Awe – inspiring April

Quantum batteries

The second half of April was moonshot season at The Knowledge Society (a year – long science and tech program I am taking part in). The aim of the moonshot is to fully flesh out the idea for an innovative, radical Start-up which solves any major global problem 10x better than all existing solutions. We took inspiration from ‘Google X – The Moonshot factory’, using their mindsets and frameworks to guide our projects from start to completion. The ideal recipe for a moonshot idea, according to Google X involves 3 key ingredients:

·       Major global problem – One that transcends national borders and has a significant negative impact on the lives of millions of people

·       Radical solution – Innovative and original, ideally based on first principles and Root cause analysis, with a notable USP from all existing solutions currently in the market

·       Breakthrough technology – Because, more often than not, that is the key to solving a global problem 10x or even 100x better than today’s solutions

My team worked on the business plan for a Start-up called Kvante, which would develop and sell quantum batteries in the market as soon as 2027. I won’t dive into the specifics here, but at Kvante, our vision is to accelerate the world’s transition to clean and green energy by solving the notorious energy storage problem caused by the intermittent and unreliable nature of sources like wind and solar energy. We specifically focused on the Electric Vehicle sector, because our quantum batteries (through breakthrough technologies involving qubits and quantum physics) could bring the charging time for Electric Vehicles down from 10 hours (the current amount of time required to charge your average Tesla) to just 3 minutes. If you do the math, that is not just 10x, but 200x faster charging speeds for Electric Vehicles if we can develop cheap and fully functional quantum batteries that can compete aggressively with lithium-ion batteries (the current industry leader for energy storage of renewables). At least to our group, that magnitude of improvement was absolutely wild, hence we got to work on the quantum battery right away.

I would love to share across the biggest ‘AHA moment’ I had through the process of building our moonshot company:

Leverage ChatGpt as a tool for creative idea generation. Believe it or not, the idea of a quantum battery came not from a website, article or research paper, but rather by asking ChatGpt for potential, 10x moonshot ideas in the energy storage space. ChatGpt helped our team tremendously with certain forecasts, creative thought experiments and radical ideas – information that we would never have found on the internet, specifically because quantum batteries are a very nascent technology with very few people currently working on their development. We as a team are indebted to Sam Altman and all the wonderful individuals at OpenAI for their efforts – our moonshot company would literally have never come into existence had it not been for your remarkable AI language model.    

Building a Machine Learning Poetry Generator with ChatGpt on the backend

This month, I gritted my teeth and dove right into the process of building projects in the AI/ML space. I wanted to start somewhere simple, with a project relevant to my personal life. Being a published author, what would I not be willing to part with for a creative writing assistant hyper – personal and tailored to my unique writing style? And not just any ordinary assistant, an assistant with access to a world of data, stories, and an intelligent creative imagination of its very own. A writing assistant that will always have an idea when I am falling short, that can stretch my imagination as I develop science fiction worlds with radical technologies and magical creatures, and that can truly build on top of any phrase, sentence, chapter or idea that I give it, like the smartest assistant on the planet, that knows exactly how you think and generate new ideas.

I followed along with this project on Buildspace, understanding the code on a deep level, before typing it down for myself. My top takeaway from this entire project, which I expected to take only 2 days but rather took me more than 2 weeks is this:     

Even more than building logic, reasoning and problem-solving skills, the beauty of learning to code is that it builds grit and patience. Not everyone needs to be a professional programmer who can develop world – class applications, websites and games, but all of us, in both our personal and professional lives, could use a little more perseverance and patience, me in particular. Being an impatient person myself, who gives up easily at the first sign of hardship or initial failure, I was more proud of myself for simply finishing the project over the actual output of the ML writing assistant. I struggled for days on end with simple bugs, software incompatibility issues and the all too familiar dilemma of ‘correct code, wrong output’ which all of us beginner coders can relate to so well. But through a combination of Chat-gpt, endless calls to my technical friends and sometimes, just a 30-minute break from the project, I was able to show my antifragility and push through to completion. I am now more motivated than ever to learn programming skills not only for the skillset itself, but because this is my new best strategy for building patience and antifragility, which I believe are 2 mindsets that every Unicorn person must embody.

Note: If you are unfamiliar with the term ‘Unicorn person’, it comes from the idea of a ‘Unicorn company’, which is valued at over $1 billion. Similarly, a ‘Unicorn person’ is an individual who is able to impact more than 1 billion people by solving pressing global problems. Much gratitude to my TKS directors, Andres and Steven for first introducing me to the term.     

Breakthrough technologies

This month, I set a target for myself to learn about 10 breakthrough technologies that had the potential to revolutionize any sector/field. It was an eye-opening and transformative experience. I would spend 2-3 hours each day watching videos, podcasts, reading articles and research papers to truly understand how a technology worked on a deeper level (beyond all the surface level jargon and fluff) and more importantly, what were the real-world applications of such technologies to solve real world problems. The technologies I covered this month included:

·      Stem cells

·      Gene editing

·      Biometrics

·      Biomimicry

·      Solar energy

·      Robotics

·      Internet of Things

·      Connectomics

·      3D printing

·      Space technology   

My top reflection from hearing scores of PHDs, researchers, university students, and scientists explain super technical topics was this: That the people who understood the topic at the deepest, most fundamental level (using first principles) were the ones whose explanations were most succinct, relatable and simplistic.    

Explaining things using jargon, buzzwords and complex diagrams is easy, but it shows a lack of deep understanding. On the other hand, explaining things with simplicity and minimalism is what differentiates the experts from the amateurs.   

Those who understood a technology on a deeper level were able to illustrate how the tech worked using simple real – world analogies and metaphors. They were also able to give a simplistic definition for jargon and subject – specific lexicon, rather than explaining one buzzword using 10 more buzzwords. They were able to clearly explain how a breakthrough technology was 10 or 20x better than current day solutions using simplistic and powerful comparisons and tables – the status quo vs. the breakthrough technology on multiple criteria such as cost, efficiency, lifespan, etc.    

We all will someday choose to specialize and go deep into a topic/field of our passion and learn scores of buzzwords and technical jargon which will be attractive at first, because it makes us sounds ‘super legit’. However, when someone walks up to us at a dinner party or in a conference and asks us to explain what we do for a living, we have to be able to simplify quantum physics topics to the level of understanding of an investor who may not have taken a physics lesson since 8^th grade. There is no magic recipe for this. Practice is key as well as borrowed learning from experts in the field whose explanations we admire and would like to borrow. The bottom line is: if we can answer the question, ‘What do you do?’ with impact and simplicity, it will surely open up a myriad of new doors in our lives.   

Book of the month:

Dale shares insights from decades of personal and professional experience to present a systematic approach to decision making and problem solving, emphasising the importance of radical transparency and embracing failure and pain as enablers of personal growth, along with fostering a culture of open feedback and embracing reality in any organisation.       

Movies of the month:

• A Separation (2011) - Ashgar Farhadi

• Invictus (2009) - Clint Eastwood

• Air (2023) - Ben Affleck

• Gone girl (2014) - David Fincher

• Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) - Aaron Sorkin

• Lion (2016) - Garth Davis

• The Walk (2015) - Robert Zebeckis

• There will be blood (2007) - Paul Thomas Anderson

• Black Swan (2010) - Darren Aronofsky

• The Social Network (2010) - David Fincher

Thank you for your time and I hope you enjoyed reading! Please subscribe to my monthly newsletter if you would like to stay updated about my monthly progress! Until then, Au revoir!