Technology

Palmer Luckey defense project just crawled out of stealth mode.

Between a flattering new Wired piece and its first few official tweets, the secretive year-old company known as Anduril is stepping into the light. Anduril, based out of Orange County, was founded quietly in June 2017 by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, three former Palantir employees (Matt Grimm, Anduril COO; Trae Stephens, Chairman; Brian Schimpf, CEO) and an early Oculus hardware lead Joe Chen.

While defense contractors typically operate under levels of secrecy uncharacteristic for the tech industry, a degree of exposure is useful for attracting additional investors and painting the project in an attractive light as it pursues government contracts. In late 2017, TechCrunch reported that the company was working on AR and VR for &battlefield awareness,& among other defense applications.

As Wired reports, Anduril calls its bespoke border wall surveillance system &Lattice& and intends for it to undercut the price of traditional border wall proposals by a substantial margin, employing high-tech, low-cost off-the-shelf devices and sensors where a traditional proposal would pour vertical concrete. These sensors are networked together and feed into an AI system that sifts through the data to detect a human presence, highlight it in a green box and send push alerts designed to notify Customs and Border Protection agents in real time.

Anduril is testing the system, in operation since March 2018, on private land in coordination with Texas Rep. Will Hurd and a cattle rancher on the Texas border. At a second site, Anduril is running a pilot program in coordination with DHS and a local border patrol office.

Wired reports that the preliminary system has proven effective: Lattice led to the apprehension of 55 individuals crossing the Texas border and 10 &interceptions& at the San Diego site within the projectinitial 12 days in operation.

Andurilsecond project, known as &Sentry,& is the development of military-style armored autonomous vehicles that can fight fires in California. Apparently MythBusters host Jamie Hyneman is currently developing such a vehicle as a subcontractor for Anduril, working out of Oakland. These vehicles could be controlled remotely and Wired describes the experience of steering the vehicle and firing water cannons as &exactly like playing a video­game.&

Beyond its debut profile, Anduril also made updates to its website, swapping some language, adding founder bios and framing its mission in light of the international arms race toward technological dominance:

Look no further than statements by Chinese and Russian leaders to see their focus on technological dominance. They are devoting massive resources to win this battle for the future, and also recruiting the best tech talent available to this cause.

We must, and will, do the same.

As we noted previously, Anduril has established relationships with the Trump administration through Peter Thiel colleague and Anduril co-founder Stephens (Stephens was involved in the Department of Defense transition with a focus on the procurements process) and Luckey, a vocal supporter of the president. In 2017, Anduril spent $80,000 on lobbying through the prominent firm Invariant and another $60,000 so far in 2018.

Anduril might not fit the Trump administrationtraditional idea of a border wall, but its pilot program results coupled with its ties to the Trump administration certainly won&t hurt its odds of securing a federal border contract.

Every once in a while, you meet an entrepreneur who is both fully present, but also has a head full of dreams. That was my experience meeting and hosting Alex Zhavoronkov, the founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, a few weeks ago in Vienna at the Pioneers conference. There, he gave a presentation on how he is going to defeat aging using a set of deep learning AI tools, and also told me that I am going to live forever because I am young enough to benefit from the tech he is developing.

I am a huge skeptic to be frank (particularly anytime deep learning gets bandied about), but after chatting with him both before and after getting on stage, I can&t preclude the possibility that aging is something that might be within humanity(or at least Zhavoronkov&s) grasp to control.

That belief in the companymission is reflected in a set of twin announcements today. The company announced that it has received a strategic round of financing led by WuXi AppTec, a Chinese integrated R-D services platform, along with Peter Diamandis& BOLD Capital and Pavilion Capital, a subsidiary of Singapore-based Temasek. In addition, the company announced a strategic partnership with WuXi, in which Insilicoinventions will be tested by WuXi. The terms of the round were not disclosed, but Insilico has raised $14 million previously from investors according to Crunchbase.

Insilico Medicine founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov

In order to understand the companytechnology, we need to understand a bit more about how therapeutics are developed. In the classical model used by pharmaceutical companies, scientists in an R-D lab investigate naturally occurring molecules while searching for potential therapeutic properties. When they find a molecule that could be a candidate, they begin a series of tests to determine the treatment efficacy of the molecules (and also to receive FDA approval).

Rather than going forward through the process, Insilico works backwards. The company starts with an end objective — say stopping aging — and then uses a toolbox of deep learning algorithms to devise ideal molecules de novo. Those molecules may not exist anywhere in the world, but can be &manufactured& in the lab.

The key underlying technique for the company is what are known as GANs, or generative adversarial networks with reinforcement learning. At a high-level, GANs include a neural net &generator& that creates new products (in this case, molecules), and a discriminator that classifies the new product. Those neural nets then adapt over time in order to compete against each other more effectively.

GANs have been used to create fake photos that look almost photorealistic, but that no camera has ever taken. Zhavoronkov suggested to me that clinical patient data may one day be manufactured — providing far more data while protecting patient privacy.

While Zhavoronkov has bold dreams about conquering aging, today the company is focused more broadly on creating an inventory of new molecules that could provide new therapeutics, albeit particularly focused on longevity (here is the companyresearch paper on PubMed). Under the companynew strategic partnership, WuXi will then take those new molecules and test them for efficacy in actual clinical settings.

As the company develops its technology, Zhavoronkov wants to offer a &longevity-as-a-service& engine that could power global longevity research using deep learning. That means providing a platform for researchers to find new molecules, identify which ones might be most promising as therapeutics, and then set them up for clinical trials to be used in actual clinical practice.

While Zhavoronkov is CEO, he is first a researcher. He has published extensively on his and his teamdiscoveries while also leading a lab of 52 researchers. The hope is that the basic research that the team is producing can be commercially translated into industry, and ultimately, purchased by the largest pharmaceutical giants in the world.

It may be early days, but Zhavoronkov is deeply ambitious about Insilicopotential to halt aging. Even if those dreams are difficult to accomplish, the technology built along the way could radically change our drug pipeline, and that will provide relief for all kinds of diseases.

Earlier today, news broke that Bozoma Saint John is leaving her position as chief brand officer at Uber to head over to Endeavor. At Endeavor, an entertainment industry behemoth, Saint John will serve as chief marketing officer, working across all of Endeavorportfolio companies, which includes William Morris Endeavor and IMG.

I had the chance to catch up with Saint John for a little bit over the phone to learn more about why she left. For starters, ¬hing horrible or terrible happened,& she told me in response to a question about if something bad caused her to leave. &I am very thankful for that because we&ve had enough of those stories. We don&t want any more of that.&

Now that we&ve gotten that out of the way, Saint John told me she wasn&t looking to leave Uber.Instead, Endeavor reached out to her and she didn&t want to pass up this opportunity to change the narrative around diversity and inclusion.

&Sometimes people think [pop culture] is superficial,& she told me. &These are where the stories that are being told are created. If we can help influence that, then thatso much better for the entire narrative of what we need to get across.&

What we need to get across, she said, is &all the deep stuff,& like diversity, inclusion and sexual harassment.

&These are all pop culture issues,& she said. &Itlike, how can all of those things work in concert to make sure the narrative is told in a way that is powerful.&

While Saint John felt the work she was doing at Uber was important, there were other things Uber needed to take care of before she could be most impactful, she said. For example, Uber still has work to do around corporate culture, she said. As you all may remember, Uber had a horrific 2017, with reports of sexual harassment, mismanagement and an overall toxic culture. While Uber has taken some steps in the right direction, there is still work to be done, Saint John said.

&I&m not saying the corporate culture has righted itself 100 percent,& she said. &Or itwhere it needs to be today. It isn&t. Therestill a lot to be done in that regard.&

She went on to say that she never wanted to use Ubersmall wins around human resources and culture as marketing. Instead, it needed to be done because it was the right thing to do — not just to make Uber look good. Unfortunately, that left Saint John with &a huge gaping hole,& she said.

At Uber, Saint John said she had some personal work wins — like the partnership with LeBron James and Kevin Durant. She pointed to how powerful it was when James spoke about being a black man in America.

&I do feel very good about the stuff I was able to do there, but I know I&ll be able to do much more impactful work right now at Endeavor,& Saint John said.

As CMO at Endeavor, Saint John said she envisions being able to impact storytelling in a new type of way. And as industries, including Hollywood, battle with issues around sexual harassment and toxic work environments, Saint John said she wants to be part of crafting the solution — whether or not itpart of her job.

&Unfair or not — as a black woman, as you know — when you&re in the job, it doesn&t matter what job you&re doing,& she said. &You are sometimes forcibly in the center of the conversation and sometimes, unfairly, given the reigns to fix it, quote unquote. So while I don&t feel the responsibility of actually doing that job — because there are people whose job that is — I do still feel the responsibility of contributing and creating solutions for the company I&m in and the industry for which I work, which is Hollywood.&