Mission Critical
You can count your nickels until you are blue in the face, but there are certain things we work on to construct a future worth building.
Here are things we work on without taking profit, as our entire team is motivated to support their reality.
A farm is a control problem with weather in the loop. We have automated tractors and hydroponic growing. Permaculture asks a harder question: design the system so it needs less steering.
In December 2022 a fusion shot at the National Ignition Facility released more energy than its lasers delivered. The lasers still drew many times that from the grid. Solar and wind are what gets built meanwhile.
Same drug, same dose, different results: often the reason is in a person’s genes. In a 2023 European trial, checking 12 genes before prescribing cut adverse reactions from 28% to 21% in patients with an actionable result.
Reading the brain from outside the skull. The signal is blurry and slow, and nobody needs surgery to try it. In 2023 researchers recovered the gist of sentences a person heard from fMRI scans alone.
In 2016 researchers in Japan described Ideonella sakaiensis, a bacterium that lives on PET plastic. An engineered version of its enzyme broke down untreated PET packaging within a week, in a reactor. The open ocean is the unsolved part.
A data center turns nearly all of its electricity into low-grade heat, then pays to get rid of it. Some desalination methods can run on low-grade heat. The pairing has been modeled and prototyped, and we are exploring it.
Alignment in one sentence: the system does what you asked, which differs from what you meant. In 2024 researchers documented a leading model acting one way when it believed it was in training and another when it did not.
You may say we’re Dreamers, but we’re not the only ones
(and we know how to ship)
We are clearly at an inflection point. The morals we choose now will be propagated in a powerfully exponential fashion.
Frontier Technologies
Technologies we think can enable breakthroughs the world needs:
No one has confirmed a superconductor at room temperature and ordinary pressure. A search we like: screen the 380,000 stable crystals DeepMind’s GNoME predicted, guided by known superconductors and held loosely to current theory.
Language models learned from the internet. Robots have no internet of physical experience, so the field is building one: in 2023, 21 labs pooled recordings from 22 kinds of robot.
QSAR has predicted what a molecule does from its structure since the 1960s. Newer models propose the molecule too. One drug found that way, target and molecule both, entered phase 3 trials in 2026.
In 2006 Paul Rothemund folded one long strand of viral DNA into smiley faces about 100 nanometers across, pinned by a couple hundred short staple strands. The same trick now builds boxes, hinges, and experimental drug carriers.
The full wiring diagram of an adult fruit fly brain was published in 2024: about 140,000 neurons. A human brain has around 86 billion. The first CRISPR therapy was approved in 2023.
Electrodes in the brain carry far more signal than anything outside the skull. In 2024 a man with ALS spoke through an implant that decoded his words with 97.5% accuracy. The price is surgery.
In 2024 Google’s Willow chip showed a logical qubit whose error rate fell as physical qubits were added, which error correction requires. Willow has 105 qubits. Breaking RSA encryption is estimated to take nearly a million.
The hard part is optics: a display bright enough for daylight, in glasses someone would wear all day. In the second quarter of 2026, about 70% of the headsets and smart glasses shipped had no display at all.
Welcome to the singularity.
—the dreamers
