Today’s piece was put together with the help of several conversations with Answer.AI co-founder Jeremy Howard.

Listen now | The centerpiece of today’s post is an extensive interview with Chuck Thorpe. Thorpe, now President of Clarkson University, spent over two decades at Carnegie Mellon University. These years were largely spent as a student, project manager, and PI working on Carnegie Mellon’s autonomous vehicle vision research.

We’ve all heard that “DARPA invented the Internet.” But few have heard of BBN, the contractor that did the most work to bring the ARPAnet into existence.

This piece is a part of a FreakTakes series. The goal is to put together a series of administrative histories on specific DARPA projects just as I have done for many industrial R&D labs and other research orgs on FreakTakes.

This piece is a part of a FreakTakes series. The goal is to put together a series of administrative histories on specific DARPA projects just as I have done for many industrial R&D labs and other research orgs on FreakTakes.

This piece is an accompaniment to today’s MOSIS piece. So please read the MOSIS piece before starting this one.

This piece is a part of a FreakTakes series. The goal is to put together a series of administrative histories on specific DARPA projects just as I have done for many industrial R&D labs and other research orgs on FreakTakes.

I’ve taken to calling the pieces I write for FreakTakes “administrative histories.” The reason I opted for that name instead of “progress studies histories” or “metascience histories” is that it was the name that drew the fewest confused stares and/or eye rolls from the scientists and engineers whom I hope to attract.

Don Swanson’s career started on a path familiar to many who read this blog.

This post is an accompaniment to Tony Kulesa’s excellent piece on the history of Y Combinator. Many in Silicon Valley think of Y Combinator (YC) as the sum of its services. The services are, in short: cash, a network, and guidance for early-stage (mostly software) founders. The YC model and its effectiveness have become widely known and understood in Silicon Valley.

Check out my guest post for the ChinaTalk Substack on recent innovation in the sport of jiu-jitsu and how it can help us think about OpenAI’s future.