On the GeekWire Gala this week, we frolicked speaking backstage with 5 of this 12 months’s Unusual Thinkers — the inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs who have been chosen in partnership with Larger Seattle Companions for his or her work remodeling industries and the world.
You possibly can hear the complete conversations on this week’s episode of the GeekWire Podcast. As I discussed on the finish, I got here away with an surprising sense of optimism.
Jeff Thornburg of Portal Area Methods spent years constructing rocket engines for Elon Musk at SpaceX and Paul Allen at Stratolaunch. Now he and his group are reviving a NASA idea from a long time in the past: spacecraft propelled by centered daylight.
After I requested what the world will seem like “if Portal succeeds,” he made a traditional entrepreneurial pivot: “When we’re profitable,” he stated, “we change into the spine of Earth-Moon logistics.”
From there, he stated, it’s about defending orbits for commerce, supporting human presence on the moon, and finally pushing out to Jupiter’s moons.
[Read the profile.]
Anindya Roy of Lila Biologics is utilizing AI to design proteins from scratch — molecules which have by no means existed in nature — to combat most cancers. He educated in David Baker’s Nobel Prize-winning lab at UW, so he noticed the earlier than and after of machine studying’s impression on the sector.
Earlier than: success charges beneath 1%, ordering tons of of hundreds of designs to seek out one which labored. Now: 5-20% success charges, ordering just a few hundred designs to discover a drug candidate.
“In the event you advised me a few years in the past that we will design an antibody from a pc, I might not imagine you,” he stated.
[Read the profile.]
Jay Graber of Bluesky runs the decentralized social community that has change into a number one various to X. However whereas most tech CEOs construct moats, she and her group are constructing a protocol designed to assist customers depart.
She talks about Bluesky and the underlying AT Protocol as a “collective organism,” and describes her function as guiding and stewarding the ecosystem fairly than controlling it.
The trade and the world can be higher off, she says, if leaders would take into consideration their function “extra as guides and stewards, fairly than simply dictators or emperors as they prefer to fashion themselves.”
[Read the profile.]
Kiana Ehsani of Vercept got here to Seattle from Iran for her PhD, spent 4 years on the Allen Institute for AI, and is now competing with OpenAI and Google within the AI agent house with a fraction of their sources.
The final word imaginative and prescient is to assist folks transfer past mouse, keyboard, and touchscreen, letting them work together with computer systems the best way they’d discuss to a coworker.
AI brokers are nonetheless early, she cautions. “Consider ChatGPT three years in the past. Don’t consider it immediately.” Her recommendation for getting began with AI brokers: “Begin small, begin with easy duties that you just don’t need to do, after which slowly construct on prime of it to see the magic.”
[Read the profile.]
Brian Pinkard of Aquagga is tackling without end chemical compounds, the PFAS compounds which have unfold by our water, meals chain, and bloodstreams. The trade normal is to filter them out after which landfill or incinerate the waste, approaches that don’t really remedy the issue and might merely transfer it elsewhere.
Aquagga makes use of know-how initially designed to destroy chemical weapons to interrupt PFAS down into inert salts below excessive warmth and strain. Pinkard didn’t imagine it was doable till he noticed the information. “I’m a skeptic, I’m cynical, I’m a scientist,” he stated. “I needed to see proof.”
His greater imaginative and prescient is to rework hazardous waste processing totally. Right now, large volumes of wastewater are trucked to incinerators and burned — which he calls “thermodynamic madness.”
[Read the profile.]
We’ll communicate on a future episode with our sixth honoree, Chet Kittleson, co-founder and CEO of Tin Can, the startup making WiFi-enabled landline telephones to assist children join with out screens.
Unusual Thinkers is offered in partnership with Larger Seattle Companions.
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Audio modifying by Curt Milton.
