. Was it worth it?

The State Department blob sees China as a grandmaster playing a hundred-year game for world domination. But what if China isn’t especially good at long-term planning, and we’re just uniquely bad at it?

Apple in China was one of my favourite books of the past year, so I was thrilled to sit down with its author, @PatrickMcGee_, the FT’s former lead Apple reporter, to discuss what the US-China relationship might look like over the next 25 years on Forecast 2050.

We discuss:
- Why Apple is more dependent on China than ever
- Why the Taiwan status quo may hold
- How Xi brought Apple to heel
- What America lost when it stopped building things
- Why the next Jony Ive will likely be Chinese
- How Chinese demographic decline could reshape the global economy

Enjoy!

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
2:54 Manufacturing Is Power
11:59 The CCP
16:56 Will China Take Taiwan by 2050?
25:11 Why Nvidia Would Be Useless in a War
27:06 The Case for Industrial Policy
32:04 How Xi Brought Apple to Heel
39:32 The End of Pax Americana
47:20 The Next Jony Ive is Chinese
1:00:20 China’s Next Leaders
1:07:47 Demographic Collapse & Automation

[Richard Starson 🇺🇸🚀🇺🇸 @DrStarson]

Excited to launch @stelliostech with the support of an amazing team, outstanding group of investors and supporters.

Truly grateful for the support and belief in my work @jamiegull @MorganSchwanke @CubitCapital @FinnMurphy12 @shervin @Nebularvc @PeterDiamandis @lpolovets @JonnyNemo @sigalitperelson @dspector @Mana_Ventures @shaunmmaguire @BrandonNeman @JonnyNemo @_bart_m @atomsandbitsxyz @primal_capital @OBatygin and so many others!

[Conor Deegan @conordeegan]

crypto-agility ✌️

[AI safety @AIsafety]

"I’m happy to say that the entire reason AI was given to humans was not to write emails better, but to be like this is a way we could finally understand, on a totally different level, animals and how they’re communicating with themselves and with other species." 24:31-24:50

Amen

[Finn Murphy @FinnMurphy12]

In a break from the current VC world drama, I pose the question everyone actually cares about. Can we use AI to talk to whales?

@ProjectCETI’s David Gruber is building the infrastructure to enable the first human-whale conversation and initiate an interspecies dialogue.

We discuss:
- David’s journey to sperm whales
- How AI can translate a language no human has ever spoken
- Sperm whale culture & the whale economy
- The seismic societal implications of human-animal communication
- The future is going to be much stranger than we can imagine.

Enjoy!

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
1:48 David's Journey
12:30 An Interspecies Dialogue
17:14 Sperm Whale Language & Culture
23:48 The Breakthroughs Yet to Come
27:49 The Whales Are Yappers
31:03 Sperm Whales Have Accents
39:47 Verifying a Whale Translation
42:13 What Success Looks Like
47:32 Saving the Whales

[Alex Pruden @apruden08]

1/ Our @projecteleven research team (@conordeegan, @furkanakal, Louis Tajan, and Jamie Judd) just published an early look at CUTS, a new few-time hash-based signature scheme. At 546 bytes, close to WOTS size, & a key that signs twice in error keeps 53 bits of security instead of collapsing. 🧵

[Finn Murphy @FinnMurphy12]

Is the path to AI alignment through religion? Could AI one day have a soul?

I sat down with Claude’s Priest, Father Brendan McGuire, for our Forecast 2050 Series to talk the biggest challenge of the present moment & how it will profoundly shape our future. Enjoy!

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
1:45 Becoming A Man of the Cloth
8:10 Smart AI Regulation
11:46 The Pope's Warning about Babel
19:10 AI & Forgiveness
27:26 Hugging Face Incident
31:56 Do AIs Have Souls?
40:06 Putting AI Doomerism In Perspective
44:20 Why Anthropic Asked the Church for Help
58:23 Recursive Self Improvement
1:02:23 Tolkien Morality vs Game of Thrones Brutality

[Finn Murphy @FinnMurphy12]

Human-animal communication? Life on other planets? Alien priests? Once again back trying to bring a more eclectic discussion of the future to the internet with a new series of Forecast 2050.

Thanks to David Gruber (@ProjectCETI), Gen. David Petraeus, Patrick McGee (@PatrickMcGee_), Yi-Ling Liu (@yilingliu95), Laura Kreidberg (@lkreidberg), (@mpi_astro), Walter Goodwin (@fractile_ai), Sir Robin Saxby, Francesco Sciortino (@proximafusion), Adrian Woolfson (@AdrianWoolfson), Frank Fukuyama (@FukuyamaFrancis), and Father Brendan McGuire for joining us.

First episode with Father Brendan McGuire, Catholic Priest & External Advisor to Anthropic’s Claude Constitution, drops on Thursday.

More to come!

[jamie palmer @j_palmer00]

powerful new logo for an all powerful organisation @Icarus_Robotics

[Alex Pruden @apruden08]

Cryptography that isn't post-quantum is obsolete according to the WH by 2031.

[Alex Pruden @apruden08]

https://t.co/KQyxdwpyri

[Finn Murphy @FinnMurphy12]

@elonmusk https://t.co/WOAkg76Mfi

[Jason Marder @JasonMarder]

Northern lights shaders
Proximity hover physics
Snappy gradient masks

Frontend detail psychosis for @Nebularvc

[Conor Deegan @conordeegan]

Super proud of the team on this one. Having an open-source, MIT-licensed reference implementation that's been audited (twice) is rare, and as a security company that's the bar I think we should hold ourselves to.

As more and more AI code and AI applications get shipped, security is degrading at a rapid rate. High quality reference implementations to build on top of are becoming a security necessity.

[Finn Murphy @FinnMurphy12]

Show Notes: https://t.co/hwYUlTvAkY
Transcript: https://t.co/TCvWz7ptlb
Spotify: https://t.co/yoD4CGwmBm

[Finn Murphy @FinnMurphy12]

90% of clinical trials fail and it’s not for a lack of trying. We spend over a quarter trillion a year to solve the ailments that trouble you and your loved ones. But we haven’t figured out how to convert that spend into an improving hit rate in finding the drugs that change lives.
So today a 28 year old with eczema has two choices: a steroid cream that wrecks her skin with long-term use, or a $37,000/year injection that only has a 50/50 chance of success.

@viswacolluru looked at those numbers and figured there must be a better approach.

The most successful drugs in history have come from nature. Aspirin, taken by 1 in 3 Americans daily, is from willow bark. Metformin, used by 500 million diabetics, is from a plant, Goat's Rue. Quinine from tree bark was first added to tonic water to mitigate malaria in pasty Europeans in the tropics. Half of all FDA-approved drugs are sourced from the natural world.

So Viswa created Enveda to unlock the 99% of nature's chemistry that we haven’t been able to read until very recently, and went from seed to unicorn in 5 years doing it.

It was really special to sit down with both Viswa and @pablolubroth at @enveda’s Boulder HQ for the Season 1 finale of Forecast 2050 to talk about the future of medicine.

We discuss:
- Why capital markets have been bad for patients.
- Why insisting on understanding how drugs work in the body is actually slowing down drug discovery.
- Why aging is not inevitable, and how to stop your body from killing you.
- Why mental health will be the defining medical crisis of the next 25 years as the mindsugar of TikTok AI slop only gets more corrosive.

https://t.co/Qg0dSWrWF0

Show Notes & Transcript in the comments👇

[Finn Murphy @FinnMurphy12]

👀

[Finn Murphy @FinnMurphy12]

The biggest issue facing young adults today?

Housing & lack of community.

The picket fences and idealistic social towns of the boomers are but a fever dream of the past. Having a garden AND room for 2.4 kids? You best hope you joined Anthropic in 2023.

This is a failure of a half century of bungled policy holding back the original ultimate human technology. Cities.

@devonzuegel thinks there is no reason the next great American city can’t be oriented to both families and founders, and she's hard at work 90 minutes north of SF proving it.

For Episode 9 of Forecast 2050, I sat down with Devon of @esmeralda_inst to talk about harnessing urban planning as a powerful technological force for good, age-segregation in America and the impending population crisis, and why we need more incredible cities popping up across the country over the next 25 years.

We discuss:
- The American college system drives age-segregation and breaks up families.
- How self-driving cars will transform cities by 2050.
- The widening gulf between the physical and the digital, as it becomes increasingly harder to build in the real world and easier to do things in the digital one.
- Why we need an alternative to the suburbs.
- Chautauqua, the town once home to Thomas Edison’s family, as the inspiration behind the family-oriented builder community Devon is building with Esmeralda.

https://t.co/6XlLQT5q2Q

[Finn Murphy @FinnMurphy12]

The UK in 2050. If you listen to the SF bubble you'd think it's well on the way to being a failed state.

But things are cooking and Britannia won't go gentle into the night. @matthewclifford & @soundboy think there is no branch of the tech tree from which the UK could not plausibly produce the next trillion-dollar company.

On this episode of Forecast 2050 Matt, the cofounder of @joinef and Ian, co-founder of @pluralplatform we talk about what Britain's resurgence could look like over the next 25 years.

- Europe's risk aversion is a bigger threat than American superiority.
- Career politicians won’t survive in the new multipolar world.
- Why the pro-growth movement is losing the culture war — and how to win it back.
- How Britain could win the AI Age by 2050.

https://t.co/tFtAAUB5ST

[Finn Murphy @FinnMurphy12]

YouTube: https://t.co/R5psALGGka
Stardust Publication #1 on Safety: https://t.co/PbHJ4DiHXv
Stardust Publication #2 on Ethics: https://t.co/s00RXmEpeS
Show Notes: https://t.co/2suxuy10EE
Transcript: https://t.co/imsoyJV4yk
Spotify: https://t.co/3M97W44iKX
Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/dK1gjYOqrK