Our house was recovering from a surgery at time. Last year it was me (emergency surgery in Istanbul) but this particular year of 2023 it was Alex who got emergency oral sugery.
In between icing and liquids, we watched a number of comedies and thus the topic of right and “wrong think” came up. The culture war was having a flare up before the election season got going. We also watched Tetris which will cement your faith in the power of markets for good but also served as a useful warning for what is emerging in artificial intelligence.
It’s inspired me to look harder into how we are perversely seeking control and benefits for large corporations and political parties in our current race to regulate new technologies like crypto and artificial intelligence. If you want a hint as to where I’m worried look no further than Gary Gensler and reinforcement learning for artificial intelligence alignment. And yes I’m making bets to that effect.
I’m glad I spoke up at the time as I took action both against the Gensler reign of regulatory ambiguity as well as forging ahead on the right to compute. Current discourse has taken a turn for the worse as talk of Finra entities and protectionism of frontier models for national security reasons. It’s always the banking crowd getting us into trouble with merging our capabilities into thr future slipstream. Wish we could convince them they are wrong.
You know things have taken a turn for the worse when an algorithm change to “I’d like to see and talk with my friends” becomes an a celebratory event, as opposed to the common sense management of a public digital commons.
And it doesn’t even seem to matter who’s in management either. Twitter just always been a little bit fucked up as a place no matter who is in charge. It’s not even about Twitter. Every digital space has its issues whether it’s media publishers or social media platforms.
It obviously worry the general public that our moods and opinions swing so heavily on management and editorial decisions we have little insight into.
When a new player like Anthropic takes up so much space in the minds of people who create our digital and media products, it’s only natural that we should get a little bit worried when they make decisions to frame what they’ve built through violence, fear and war.
The issue remains that everywhere, you are working somewhere between a chronological feed and an algorithmic feed and you aren’t in charge. You aren’t in charge of your own programming either but at least you can tweak around the edges.
Just as you can probably make some educated guesses as to how Instagram and TikTok work, but you actually can dig in on Twitter’s algorithms and have always sort of had some capacity to do so.
Some aspects of the firehose of Internet traffic shows you flow. That’s been true since even the early days of the network and even truer with gatekeepers like Cloudflare handling network security.
But if you want to understand why it can be so hard to reach the people that you want, recall that one of the best ways to keep your enemy (or your citizens) subdued is to keep them busy, tired, and angry.
I am going to be scattered and long winded so please excuse my exhaustion and joy, as I have used up all of my focus in the excitement of a truly incredible moment that represents years of work.
Moments ago, Valar Atomics took Ward 250 critical for the first time. This fulfills President Trump’s EO 14301, which called for 3 advanced reactors to go critical by July 4th.
This is our second criticality as a company, and an important step toward our goal of power by July 4.
This is a historic moment and the culmination of two years of work on the part of the Valar Atomics team. This is the most hardcore, intelligent, and driven people I’ve ever had the privilege of working with; which will be seen as we begin power ascension in the coming days.
Our mission at Valar Atomics is to make abundant energy for all mankind. The best way to make energy 10x cheaper today is to mass-scale nuclear fission. We began our mission by creating WardZero, our fully functional thermal prototype. Next, we took the NOVA core critical.
Today, we took the next step: criticality in the Ward 250 test reactor. Ward 250 is a TRISO-fueled High Temperature Gas Reactor (HTGR) designed for simplicity and scale, and is the first nuclear reactor ever air-lifted by a C-17.
We’ve been honored to be become part of the community in Orangeville, Utah, the home of Ward 250. Many thanks to all of our government partners who made this possible: hundreds of individuals across the Trump administration, the DOE, the DoW, and the government of Utah.
The list of individuals who have spent their time and energy and talents to accomplish this feat is too long to list in one post, but I am incredibly grateful to all of them.
I am one of those individuals who spent their time, energy, talents and capital to accomplish this incredible feat. Investing in Valar may well be the greatest accomplishment of my life.
You see I am Valar’s very first investor. Yes I mean I wrote the very first angel investment check from my small venture fund.
Crazy but possible makes complete sense to me. So I said he’s. And we chewed glass for a few years working towards the possible, while everyone told us it couldn’t be done.
Through the magic of Twitter DMs, I met Isaiah before he had even started Valar. He was working on another startup I didn’t love but I knew immediately that I loved him as a founder.
I was so impressed with his intelligence and his capacity to learn quickly. He had that ineffable “it” quality that all founders possess in some measure. He took feedback well but had a firm backbone. He listened to one piece of advice I gave him and based on that decision alone, I told him I’d back anything he did in the future and I meant it. I’ll admit I didn’t expect it to be “I’m building a nuclear reactor” but I am true to my word.
We’ve been there for every step of this amazing journey. It was an objectively insane thing to invest in. Yet the more time I spent with Isaiah the more convinced I was that he was a generational talent. The best part of being first is the opportunity to spend lots of time with a founder before anyone else learns of their genius. I learn as much from them as they do from me. And Isaiah is a quick study.
I wrote the check and went about the long grueling process of convincing others they should invest alongside me. It wasn’t easy. We got told no a lot. Failure lurked around every corner. People ranged from outright hostility to tempered skepticism. There were moments when defeat felt very close.
There were hard times. A lot of glass chewing. I never wavered in my belief that Isaiah would get it done. Alex and I were blessed with the opportunity to invest more and gladly wired in additional capital when others couldn’t see as far as we did. This may well be a career defining investment for me. I intend to keep putting in whatever Isaiah will allow us to invest.
And to everyone who said it couldn’t be done, or that it was too early or too risky to invest in something as crazy as nuclear, please let me invite you to join us now. There is much more to be done. We will need all the talent and capital we can get to win this bright future for America and for humanity.
