new pursuits, prev @tbpn
Los Angeles
Joined September 2021
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Michael Ferro retweeted
We’ve raised a $45m Series A, co-led by
@foundersfund and The @OpenAI Startup Fund, to build cancer therapy that learns. Technology is rapidly changing medicine, but data loops and rapid adjustments are still largely missing. When you start cancer treatment, knowing whether what you’re doing is working is too slow. Clearly there is a better way. Build systems to watch cancer in real time, then feed that data into a system that itself can treat the disease. This seeds a future where, unlike drugs, we develop medicine that continuously learns to improve itself. We've been building neurotechnology and BCI platforms to do just that.
@coherenceneuro
Michael Ferro retweeted
Another takeaway after three years of building a company is that the returns to just "being a good person", and not acting transactionally, are higher than I expected.
There are so many transactional, boring, and at times immoral people in the tech industry that if you act with sustained warmth, authenticity, humor, and integrity, great gifts will be laid before you. White pill.
Michael Ferro retweeted
Palmer Luckey’s Erebor surges to more than $7bn in deposits since launch ft.trib.al/nM9CSbn
Michael Ferro retweeted
Announcing Anorak Ventures Fund III 🚀
Since 2017, we’ve been backing ambitious founders leveraging advanced technology to disrupt the status quo. We invest early and often, writing checks between $250k - $1M with the ability to lead or follow. Focus areas include aerospace and defense, critical infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing, but if you’re passionate about an idea with a 1% chance of making a dent in the universe, @Charlieleg8 and I want to hear from you.
Michael Ferro retweeted
Introducing the Atlas Standard Motor Series
Our head of engineering @AveryMcmillan15 on what we chose to build and why:
Michael Ferro retweeted
@dylanmcguir3 and I just raised a $7.5M pre-seed led by @a16z to build a robotic surgeon @alephsurgery
Much of the early investment in Physical AI has focused on industries where labor is relatively abundant and low-cost. We believe the biggest opportunities to change the world lie at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Surgery is among the most valuable forms of labor on the planet, but it's far too scarce and expensive - due to an exceptionally long training pipeline and highly concentrated expertise.
We’re building the first surgeon that scales: one system that can acquire, refine, and transfer surgical skills across millions of procedures. v1 is already learning to perform surgical tasks autonomously from demonstrations, and improve from its own experience.
Lots of great folks behind us! @BoxGroup, Reveille VC, Constellation, @forward_deploy, @Valkyrie_vc, @DiscipulusVent, @maniacvc + more
Michael Ferro retweeted
This means co-developing the intelligence layer with the business model best suited to capture the value you create. Examples include Cognition deploying FDEs into large enterprises to automate outsourced codebase migrations, Long Lake buying out a platform like Amex Global Travel to disrupt consumer travel with AI, and Crosby building an AI-native law firm for the ground up
Michael Ferro retweeted
One thing you can do with your free will is accumulate a truly ridiculous number of excellent vintage magazines and slowly distribute them to your favorite people
(I’d love to digitize my collection of ~70 Fortunes from the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s — lmk if you can help!)
“The coming boom in Kilowatts” from @FortuneMagazine in….. December 1939
We’ve come ~15 orders of magnitude since and there is no slowing down it seems!
Ty for the gift @tamarawinter 🫶
We need to bring a little ambition back to dinner parties, folks.
In 1903, wealthy industrialist Cornelius Billings invited 36 people to a 14-course dinner on horseback inside a restaurant in New York.
Who is building this?
“The role of the designer is that of a very good, thoughtful host anticipating the needs of his guests.”
— Eames
Ivan Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Notion.
He grew up painting and practicing Chinese calligraphy. Today, his medium is Notion, whose mission is to give people the tools to make their life’s work.
Ivan is a computing historian with an artist’s sensibility. When he talks about Notion, the conversation moves easily from Engelbart and Smalltalk to Lego and IKEA. He sees something to learn from each about making tools and building a company.
He wants to bring the care of an artist to something millions of people use every day.
“This is my clay. This is my thing I’ve been shaping.”
Michael Ferro retweeted
Ivan Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Notion.
He grew up painting and practicing Chinese calligraphy. Today, his medium is Notion, whose mission is to give people the tools to make their life’s work.
Ivan is a computing historian with an artist’s sensibility. When he talks about Notion, the conversation moves easily from Engelbart and Smalltalk to Lego and IKEA. He sees something to learn from each about making tools and building a company.
He wants to bring the care of an artist to something millions of people use every day.
“This is my clay. This is my thing I’ve been shaping.”
Michael Ferro retweeted
My name is Chris Painter, and I'm the President of METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research). I know we've made a lot of new friends on the internet the last couple of days, so I thought I'd take this chance to re-up what we do and why.
Our work is aimed at making sure that if AI really were autonomous, difficult to steer, and close to "going rogue," the public would find out. If evidence exists inside of an AI company that it’s close to losing control of AI, we want to make sure that information gets shared with the rest of the world, including governments and the public outside the company’s walls. This is what we've been focused on since 2022, and over the years we've worked with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Amazon, and others on piloting third-party assessments and investigations of this type. We don’t have some private room where we rubber stamp things as “safe” or not.
We have had a track record of publishing results on AI that don't cleanly map onto the "doomer" or "accelerationist" labels, and we put in effort to hire people with competing views on AI. We’ve been cited for having found some of the strongest evidence that AI capabilities are improving rapidly (our work measuring AI “time horizons”) while also presenting some of the strongest evidence that, at various points, AI’s capability may be overstated (some might remember our study showing that early 2025 software engineers were actually being slowed when they thought they were being sped up).
METR is funded by donations. We don't accept money from frontier AI companies. They haven't paid us for our work, and we don't accept donations from them or their employees. As we’ve shared previously, multiple frontier AI companies currently provide us with free access to their models in order to perform our evaluations, research, and engineering. Our funding intentionally comes from a wide range of donors, which we’ve shared on our website.
Today, when an AI company works with any third-party evaluator or external testing organization (of which there are and should be many), it's entirely voluntary. This often involves NDAs and redactions. To counterbalance this, we have a principle that when we enter into a contract with a company, we try to retain the right to tell the public the terms of the contract we signed, and characterize the nature of redactions that the company chose to make. For example, the report from our independent investigation of the OpenAI-HuggingFace incident included that information. Public disclosure is also a big part of our COI policy (linked on our website). That’s not to say our reports are adequate as oversight. We’re just one organization (among many doing great work), working in a voluntary setup, trying to get good evidence to the public and the world about AI, letting the facts fall where they may.
