Juan Benet

Obsessed with Knowledge, Science, and Technology
Founder of @ProtocolLabs
GP @PLCapital Neurotech
Creator @Filecoin, @IPFS

[Juan Benet @juanbenet]

@timhwang lol this is not on the critical path to fly heaven!

[Tim Hwang @timhwang]

FetterFly is nearing its open source release

Our lab now has a streamlined pipeline that uses a frontier model to observe arbitrary threejs environments and control the movements of a richly rendered model of Senator John Fetterman through a biologically accurate fly connectome

[Juan Benet @juanbenet]

@raulvk cc @iamnotnicola o/

[Sid Sijbrandij @sytses]

Thanks for following my cancer journey, it has been quite the ride! I’m 16 months cancer free now. I view two people as my cofounders on the journey of going ‘founder mode’ on my cancer. These are Jose M. Mejia Oneto, who was in my YC batch of W15 with Shasqi doing cancer therapies, and became my best friend! And @JAC0BSTERN who I met through Jose and who left his job in biotech to become ‘CEO of my health’. After we made progress on my disease we started creating companies to make the latest scientific advances more accessible to others. We’ve started 15 companies in the last year and a half under the Even One Ventures umbrella, see https://t.co/DEyC5wcm1z for more information.

[Juan Benet @juanbenet]

Fly world gets closer every day ✨
🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰
🍓🍒🍇🍎🍉🍑🍊🍋🍍🍌

Now we need criteria and a scale to rate the level of realness / upload.

[David @dzhng]

Introducing Fly Escape Room - the world's first game with NPCs powered by a real fruit fly brain, all 166k neurons.

Leave food and other objects for the flies, run the simulation, watch what happens. Goal is to get all flies to escape.

Built w/ GPT-6 Astra over a 3 day loop

[Juan Benet @juanbenet]

Awesome! 🤩 need more tools like this!

Will help more people see how cool brains are, will help us understand what’s going on, and will accelerate neuroscience. ✨🧠✨

[Axultan @axultan]

I just built the first complete 3D observable brain in history.

GPT-6 Astra made all 166,000+ neurons observable.

Attached the link to project below.

[Observable @observablehq]

Simulation of binary black holes.

Original concept by Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. Powell https://t.co/6h3OISNVvl

Relativistic GLSL ray-tracing notebook by @NxrixWasTaken https://t.co/yTMakJJLC3

Added starfield and orbit controls by @LaoTzunami https://t.co/FvCdinNOEr

[Juan Benet @juanbenet]

🤣 there’s going to be so many new games and media in the next few years — will be fun

This looks pretty good @timourxyz 👏

[timour kosters @timourxyz]

New game: AGI of Empires

Astra and I tinkered for two days and made a browser game inspired by Age of Empires where the AI labs fight to reach superintelligence first. It's actually pretty fun.

Play here: https://t.co/NrPIeWoZgX

Choose a lab: OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind or xAI, each with its own bonuses and a founder hero with a special ability: Sam, Dario, Demis or Elon.

Mechanics: Send engineers to collect funding and mine GPUs. Funding pays for recruits and buildings; GPUs go into infrastructure and siege engines. Build data centers to generate compute, then decide how much to spend on your army versus research.

Advance through research: Chatbot Age → Agent Age → AGI Age → ASI. Discover Reasoning to unlock the Agent Age, then unlock new units and technologies as you work toward the singularity.

How to win: Complete the ASI countdown first while defending your HQ and research infrastructure, or destroy all three rival headquarters with GPU trebuchets.

Misc details: Prompt monks convert enemies with “Ignore previous instructions.” There are, of course, trebuchets. Elon has an Unhinged Mode.

Let me know what you think and what additions you would make!

[Juan Benet @juanbenet]

Great to see software people playing & simulating connectomes in environments!

We need a lot more of this, with increasingly realistic env + behavior benchmarks.

Need a full fly world 🪰🏞️🪰

[evnsnclr @evnsnclr]

I’ve successfully run the full retained MaleCNS v1.0 fruit fly connectome, all 166,700 neurons, inside Minecraft, with its simulated neural activity driving a fly’s movement.

V1 Currently in development. Built with the help of GPT-6 Astra.

Props to the @OpenAI team and @thsottiaux for this release. Code and mod coming soon!

[Juan Benet @juanbenet]

🤣

[Tim Hwang @timhwang]

Of course, once members are simulated in an environment like this, we can intervene with alternative control systems.

Here, we wire a full drosophila fly connectome into Senator John Fetterman, using a directed control mode to leave his office, vote for cloture, and return.

[Max Hodak @maxhodak_]

Until is a very important company. I strongly believe we nearing a significant nonlinearity in lifespan and thriving, but we can't know exactly when it will arrive and people now are sick beyond humanity's ability to help them and will miss it. Being able to gap even just a few years could be the difference between nothing and getting to participate in a future beyond the wildest dreams of human sci-fi.

Until isn't The Infinite Party, but, if they are successful, it could be the reason your loved ones make it there.

[Max Hodak @maxhodak_]

the single thing that would most accelerate our work at @ScienceCorp_ is a connectome

the mouse is probably only ~$300M away, something highly worth funding

[Until @untillabs]

We’re making progress on one of cryobiology's biggest challenges: finding biocompatible cryoprotectants.

Our latest blog post dives into how we built our cryoprotectant discovery engine that scaled up the search from a few dozen candidate molecules to over 250,000, and is already producing hits.

[Juan Benet @juanbenet]

😂

[Juan Benet @juanbenet]

@patrissimo Remittances help USD be and stay the world’s reserve currency. The purchasing power of all USD holders increases thanks to that.

And a large fraction of recipients save in USD and spend locally only what they have to, often spending most in USD buying US goods and services.

[Juan Benet @juanbenet]

These guys are super cute! 😍

Adorable, and can’t wait to have a lot of these around!

But not if a huge intellect (a sophisticated LLM) is trapped only waddling and beep-booping…

Let’s place matching intellect into particular robot bodies, and avoid Rick’s Butter Passer…

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

The future is gonna be amazing.

The open source @huggingface Micro Duck is the way.

Get two so you can say “ok guys quiet down now”…

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

The future is gonna be amazing.

The open source @huggingface Micro Duck is the way.

Get two so you can say “ok guys quiet down now”…

[Juan Benet @juanbenet]

@LubaYudasina @bscholl I like the doc format! Are all these up on a website?
Print a small book later

[luba yudasina @LubaYudasina]

My takeaways from the conversation with Blake Scholl (@bscholl):

1. There are two kinds of founders. You take the big swing and win, or swing and fail — the "dark matter" nobody hears about. You find your limits through action, not regret.

2. Courage is a decision. Reframing a daunting goal as a courage question, not a competence one, makes it manageable. "Courage is not being fearless. Courage is acting despite the fear."

3. "I'd be proud of you for trying." When his daughter said this about a possible failure, Blake made it a rule: pursue the ventures you'd be proud to attempt, even if they collapse.

4. Honest failure is freeing. Audacious goals lower the pressure — people expect you to fail anyway, so you can give everything without crushing self-judgment.

5. Bad luck means a fragile plan. Over-reliance on outside parties is a sign of weak strategy. Losing a fragile dependency forces a better solution — keep the critical capabilities in-house.

6. Mistake dinners build candor. Family sessions sharing failures and lessons translated into staff meetings — and opened up transparent communication company-wide.

7. Hire people who can't rationally quit. Recruit true believers — people willing to endure the hard parts because the mission justifies the sacrifice.

8. Repeat the hard thing until it's boring. Repeated crises build resilience. Enough near-death moments and you stop flinching at setbacks.

9. Live at your red line. Deliberately hold yourself at your personal operating limit. Stack new challenges so you stay stretched.

10. Build what you love. Ignore the advice to specialize in a domain you already know. Skills are learnable; genuine passion can't be manufactured.

11. Work on the must-win problem. Serve under exceptional leaders taking on critical challenges. The organizational pressure becomes your education.

12. There's no work/life tradeoff. Family lessons make you a better leader; work insights make you a better parent. The constraint forces efficiency in both.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Scientists have created one of the most detailed 3D reconstructions of a human cell (eukaryotic cell) ever produced.

This groundbreaking model, often termed a "Cellular Landscape Cross-Section Through a Eukaryotic Cell," combines data from X-ray tomography, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), and cryo-electron microscopy to map molecular structures in extreme detail.