Black Hole Prof, won't you come, and help AI to train...

Top News

• OpenAI hires theoretical physicist: Your favorite TWiST 500 company and mine brought in celebrated theoretical physicist Alex Lupsasca as the first major hire for its “OpenAI for Science” initiative. (He’ll also keep his current position at Vanderbilt University.) The team will be led by OpenAI’s Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil, and plans to use the company’s models for deeper scientific inquiries in fields like math and physics, leveling up their ability to tackle multi-step reasoning and problem solving. While other AI heavyweights — like Google’s DeepMind — have been directly applying their models to rigorous scientific inquiries, OpenAI has largely made its name on consumer-friendly applications like ChatGPT and the Sora app. It seems they’re eager to not be completely left behind as rivals start making a notable impact on real-world science.

• Can AI feel your pain? An intriguing long read from the MIT Technology Review examines how AI might one day be used to aid doctors and healthcare workers specifically around pain management. The piece highlights an Australian smartphone app called PainChek, which scans patients’ faces looking for microscopic muscle movements, then uses them to assign them a “pain score.” It’s apparently a major improvement over the old analog systems for assessing a patient’s pain, which are highly subjective, prone to caregiver bias, and often fall back on vague adjectives like “burning,” “stabbing,” and “throbbing,” or simple number scales that don’t capture nuance.

• Medal spins out research lab: The company’s popular tool helps fans capture, upload and share clips of themselves playing their favorite video games. They’ve clearly found solid product market fit; their library now consists of more than 2 billion videos posted by over 10 million monthly active users. That collection contains so much useful data, in fact, that Medal has spun out a frontier AI research lab called General Intuition, which will use the clips to train AI agents. Specifically, General Intuition is pursuing “spatial-temporal reasoning,” and will use clips from video games to teach AI models how various objects move through space and time. The new company has raised over $133 million in seed funding, led by Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst.

TWiST 500

We’ve got a trio of hot news stories from three more TWiST 500 companies so let’s waste no more time…

• Flock Safety: The surveillance tech startup — which develops both security hardware and software for police, neighborhood watch associations, and private homeowners — introduced Alpha, a “first responder drone” designed to help law enforcement agencies reach incidents faster and begin identifying suspects. These kinds of security drones already exist in big numbers, but they are primarily manufactured in China. Flock’s aiming to appeal to agencies looking to move their drone production back home without sacrificing accuracy or legal compliance.

• Deel: The HR and payroll platform is still locked in a legal battle against rival Rippling over alleged corporate espionage, but by most other metrics, they’re thriving. Deel reports that they’ve now surpassed $1 billion in ARR, and brought in more than $100 million in revenue in September alone. They’re now serving over 35,000 customers, employing over 1.5 million workers in 150 countries. Those are appealing enough numbers to overlook some spying allegations here and there, so Deel announced a new $300 million Series E this week, led by Ribbit Capital and Andreessen Horowtiz.

• Kraken: The large crypto exchange picked up Small Exchange, a futures market, from IG Group for a tidy $32.5 million in cash and $67.5 million in Payward stock. (That’s their parent company.) IG and Kraken also announced a new partnership agreement. The deal allows Kraken to operate as a designated contract market (DCM) in the US, allowing it to potentially offer its own derivatives rather than routing these contracts through third parties. (Kraken already has these permissions across the UK and Europe.) – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2193: On a special edition of TWiST, Jason sits down for a 90-minute 1-on-1 chat with long-time friend and legendary venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, as part of a wide-ranging conversation in the AI hype cycle, the significance of “neural networks” in nature, the return of nuclear power, the absurdity of discussions around “AI safety,” and much much more.

E2192: Jason is joined by his favorite new guest, Eric Glyman of Ramp, who has out for the whole show. Together with co-host Alex, they discuss Ramp’s mission to help startups spend LESS money, and delve into the payment company’s treasure trove of insightful business data. PLUS some pressing questions from founders, Jason’s favorite startup accelerators, why unemployment has spiked among male college grads, and much more.

E2191: No Alex today, so Jason and Lon are checking out the Figure 03 demo, and debating whether or not you’ll ever have a full-sized humanoid robot taking care of your day-to-day chores. PLUS President Trump’s latest trade war triggers panic in the markets, a look at ChatGPT’s new integrations, and why Mark Cuban and Jake Paul are in every other Sora app video.

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