DTN 012: The De-Extinction Business with Colossal CEO Ben Lamm
DTN 012: The De-Extinction Business with Colossal CEO Ben Lamm
Plus: A leaky nuclear reactor, a chatbot suicide, a government crypto conspiracy, artificial cells, and more.
Welcome to The Deep Tech Newsletter, a weekly exploration of the business, science, and engineering behind the world’s most important frontier technologies.
On commercializing academic research: “Academia is amazing and a lot of great sparks of innovation come from academia. But without support and oxygen, it’s difficult for those sparks to turn into a fire. As George Church accurately says, if he had the right money to do this five years ago, we’d have a mammoth today.”
On building a innovation hub: “All the technologies needed to achieve de-extinction already exist in some form or fashion. It’s mostly about making them more efficient and making them work at scale. There are interesting technology and innovation challenges, but not really invention challenges. It seemed like one or two technologies that come from this could be multibillion dollar companies on their own. We've gotten a lot of the Bell Labs comparisons, which is about one of the nicest things you could say.”
The Big Picture
Elon Musk and 1000 other researchers call for ‘pause’ on advanced AI systems
“We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium. This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities.” (Future of Life Institute)
US, Japan ink trade deal around EV battery materials
“The Agreement builds on the 2019 U.S.-Japan Trade Agreement and will strengthen and diversify critical minerals supply chains and promote the adoption of electric vehicle battery technologies. In particular, the Agreement memorializes the shared commitment of the United States and Japan with respect to the critical minerals sector to facilitate trade, promote fair competition and market-oriented conditions for trade in critical minerals, advance robust labor and environmental standards, and cooperate in efforts to ensure secure, transparent, sustainable, and equitable critical minerals supply chains.” (Office of the US Trade Representative)
Did The Government Start A Global Financial Crisis In An Attempt To Destroy Crypto?
“A month ago, I warned that banks dealing with crypto clients were facing a concerted effort on the part of regulators and supervisors to redline the entire crypto space. What has happened since was utterly shocking. The two most crypto-focused banks, Silvergate and Signature, were forced into liquidation and receivership, respectively. The established narrative is that they made “bad bets” and lost, or that they couldn’t handle flighty depositors in the form of tech and crypto startups. But there’s an alternative version of events being pieced together that is far more sinister — and convincing. It appears that these banks, especially Signature, were the victims of an opportunistic campaign to decapitate banks serving the crypto industry.” (Pirate Wires)
Deep Tech News
Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
NASA pushes back Boeing Starliner’s crewed flight test to July
Xcel Energy powers down Minnesota nuclear plant after finding 2nd leak of radioactive water
Meet the WasteShark: An electric catamaran that eats plastic and cleans the water
Crypto News
Bankman-Fried accused of bribing one or more Chinese officials with $40 million
Are cryptocurrencies commodities or securities? Depends on which US agency you ask
Tested on Ethereum, StarkWare’s Zero-Knowledge Proofs Are Now Live on Bitcoin
Jack Dorsey-Backed Spiral Plots Course for Mainstream Adoption of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network
Peer Review
Funding x M&A
DEEP TECH
Isar Aerospace raises $165M to bring more sovereign launch to Europe
Venti raises $29M to designed autonomous vehicles for industrial and logistics hubs
DataDome, which uses AI to protect against bot-based attacks, raises $42M
OQmented, an AR/MR display and 3D-sensing company, raised a $20M Series A
CRYPTO
Web3 infrastructure provider Fetch AI has raised a fresh $40M
Solana-based derivatives protocol Cega raises $5M to expand on Ethereum
Orderly Network raises fresh funding at a flat token valuation of $200M
Irene Zhao’s web3 social platform So-Col unveils $4.5M in new funding
Hydra Ventures DAO raises $10M for fresh take on fund of funds
Conduit, a remote crypto native infrastructure platform, raised a $7M seed
Miscellanea
It's time to end the speed limit in US airspace / Bomb-sniffing rodents undergo vaginal transformations / Belgian man dies by suicide following exchanges with chatbot / One Man’s Quest to Revive the Great American Vacuum Tube / Startup makes mammoth meatball / One of the biggest black holes ever found / The cozy, creepy world of VR sleep rooms / My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM / Floating PV system mysteriously washes up on Hong Kong beach
a digital agency built for the future.
Haus Biographics is a digital agency in NYC that specializes in marketing and communications for web3 and deep tech organizations. Check out our website, follow us on Twitter, or say hello@hausb.io
