Historians survey the past and the Twitterati (X-erati?) process the events of the present day. But what does it mean to search the future for clues of what’s to come — and how much longer will we have to wait for it? In this episode of “Securities”, Danny Crichton welcomes Lawrence Lundy-Bryan, research partner at Lunar Ventures and the publisher of “State of the Future”, a Deep Tech Tracker whose distinguishing feature is its extraordinarily wide remit to investigate the interstices of...

Welcome to "Securities," a podcast and newsletter devoted to science, technology, finance, and the human condition. In this episode, Josh Wolfe and Danny Crichton bring science fiction into science fact with our guest, Christopher Mason, a geneticist and computational biologist who has been a principal investigator of 11 NASA missions and projects. Mason, a professor of genomics, physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine, discusses his book, "The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to...

The rise of generative AI and large-language models (LLMs) have forced computer scientists and philosophers to ask a fundamental question: what is the definition of intelligence and consciousness? Are they the same or different? When we input words into a chatbot, are we seeing the early inklings of a general intelligence or merely the rudiments of a really good statistical parrot? These are modern questions, but also ones that have been addressed by philosophers and novelists for years, as...

The birds and the bees just don’t cut it anymore. With the rising age of first pregnancies in America, optimizing fertility has become the linchpin for potential parents embarking on the journey to childbearing. Even so, we remain beholden to dozens of myths driven by inadequate science, even while we ignore the vast new potential — and limits — of a bountiful set of advanced technologies that aim to make fertility a more understandable and approachable subject. “Securities” host Danny...

While the natural world is fecund with a dazzling diversity of smells, the landscape of scents in our daily lives is far less organic. A handful of tightly-held fragrance companies and an extremely small guild of perfumers carefully craft the scents that go into every product we purchase, from the scent of clean laundry in our detergents to the orchestrated beauty of scents that make up a modern perfume. Our memories are — without too much exaggeration — controlled by roughly 600 people...

In a quantified world, the act of creation remains mysterious. Where do ideas come from? How does an artist translate a concept or a feeling into the final work that we get to read or view? The interior drama of that mystery becomes ever more visible as the singular artist expands into a collaboration. How do relationships change the trajectory and originality of creativity? Few novels have better distilled the essence of these questions than Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle...

We perceive the world through our senses, watching the sunset, hearing the staccato of a violin soloist, smelling and ultimately tasting the chocolate and butter of freshly-baked cookies, and of course, feeling the touch of a loving partner. Yet while scientists have answered fundamental questions about color and audio, from understanding their physics to constructing mathematical representations of them, there remains a huge gap when it comes to smell. Given how much more complex and higher...

It’s been a long road to mastering the cell, but biological scientists think they are getting closer and closer to understanding the fundamental mechanics of the kernels of life that make up our bodies. Decades after the sequencing of the first human genome, we now have a much more comprehensive understanding of how to discover a cell’s functions — and increasingly, the tools to actually analyze and prove that our models and theories about them are correct. That’s been the domain of...

ChatGPT has overtaken the cultural zeitgeist faster than any consumer service in the history of technology, with some analysts estimating that it has already been used by more than 100 million people. So when OpenAI, ChatGPT’s creator, live-streamed the launch of its new AI model GPT-4, there was a rush of excitement reminiscent of the Apple product launches of the past. It’s been about 24 hours since GPT-4’s public launch, and all of us here at Lux have already extensively played around...

The Lux LP quarterly letter has become an institution for its intricate weave of pragmatic cynicism about human nature and unbounded optimism about the power of human progress in the face of macroeconomic forces. We released the latest quarterly letter on the theme of “From Strife to Strive” just before the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank last week. With more strife than ever in the market, where will entrepreneurs strive next? Joining me (Danny Crichton) to talk about our analysis of what’s...

While much of the venture world has hit a reset in 2023, you’d never know that in artificial intelligence, where fire marshals are shutting down crammed engineering meetups and startups are once again raising at eye-watering valuations. Why the excitement? Because for founders, technologists and VCs, it feels like the everlasting promise of AI dating back to the 1950s and 1960s is finally on the cusp of being realized with the training and deployment of large language models like GPT-3. To...

Artificial intelligence has become ambient in our daily lives, scooting us from place to place with turn-by-turn navigation, assisting us with reminders and alarms, and guiding professionals from lawyers and doctors to reaching the best possible decisions with the data they have on hand. Domain-specific AI has also mastered everything from games like Chess and Go to the complicated science of protein folding. Since the debut of ChatGPT in November by OpenAI however, we have seen a volcanic...

They say that you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, but what if each shot costs money and is actually a tradeoff with taking a different shot? Time and money are limited, and that means we must constantly balance investing in our current projects and ideas against seeking out new opportunities. While there has been prodigious work published on how to find the “next big thing”, few researchers have investigated what it takes to just throw in the towel, jump ship, fold and quit in the face...

Technology’s prime and still growing role in society has led to a crescendo of criticism that it has exacerbated inequality. Critics say that the economic models and algorithms underpinning out apps and platforms are tearing apart our social fabric, fracturing the economy, casualizing labor, and increasing hostility between nations. But for all the negativity around technology, there is a parallel positive story of how technology can empower people to achieve their best lives. Whether it’s...

No technology has as many dual-use challenges as artificial intelligence. The same AI models that invent vivacious illustrations and visual effects for movies are the exact models that can generate democracy-killing algorithmic propaganda. Code may well be code, but more and more AI leaders are considering how to balance the desire for openness with the need for responsible innovation. One of those leading companies is Hugging Face (a Lux portfolio company), and part of the weight of AI’s...

Semiconductors are ubiquitous in modern life, powering our appliances, smartphones, cars and electronics. That’s led to soaring demand from consumers, companies and governments much to the chip industry’s benefit, but its centrality to the global economy has also brought heightened scrutiny from analysts concerned by the deep dependency we have on a handful of companies around the world producing these products. The semiconductor industry is now on the front pages of news sites almost daily,...

We live in a time of tremendous focus on … focus and productivity. Scan the shelves of any self-help section in a bookstore and you’ll find copious volumes on how to focus better, deeper, and longer along with a litany of productivity hacks and habits to efficiently glean. What you will often struggle to find however are books advocating doing nothing. But when it comes to creativity and making deep connections, it’s precisely when we are wandering that we are most focused on invention. To...

Episode reading list: The future of crypto regulation: Highlights from the Brookings event Lux + Tactic funding announcement Fourteen years after the release of the Bitcoin white paper, Web3 and crypto are transitioning into adolescence. Technologies and communities that have collectively been a financial Wild West are slowly but inexorably transforming into mainstream infrastructure powering payments, finance, banking, and even identity and data storage. That transition though is...

Episode reading list:  Forging the Industrial Network the Nation Needs Defense Fordism and AI Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy The Return of Industrial Warfare America spends more money on defense than ever, with a budget that more than doubled in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Despite those dizzying appropriations though, America is now down to just 5 big prime defense contractors, consolidated from dozens during the Cold War. It’s a pattern of consolidation, higher...

Stanford University is at the beating heart of Silicon Valley and has become almost a rite of passage for generations of entrepreneurs. But how does each generation form, and what skills and mindsets should they be equipped with given our changing world? No one has thought more about how to shape that entrepreneurial spirit than Dr. Tina Seelig. Seelig is the Executive Director of the prestigious Knight-Hennessy Scholars program at Stanford among many other leadership roles, and she is also...

Agricultural commodities is a bit like accounting: you only hear news stories about it when things go wrong. And unfortunately for the world in 2022, a lot is going wrong in agriculture. Russia’s war on Ukraine has devastated one of the world’s great breadbaskets, and global climate disruptions are wrecking havoc on food productivity. That’s led to soaring inflation and increasingly contentious politics, particularly in the developing world. Sadly, that’s not the only problem the industry...

“Securities” podcast host Danny Crichton and producer Chris Gates talk about the latest newsletter issue, “Truth and reputations.” Reputations are always a trailing indicator of truth. When people and organizations are rising, reputations obviously lag — the public has never heard of these new upstarts, and its opinion remains unformed. Reputations gallop to catch up, and for a brief moment perhaps, the true quality and the perceived quality intersect. Inevitably decline sets in, whether in...

Humans have been bartering and trading for millennia, building extraordinarily complex mechanisms of exchange centered on fiat currencies, contracts, and trust. As cryptocurrencies have emerged this past decade, economists and incentive designers have been forced to consider how to construct new forms of currency without the social lubricant of trust. How can we prove that every market participant is incentive aligned with market goals? What contributions can game theory, theoretical computer...

Recently in the Lux Capital office, my colleague Chris Gates, the producer of the "Securities” podcast, along with biotech investor Shaq Vayda were talking about the global macro environment and venture capital. Tech stocks hit their zenith in November 2021, and now a lot of VCs have slowed down their investments over the last couple of months. That's led to something among limited partners and asset allocators known as the “denominator effect”, where portfolio managers move money from one...

There has been a massive expansion in data emanating from bio labs, and that means next-generation AI algorithms and machine learning models finally have the grist to transform the future trajectories of biology and health therapies. Yet, there’s a key translation challenge: how do  you get computer scientists and biologists — two types of specialists with very different training — to collaborate with each other effectively? Two groups, Bits in Bio and Nucleate, have independently...