Top News | Amodei heads to the White House: Anthropic chief Dario Amodei reportedly met on Friday with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, in a promising sign that there may be movement in the company’s stand-off with the Pentagon. (Alert readers will recall that Anthropic was uneasy with some of the US military’s planned applications of their technology, leading to a threatened “supply chain risk” designation for the AI giant. This is currently being battled out in courtrooms.) The rumors about Anthropic’s powerful new model Mythos, which allegedly has devastating potential consequences for cryptography and system security, may be responsible for the cooldown. The government’s intelligence communities are eager to get their hands on the model and start planning for how to defend against threats from next-generation hackers and other international bad actors. Charles Schwab debuts crypto investment product: The storied brokerage FINALLY introduced Schwab Crypto, a long-awaited portal for making bitcoin and ether trades. Apps like Robinhood have long offered stock and crypto investing side by side, but to a relatively younger and more tech-savvy crowd. A conventional broker wading into crypto trading opens up the market to a vast new audience. (For some perspective, Schwab controls roughly $11 trillion in client assets, compared to Robinhood’s $324 billion as of last year.) Many of Schwab’s more conventional rivals — including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Fidelity Investments — have also been slowly exploring the crypto markets; Fidelity launched their crypto trading app in 2023. Bluesky DDoS attack: Blueskiers having trouble accessing the social media app this week weren’t just imagining things. The Sky’s Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang confirmed that they’ve been experiencing an ongoing “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” which kicked off on Wednesday evening. (This basically means someone is sending them a ton of “junk” traffic, with the goal of overwhelming the system and taking the service down.) The app insists that no one’s private data has been compromised, but did not provide any kind of estimate on when the problems might be resolved.
| TWiST 500 | In just a few years, advanced and intelligent robots have jumped from essentially sci-fi into a daily reality. Unitree’s $6,000 R1s are already being shipped. Just this week, we had 1X Technologies CEO Bernt Børnich on our show to talk about designing NEO, the cuddly safety-first humonoid robot specifically designed for domestic work, and bringing him to actual customers by the end of this year. | Another exciting startup in this space is San Francisco’s Physical Intelligence. But rather than designing the actual robots themselves, PI develops the AI models that train automatons to perform helpful real-world tasks in 3D space. | The company published new research this week indicating that their latest model — π0.7 — has demonstrated what’s called “compositional generalization.” That means it can combine skills it already learned in different contexts and apply them to brand new tasks. This could be a major leap forward if we want to advance robots from needing task-specific training to a more generalized problem-solving approach. | Teaching your robot how to perform every discrete task around your home sounds taxing and time-consuming. π0.7 points to a future in which AI gives robots the ability to learn by doing. For example, the Physical Intelligence team showed the model an air fryer. Though its training data set only included a few encounters with air fryers in the past, with no actual trial runs or uses of the appliance, the model was able to deduce the basics on how air fryers work all on its own. | The team stressed to TechCrunch that the model still has serious limitations, and can’t currently execute complex multi-step tasks on its own. Despite recognizing an air fryer and grokking the basics about it, the model still needed some coaching to use it effectively. Still, PI is on the path toward developing a system for training robots to “think” for themselves, which will be essential if they’re going to be true helpers and collaborators in the future. – Lon | A message from IM8 Health | Start feeling like your best self every day. Go to IM8health.com/twist and use the code TWiST to get a free welcome kit, five free travel sachets, and 10% off your order. | This Week in Startups | E2276: Jason and Lon kick off the show with Albert and Boris for Nanogram, an app that’s essentially TikTok for mobile games. People create casual mini-games with AI and then share them on an endlessly scrolling feed. It’s pretty addictive! Then, Alex chats with 1X Technologies CEO Bernt Børnich about building NEO, a safety-first 66-lb humanoid robot designed specifically for the home. Find out why Bernt says households are an even trickier workspace for robots than a factory floor or warehouse. | E2275: Stillcore Capital partner Mark Jeffrey joins the show once more to pick through the Templar/Covenant-72B scandal and look ahead at how the Bittensor community can prevent future (alleged!) rug pulls. They’re joined by subnet owners Ken Miyachi (of BitMind) and Will Squires & Steffan Cruz (of MacroCosmos) for a full rundown on the specific powers wielded by subnet owners, how investors should divvy up their TAO vs. Alpha Token purchases, and much much more. | E2274: It’s the (alleged) rug pull threatening to tear the Bittensor community apart! Jason and Alex are discussing the highly-visible Templar subnet, which had trained the massive Convenant-72B AI model using an innovative, decentralized approach. But when CEO Sam Dare (allegedly!) sold off $10 million of subnet tokens, he threatened the project’s future, and caused the largest single-day drop in the price of TAO ever. What really happened? Who’s in the wrong? And how can the Bittensor ecosystem prevent this from happening again? We’re digging in on a new TWiST. | TWiST Partner Offers | Grasshopper Bank: Time is money. Don’t waste either. Go to grasshopper.bank/twist and get an exclusive $500 cash bonus just for opening an account Render: Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one cloud platform, Render. Go to render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500-$100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and backers. Northwest Registered Agent: Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist.
| LAUNCH Accelerator 36! | Our 36th LAUNCH Accelerator cohort has kicked off. If you’re an early stage investor and want to take a look at this cohort first-hand during an exclusive pitch session, please email bianca@launch.co! | Our Favorite Tool | If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! | SF Live-Work Space Now Available | Need a flexible living and working environment in San Francisco? This thoughtfully designed loft-style residence at 787 Bryant St., the heart of the vibrant SOMA district and the city’s creative hub, is now available for rent or purchase. Check the listing for more details. | The TWiST500 newsletter is the new, updated, and improved TWiST Ticker. |
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