The $60 billion resource hiding in space, and the start trying to mine it | E2268
Jason Calacanis hosts three fascinating guests exploring the cutting edge of space mining, decentralized AI training, and AI-powered meeting assistants. The episode showcases how blockchain incentive mechanisms, dramatically lower launch costs, and open-source software are enabling previously impossible ventures to become reality.
Key takeaways
- • Astroforge is mining platinum group metals from near-Earth asteroids using laser-based extraction and magnetic sorting, with each mission costing ~$10.4M to potentially return $105M in materials.
- • Decentralized training via Bittensor subnets can train large language models at a fraction of traditional costs—Templar trained a 72-billion-parameter model for $2-3M by distributing compute across hundreds of miners with properly aligned incentives.
- • Templar's next breakthrough involves heterogeneous sparse learning to train across any type of GPU hardware, from enterprise data centers to consumer devices, dramatically expanding accessible compute for AI development.
- • Open Oats (formerly Open Granola) is an open-source, privacy-first note-taking agent that runs locally on Mac with real-time insights, fact-checking, and competitive analysis delivered through an AI co-pilot—solving what Granola locked behind a proprietary paywall.
- • The economics of IP-based entertainment are shifting: Harry Potter will cost ~$5.6B across seven seasons at reported $100M per episode, betting that expanded TV adaptations unlock content that film versions had to cut for time.
- • Bitcoin's network effects are defensible but not inevitable—Tao and other incentive-focused blockchains may attract compute and infrastructure away from Bitcoin if they offer better economic returns for miners and validators.
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