FULL INTERVIEW: Flapping Airplanes just raised a $1B Series A after rebuilding the GPU stack from scratch. Co-founder Aidan Smith says they don’t even use Torch, NCCL or CUDA’s normal runtime. One kernel on one B200 can now train a model, serve inference and play Doom at the same time. @aidanmantine, Thiel Fellow and 3-year Neuralink alum, co-founded @flappyairplanes. He joined @sophiadew and @theojaffee to break down why AI needs to learn more like the brain, how they rebuilt the GPU stack, and who they hire: 00:30 where the name Flapping Airplanes comes from 02:04 why they bet on data efficiency 03:07 what Neuralink taught him about AI 04:27 how slow your brain actually is 06:06 why not just emulate the whole brain 08:40 why they rebuilt the GPU stack from scratch 10:33 compute overhang and safety 12:56 can a neo lab win if the big labs hit RSI first 14:27 what ML research looks like when no one writes code 15:40 why DNA, robotics and trading are data-starved 18:41 how they hire in the AI talent wars 21:17 the models they might ship first

SITUATION DETECTED: Nearly all of North Korea’s official websites have been offline for over 24 hours, including state media and government portals. No explanation has been given, and the cause is unconfirmed.

SITUATION DETECTED: DeepSeek raised $15 billion in one of China’s largest funding rounds ever. Tencent was a major investor, per Bloomberg.

Flapping Airplanes co-founder @aidanmantine explains why OpenAI or Anthropic reaching superintelligence first wouldn't mean the end of AI research: "What we’re a bet on is that the age of research is not dead." "Coding is this very narrow domain where it’s easy to verify what’s going on, and you can just scale the thing. Basically, no one I know programs anymore. Myself included." "Models are still not that great at creating new research ideas. The fact that data labeler is a job, and a growing job even, indicates that there’s something wrong." @flappyairplanes

Flapping Airplanes co-founder @aidanmantine reveals how he attracts top AI talent by trying to talk candidates out of joining his own lab: "When people interview with us, we counter sell them a ton. If they wanna go work at OpenAI or Anthropic, they should go do that. You should go to Flapping Airplanes if you wanna be part of the last age in human history where you can do research." "It's really easy to go into a big org and hide under the floorboards. At Flapping Airplanes, you own this thing that's really important. This project will live or die on your success." "We've had some people inbound us who are very radically different, like a Clash of Clans world champion, who you interview and you're like, holy crap, this guy is really smart." "We have lots of IMO medalists, but also lots of IMO medalists are maybe not the best machine learning people." @flappyairplanes

Flapping Airplanes co-founder @aidanmantine explains why treating GPUs as "just a math machine" wastes their potential: "We look at GPUs and we say, how do you go under the floorboards? We don’t use Torch. We don’t use NVIDIA’s normal CUDA runtime stuff. We don’t use NCCL. We basically have built everything from scratch." "This means we can do some really crazy stuff like have your experimental training models run at the highest level of a production inference stack at a big lab. The systems guys sit next to the post-training guys next to the pre-training guys." "The GPUs are blessedly a really flexible substrate. There’s so much that can be done with them, and yet everyone’s like, I don’t know, it’s just a math machine. What a waste. We really see a lot more potential in the GPUs than other people." @flappyairplanes

Flapping Airplanes co-founder @aidanmantine explains why your brain’s slow wiring is a clue to making AI much smarter: "How slow do you think it is to go from one side of the brain to the other? It takes 150 milliseconds. In a GPU you’re talking about microseconds. It’s not even close." "In order to even get that latency, your brain has to pull some unbelievable bullshit. And it’s tapping out at 150 milliseconds. That’s so slow that you would not be able to watch this video if it was streamed at that frequency." "Everything fits to the hardware that it’s given. Everything is downstream of the primitives that you give it. By unlocking the GPU primitives, we can make models that are much smarter than today’s." @flappyairplanes

Blue Ocean Materials founder @lucasme_12 explains why El Segundo feels like Silicon Valley in the ’80s: "You’re seeing these founders tackling these very hard problems where we have no playbook. El Segundo feels like what I imagine was Silicon Valley in the ’80s." "There’s no career path. Who do you mimic? How do you create a Valar Atomics? How do you make it rain like Rainmaker? It’s just a bunch of mavericks trying to solve these problems." @BOMaterials

Coherence Neuro CEO @WoodingtonBen reveals the terrifying discovery that your brain can communicate with cancer tumors: "I came in as an engineer like, okay, it’s just the engineers’ time to cook now. The deeper I went, the more I learned how little we actually know about how the brain functions." "My co-founder Elise came up to me and was like, have you seen this concept that cancer interacts with the brain and the nervous system? I had no idea. And it turns out, up until about 7 or 8 years ago, no one had any idea." "When you have a tumor in your body, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It forms communication networks with your body, with your brain. Your brain is talking to the cancer, using the same language. That is both fascinating, and should be probably quite terrifying as well." "We felt like brain tumors are relatively well understood. Nope. There’s this entire fundamental dimension of brain tumors that we knew nothing about until about 8 years ago." @coherenceneuro

Coherence Neuro CEO @WoodingtonBen reveals how a Neuralink-like brain implant could be used to fight cancer: "Sci-fi is the word that everyone goes to, but it’s not. This is the future we’re living in now." "It’s a brain interface that we use in brain cancer. We leave it behind at time of surgery. It allows us to control tumors, and it allows us to record the electrical activity from them to predict what’s happening inside the body." "It’s a tiny little glass implant the size of your fingertip, with these thin thread-like leads that come out the front." @coherenceneuro

The Nuclear Company CEO @JonathanWebbKY warns China is winning the nuclear race: "I wanna be clear to everyone in nuclear that might be listening, you’re a friend, you’re an ally. We got one competitor and it’s China, and they’re winning." "This country is gonna build micro, it’s gonna build small, and it’s gonna build large reactors. This site is gonna show the world that we can build big things again, and we can cut costs, we can cut schedule. We won’t compromise on quality or safety." "We will have teams of men and women actively out on this site starting next week doing confirmatory analysis. CSX rail runs to the Port of Norfolk, getting ready for all the materials that’ll be coming in on the rail and on the barge." "We wanna partner with the nuclear community and show the world that not only China can deploy gigawatts of nuclear. We can do it in the US and we’re gonna do it right here in Eastern Kentucky." @TheNuclearCo

The Nuclear Company CEO @JonathanWebbKY reveals why Kentucky coal country beat 1,500 other sites for a massive 6.6 GW nuclear project: "This is our beautiful campus of Prosperity One, about 4,000 acres on the Ohio River." "Growing up in a coal state, seeing a lot of the coal plants shut down, we got a need for power in the region. Behind me, there’s the 765 kV line. It’s the largest transmission line in the country, and it connects us to PJM, which is the entire Northeast. And the Ohio River’s got about six times the amount of water we would need for the reactors." "We’ve looked at about a dozen states, met with governors, and looked at about 1,500 properties. Today’s the day that we’ve officially announced the project to the world." @TheNuclearCo

Hamlet CEO @subes01 reveals why the most important political fights over American cities happen in meetings almost nobody watches: "Every important fight about cities is happening right now in a council chamber. If you’re not following city councils, planning commissions, and school boards, you’re missing the plot when it comes to politics." "I ran for city council. Nobody shows up, but everybody cares." "A vast majority of American cities had to go online for COVID and started recording those meetings. The combination of having AI available to us now, plus recorded meetings, made it possible to understand how cities work in a way that previously was not possible." @myhamletinc

Topos Bio CEO Ryan Zarcone explains why designing drugs for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's is almost impossible for humans, but a perfect problem for AI: "When a chemist designs a drug for a protein, the model is static. I have this protein, it has a shape, and I’m trying to fill that shape with a drug." "These really dynamic proteins, like those involved in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, don’t have one shape. They have potentially thousands of different shapes that they’re constantly interconverting between, kind of like someone who’s dancing." "That becomes basically impossible when you tell a human, design something for these thousand things at the same time. It’s really only been possible to start doing that with AI." @ToposBio

.@jamespoulos argues that people should get a share of AI profits even if they never use AI: "So few people have engaged with AI at all beyond a chatbot level. People are worried that this is just gonna be a backdoor to serfdom." "It is not necessary for a person sitting on a board to use the product of the company. You could think of an arrangement where large numbers of people are stakeholders in these entities, not obliged to use the product, not gonna receive a lower number of credits if your usage is down." "Super concentrated finances tend to result in super concentrated political systems. Tyranny bad, autocracy bad, fill in the blank."

.@jamespoulos explains why letting AI take over the entire economy could turn UBI into a trap: "It’s always nice to put the money in the collection plate because you want to and you can, rather than because you’re afraid that your neighbors are gonna hate you if you don’t." "Keeping it that way is definitely going to involve keeping certain elements of socioeconomic life distinctively human. It’s one thing to be banning superintelligence or whatever. It’s another thing to let the humans human. It’s a good hedge against all kinds of weirdness" "We have a large country, thank God. Lots of room to conduct these experiments."