572: Daniel Ek + German Defensetech Helsing, Zuck + Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross, Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI GPT-5, TerraPower, Waymo & Gemini, Midjourney, and Mindhunter
“supergroups rarely work"
Money is fungible, talent is not.
—Sebastian Mallaby
🎸🛒📦📭 Guitars are kind of like cars.
Everyone has their favorite brand, model, shape, and color.
It depends on what you grew up on, what your heroes had, and what you need it for: are you hauling groceries or cinder blocks? Playing B.B. King or Gojira?…
Some people just luuuv Les Pauls, others Stratocasters. Some people are into hollowbodies, Explorers, weird spiky BC Rich shredders, baritones, or 7- or 8-string monsters.
It’s all good. When it comes to guitars, I’m pretty omnivorous.
The model in the photo above is the one I’m *this close* to ordering (it’s not in stock, so it’ll take months 🥺).
It’s an ESP LTD MH-1000 ‘Charcoal Burst’.
I’m already planning to get it modified so the volume knob is push-pull and can activate the single coil mode on the Fishman Fluence active pickups for maximum versatility (From the factory, the tone knob is push-pull for Voice 2 — the passive, lower-gain option — but Voice 3, the single-coil mode, isn’t wired up out of the box).
At some point, I’ll explain how the Evertune bridge works, because it’s an extremely clever piece of analog engineering. You tune the guitar once, and then, no matter how hard you play, or how wild the swings in temperature or humidity, it stays in tune for months.
It’s basically a self-correcting mechanism that maintains tuning homeostasis. Once I learned about it, I couldn’t resist. It’s so clever that I wanted one even though it’s overkill for my needs (I’m not exactly touring with Meshuggah anytime soon).
(If you’re curious, this video gives a good overview of how it works.)
🛀💭🏭 A lot of people build their own Berkshire Hathaway…
…but they end up with the pre-Buffett version of the company! 😅
💵📚📺🎬🎧🎶 Many of the best things in life are *very* underpriced compared to the value they bring…
The best books, TV shows, films, music, podcasts… even Substacks!
What’s interesting is that all this value is out there, just waiting to be discovered.
Gold is lying on the ground, waiting for you to pick it up.
With so many out there, the odds that you’ve already found all the ones that truly resonate with you and can stop exploring are basically zero.
In other words: Your next favorite thing is out there.
You just haven’t found it yet.
🏦 💰 Business & Investing 💳 💴
🇩🇪💰🚁 German Defensetech Startup Helsing Raises €600m with Spotify Founder & CEO Daniel Ek Leading the Round
The European defense sector has been on fire (I mean, in a good way) lately. Rheinmetall AG, still the coolest defense company name out there (🤘), is up 184% YTD and 273% since November 4th, 2024 📈🚀
Helsing is one of the newer entrants, a kind of younger Anduril with fewer burritos, more Bratwurst, and double the ümläüts:
Prima Materia, the investment company founded by Ek and early Spotify investor Shakil Khan in 2020, made the first significant investment into Helsing in 2021, months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Now Prima Materia is “doubling down”, Ek told the Financial Times. It is leading the start-up’s latest investment alongside existing backers including Swedish defence group Saab and venture capitalists Lightspeed Ventures, Accel, Plural and General Catalyst.
Daniel Ek is not just a passive investor, he’s also the chairman of Helsing.
The round is for €600m at a €12bn valuation, which makes them one of the five most valuable private tech corps on the continent, and they’re not even 5 years old yet.
That’s pretty impressive considering that Anduril's latest $2.5bn round a few weeks ago valued them at $30.5bn
Helsing is privately held. It was founded in 2021 in Munich by former game-developer Torsten Reil, ex-German MoD official Gundbert Scherf, and machine-learning engineer Niklas Köhler.
The founders have vowed “not to sell the company” and plan to go public.
Part of the raise is to expand into more hardware:
The deal comes as the Munich-based start-up is expanding from its origins in artificial intelligence software to produce its own drones, aircraft and submarines.
Helsing has sold thousands of strike drones, which are manufactured at its southern Germany facility, to Ukraine. They also have contracts with the UK, Germany, and Sweden.
They have a product called Centaur that uses AI to augment existing (and future) fighter jets. They recently tested it with a Swedish plane:
The flights, which took place on May 28th and June 3rd, saw a Gripen E fighter jet give control to Centaur above the Baltic Sea and focused on testing Centaur’s Beyond-Visual-Range (BVR) air combat capabilities. A safety pilot was available to take back control from Centaur at all times. A second, human-controlled, Gripen was airborne to represent Centaur’s opponent. [...]
Once switched on by the Gripen’s pilot, Centaur is entrusted with full machine control to conduct combat manoeuvres in a beyond visual range air-to-air combat scenario. It continuously processes native inputs from Gripen onboard sensors to plan and manoeuvre, and ultimately engages adversaries as well as evades threats.
These guys are shipping! It took “less than 6 months” from conception to live testing.
“Trained at massive scale in Helsing’s RL-Factory, Centaur acquires decades of virtual air combat experience in as little as 24 hours - creating mission-ready AI systems that can handle the real-world dynamics of warfare, as proven by its integration on Saab’s Gripen E. At the current stage of development, Centaur already offers human-level capabilities to control aircraft during high complexity missions and will critically support human pilots to protect our skies against peer adversaries.”Could this be the AlphaGo of aerial dogfighting? 🤔
🤖🧑🔬 Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross: Targets of Zuck’s Expensive A.I. Acqui-Hiring? (Ilya Sutskever said no)💰💰💰
At least Zuck has good taste in people. Nat and Daniel are great:
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