"Age of Miracles"

Packy an Anton discuss Chroma's (Anton's company) launch of Stable Attribution.  Stable Attribution is a tool that let's anyone find the humans behind AI generated images. Given any image generated by Stable Diffusion, Stable Attribution is able to identify the images in the model's training set which most contributed to the generated image.   Packy and Anton discuss the development of Stable Attr...

Sam Levin is the co-founder and CEO of Melonfrost. Melonfrost is using the power of evolution and machine learning to launch the next generation of microbes that will revolutionize the fields of therapeutics, biomaterials, food, and agriculture. You'll learn more about what exactly that means in this conversation between Packy and Sam.   Melonfrost, a Not Boring Capital portfolio company, recently...

Andy Chatham is the CEO and co-founder of Dimo. Dimo's mission is to be the driving force behind the future of mobility: a future where data shapes infrastructure, emissions are lower, roads are safer, and life behind the wheel is—well, better.  DIMO helps you get more from driving. Save money. Learn how to better take care of your car. And, contribute to a future where driving apps work for vehic...

Michael Kelly is the co-founder of Open Forest Protocol.    Open Forest Protocol (OFP) is a scalable open platform that allows forest projects of any size, from around world, to Measure, Report, and Verify (MRV) their forestation data.  Through OFP, individuals, communities, NGOs, entrepreneurs, and governments are able to create transparent, immutable, proof-of-impact data that is comprehensively...

Nicholas Chadwick is the founder and CEO of Mission Zero Technologies. MZT is developing direct air capture (DAC) technology that will recover high-purity CO2 from the air while incurring only a fraction of the costs and energy it takes to do so today.  Frontier is a recipient of an advanced market commitment grant from Frontier, the effort from companies like Stripe, Shopify, Meta, and Microsoft...

Exponential makes it easy to discover, assess and invest in liquidity pools across chains. It wants to be the Coinbase of DeFi. We were joined by the companies three founders: Driss Benamour, Mehdi Lebbar, and Greg Jizmagian to discuss the current crypto market, Exponential's risk-first approach, and how to asses a digital risk-asset. You can learn more at exponential.fi. You can also watch the fu...

LINK to essay Every new year is a blank page, a chance to start fresh with new ideas and new sources and new energy. Of course, January 1st isn’t actually any more different from December 31st than December 31st was from December 30th. But the collective time we all spend away from the daily routine during the holidays feels like a reset. And we’ve all tacitly agreed that the new year is a differe...

Audio Essay: Four Seasons Total Tech Link to full essay: https://www.notboring.co/p/four-seasons-total-tech Packy analogizes the Gartner Hype Cycle to the four seasons, to explain why some technology winters feel so long and cold while all summers feel pretty much the same. We're coming out of a many decades long winter for a bunch of frontier technology spaces (AI, Space, Nuclear, etc) seemingly...

Packy and Anton breakdown one of the early, foundational artifical intelligence papers, "A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity," which was first published in 1943. The researchers, Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts, were trying to understand how the brain could produce such complex patterns by using basic, connected cells. Their work was foundational in understanding neur...

The idea is this: the world oscillates between centralization and decentralization, with progress sloping upward through the turns. We’re approaching an era of decentralization.  This shift from centralization to decentralization is popping up everywhere I look:  Energy: Fossil Fuels vs. Renewables Manufacturing: Globalization vs. Reshoring Manufacturing: Making vs. Growing Science: Government Fun...

We're back! In Episode 2, Anton Teaches Packy about Deepmind's March 2022 paper, Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models, or as it's more commonly known, Chinchilla.  Prior to Chinchilla, the best way to improve the performance of LLMs was thought to be by scaling up the size of the model. As a result, the largest models now have over 500 billion parameters. But there are only so many GPUs...

Anton Teaches Packy AI is Not Boring's attempt at making AI more accessible to our audience. It's become increasingly obvious that we're in the Golden Age of AI, so we think it's important to demystify what's going on and how it all actually works.   Anton Troynikov is the founder of Chroma, former Meta Reality Labs Research Engineer and Roboticist.   Packy McCormick is the author of the popular t...

Odyssey (formerly Agora) fully believes in the power of technology to provide families with opportunity to choose the educational environment and services that help them best meet their unique learning needs.  In order to help parents do that, we have partnered with the best K-12 providers and vendors in order to create a robust marketplace for our families. Joe Connor is the founder and CEO of Od...

Capital & Taste audio essay. Capital is banking built for founders. If that sounds like you, sign up for a Capital account today, whether you’re just raising your first million or doing millions in ARR. Capital expands Party Round’s offering from fundraising to a full suite of financial services focused on startups. Today, that’s banking – so you can hold, spend, and send the money you’ve raised w...

Formic delivers Robots by the Hour to manufacturers. It’s making small and medium American businesses stronger, fighting inflation, and creating abundance Link to full essay here. -------------------------- The goal is abundance. We want more and better things, more cheaply. We want those things to be made closer to home. We want less fragile supply chains, so that those things are always availabl...

John Andrew Entwistle is the founder and CEO of Wander. Wander is a fully-integrated platform for experiencing magnificent short-term rental homes. Wander owns the customer experience end-to-end: the homes, the booking platform, and the value-added services. Over 100,000 people have joined the Wander waitlist. In this episode, John Andrew announces, for the first time, Wander's newest product: Wan...

Social vs. Science Experiments: We talk a lot about progress here in Not Boring. Progress can be difficult and messy and winding, and importantly, progress moves at different speeds and follows different paths for different kinds of products. Today’s essay is my thinking on two types: science experiments and social experiments. Successful science experiment products clearly move the world forward;...

In "How Do I Teach These Kids?!" Packy confronts the challenge of how to properly educate his two young children in a rapidly evolving world. "Dev and Maya get a blank educational slate to start with. Puja and I are responsible for figuring out how to give them the best education possible, one that helps them love learning, have fun, and get prepared for life beyond school. I don’t think the answe...

Tegus is building the modern investment research platform for fundamental private and public market investors, starting with a novel twist on the classic expert call model, and expanding into adjacent opportunities by listening intently to customers. This audio essay covers: The Course to Tegus Modernizing Investment Research The Tegus Business Model The Outsiders: Fundraising, Buybacks, and Acqui...

Peter Johnston is the founder of Polywork. Polywork is a place to discover opportunities to collaborate with other professionals. Existing networks like LinkedIn focus on connecting us to 9-5 opportunities — but where do you go to find opportunities to speak on podcasts? Or discover partners for your side project? Check out who at Google or Netflix is open to angel investing or starting a company?...

The Enchanted Notebook: on the real and growing power of writing down the future you want to see exist. In the context of a recent Lex Fridman and Ray Kurzweil podcast conversation, Packy explores where we are with AI today and what the future may hold. This essay and audio essay were sponsored by Secureframe. If you're starting a software company or getting up-to-speed on enterprise, schedule a d...

Monday Audio Essay: "Indistinguishable from Magic" Packy explores "magic" in tech and how it impacts the startup lifecycle: "It’s the Magical Startup Circle of Life. A startup, if it’s lucky, creates magic, turns that magic into dollars, and transitions to life as a successful Big Muggle Company, capable of enormous profits and power but no longer able to conjure magic. Then a new Magician comes a...

Mike Saunders is the co-founder and CEO of Captain. Captain powers restaurants and their communities through a mix of web2 and web3 technologies. Mike is an experienced food delivery entrepreneur, having previously started campusfood.com, which subsequently sold to Grub Hub where Mike served as an exec for a number of years. Captain, in many ways, is a response to many of the problems that Mike co...

Eli Wachs & Alex Grinman are the co-founders of Footprint. Footprint's mission is to bring back trust on the internet. The company wants to put people in control of their identity while solving KYC, IDV, and PII storage problems for enterprises. Footprint just announced a $6M Seed Round led by Index Ventures. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/messag...

Brandon Arvanaghi is the co-founder and CEO of Meow. Meow is a startup that opens corporate treasurers up to crypto markets. This is Brandon's second time on the podcast -- and he's on to discuss raising Meow's Series A & navigating challenging times in the crypto markets. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message