The Blended Journey of Ambitious People

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Dr. Travis Dirks is CTO at XLabs, building moonshots powered by artificial intelligence (AI), quantum & neurotechnology. Prior to XLabs, Travis was co-founder and chief science officer of Seldn, an AI that could accurately predict rare global socio-economic disruptions in 12 countries. Travis led the team at Seldn to predict ‘black swans’ such as labor strikes, jumps in commodities & currencies, and societal riots four months before they happened with 95% accuracy. He connects complex science and math to challenging business problems and designing new software solutions with AI. Travis has pioneered several AI algorithms and new approaches to engineering moonshots and novel breakthroughs, including ‘Mental Model Arbitrage’. Prior to Seldn, Travis co-founded and led Rotary Gallop – a machine learning fintech firm that applied game theory to corporate control (for M&A, hostile takeover, and activist situations). Travis’s analyses and quotes have been heavily featured in popular media, including the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Travis received his PhD in Nanotechnology from the world’s leading institution for condensed matter physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and holds a B.S in physics from Purdue University.  

Episode Links:  

Travis Dirks’ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travisdirks/ 

Travis Dirks’ Twitter:  https://twitter.com/TravisDirks 

Travis Dirks’ Website: https://www.travisdirks.com/   https://xlabs.ai/ 

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Outline: 

Here’s the timestamps for the episode: 

(00:00) – Introduction

(01:49) – For XLabs, moonshots are those startups which change your perception of what's possible. It should push out the boundaries of possibility

(02:58) – XLabs’ goal over the next 10 to 15 years is to develop start-ups in each theme to change the aspects of the world in three categories: amplifying genetics, creative destruction of the internet and culture as a technology

(04:16) – Uber, self-driving and state-of-the-art technology to shy away from uncomfortable things and interact as people.

(07:01) – XLabs trends include X-core, a metal learning AI engine pipeline that learns to build other AIs and genetics data to predict cancer

(08:56) – Mental Model Arbitrage is essentially the idea of going to other fields, intentionally seeking out their best ideas, their best models, their best tools, intentionally generalizing them to see where else you can apply them

(11:17) – AI is on the verge of great things that don’t happen as fast, because of trying to show that an algorithm could do what someone thought it would do as opposed to being built with the assumption that it will do its job

(12:50) – AI is essentially the attempt to duplicate things that come easy to human beings. We're more interested in the space of things that are not easy for humans or computers, and it’s called Amplified Intelligence

(15:54) – X-core is really an evolution. Rebuilding in a more general way an engine that allowed us to make stunning predictions about rare events such as labor strikes, commodity prices, violence break outs through complexity physics or “mining of human knowledge”

(18:39) – Why investment in research for moonshots is not as high

(21:42) – The XLabs purpose for a moonshot company in a nutshell: be driven, develop something relevant to AI, machine learning or cloud computing, breadth of interests and  surprisingly rare skills

(23:37) – The allegory of the showman and the artist in the entrepreneurial scene

(29:41) – Dirks’ recipe for achieving great things