Climate crisis
We trained a new flood forecasting model designed to predict flash floods in urban areas up to 24 hours in advance. To help address a flash floods data gap, we created Groundsource: a new AI methodology using Gemini to identify 2.6M+ historical events across 150+ countries. We’re open-sourcing this dataset to advance global research, and urban flash flood forecasts are live now in Flood Hub to help communities stay safe.
T1 Energy CEO @_danielbarcelo says China can make an entire American grid’s worth of energy - just in solar - every year: “China is up to over 1,000 GW (1.2 TW) of capacity. Last year, China added close to 350 to 400 GW. That’s close to the American grid. So it’s almost like China can add an entire grid, just in solar.” “I don’t believe China’s doing it to lower carbon emissions. China’s doing it because they need to grow very, very fast.”
Introducing NeoEarth by @axionorbital: the first world model for Earth. They forecast surface changes days to months out to track floods, crops, and forests, and predicted Hurricane Helene with 25% more accuracy than legacy forecasters. Congrats on the launch, @dhenenjay & @atharva_peshkar!
As a college student, Peter Reinhardt (@reinpk) started a company that stumbled, pivoted, and nearly ran out of money before a small open-source library became Segment—the data layer behind thousands of software companies and was later acquired by Twilio. On the Social Radars with @jesslivingston and @cjoneslevy, he reflects on the panic attacks, pricing mistakes, and how he learned to sell by listening hard to customers. Lessons he now carries into Charm Industrial, where he’s working to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it permanently underground. 00:00 – From MIT to YC: The ClassMetric idea 07:02 – When your customers don’t actually care 12:38 – A year in the wilderness building analytics 18:27 – Panic attacks and the lowest point 27:18 – The Hacker News post that saved the company 35:06 – Learning to sell (and asking for 1000x more) 44:52 – Hitting product-market fit the hard way 54:10 – The moment revenue started shrinking 1:02:33 – Selling Segment & starting Charm
"Even if we kind of start to lower the burdens to play catch up with China, we actually have to go faster than China does." @MarianaMinerals CEO Turner Caldwell on the critical mineral lag nobody is talking about and what it will take to close the gap: "I think, put plainly, the US is 50 years behind on critical mineral supply." "So if we're not innovating in the critical mineral space, we will be perpetually behind... specifically behind China, but I would say also globally, we have a couple of decades of lag." "The things that we can do at the top level are: accelerate permitting, we can make project-level finance more available." "But that doesn't actually solve the underlying problem, which is that we are too slow at designing, building, and ramping up new mineral capacity even after we have licensed to operate." "Mariana is laser focused on that phase of project development." "Once you start building, it can take five years to get something built, and then it can take three or three to five years to get something actually operating at rate. And that's why we're laser focused on that." @tbc415
