There are some great conferences coming up in September, but weāve chosen to go into monk/nun/hermit mode and focus on doing real work instead. But please go enjoy the AI evangelists! Jokes aside, the Resilience conference looks great, and we will swing by a cool meetup in Berlin next week.
š¤¼Ā People
O.A. - co-founder at Stealth
O is building technology at the intersection of AI and hardware. Think similar to zoo.dev, Dirac or other text-to-cad startups. They have been building for a few months, starting customer conversations, but the conclusion seems to be: itās really hard to get to anything performant enough to sell in good conscious. Iām as sure as can be that we will be able to generate stable CAD designs that are conform with basic geometry, fit the physics we want etc. but itās not yet there.
Adam BoÄev - investor with Czech Founders VC
Adam is part of a group of successful Czech and Slovak founders who are bundling capital and investing across Eastern Europe. We chatted about defense tech and what constitutes a strong signal of PMF or willingness to buy when it comes to governments.
š¼ Portfolio jobs board
This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:
šĀ Companies
Ultra - Warehouse robots
Status: YC S24
Source: CAVI
Founders: Jon Miller Schwartz, Chetan Parthiban, Oliver Ortlieb, Max Friefeld
Why itās cool:
Develops robots to automate repetitive tasks in warehouses, aiming to revolutionize logistics operations. Focused on creating efficient solutions for the American warehouse industry.
Spaceium - Space service stations
Status:
Source: CAVI
Founders: Reza Fetanat, Ashi Dissanyake
Why itās cool:
Developing in-space infrastructure to support interplanetary missions is obviously cool. Depending on how fast thereās demand, the commercial cool is dialed up or down. Then theyāll build service stations along the space superhighway for refueling, repairs, and upgrades of spacecraft, extending their capabilities beyond traditional limits.
Nervosys - Nervous system for robotics
Status: Founded in 2022, maybe on ice
Source: CAVI
Founders: Adam Erickson
Why itās cool:
Nervosys is developing an innovative platform designed to serve as the world's first nervous system for robotic general intelligence, aiming to enhance the capabilities and functionality of robots.
š”Ā Ideas & Science
This week weāve had a lot of food for thought, as weāve been quite deep in research mode. There was also a couple of events weād like to highlight. š
Wake up babe, new SGX side-channel just dropped
Another side-channel attack on SGX found. Itās not great. Mark Ermolov has successfully extracted Intel's SGX Fuse Key0, also known as the Root Provisioning Key, which is a critical security component of Intel's Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) technology. The extracted key can be used to decrypt sealed data, forge attestation reports, and bypass SGX's security measures. Intel has provided mitigations for this issue, but the legacy of these vulnerable processors continues to pose a threat.
Intel shuts down Ignite program š¢
As a consequence of the global Intel budgeting measures, the Ignite programs are being shut down. They were really great semi-con/compute focused accelerator programs in Israel, Munich, London and Boston. They didnāt take any equity or payment, and helped coach batches of startups in everything from technology to pitching. Weāre very sad to see them shut down. A big loss for the ecosystem.
Diffusion Models are Real-Time Game Engines
This was maybe the most insane demo weāve seen in a while. I remember logging in through the terminal interface of MS-DOS to play a probably pirated copy of DOOM back in the 90s. Now researchers for Google Research have trained a RL agent on the playing the game, recording the training sessions, then trained a diffusion model on the individual frames, conditioned on the past frames and actions. And the game-play is barely distinguishable from actual game play to human raters. The future of the generated everything is coming true. (blog post coming)
One-shot signatures by Justin Drake (thanks Alex O for the hint)
This is such a magical concept, truly mind-breaking at first glance. With some fairly simple quantum computers, we can create a signature scheme where the private key āself-destructsā after signing a message once. Itās because of the old āopen the box and see if the cat is dead or aliveā collapse of state, plus the fact that a state canāt be cloned. This also means we can have offline, perfect security quantum money. Can only be spent once etc. Unfortunately we need a quantum computer for this.
GPTEngineer and Cursor taking over coding
Weāve played around with Cursor for quite some time now, but still the GPTEngineer feeling is different. Itās just so easy to use! Check out a retro landing page we made. Itās great for small, simple projects, but in the end, this democratizes the digital world. Itās so simple to create an actual product. It might not scale and be perfect, but itās pretty cool.