{"id":17146,"date":"2026-01-30T07:22:40","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T07:22:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/?p=17146"},"modified":"2026-01-30T07:22:40","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T07:22:40","slug":"flapping-airplanes-and-the-promise-of-research-driven-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/?p=17146","title":{"rendered":"Flapping Airplanes and the promise of research-driven AI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A new AI lab called <a href=\"https:\/\/flappingairplanes.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Flapping Airplanes<\/a> launched on Wednesday, with $180 million in seed funding from Google Ventures, Sequoia, and Index. The founding team is impressive, and the goal \u2014 finding a less data-hungry way to train large models \u2014 is a particularly interesting one.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Based on what I\u2019ve seen so far, I would rate them as Level Two on <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2026\/01\/24\/a-new-test-for-ai-labs-are-you-even-trying-to-make-money\/\">the trying-to-make-money scale<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But there\u2019s something even more exciting about the Flapping Airplanes project that I hadn\u2019t been able to put my finger on until I read <a href=\"https:\/\/dcahn.substack.com\/p\/investing-in-flapping-airplanes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">this post from Sequoia partner David Cahn<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As Cahn describes it, Flapping Airplanes is one of the first labs to move beyond scaling, the relentless buildout of data and compute that has defined most of the industry so far:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The scaling paradigm argues for dedicating a huge amount of society\u2019s resources, as much as the economy can muster, toward scaling up today\u2019s LLMs, in the hopes that this will lead to AGI. The research paradigm argues that we are 2-3 research breakthroughs away from an \u201cAGI\u201d intelligence, and as a result, we should dedicate resources to long-running research, especially projects that may take 5-10 years to come to fruition.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[\u2026]<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A compute-first approach would prioritize cluster scale above all else, and would heavily favor short-term wins (on the order of 1-2 years) over long-term bets (on the order of 5-10 years). A research-first approach would spread bets temporally, and should be willing to make lots of bets that have a low absolute probability of working, but that collectively expand the search space for what is possible.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It might be that the compute folks are right, and it\u2019s pointless to focus on anything other than frenzied server buildouts. But with so many companies already pointed in that direction, it\u2019s nice to see someone headed the other way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2026\/01\/29\/flapping-airplanes-and-the-promise-of-research-driven-ai\/\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new AI lab called Flapping A&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17147,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[249],"tags":[11093,329,195,291],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17146"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}