Links and short notes, 2026-01-26
The wisdom of Vitalik, Voices from 2099, ultrasound BCI, preventative MRIs, a browser written by AI, and much, much more
Once again it’s been too long and this digest is too big. Feel free to skim and skip around, guilt-free, I give you permission. I try to put the more important and timely stuff at the top.
Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, or Farcaster.
Contents
Progress in Medicine, a career exploration summer program for high schoolers
From Progress Conference 2025
My writing
Jobs
Fellowships & workshops
Fundraising
New publications and issues
Queries
Announcements
For paid subscribers:
From Vitalik
Other top links
Voices from 2099
Jared Isaacman sworn in as head of NASA
Whole-body MRI screening?
AI does social science research
AI writes a browser
AI does lots of other things
AI could do even more things
AI and the economic future
AI: more models and papers
AI discourse
Waymo
Health/bio
Energy & manufacturing
Housing
Other links and short notes
Politics
Gratitude
New Horizon photographs Pluto’s mountains
Charts
Quotes
Progress in Medicine, a career exploration summer program for high schoolers
Reminder that applications are open for Progress in Medicine, a summer career exploration program for high school students:
People today live longer, healthier, and less painful lives than ever before. Why? Who made those changes possible? Can we keep this going? And could you play a part?
Discover careers in medicine, biology, and related fields while developing practical tools and strategies for building a meaningful life and career— learning how to find mentors, identify your values, and build a career you love that drives the world forward.
Join a webinar to learn more on February 3. Or simply apply today! Many talented, ambitious teens have applied, and we’re already starting interviews. Priority deadline: February 8th.
From Progress Conference 2025
A few more batches of video:
American Dynamism: Progress begins at home. New industrial paradigms, anti-fragile and future-proof regulation, the case for hardtech, the grid as the bottleneck, and a call for US innovation in shipbuilding: the American Dynamism talks, and some of the writing published afterwards
Culture: Inspiring progress in stories and institutions. How do you create a culture of progress? What is it—and why does it matter? Jerusalem Demsas, Virginia Postrel, Charles C. Mann, Alexander Berger, Dan Wang in discussion with Kmele Foster, and I shared our thoughts
My writing
My essay series The Techno-Humanist Manifesto has concluded, and you can read the whole thing online. I’m pleased to announce that the series will be revised for publication as a book from MIT Press (expected early 2027)!
2025 in review. My annual update, including my reading highlights
How to tame a complex system. Nature is a complex system, I am told, and therefore unpredictable, uncontrollable, unruly. I think this is true but irrelevant: we can master nature in the ways that matter
Jobs
IFP is hiring an editor: “seeking a curious, entrepreneurial, and opinionated lover of writing. … You’ll partner with our policy experts to turn their drafts into pieces that change minds across DC. You’ll coach both new and experienced writers to become better communicators. You’ll also innovate on our systems to help the team consistently ship great products.” (via @rSanti97)
OpenAI is hiring a Head of Preparedness: “If you want to help the world figure out how to enable cybersecurity defenders with cutting edge capabilities while ensuring attackers can’t use them for harm, ideally by making all systems more secure, and similarly for how we release biological capabilities and even gain confidence in the safety of running systems that can self-improve, please consider applying. This will be a stressful job and you’ll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately” (@sama)
Anthropic is hiring someone to work with Holden Karnofsky on his projects, “in particular re Anthropic’s ‘Responsible Scaling Policy’. Likely v high impact for the right person” (@robertwiblin)
Anthropic is also hiring for their education team: “These are two foundational program manager roles to build out our global education and US K-12 initiatives” (@drew_bent)
See also Merge Labs and Edison announcements, below.
Fellowships & workshops
MATS 10.0 (Machine Learning Alignment & Theory Scholars): “Come work with Seth Donoughe and me this summer on AI-biosecurity! We will be mentoring projects on threat models, frontier evaluations, and technical safeguards.” (@lucafrighetti)
Beyond the Ivory Tower, via Joseph Fridman: “an intensive two-day writing workshop for academics, taught by James Ryerson, a longtime editor at the New York Times. … Our alumni have published hundreds of pieces in outlets from the Atlantic to Aeon to the Wall Street Journal. … I think historians and economists of technology and innovation would be a great fit.” Apply by March 1
Fundraising
Nonprofits that would make good use of your money:
Lightcone Infrastructure: “We build beautiful things for truth-seeking and world-saving. We run LessWrong, Lighthaven, Inkhaven, designed AI-2027, and so many more things. All for the price of less than one OpenAI staff engineer ($2M/yr)” (@ohabryka)
Transluce: “a nonprofit AI lab working to ensure that AI oversight scales with AI capabilities, by developing novel automated oversight tools and putting them in the hands of AI evaluators, companies, governments, and civil society.” OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba calls them “one of the strongest external AI safety orgs—on par with METR and Apollo.” (@woj_zaremba)
New publications and issues
Works in Progress, Issue 21. The triumph of logical English; a measure of monopoly that actually works; getting artificial gravity in space with current tech; why the developing world needs more roads; and more. (via @s8mb)
Abundance and Growth Blog, from Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy). Writers include Matt Clancy, Saloni Dattani, and Dylan Matthews (via @mattsclancy)
Stefan Schubert launches The Update, “a newsletter in the spirit of my tweets.” (@StefanFSchubert) Stefan is the most anti-hype, anti-BS account in my timeline
Queries
“Who is best to read / follow for advice on using AI e.g. Claude Code? especially interested in: productivity and todo wrangling (especially for the distractable); research assistance; editing; learning” (@rgblong)
Announcements
Merge Labs launches, “a research lab with the long-term mission of bridging biological and artificial intelligence … by developing fundamentally new approaches to brain-computer interfaces that interact with the brain at high bandwidth, integrate with advanced AI, and are ultimately safe and accessible for anyone” (via @SumnerLN). SamA is listed as a co-founder. Merge grew out of the Forest Labs FRO; Convergent Research notes that the tech is ultrasound-based and that they’ve raised over $250M. (!) And of course, they’re hiring
Edison, the for-profit spinout of Future House, has raised $70M: “we are integrating AI Scientists into the full stack of research, from basic discovery to clinical trials. We want cures for all diseases by mid-century.” They are hiring software engineers, AI researchers, scientists, and business operators. ”Our goal is to accelerate science writ large.” (@SGRodriques)
Science Corp. announces Vessel (WIRED). Vessel is “a project focused on rethinking perfusion from the ground up, extending how long life can be sustained, and expanding what’s possible in transplantation and critical care. Life-support technologies like ECMO can keep patients alive when the heart or lungs fail, but they aren’t designed for long-term use. Vessel exists to close the gap between what perfusion technology is fundamentally capable of and how it is deployed in daily practice.” (@ScienceCorp_)
Fuse Energy raises a $70M Series B. Honestly hard to figure out exactly what they do, but it seems to involve deploying solar and batteries, and maybe later doing fuel synthesis and fusion? Anyway I liked this from (presumably) one of the founders: “Energy is the fundamental source for human progress. But for the last 30 years, we’ve been told that the future requires sacrifice ‘use less, be less, restrict yourself’. No one should have to trade a good life today for the chance of a better tomorrow.” (@alanchanguk)
Confer is a new LLM app from Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike, where your conversations are end-to-end encrypted. Confer goes to impressive lengths to ensure that the LLM server doesn’t, e.g., exfiltrate your data somewhere. The entire server image is signed and is auditable on a public ledger. The client verifies the signature before chatting. The server also runs in a VM that is isolated from its host at the hardware level.
Gordian Bio announces “a research collaboration with Pfizer to apply Gordian’s in vivo mosaic screening platform to obesity target discovery.” (@GordianBio) Story in Business Wire
