In 1820s France, a teenager had an epiphany that would reshape how we think about mathematics, chemistry, even quantum computing. But he was killed in a duel before he turned 21. His last communication with the world was a 60-page letter begging the trusted scholars of his day to "decipher all this mess." The letter kicked off a project that required dozens of mathematicians and tens of thousands of pages across multiple languages. Naysayers said it was “little advanced beyond mathematical illiteracy.” It took 150 years to untangle the boy's visions. Five people found the final missing pieces in 1985. Rather than limit their findings to journals, they created an absurdly large, bright red book, and called it an Atlas. @TerranMott of @joincolossus and @psumvc has been collecting stories about how the Atlas came together. It is the best story in math, and shows that even the most rational projects can take irrational persistence.

David Vélez is the founder of Nubank, a bank with 140 million customers and a market capitalization of $60 billion. When he started the business in 2013, no one thought it would work, not even his investors. He has faced down regulators, oligopolies, and corruption to build Latin America's largest digital bank. Now he is bringing Nubank to the United States, where he faces his biggest challenge yet. @gabi_imarques, who grew up four miles from Nubank's headquarters in Brazil, spent time with @velez_david in São Paulo, where the business started, and in Miami, its latest beachhead. She profiles a man who is no stranger to a fight, having grown up in Medellín, Colombia, when the city was at war with Pablo Escobar. Six-year-old Vélez would pull on layers of sweaters before stepping outside, hoping, as a child might, that the extra padding would cushion any bullets. colossus.com/article/david-v…

Tomorrow.

juicy details about how I wrote “100,000,000 CROWPOWER and no horses on the moon” writingclub.world/writing-ab…

Excited to release my first podcast as host. Give it a listen. Applied Intuition is a fascinating company.

Samir Menon @blintzbase and I are thrilled to announce Sail @sailresearchco ! We build infrastructure for long-horizon agents: inference served at unbeatable prices-per-token for open models, plus sandboxes designed to run for days, weeks, or longer. We've raised $80M, w/ our seed led by @Sequoia and series A led by @KleinerPerkins. We're using this capital to build the most efficient infrastructure for long-horizon agents. What makes agents so different? Unlike a human waiting at a keyboard (top priority: speed), agents need scale, reliability, and sustainable cost. Sail finds this efficiency everywhere in the stack: we carefully choose our chips, write custom inference engines, and run a global controller that fully utilizes every computer in our fleet. Tight integration from silicon to API lets Sail open up the cost / latency frontier to our customers - the most patient agents can now access 10x more intelligence per dollar. We're excited to be working with great companies like @parallelweb, @detaildotdev,@Jackandjillai, and @quadrillion_ai to deploy long-horizon agents with trillions of tokens. Our team is thoughtful in our engineering craft and relentlessly ambitious in our pursuit of peak performance. We previously trained at companies like NVIDIA, OpenAI, Google, and so many trading firms. Now we're ready to do the work that will define our careers, in the most compute intensive market of all time. Welcome to the era of abundant intelligence. We can't wait to build with you!

If you’ve ever listened to Dune, Moneyball, Jurassic Park, Atlas Shrugged, Chernow’s Washington and Hamilton, or the Foundation or Jack Ryan series on audiobook, you know the voice of Scott Brick, the legendary voice actor of epic science fiction and historical nonfiction, and inductee to Audible’s Narrator Hall of Fame. We’re pleased to announce that Scott is now the official voice of Colossus Magazine. To hear our writing brought to life in audiobook form, subscribe to the new Colossus Magazine podcast feed:

favorite part of worklife: learning from incredible people favorite part of writing early days: showing them off in today's edition, love for @DevinLewtan and @thesephist & a cameo from @TerranMott

.@camillericketts and I first got introduced to @eigenhq by Akshay, Notion’s COO, who said its founder, @paulscherer, reminded him of Ivan, Notion’s exquisitely high-taste founder. Then there was Benchmark’s $15M seed bet and Peter Fenton’s tweet putting Eigen in the lineage as “TheFacebook, Twitter, Instagram, and SnapChat.” Stuff like this gets said pretty often about founders–especially by investors–but after spending time with Paul and the team, we think there’s something special going on here. A dispatch from a month with Eigen and their honestly 🤯'ing mutual friend.

Scott Wu is the co-founder of Cognition AI, one of the fastest-growing companies in history. He’s also the greatest competitive programmer the US has ever produced. You may have seen him doing impossible card tricks and mental math. You’ve never seen him asked about weed, Michael Jordan, cancer, and human consciousness over a punnet of strawberries. That is what Colossus editor-in-chief Jeremy Stern did on a recent visit to San Francisco. For those less familiar with @ScottWu46: In 2nd grade, he entered a math competition for 7th graders, lost, and was so furious he still fumes about it 20 years later. The next year he entered the 9th-grade division as a 3rd-grader and got a perfect score. Then he won first place at the US national middle-school math competition and three straight gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, where he became the greatest American gold-medalist and coach in history. Most of the people running the biggest AI companies met as teenagers, competing for their countries on international math and science teams. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Alexandr Wang, to name just a few. Most agree that the von Neumann among them was Scott Wu. In November 2023, a few weeks after his mother died of lung cancer, on the day Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI, Wu founded his own AI company: Cognition. He was 26 and saw earlier than almost anyone that AI would converge on agents that work in the background, 24/7, like coworkers. He shipped Cognition’s AI software engineer Devin in March 2024. It worked poorly, and he took intense public criticism for it. Now, in its first 18 months of service, Devin has generated $445 million of revenue run rate and usage has doubled every eight weeks. The US Army, Goldman Sachs, and Mercedes-Benz are all customers. Cognition is raising at a valuation around $25 billion. @JeremySternLA sat down with Wu, the emperor of the nerds, to ask the questions we’d all ask one of the smartest people in America—building the most consequential technology of our generation—if we ever got the chance. As well as MJ and weed, they talk about the cluster of competitive math prodigies behind so much of AI, what makes us human when AGI arrives, and why Wu believes he was put on this earth to teach AI how to code. Read the piece below.

The third best-selling computer platform in history, after Windows PCs and the Mac, began as a recruiting tool for Cambridge University's computer science department. It's the size of a credit card, has no case, and costs less than a pair of shoes. Eben Upton built Raspberry Pi in 2012 to get more applicants into Cambridge's computer science course, then the easiest to get into. He thought kids needed the real thing: a general purpose programmable computer (like his childhood BBC Micro) to fall in love with the unbounded creativity of coding. He was more right than he could have imagined. On launch day in 2012, he sold 100,000 computers. A million shipped before Raspberry Pi hired an employee. Computer science is now the hardest course to get into at Cambridge, and Raspberry Pi is a $1.5 billion public company that has sold over 73 million units. 80% of its revenue comes from industry. Every digital display at Heathrow runs on a Pi. Schindler uses them in its elevators. The International Space Station has carried one in orbit since 2015. You'll also find the tiny computers wherever the next thing is. Bitcoin mining farms ran on them. So did the first wave of hobbyist drones. Pis now run LLMs. In five years, Upton thinks Claude Sonnet-class intelligence will fit in your pocket. Most tech conversation is about the frontier: the newest chips, the biggest models, trillion-dollar training runs. Raspberry Pi is a case study in the opposite. It shows what cheap, general-purpose, and performant-enough can achieve. It's also a rare British hardware success story, designed in Cambridge, manufactured with Sony in Wales, and reshored from China a decade before the rest of the industry caught on. Read @TerranMott's interview with Upton below. It comes with extraordinary photos of Pis baking in the Welsh factory, and covers the journey of automation, teaching children to program in the era of agents, and putting foundation models in your pocket.