Sonnet 5 Drops, Fable 5 Will Return & Fusion’s First Plant Gets Licensed W/ Philip Johnston | #268
TL;DR
Experts systematically underestimate exponential growth: Charts show solar, EVs, and batteries all grew exponentially while experts projected linear growth. The panel notes that experts are incentivized to predict stasis because disruption makes them irrelevant.
Chinese robots hitting commodity pricing: Unitree's R1 humanoid sells for $4,900, the price of a cheap used car. The value layer shifts to software and apps, creating a Raspberry Pi moment for robotics entrepreneurs.
Helion cleared the first fusion regulatory hurdle: The Sam Altman-backed company secured Washington state approvals for its 50-megawatt fusion plant, targeting 2028 to supply Microsoft. Unlike tokamak designs, Helion directly recovers energy from plasma using magnetic fields.
AI read 2,000-year-old scrolls from Vesuvius: The $1.8M Vesuvius Challenge was won using AI to unroll and read carbonized papyrus scrolls, recovering 22 columns of ancient Greek text. Computational archaeology could eventually reconstruct Earth's history at scale.
Fable 5 went offline for 15 days: The US government pulled Anthropic's flagship model for national security review. Stripe reported Fable 5 overhauled 50 million lines of code in a single day, work that would have taken engineers months.
Orbital data centers are already running: Starcloud launched NVIDIA H100 GPUs on Falcon 9, trained nanoGPT in space, and ran Doom. CEO Philip Johnston says break-even launch cost for space compute is $500/kg versus $50/kg for space-based solar power.
Summary
A $4,900 humanoid robot from China, the first fusion power plant cleared regulatory approval, and AI just read carbonized scrolls buried by Mount Vesuvius 2,000 years ago. The panel digs into why experts chronically underestimate exponential growth, from solar to EVs to robotics, while Starcloud's Philip Johnston explains why 99% of compute will eventually run in orbit.
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