Bivek

engineer-turned-investor
👉🏼 posts research & notes from convos w inventors, consultants, bankers, execs, investors & builders

[Bivek @bivekey]

Industrial Vision AI (SW) is at an inflection point.

I mapped the key players I'm tracking across the market, from vision infrastructure to embodied inspection.

Who am I missing?

[Bivek @bivekey]

@wholemars perhaps an ai-written poem finds its soul not in the writer, but in the reader. maybe the soul was never in the ink at all, only in the heart that reads it.

[Bivek @bivekey]

@4lexsvv @paulg if you aren't getting dissed, can you really be VC?

[Bivek @bivekey]

@wholemars @wholemars not saying your poem ai-written, the thought just popped in my head and figured I'd share.

[Bivek @bivekey]

@wholemars perhaps an ai-written poem finds its soul not in the writer, but in the reader. maybe the soul was never in the ink at all, only in the heart that reads it.

[Bivek @bivekey]

folks are going out of their way to hack the system: https://t.co/ax6eODegyQ

[Bivek @bivekey]

@Starlink’s residential plan should include a camping mode that allows users to roam for a set number of days or weeks.

It is frustrating to change your residential address every time you go camping, and the Roam plan does not quite fit the need when you are home most of the time.

cc: @elonmusk @Gwynne_Shotwell

[Bivek @bivekey]

@paulg How’d you rank reusable rockets and curing cancer?

[Bivek @bivekey]

@BraytonKey 👏🏼very impressive, considering this:

https://t.co/JMsnu3EvUb

[Peter Walker @PeterJ_Walker]

Top 5% of "seed" valuations in Q2 of each year:

• Q2 2017: $25.8M
• Q2 2018: $29.6M
• Q2 2019: $29.9M
• Q2 2020: $26.0M
• Q2 2021: $49.9M
• Q2 2022: $57.8M
• Q2 2023: $56.7M
• Q2 2024: $56.5M
• Q2 2025: $72.2M
• Q2 2026: $200.4M

growing faster than now than ever

[Bivek @bivekey]

https://t.co/APrDqeMvVq

[Bivek @bivekey]

Robotics is hard. That’s why, not too long ago, it was mostly limited to demos and experiments in top university labs.

Three things are different this time around, and the third is the most telling:

1. LLMs democratizing and accelerating learning, development, iteration, and debugging

2. An influx of private capital

3. Robotics leaving the lab and becoming a hackathon staple, so much so that 10-year-old Arjun, pictured below, is building robots every week

[Bivek @bivekey]

~35% of seed investments are going to capex-heavy startups (at lofty valuations). Insane how quickly the landscape has changed. I wonder whether capital will retreat just as quickly to pre-2020 levels if these bets struggle to meet venture expectations over the next five years.

[Peter Walker @PeterJ_Walker]

@bivekadhi About 35% capex-heavy, depending on the quarter in recent years

[Bivek @bivekey]

@PeterJ_Walker wow! that's high.

[Bivek @bivekey]

@PeterJ_Walker would be interesting to see how many of these are hardware/capex-heavy vs AI/SW

[Bivek @bivekey]

@Tesla_Optimus are you doing this?

[Aaron Slodov @aphysicist]

here's a vid of unitree robots building themselves using their own models (not teleop supposedly). this will only accelerate. it doesn't matter how much it costs to beat them, the economics are irrelevant. build it all now, and do it domestically.

[Bivek @bivekey]

future is starting to look like the future

[Chubby♨️ @kimmonismus]

The Midjourney medical thing is genuinely strange and I kind of love it.

The plan is a spa.

Hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, open 24/7, first location in San Francisco in 2027.

You step into a shallow pool of water, sink slowly through a ring of half a million tiny ultrasonic sensors, and in about 60 seconds you walk out with a 3D map of your insides down to a fraction of a millimeter. No magnets, no radiation, no contrast, just sound waves and warm water.

Compare that to how we do this now:

They say it's close to 100x faster than an MRI ("60 seconds"). For context, a normal MRI in the US averages around $1,300 and the scan alone can take over an hour inside a loud metal tube. A full-body scan from Prenuvo runs about $2,500 for roughly the same hour.

Midjourney wants to flip the whole feeling of it. Build a place you'd want to visit even if there were no scanner, then collect the health data as a side effect. I have no idea yet if the tech delivers what they claim. But the framing is smart.

The hardest problem in preventive health has always been getting people to actually show up, and a spa solves that better than a hospital ever will.

[Bivek @bivekey]

Photonic computing FTW!

[Kekius Maximus @Kekius_Sage]

Nobel Prize physicist Serge Haroche says we can trap a single photon and read its quantum history.

This proves light is a programmable data packet, allowing us to pause and inspect the universe's memory.

[Bivek @bivekey]

@ti_morse I would not wait on @elonmusk to start a podcast here. Keep the momentum going with 5+ podcasts a day on this set, featuring folks who contributed to the shared mission of making human life multiplanetary.

That momentum might make @elonmusk the showstopper for IPO week.

[Bivek @bivekey]

concerning how this didn’t get enough coverage in today’s news cycle.

regardless of your position on this, a major statement from a leading lab should NOT be ignored.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

None of this guarantees recursive self-improvement is on the horizon. It’s not yet clear that Claude is capable of research judgment—of choosing the right problems to work on.

But if these trends continue, AI systems designing and building their own successors is plausible. This could revolutionize society—medicine, technology, the economy—for the better. But it may also compound alignment issues and ultimately lead to loss of control.

The Anthropic Institute (in collaboration with external stakeholders) will conduct research to think through the implications of increasingly powerful, potentially self-improving systems—and how to create the ability for the world to make deliberate choices about the future development of the technology.

Read the full post: https://t.co/XkYALsONft

[Bivek @bivekey]

additive manufacturing walked so that physical AI could run

[Bivek @bivekey]

@paulg 3D printed or CNC parts?

[Bivek @bivekey]

@unusual_whales makes one wonder why the threshold was at $500K in the first place...