GP @Nebularvc / cofounder @tachyon______ & @projecteleven / first lead check @teamoratomic @starcloud_ - I like things that do stuff-from 🇮🇪 gone west to 🇺🇸
New York, USA
Joined February 2016
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SCOOP: @JoeBiden has been working the phones since Monday, making around 40 calls, as he watched the party he once led have explosive victories from his home in Wilmington. Biden spoke to Beshear, Lance-Bottoms, Bayh, Shapiro, Amy Acton, and more:
huffpost.com/entry/joe-biden…
Finn Murphy retweeted
Developers are building incredible agents, with no way to share them or get paid for what they’ve built. Cowboy changes that.
We're thrilled to launch Cowboy, the app store for AI agents.
Build it, own it, get paid for it. cowboy.inc 🤠
EXCLUSIVE: AI agents are getting their own app store.
Cowboy launches from stealth today with $5M, and 100 agents in its marketplace.
I spoke to CEO Chad DePue (@chaddepue) about his vision for a safe way to deploy and trade agents that doesn't depend on Anthropic or OpenAI.
Finn Murphy retweeted
Exactly a year ago today, we launched Starcloud-1 to space. To celebrate its birthday 🥳, we have put together some previously unseen footage we have from around the launch. I particularly like the footage we have of the @Starcloud_ kids! 😅👌
Starcloud-1 is operating today with the only @NVIDIA H100 in space, still the most powerful SI compute on orbit. With it we became the first entity to do training and high powered inference on orbit, and we now have 3 more launches coming up in the next year! We are planning to move almost all compute off Earth 🚀
See the careers page on our website if you want to join this awesome team!
Finn Murphy retweeted
Bitcoin Whitepaper Day
Halloween
and...
Project Eleven’s Birthday?!
Learn about the significance of this historic day with our co-founders @apruden08 and @conordeegan
Our hero at p11 & long time schemer @conordeegan leading the charge alongside @drakefjustin, @zooko and many other brilliant folks to prepare for an internet with very different rules to the one we’ve know these past 30 years.
The end of history in cryptography is over.
Finn Murphy retweeted
BREAKING: Inside Starcloud, the $2.3B Startup Putting Data Centers in Space
FACTORY TOUR - Redmond, WA
Primes quoted them $75M-$100M to build their first data center in space. They did it for $2.5M.
In just 21 months, Starcloud is one of the fastest companies to go from founding to orbit.
With $450M in total funding from Manhattan West, Nvidia, Cisco, Benchmark & EQT, the team walks me through their mission for AI in space.
I toured the new HQ w/ CEO @PhilipJohnston + co-founders @EzraFeilden & @AdiOltean
AI compute on Earth is limited by power & permitting. @Starcloud_ is moving it to orbit, where solar power is nearly constant. Philip says the dawn-dusk orbit alone could fit about 10 TW of compute, roughly 20x the entire US power grid. Once launch costs fall below $500/kg, he says compute in space will be cheaper than on the ground.
From Starcloud 1, Starcloud 2, to Starcloud 3, we saw:
Tracking Starcloud 1 live in orbit, circling Earth every 90 minutes at 17,000 mph with the first Nvidia H100 in space.
Co-Founder & Chief Engineer Adi Oltean walks through Starcloud 2 as the team fires the latches that deploy its 120 ft solar wingspan. It launches in January with 100x the power of Starcloud 1.
Co-Founder & CTO Ezra Feilden shows the 16-ton secondhand vibe table. The team bought it for $200K, instead of paying $1.5M & waiting 2 years for a new one, they rebuilt it over a weekend.
Engineering Manager Bailey Montaño leak checks the ion thruster after vibe. Bailey designed the radiators, which have 10x less mass & cost 500x less per watt than the ISS’s.
In the fab shop, Ezra shows the Starcloud 3 demonstrator, a 2-ton, 235 kW vehicle that fits 50 to a Starship.
Camilo Lopez cuts stainless on the laser cutter.
Engineering Operations Lead Miguel Rivera, formerly of Helion Energy, teaches me to MIG weld.
The tour ends in the new campus, about 100,000 sqft built to produce 100 satellites a week toward an 88,000-satellite constellation.
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Philip Johnston, Co-Founder & CEO of Starcloud
(00:53) Tracking Starcloud 1 live in orbit
(02:46) Fixing a 16-ton vibration machine in one weekend
(06:59) From founding to orbit in 21 months
(08:17) From SpaceX to Microsoft to Starcloud
(09:49) Inside Starcloud 2
(13:12) A $15M mission to the nearest star
(17:49) What goes on a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri
(19:10) Why SpaceX could be worth $100 trillion
(20:41) “This isn’t a hot take, this is just a fact
(24:22) How big is Starcloud 3?
(26:41) How do you book a ride to space?
(30:11) How Starcloud tests in zero gravity
(33:49) Can GPUs survive space radiation?
(35:46) The first AI model trained in space
(38:40) Will solar satellites block the sun?
(40:57) How Starcloud tests a satellite for launch
(46:45) The paperwork behind a launch
(53:07) Molly puts her welding skills to the test
(1:00:18) The engineer behind Starcloud's radiators
(1:03:07) Inside Starcloud’s new campus
(1:05:55) Why launch slots are the new scarce resource
(1:06:45) Can someone shoot down a data center in space?
Finn Murphy retweeted
Apple made China into a Superpower. Was it worth it?
The State Department blob sees China as a grandmaster playing a hundred-year game for world domination. But what if China isn’t especially good at long-term planning, and we’re just uniquely bad at it?
Apple in China was one of my favourite books of the past year, so I was thrilled to sit down with its author, @PatrickMcGee_, the FT’s former lead Apple reporter, to discuss what the US-China relationship might look like over the next 25 years on Forecast 2050.
We discuss:
- Why Apple is more dependent on China than ever
- Why the Taiwan status quo may hold
- How Xi brought Apple to heel
- What America lost when it stopped building things
- Why the next Jony Ive will likely be Chinese
- How Chinese demographic decline could reshape the global economy
Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
2:54 Manufacturing Is Power
11:59 The CCP
16:56 Will China Take Taiwan by 2050?
25:11 Why Nvidia Would Be Useless in a War
27:06 The Case for Industrial Policy
32:04 How Xi Brought Apple to Heel
39:32 The End of Pax Americana
47:20 The Next Jony Ive is Chinese
1:00:20 China’s Next Leaders
1:07:47 Demographic Collapse & Automation
Apple made China into a Superpower. Was it worth it?
The State Department blob sees China as a grandmaster playing a hundred-year game for world domination. But what if China isn’t especially good at long-term planning, and we’re just uniquely bad at it?
Apple in China was one of my favourite books of the past year, so I was thrilled to sit down with its author, @PatrickMcGee_, the FT’s former lead Apple reporter, to discuss what the US-China relationship might look like over the next 25 years on Forecast 2050.
We discuss:
- Why Apple is more dependent on China than ever
- Why the Taiwan status quo may hold
- How Xi brought Apple to heel
- What America lost when it stopped building things
- Why the next Jony Ive will likely be Chinese
- How Chinese demographic decline could reshape the global economy
Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
2:54 Manufacturing Is Power
11:59 The CCP
16:56 Will China Take Taiwan by 2050?
25:11 Why Nvidia Would Be Useless in a War
27:06 The Case for Industrial Policy
32:04 How Xi Brought Apple to Heel
39:32 The End of Pax Americana
47:20 The Next Jony Ive is Chinese
1:00:20 China’s Next Leaders
1:07:47 Demographic Collapse & Automation
Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/014…
Show Notes: finnmurphyirl.substack.com/p…
Transcript: finnmurphyirl.substack.com/p…
YouTube: youtu.be/LHe8P4j2ZM8
Market starting to price AI/Quantum ending cryptography as we know it and pushing the world back to physical trusted networks.
Something something scarce assets….
There are two modes of Cognition fundraise depending on the month to month progress of the business.
Mode 1, when things are a bit slow; ‘Scott Wu is computer.’
Mode 2, ‘we added an order of magnitude of revenue this quarter.’
Current signals on X indicate mode 1 in play.
Finn Murphy retweeted
Wise words from Laura Kreidberg, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy on the Fermi Paradox:
“It may be that intelligence is not evolutionarily favourable.”
@FermiExplorer
Once we have the telescopes to look, signs of life in the galaxy will be more frequent than we expect. For this Forecast 2050 we discuss looking up to the stars for the sparks of life that might help us answer the question that has plagued humanity for centuries. Are we alone out here?
Laura Kreidberg, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, thinks that we are within 30 years of finding out whether humanity is all alone in the universe.
Appointed at the age of 30, Laura is one of the youngest directors in the history of the Max Planck Society. Her work uses the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes to explore the atmospheres of planets orbiting distant stars. Read more about the science behind this in the @SkyandTelescope article linked below.
We discuss:
- How astronomers study exoplanet atmospheres, including measuring wind speed.
- The race to find the first exomoon.
- Why Laura would bet more than a bottle of wine that Mars and Venus once had life.
- The smoking gun evidence for alien life.
- The Fermi Paradox & whether the universe is indifferent to our presence.
- Science as soft power on the world stage.
Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
3:10 The Atmospheres of Other Worlds
8:14 In Astronomy, Bigger is Better
10:50 Earth-like Planets
20:04 The Huge Variety of Exoplanets
26:03 Science Communication
27:30 Intelligence is Not Evolutionary Favorable
33:30 Signs of Life on Exoplanets
40:19 Discovering Aliens in 30 Years
45:44 Science as Soft Power
Once we have the telescopes to look, signs of life in the galaxy will be more frequent than we expect. For this Forecast 2050 we discuss looking up to the stars for the sparks of life that might help us answer the question that has plagued humanity for centuries. Are we alone out here?
Laura Kreidberg, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, thinks that we are within 30 years of finding out whether humanity is all alone in the universe.
Appointed at the age of 30, Laura is one of the youngest directors in the history of the Max Planck Society. Her work uses the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes to explore the atmospheres of planets orbiting distant stars. Read more about the science behind this in the @SkyandTelescope article linked below.
We discuss:
- How astronomers study exoplanet atmospheres, including measuring wind speed.
- The race to find the first exomoon.
- Why Laura would bet more than a bottle of wine that Mars and Venus once had life.
- The smoking gun evidence for alien life.
- The Fermi Paradox & whether the universe is indifferent to our presence.
- Science as soft power on the world stage.
Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
3:10 The Atmospheres of Other Worlds
8:14 In Astronomy, Bigger is Better
10:50 Earth-like Planets
20:04 The Huge Variety of Exoplanets
26:03 Science Communication
27:30 Intelligence is Not Evolutionary Favorable
33:30 Signs of Life on Exoplanets
40:19 Discovering Aliens in 30 Years
45:44 Science as Soft Power
Sky and Telescope Article: skyandtelescope.org/astronom…
YouTube: youtu.be/uywQxElUAxI
Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/35x…
Show Notes: finnmurphyirl.substack.com/p…
Transcript: finnmurphyirl.substack.com/p…
Finn Murphy retweeted
If you think the maneuverability conversation is just for defense satellites, you might want to follow along
Russian Kosmos 2612 and ICEYE-X36 (providing Ukraine military support) are now in perfect sync with each other. The Russian military satellite is intentionally stalking and tracking the Western radar satellite. Keeping a satellite "bumper-to-bumper" in this manner allows Russia to intercept or jam data transmissions, physically inspect Western technology, or quickly pivot to execute a kinetic or non-kinetic anti-satellite (ASAT) attack with very little warning or fuel expenditure.
Kosmos 2612 executed a series of highly precise, fuel-heavy maneuvers to force itself into a "coplanar" orbit—matching ICEYE-X36's exact altitude (~555 km), speed, and inclination (~97.8°). The ICEYE-X36 satellite is giving the Ukraine military support.
Finn Murphy retweeted
Hello from Dublin airport as I'm leaving the International AI Summit with something close to existential dread from being exposed yet again to the parallel reality in which much of Europe’s political establishment appears to be living.
The summit was literally organized around the theme of European competitiveness. Yet from the plenary stage, I heard from mostly American companies (fair play to them, Ireland is home to their international HQs) coupled with European politicians advancing claims that the AI Act, DFA, CADA and other digital rules somehow make European startups more competitive and that regulation is what will stop AI agents from “escaping their sandboxes."
Meanwhile, you could walk around the innovation hall and struggle to find any of the major European AI companies that are actually trying to compete at the frontier.
Panel after panel returned to the same comfortable and boring platitudes about trust, values, guardrails and responsible innovation.
There is an huge disconnect from the real world. In a desperate pursuit of sovereignty for sovereignty's sake and an ever-growing digital maze of bureaucracy, Europe will fall behind in AI. We will have fewer frontier companies, less capital, less compute and dramatically less appetite for risk than the US or China. We will also be incapable of grasping (or, at a minimum, understanding) the opportunities ahead of us.
Instead, we keep congratulating ourselves on having built a telegraph cable in the 1800s (!?) and now the world's most elaborate regulatory framework and call that a competitive advantage.
One of the few genuinely refreshing interventions came from Siemens CTO and Chief Strategy Officer Dr. Peter Koerte, who spoke frankly about some of the real obstacles European innovators face.
I will keep saying this until I'm blue in the face: Europe does not have an AI values problem, it has an AI competitiveness problem. But I’m increasingly worried that many of the people supposed to solve either don't have the intellectual capacity or curiosity to do so.
To end on a positive note: the event was super slick, and the logistics were very straightforward. Congrats to the Irish government for their ability to put together a great experience for their guests, for being so welcoming, and attracting a very high caliber of speakers.
#AISummitIE #Ireland2026EU
This weeks Forecast 2050 was all about China. Me and @yilingliu95 got talking about why their Government efforts to fix Demographics by boosting birthrates will fail - in the same way controlling family sizes with One-Child failed as documented superbly by @danwwang in Breakneck.
“One takeaway from Dan’s book is that when that [government] heft is applied to social engineering, it tends to fail. The one-child policy is in many ways a failure. Any brute force, engineering-style attempt to build bridges will probably succeed. But that same method applied to getting people to have babies probably won’t.”
One of the big shticks around racing to super-intelligence/RSI is that people would rather die at the hands of an American made robot-god than a Chinese one.
This seems suspect, so I decided to talk to an expert on Chinese internet culture to get a sense of what Chinese people really think of AI and how those thoughts will shape the types of AI that they build. Also how the Chinese internet may be a vision into the future of our own.
@yilingliu95, journalist and author of The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet, joined me on Forecast 2050 to discuss what the West still doesn’t understand about China.
We discuss:
- Why creating super-intelligence is not China’s goal
- The permanent underclass already exists in China
Chinese memes like involution & lying flat, and the migration to RedNote during the TikTok ban
- The Christian roots of American AI Doomerism
- What it takes to navigate Chinese internet censorship
- The burgeoning Chinese silver economy
- This conversation was really special and quite prescient for the next 25 years. Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
2:58 Superintelligence Is Not China’s Goal
8:06 The Pre-AI Permanent Underclass
11:00 The Tech-Government Revolving Door
17:05 Lying Flat
19:57 Christian Singularity vs. Daoist AI
26:06 Overcoming Censorship
32:10 The TikTok Ban
36:58 Chinese Perceptions of the West
46:16 The Silver Economy