involuntary death is still a thing.
speed is always in demand.
building the highest-performing most safe and secure ai service - as a matter of physics. if interested, lets speak.
just look at the timeline chad
Midjourney just pivoted into medical hardware
a full body scanner that uses sound waves and a pool of water to map your entire body in 60 seconds.
no radiation. no MRI tube. no $1,000s bill
could you imagine, an image generation company built this before most hospitals modernized their imaging
that should tell you everything about what the future of medicine looks like
turns out the companies with AI infrastructure and capital are now better positioned to build healthcare hardware than healthcare companies are
biology just became the most interesting vertical for every serious AI lab on earth
simply can't be bearish on biotech anymore
bio/acc
Full body ultrasonic computational tomography
Our goal is to build a fleet of 50,000 of these scanners capable together of doing a billion scans a month.
Enough to bring full body imaging to everyone on earth.
Midjourney Medical is here
TLDR: What lights you up?!
Opener for our 1517 Summit:
25 years ago I started working with homeschoolers. Those families changed the trajectory of my life. It’s where I got to see that real learning starts with passion and curiosity.
16 years ago, when Michael and I were on the founding team of the Thiel Fellowship, we called it an older young person’s homeschool program.
And today, with 1517, we say we homeschool CEOs.
I think that there is a lot that we can learn from homeschoolers about going against the grain, following curiosity, and getting a sense of what real learning looks like.
In homeschooling there is a concept called “deschooling” — a transition time between being in a more institutionalized setting, to one of their own creation. It sometimes looks chaotic, “unproductive,” and purposeless.
But this time period is when people start unraveling assumptions that have been shaping their lives, without them knowing it. By letting go of the rules, natural curiosity and passion can start to emerge.
Over the next ten years, I think all of us are going to go through something like a collective deschooling period. We’re going to need to unlearn the assumptions that were put down before us by other people and institutions, ride the chaos, and emerge through to the other side with passion and curiosity.
The path used to look clear. Work hard. Get good grades. Collect credentials. Climb the ladder. Success had a map.
But the world we're entering is uncharted.
Artificial intelligence is making information abundant. Institutions are failing us. Careers are becoming less linear. Entire industries are appearing and disappearing in just a few years.
The old question was: "What should I do?"
But today, I propose a new question: “What lights you up, when no one is watching?”
That's a much harder question.
Many people discover that when the external structure disappears, they're left with an uncomfortable feeling. Not freedom. Not excitement.
Meaninglessness.
Because for years, meaning was outsourced. A syllabus told us what mattered. A test told us what to learn. A boss told us what success looked like. A credential told us we were progressing.
But what happens when fewer and fewer people can tell you what matters next?
I think that's one of the defining challenges of the next decade.
And I think the antidote is surprisingly simple.
Start dreaming:
What is the thing you can't stop thinking about?
What rabbit hole do you disappear into?
What topic makes you lose track of time?
What project would you work on, even if nobody was grading it?
All summed up: What lights you up?
When we're young, we're often taught to treat those interests as distractions from the "real" work.
I think the opposite is true.
Those interests are clues. They're pointing toward the place where your curiosity, your energy, and your contribution intersect.
The people who will thrive in the next ten years will be like shining beacons!
They'll be the people who know how to follow genuine curiosity.
The people who can create their own path.
The people who can stay fascinated.
The people who know what lights them up and have the courage to build around it.
So welcome to your summit. When you meet a new friend today, ask “What lights you up?” May the answers surprise and delight and lead you into your next 10 years.
I’ve been saying that my region, Western New York is underrated alongside Upstate and the Finger Lakes.
We have Niagara Falls which should delivery abundant cheap clean power. We have a world class university system. We have the Erie Canal, which could be a testbed for new technologies. We have talent. We used to have the culture which can be built back. Heck, cloud seeding was first performed by GE over the Finger Lakes in the 40s. The area is beautiful. Detroit is a 4 hour drive, Toronto 2.5. If we had China style high speed rail, we could get to NYC in 2 hours.
The actions by our regulators to restrict manufacturing machinery is yet another example of the policies that are preventing us from realizing our potential as a region.
SpaceX has almost finished writing V1.0 of an in-house AI training stack in C that exact-maps to 220k GB300s with 800G NICs, making heavy use of pipeline parallelism and getting as close to bare metal as possible.
The potential speed improvement vs JAX for large training runs is over an order of magnitude.
So incredibly proud of Spencer!
He started working on the idea that became Radar when he was a 2012 Thiel Fellows. Incredible to watch him grow from a young man with an idea to the CEO he is today: https://t.co/7rXSZgkagH
Be the first check, not the last!