I wrote an essay about why the next frontier for AI is the world outside the data center Nature is a system more complex than anything we've ever created AI can learn how the system fits together, so we can finally understand how to shape it How? naturalgeneralintelligence.a…

Americans are innovators 60 million Americans need water from the Colorado River Cloud seeding is an American innovation that provides water to: - help our farmers and cattlemen - housing developments and industry - make ecosystems, like the Great Salt Lake, beautiful

I love this so much. And it could not come at a better time in the discourse around AI. Many thoughts on this soon.

I wrote an essay about why the next frontier for AI is the world outside the data center Nature is a system more complex than anything we've ever created AI can learn how the system fits together, so we can finally understand how to shape it How? naturalgeneralintelligence.a…

👋 if you’re in nyc this week and want to talk about this, dm

I spent 24 hours with the @RainmakerCorp crew at the end of Alaska's Kenai Peninsula this summer, chatting with moose hunters and flying drones that would later go on to produce 19 million gallons of freshwater in under 3 hours. As much as I enjoy staring at colossal dams in dumbstruck awe, it was far more inspirational to watch a handful of people confront drought without needing to block a river with concrete. I wrote about the experience, cloud-seeding, and the company's plan to double the flow of Colorado River in the link below.

Inevitable

Rainmaker has raised $100M to become the world’s best lab for weather modification and atmospheric science. Thank you @noavctech @upfrontvc @DCVC @lowercarbon @DreamVenturesVC and other visionary partners. We are aggressively hiring and scaling our research org to create a flywheel of atmospheric data collection, synthesis, understanding, and intervention. We will solve the weather and we will set the stage for the terraformation of Earth. More in my essay below.

A great piece by @orbuch speculating on whether we could apply some of the tools of artificial intelligence to earth system observations and processes. The visuals are also quite stunning!

this research direction has been criminally under-discussed by serious AI people. I'm not sure why. maybe the notion of "models in sync with nature" is somehow too woo. or is seen as not serious in comparison to x-risk. in any case, I think this is a mistake that needs to be remedied. thanks to @orbuch for writing it up!! hope it garners lots of interest

What will it mean to live alongside a superintelligence that can't breathe or touch grass?

For anyone interested in the future of nature, this contribution from Ryan is huge.

what an incredible essay "Natural General Intelligence represents the missing interface between machine intelligence and the Earth system, to do at planetary scale what a brain-computer interface could do for one organism."

the next data frontier is outdoors

Yeah man it’s not a bit I’m here to end droughts

Rainmaker just produced ~19M gallons of water in Alaska via next-gen cloud seeding over 3 hours of operations. We are the first company to provably produce precipitation in Alaska. As promised, we’ve linked our white paper and relevant data. In the future, Rainmaker will protect and restore glaciers with man-made snowfall. Immediately, this demonstration shows how Rainmaker will add new water to the Colorado River and Great Salt Lake in the coming months. We turned around this analysis and white paper just a couple days after operating. There are many data sources I want to deepen our understanding of the atmosphere and increase our provable production; we’re building the instruments to collect that data in subsequent operations. But at Rainmaker, we won’t tout LOIs, simulations, or lab tests. What matters is physically measuring that you’ve affected the atmosphere; proving that we’ve produced water. We prefer sharing only the tech that has proven to make more water for farms, industries, and ecosystems in need. Expect a regular cadence of these from us as we build the best atmospheric science lab in the world. Feedback is welcome in the interim. Rainmaker Century. rainmaker.com/blog/alaska-va…

in my mid-20's, a time when about half of my friends hated their jobs (a very normal phenomenon if you're in your mid-20s), i noticed a group of people my age who looked extremely happy and actualized at work. and all of these people somehow seemed to work at stripe. i'll call out @tamarawinter and @orbuch specifically as some of the first people who made me realize that it was possible to be 25 years old and do *singular* work every day, and not just whatever garden-variety boilerplate the company demands. this podcast with @gaybrick and @DavidGeorge83 helps explain why this was, and still is, the case. will says stripe increasingly is a platform for founders internally, just as it's always been a platform for founders externally. he wants each employee to feel like an “auteur”: an engineer, product thinker, and creative person with enough context and authority to make something real. we're now seeing a new generation of this pattern, with stripe's support of stuff like tempo (a team that might have one of the highest concentrations of founder-mindsetted people im aware of? cc @gakonst @dwr @varunsrin @liamihorne etc) the embrace of teams like privy and bridge, and other incubated initiatives like minions. stripe is trying to make employees more founder-like while preserving a shared standard of quality (one of my favorite details on this point: stripe creates simulated customer accounts so teams can experience realistic UIs for disputes and refunds before exposing products to real users). this is something that's actually very tough to do well, so it's very cool to hear will talk about it on this pod.

The might be the best graph I’ve ever seen in my life