HUANG: “.. Try getting a kid to do long division right now. Multiplication tables are starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots? My goodness. .. .. Does it matter? .. I don’t think it does.” @ezraklein @JensenHuang

At @IFP, we’ve spent the past 3 years thinking about all the different ways the US government & philanthropy fund R&D. Until now, R&D funders haven’t had a systematic way to match the innovation problem to the right funding tool. We built THE ATLAS OF INNOVATION to fill that gap. atlasofinnovation.org Alongside @UChi_MSA, we’ve boiled down thousands of hours of research into a handful of questions covering how much the R&D funder knows about: - the problem they want to solve - the solution it should have - the team that should build the solution Why the Atlas matters: The US government spends close to $200 billion every year on R&D. And after the Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs, there will be hundreds of billions of dollars in new philanthropic giving. Choosing the correct funding approach to the social problems they’re trying to solve will mean the difference between success and failure. For example, NSF research grants have helped seed breakthroughs from MRI machines to search engines, but grants aren’t built to deliver the kind of industrial speed and scale that a project like Operation Warp Speed required. Picking the wrong funding approach can leave programs behind schedule, over budget, or without anything to show for all the money they spent. How we built the Atlas: 1. We began by creating a matrix of dozens of considerations that a thoughtful policymaker or funder would ideally weigh before deciding how to fund a project. 2. We looked at every major funding approach, from grants to R&D tax credits to advance market commitments, analyzing when they work well and when they fail to meet the mission. 3. We spent months deep in the weeds of contract theory and incentive design, looking at historical examples and the state-of-the-art research in innovation economics. 4. We then worked to turn that research into a tool that time-strapped policymakers and philanthropic funders could rely on at the start of an innovation funding cycle. 5. Three years later, we are launching just that: a new (and visually stunning) website to help funders decide how to best incentivize innovation. And all they have to know… is what they currently know about their innovation goal! The Atlas takes care of the rest. How to navigate the Atlas: Answer questions about your goal to find the funding approach aligned with the information you have. Each funding mechanism has its purpose for particular technologies and specific moments in development. There shouldn’t be an ARPA for every field, just like we don’t need a prize or AMC for every innovation. The Atlas helps you navigate those tradeoffs.

I think this is a really important constraint. We won't be able to commit to a single European innovation hub, so our model *must* be different from the American one & we should think about how to get the knowledge spillovers of physical proximity in multi-innovation-hub Europe.

Why do new buildings seem, on average, uglier than old buildings? We discuss some options: - Survivorship bias: only the beautiful old buildings have survived (we reject this option); - Cycles of taste: everyone always finds new buildings uglier (we mostly reject this too); - Ornament became too expensive because of rising labour costs (we reject this); - Ornament became too cheap because of mechanisation and then became low status (we reject this); - Some sort of Protestant or Puritan anti-beauty inheritance (we are doubtful); - Some kind of elite status game, perhaps a response to democratisation or elite overproduction (we think there is promise here, but serious work is needed on the details). I discuss this and more with @Aria_Babu and @bswud. Apple podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcas… Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/2pI… Youtube: piped.video/watch?v=qvueKtEk…

Government must deliver for working people—and every dollar in our budget should work as hard as they do. That’s why I directed every agency to cut waste and help close our budget gap. Here’s some of what we found.