Founder of @ValstadShip. We're building the machine that builds the ships.
Austin, TX
Joined July 2021
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We're hiring an Operations Lead!
Come help us change the way ships get built in America.
valstad.com/careers/operatio…
Won't be participating this time around (cooking on something for a customer), but excited to see Austin's deep tech ecosystem exploding!
“The future is actually starting to happen.”
Technologies that spent decades in sci-fi are finally starting to show up as real products and companies.
@Andercot is unusually well positioned to see that shift. He went from designing superconducting magnets for fusion to launching Deep Tech Week.
Our conversation started with Austin DTW, which kicks off next week, but we went down the rabbit hole into a bigger question. What has to happen for science fiction to become real and ordinary?
Agenda
0:00 Austin’s takeoff and cowboy futurism
10:00 Where physics meets economics
17:12 Industry, AI and abundant energy
28:18 The geography of deep tech
33:29 Underwriting hard tech
39:21 Ambition and the sci-fi future
46:47 Austin’s factories and permission
53:53 Orbit, beamlines and what comes next
Dumb mass alone is rarely decisive in combat.
Continuing to invest heavily in kinetic & EW anti-drone systems can quickly neutralize any production advantage China might have here.
We don’t need to play by China’s rules.
Valstad is so vertically integrated that we now have our own oxygen. This often saves important time that would otherwise be spent asphyxiating.
Have yet to a supplier that has:
a) Plate leveling machine
b) Large format laser cutting table
c) Plate preservation line (blast & prime)
d) 2000T+ press brake (40’+)
For 10x40’ plate up to 1.5” thick, in one building.
Am I gonna have to drop $10M to make this happen?
Accuracy testing.
Right now we’re able to compensate for weld distortion using only a single sensor.
Still slower than we’d like, so we’re already working on a multi-sensor approach that will speed things up significantly, although this is good enough that we can start ramping production while we continue to iterate.
Tons of little details required to get this right.
It’s hard not to be impressed at the engineering that goes into industrial robots.
Robots weighing thousands of pounds with ~0.05mm repeatability.
Think about how good you have to be at actuators, encoders, gearboxes, castings, etc to pull that off.
To my robotic welding friends: we’re getting this weird intermittent issue with FCAW welding in our weld tests.
Doesn’t seem like classic wormholing, since it almost exactly matches the diameter of the .045 wire. Almost like a piece of wire was dragged along the surface the cooling melt pool, which is the usual manifestation we’ve seen.
Ideas on possible cause? Need to tune our burn back settings? Stickout too long relative to CTTWD?
Hey @zanehengsperger, wen Austin location that stocks A36 plate steel, flat bar, angle, square tube, etc.?
Dustin Walper retweeted
AI folks who live in the discrete world of bits and tokens don't always understand how incredibly messy the real world is.
Nailed it.
What Is To Be Done?
I propose a simple plan:
Big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can – but not allowed to achieve regulatory capture, not allowed to establish a government-protect cartel that is insulated from market competition due to incorrect claims of AI risk. This will maximize the technological and societal payoff from the amazing capabilities of these companies, which are jewels of modern capitalism.
Startup AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can. They should neither confront government-granted protection of big companies, nor should they receive government assistance. They should simply be allowed to compete. If and as startups don’t succeed, their presence in the market will also continuously motivate big companies to be their best – our economies and societies win either way.
Open source AI should be allowed to freely proliferate and compete with both big AI companies and startups. There should be no regulatory barriers to open source whatsoever. Even when open source does not beat companies, its widespread availability is a boon to students all over the world who want to learn how to build and use AI to become part of the technological future, and will ensure that AI is available to everyone who can benefit from it no matter who they are or how much money they have.
To offset the risk of bad people doing bad things with AI, governments working in partnership with the private sector should vigorously engage in each area of potential risk to use AI to maximize society’s defensive capabilities. This shouldn’t be limited to AI-enabled risks but also more general problems such as malnutrition, disease, and climate. AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for solving problems, and we should embrace it as such.
To prevent the risk of China achieving global AI dominance, we should use the full power of our private sector, our scientific establishment, and our governments in concert to drive American and Western AI to absolute global dominance, including ultimately inside China itself. We win, they lose.
And that is how we use AI to save the world.
It’s time to build.
Anthropic: We're worried about a swarm of botnets taking down the internet.
Companies: Okay, so... you'll give us Mythos access so we can harden our infrastructure, right?
Anthropic: Sure, just participate in this totally opaque application process and we'll maybe give you access if we feel like it, eventually, or not, who knows man.
