Jeremy Howard quietly launched 𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐰𝐞𝐫.𝐚𝐢, a "new old kind of R&D lab" with 10m USD funding. I chanced upon the launch post and it is a gem of a read.

- Moving from fast.ai (more altruistic goals, very successful) to a more build-and-research approach, with the goal of making the org long-time profitable.

- what cool stuff can we build with current (pre-AGI) models? a mega-opportunity!

I look forward to seeing Jeremy again rouse up sleeping talent and ideas (and business this time) with his top-down teaching style, uncanny ability to spot gaps and massive social reach.

Some terrific quotes:

👉 "fast.ai will be a fully-remote team of deep-tech generalists—the world’s very best, regardless of where they live, what school they went to, or any other meaningless surface feature."

👉 "I think people will be very surprised to discover what a small team of nimble, creative, open-minded people can accomplish."

👉 “People think that the order is research→development, and that therefore an R&D lab does “R” and then “D”. That is, the research informs the development, and so being practical means having researchers and developers. But this is wrong, and leads to a lot of bad research, because development should inform research and vice-versa. So having development goals is a way to do more effective research, if you set that out as your north star.”

👉 "We’re interested in solving things that may be too small for the big labs to care about-—but our view is that it’s the collection of these small things matter a great deal in practice."

👉 "If you’ve read this far, then I’ll tell you the honest truth: we don’t actually know what we’re doing."📝 the full post

fast.ai I also feel validated by the launch personally -- the tenets of free, open-to-all, small-group, R&D is at the core of fast.ai I'm eager to see how the fast.ai org flourishes and how they create a sustainable business model.