Futurology

Blue Origin is just about to launch its reusable heavy-lift 'New Glenn' rocket in a few days. Are we about to see a version of Aesop's tale of 'The Hare & the Tortoise' play out, with SpaceX playing the role of the hare?

This Sabine Hossenfelder video does a good job of laying out the argument - Jeff Bezos’ Space Plans Make More Sense Than Elon Musk's.

In summary, Blue Origin's plans are built around space stations in near earth orbit, while SpaceX's plans are for Mars colonization. It's far more likely Blue Origin's plans can be realized in the 2030s and 2040s. Apart from China, no one else will have a space station by around 2030 when the ISS goes - there will be no other choice but to look to commercial providers.

Blue Origin's plans for space stations designed as O'Neill cylinders with artificial gravity are the obvious next step on from ISS-type space stations.

A team of researchers across 20 separate labs just unveiled Genesis, an open-source physics engine that combines generative AI with ultra-fast simulations, potentially transforming how AI learns to interact with the physical world.

Genesis runs 430,000 times faster than real-time physics, achieving 43 million FPS on a single RTX 4090 GPU.

It’s built in pure Python, it's 10-80x faster than existing solutions like Isaac Gym and MJX.

The platform can train real-world transferable robot locomotion policies in just 26 seconds.

The platform is fully open-source and will soon include a generative framework for creating 4D environments.

Why it matters: By enabling AI to run millions of simulations at unprecedented speeds, Genesis could massively accelerate robots' ability to understand our physical world. Open-sourcing this tech, along with its ability to generate complex environments from simple prompts, could spark a whole new wave of innovation in physical AI.

Commentary from 'The Rundown' Newsletter

I follow a lot of tech news, and one of the most common biases I see in most commentary is its 'Venture- Capital-Centredness'. Almost everybody mostly just talks about VC-funded start-ups. Meanwhile, often the most important trends are happening outside of those spaces.

Open Source's role in AI and robotics is a prime example of this. Players in the AI space are using it to 'poison pill' their competitors. Investors are pouring hundreds of billions into companies like OpenAI, but every time they have a chance to justify that cost with a revenue stream, someone ruins it by open-sourcing the tech and making it free-to-use.

These 20 academic institutions aren't motivated the same way, but they will have the same effect. Former robotics leaders like Boston Dynamics have lost their advantages. Now small companies in China's industrial zones have the same as them, but at no cost.

The result? Married to Chinese manufacturing, future robots will be cheap, ubiquitous, and it's likely no one Big Tech player will own the space. Will there be an Apple version of robotics? A company able to make hundreds of billions from high end products? Perhaps. But even if there is, most robots will still likely spring from open-source and many different manufacturers.