USA. A potluck. Everyone brings one dish. I have never been so out of my depth in my life.
I was invited to a gathering. "Just bring a dish to share," they said. Simple words. I did not sleep for three days.
Because I understood instantly what this was. A summit. Every guest, a lord of their own house, arriving bearing tribute. And tribute is judged. Tribute is ranked. To bring the wrong dish to the wrong table is to fall in standing before your peers, possibly forever.
So I prepared. I made my finest dish. I carried it to the door with two hands and a straight back, braced for the weighing of my worth.
The first lord arrived with a bowl of orange powder noodles. Macaroni and cheese. The crowd roared. He set it down at the center of the table. The CENTER. I noted this. The center is the seat of power.
The second lord brought a tower of small brown meat orbs in red sauce. "Meatballs," he announced, like a man laying down a sword. They were placed beside the macaroni. A strong showing. An alliance, perhaps.
I studied the table like a battlefield map. Potato salad: defensive, reliable, old money. A vegetable tray, untouched, clearly a hostage offering no one expected to win. And then a woman walked in, raised a flat box overhead, and the entire room turned and CHEERED.
Pizza. She had brought pizza. Store-bought. Still in the box.
I was stunned. She had not even cooked it. And yet the people rejoiced as if a king had entered. I revised my entire understanding of the hierarchy on the spot. Effort means nothing here. Only the roar of the crowd decides rank.
I placed my dish down, humbly, near the napkins. A peasant's position. I accepted it.
And then a man tapped my shoulder, pointed at my dish, and said the words that changed everything.
"Whoa, did you make this? This is amazing. Everybody, you GOTTA try this guy's thing."
The room turned. The room came. The room ATE. My dish vanished in ninety seconds. The pizza woman herself took a second helping and looked at me with respect.
I had won the summit. By accident. With a dish I placed by the napkins.
I understand nothing about this country. I have never been happier. I am hosting the next one.
So tell me, America.
Is there a system to the potluck? A secret rank? A hidden law?
I have decided there is not.
You just bring the thing you love, and everyone eats it, and somehow everybody wins.
It is the most insane way to hold a war.
I will fight in every single one.
Single Crystal CVD Diamond
Have no doubt, you are at the dawn of an industrial revolution. There is a string of breakthroughs happening throughout upstream industries that all compound.
Diamond manufacturing is now able to produce CPU size single crystals wafers.
Currently these are marketed as heat spreaders because they have thermal conductivity of 2,200 W/mK which means they move heat incredibly effectively.
However, that somewhat misses the wood for the trees…
Diamond has physical and electrical properties that exceed traditional silicon, making it uniquely suited for high demand applications.
Thermal Conductivity: Heat is the enemy of electronics. Diamond conducts heat better than almost any other known material, about 5 times better than copper and over 10 times better than silicon.
A diamond chip can act as its own heat sink.
Ultra Wide Bandgap: Diamond can handle massive amounts of voltage and operate at incredibly high temperatures without electrical breakdown.
This makes it perfect for high power applications like electric vehicle inverters, power grids, and aerospace technologies.
High Frequencies: Electrons move very quickly through diamond, allowing chips to operate at much higher frequencies, which is ideal for advanced telecommunications and radar.
Radiation Hardness: Diamond is incredibly resilient to radiation, making diamond based chips ideal for satellites, space exploration, and nuclear facilities.
To make a material act as a semiconductor, you have to "dope" it. To do this you inject impurities into the crystal lattice to create a positive (p-type) or negative (n-type) charge.
Diamond's atomic structure is so tightly packed that forcing other elements into it is hard. While p-type doping (with boron) has been figured out, reliable n-type doping (with phosphorus) remains a massive hurdle.
Theoretical ceilings
Band gap
Silicon wafer = 1.1 eV
Diamond CVD wafer = 5.5eV
Clock speed
Silicon wafer = 5-6 GHz clock wall
Diamond CVD wafer = 1-2 THz clock wall
Max Running Temp
Silicon wafer = 150°C
Diamond CVD wafer = 1,000°C
Whilst we etch silicon with photolithography and Extreme UV light, this doesn’t really work with chemically inert diamond.
Diamond CVD is currently etched with oxygen plasma etching, but this lacks the precision of EUV.
However, we can etch diamond to extreme precision with electron projection lithography. EPL was invented in the 90s by Bell Labs, IBM and Nikkon but abandoned as it was harder than EUV.
Electrons repel each other so the beams blurrs too readily.
What if we built a femto electron beam?
What if we built it to extreme such that it was a ‘single electron’ pulse?
What if we build a microscopic "bed of nails" containing millions of nanoscale tungsten or silicon tips (photocathodes). You shine a massive, highly complex femtosecond laser system across the entire array.
Every time the laser pulses, millions of tiny tips each fire a single, perfectly straight electron at the exact same time.
Turns out, research teams at likes of MIT and Stanford are currently experimenting with exactly this, laser driven nanotip electron emitters.
Pair that tool with Diamond CVD substrate tech and we approach the material limits of both semiconductors and nanotechnology.
Would require asynchronous logic to escape fatal clock skew and operate at full capability.
But I think I will live to see it.
Aging is arguably the root cause of most major diseases (loss of function in our cells). Four years ago, we made a bet that aging was treatable, and NewLimit was born.
NewLimit now has a prototype drug that reverses the age of some human cells (restores function they had when they were younger), and a clinical trial scheduled for next year (with more drug candidates in the pipeline).
Grateful to Founders Fund, Thrive, Greenoaks, and the rest of the investors for this latest round. @jacobkimmel and the team are just getting started.
it feels like we are entering a different phase of the ai era.. e.g.
- frontier models are still improving, but improvements are increasingly measured in reliability, latency, memory, cost, tool use, & workflow completion rather than holy shit benchmark jumps.
- the labs are starting to look less like research projects & more like mature platform companies who are now going public which means quarterly earnings.
- distribution is becoming way way more important than raw intelligence.
- product design matters again. taste matters again. trust matters again. always did but now there isn’t that much differentiation at the model layer for the most part.
- the releases are slowing down to a normal pace instead of the frenzy.
- no one in their right minds is questioning the tech at all anymore.
- it feels less like 1995 internet & more like 2004 internet.
kinda like a checkpoint in a video game where your game gets auto saved.
Here's what ChatGPT came up with after a few prompts.
In a few years, we'll be able to few-shot prompt a whole car design (with CAD parts and everything), or any other item.