06-reference

not boring wdoo 209

2026-09-04·reference·source: Not Boring (Weekly Dose of Optimism)·by Packy McCormick
world-modelsai-infrastructuregeothermal-energyrobotaxinot-boring-capital-portfolio

Why this is in the vault

Issue #209 of the standing Friday optimism series — kept for item 1's World Model Week roundup (Runway Solaris, Runway GWM 2, World Labs Atlas), which extends the "world models as a new foundation-model category" thesis the vault already tracks from Packy's own March essay and this week's separate AlphaSignal Solaris coverage.

Curation section

  1. World Model Week: Runway Solaris, Runway GWM 2, and World Labs Atlas. Three releases in three days. Solaris ("Interface World Model") generates an app frame-by-frame in real time with no underlying code — "the image is the application." World Labs' Atlas is an "omni world model" trained jointly on text/image/video/camera-pose/depth/3D that generates up to a minute of 1440p video with pixel-perfect camera control and can reconstruct 3D scenes from as little as one photo. GWM 2 generates continuous real-time interactive 720p video simulations at 24fps with audio, responding live to input. Packy frames all three as steps toward the definition he and General Intuition CEO Pim DeWitte set out in their March co-written essay (already in vault) — "systems that learn from watching the world... compute what was previously uncomputable."
  2. (1a) OpenAI ships Astra 6. Brief item — Packy hasn't used it yet, citing secondhand demos (Matt Shumer's simulated-agent-coordination world) as evidence people are calling it AGI-adjacent. Thin sourcing; treat as color, not a verified claim.
  3. Fervo signs 396MW geothermal PPA with Google (largest enhanced-geothermal deal to date), covering a potential Utah data center from 2028, with an option for ~600MW more by 2030 (up to 1GW total from one customer). Third Fervo-Google deal after Project Red (Nevada, 2023) and a 2024 NV Energy Clean Transition Tariff deal. Series-recurring item (Fervo previously covered in Dose #189/#190/#193 around its IPO). Verification (WebSearch, 2026-09-04): could not confirm Not Boring Capital as a disclosed investor in Fervo's public funding history (Series E led by B Capital, $462M, Dec 2025); no NB Capital position surfaced. Treat Packy as messenger, not disclosed investor.
  4. Tesla launches Cybercab robotaxi service in Austin — no steering wheel/pedals, 9 cameras, 48kWh pack, ~290mi range, ~$30K claimed build cost, 20¢/mi claimed operating cost at scale. 45 Cybercabs vs. 269 Model Ys in the current Austin fleet, against Waymo's 500K paid rides/week on 4,000+ retrofitted vehicles. Continues the "cars as moving rooms" thread Packy started at Zoox's steering-wheel-free approval (Dose #204).
  5. Sami Robotics robot harvests iceberg lettuce on Reservoir VC's Salinas test farm — called an "AgTech moon landing moment" by the fund's GP; framed as solving agricultural automation's hardest sub-problem (leafy-green harvest). Novelty/proof-of-concept item; no direct RDCO mapping.
  6. NASA's Roman Space Telescope launches nine months ahead of schedule. Same 2.4m mirror as Hubble (ex-spy-satellite optics), 100x wider field of view, heading to Sun-Earth L2 for a five-year exoplanet/dark-energy survey. Science-optimism item, no RDCO relevance.
  7. Physical Superintelligence (PSI) raises $58M to rebuild physics simulation from scratch — founded by Matthew Pines, Alex Wissner-Gross (Innermost Loop author already tracked in the vault via his own newsletter, e.g. [[2026-09-04-innermost-loop-gpt6-astra-fable51-capex-gigawatts]]), and Alex Klokus. Cited example: PSI reportedly designed a "perihelion-pump maneuver" for the Fermi Explorer interstellar-probe mission using ~10B tokens in a week, after the mission team's own three-month, 1B-token effort. Also notes Arena Physica's new Heaviside-1 electromagnetism model. Verification (WebSearch, 2026-09-04): PSI's $58M seed was led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, joined by Dragon Global, Robot Ventures, Solari, Susa, SV Angel, Valkyrie, and others — Not Boring Capital does not appear in reported investor lists. Treat as messenger; personal-relationship framing (Packy references a prior 4-hour podcast conversation with Pines) is friendly-network color, not a disclosed financial stake.
  8. (Not scored) "Any Human Ever" — a site (h/t Gina Gorlin) that draws a random life from the ~100B humans who have ever lived, framed via Rawls' veil of ignorance and an Obama 2016 quote. Philosophical/optimism framing device, no RDCO mapping.

Two WebSearch verifications were run (Fervo, PSI) against public funding/investor records to check Not Boring Capital's portfolio-disclosure pattern on this issue's two most enthusiastically-framed items; neither surfaced a disclosed position, so both are noted as messenger-not-investor above. Zero of the issue's own external links were deep-fetched — the newsletter text and existing in-vault coverage (world models, Reducto) were sufficient to ground the mapping without following through to primary sources.

⚠️ Sponsorship

Explicit paid sponsor block, top of issue: Reducto (document-ingestion/parsing API), promoting its new r-1 frontier parsing model — claimed 20% parsing-error reduction, sub-second latency at volume, 1¢/page, plus up to $5,000 in migration credits for teams switching from another parser. Clean, disclosed third-party ad. Reducto is a recurring sponsor name elsewhere in the vault's tracked-sender set — it sponsored two AlphaSignal issues in July 2026 ([[2026-07-08-alphasignal-claude-agent-cost-efficiency]], [[2026-07-12-alphasignal-model-routers-missing-middleware]]), so this is not a one-off relationship but a company running a broader sponsor campaign across the newsletter ecosystem RDCO watches. No editorial content in this issue covers Reducto's product category, so the sponsorship doesn't appear to distort the World Models/Fervo/Cybercab coverage.

Mapping against Ray Data Co

The concrete connection is item 1: Runway Solaris's "no code, the image is the application" pattern is a live extension of the world-models-as-a-new-foundation-model-category thesis already filed in the vault from Packy and Pim DeWitte's March essay ([[2026-03-19-not-boring-world-models]]), and this same release got same-week primary coverage via a different tracked sender ([[2026-09-01-alphasignal-timesfm3-claude51-runway-solaris]]) — this WDoO entry adds Packy's framing (world models "computing what was previously uncomputable") plus World Labs' Atlas as a second concrete example, not new facts about Solaris itself. Separately, the Reducto sponsor block is a minor but real RDCO-relevant data point: document parsing/ingestion is directly adjacent to RDCO's data-engineering roots, and Reducto's repeat appearance across two tracked senders (Not Boring, AlphaSignal) in two months is worth logging as a name in the applied-AI-infra space worth revisiting if RDCO ever needs a document-ingestion vendor comparison. The Fervo and PSI items are series-continuation/energy-optimism throughline with no new RDCO-specific signal beyond the portfolio-disclosure verification performed above.

Related