• Partnering With Flapping Airplanes Building the “young person’s AGI lab” to unlock data efficient models, which we believe is the bottleneck to laddering up the next rung of AI intelligence Sometimes you meet a founder who is so good that you want to back them no matter what they are working on. • Just as rarely, you meet a company whose vision is so singular, it feels both inevitable and differentiated at the same time. • When I first sat down with Ben and Asher Spector to discussFlapping Airplanes, I felt both of these to be true at once. • Ben is a founder of Prod, which has quickly become one of the most powerful talent incubators in Silicon Valley. • Asher, one year Ben’s senior, is a former debate champion turned Stanford statistics Ph.D. • The brothers have an eye for raw talent, and aged 25 and 26 respectively, they are building the “young person’s AGI lab.” Their co-founder Aidan Smith is a former founder and Thiel fellow who worked at Neuralink for three years while in college at Georgia Tech.
Article Summaries:
- Flapping Airplanes, a new “young person’s AGI lab,” was founded by Ben and Asher Spector-talent incubator leaders-and Aidan Smith, a former Neuralink founder. The trio argues that raw, under‑hired talent is key to advancing AI, contrasting the current trend of hiring high‑profile AI experts at any cost. Their focus is on data‑efficient models, addressing the claim that data-not compute-is the current bottleneck for scaling AI. The lab positions itself within the broader debate between scaling‑first and research‑first approaches, aiming to accelerate AGI through long‑term, low‑probability research bets.
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