Drew Volpe

Geothermal has a clear path to becoming the cheapest form of energy, period. It starts with a better picture of the subsurface, using what we learn in the field to build better models and find geothermal resources others have missed and overlooked. This is just the beginning.

In January 2025 my mom’s lung cancer spread to her brain. The drug with the best chance of helping her was approved in China but not here. A doctor told me, almost as an aside, that if she were Chinese she could buy it at a pharmacy. So I flew to Shanghai and came home with 26 boxes in my luggage. That was 19 months ago. My mom is still here, still working, and in her words has had an amazing three years. The drug was approved in China in 2023. The FDA approved it in July 2025. It still is not for sale here. I know of at least 30 Americans who have made the same trip. I have been scared to tell this story because I worried it could cost my mom access to the medicine keeping her alive. But the problem matters more than my silence. These drugs need to be developed and available here, and that means FDA reform. Art Allen at KFF Health News told our story this week. It also ran in The Washington Post. kffhealthnews.org/health-ind…

Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.

Christina Cacioppo on why French software companies have stopped building on American models: "I was very surprised to learn a lot of the French software companies are using Chinese models predominantly. I was with our customers in France...and someone said, 'We all switched to Chinese models when Trump closed Fable off to non-Americans. We just realized there's a huge business continuity risk. We can't trust that if we build a business on one of these American models, it'll always be available, so we stopped doing that.'"

interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works already-clean.goodfire.com/