alt Hacker NewsFrom my research the whole Alvea thing was an Effective Alturism cooked up project that only lasted 3 years and made no money, and then now they are at Astera which seems to be some rich persons plaground where they throw money at researchers to do “stuff”. What that stuff is, I don’t know.
The real moral of this story is you should get rich eccentric friends from the Ivy League elite who throw money at you to do AGI. Like you really think this company of like 40 people is going to crack AGI?
Man I should cross the moat and get some rich friends.
Replies
"Alvea started in late 2021 as a moonshot to rapidly develop and deploy a room temperature-stable DNA vaccine candidate against the Omicron wave of COVID-19, and we soon became the fastest startup to take a new drug from founding to a Phase 1 clinical trial. However, we decided to discontinue our lead candidate during the follow-up period of the trial as the case for large-scale impact weakened amidst the evolving pandemic landscape."
To be honest Alvea doesn't sound like a crazy idea on paper. Reducing lead times on new drugs is a really good idea that seems like it is bottlenecked more by bureaucratic concerns.
A company which focused on that as its sole mission could be really profitable, if they could sell their professional services to a group that already had plenty of in house expertise on actually creating the drugs. My very low resolution guess is that they slipped up when they actually tried to make the drug themselves. That may have been a requirement to get funding from the US government at the time, I don't know.
Well yeah , being high status does not always mean you actually contribute a lot of value to society. And being medium status does not mean your value is mediocre - take a nurse or a kindergarten teacher - their value is substantial but the status they get is mediocre at best. So if you get a feeling the "game" is somewhat rigged and twisted, perhaps the feeling is correct...