Speed & scale, faster
The Speed & Scale framework and opportunity areas is a great resource for learning how to decarbonize civilization Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. . Moving fast requires clarity, which their taxonomy of technologies initiates. Applying the “Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)” framework, they define outcomes that require innovation within each area.
I wanted to answer:
- Which outcomes are highest impact?
- Which outcomes are most neglected?
- What are the bottlenecks, and can AI solve them?
Interfaces determine how you think, so I used Astra and Codex to reorganize and extend their website to be outcome-first. You can now sort by outcome, see which are most neglected, search by keyword, rank by quantities, and find companies.
I didn't review the model's research, so there could be inaccuracies and it’s certainly incomplete (I gave it a $100 budget). However, even with limited rigour, you learn a few interesting things:
- The top 3 highest impact outcomes are: "Always-on clean power production", "drive down cost and reduce land use for intermittent renewables", and "expanding cost-competitive clean heat to higher temperatures"
- There are 2,306 companies with $80.4B in funding across all outcomes
- 116/122 outcomes (95%) have more than 10 companies working on them
Future extensions:
- Use Codex to research subproblems, companies and people relevant to each outcome
- Use Codex to determine where LLM-based agents can solve bottlenecks
- Use Codex to build personalized recommendations for aspiring entrepreneurs
I hope this interface helps aspiring founders think in terms of which outcomes they are best positioned to drive impact. If we can identify where AI can accelerate these outcomes, the faster we'll achieve them. In a future post, I'll open-source the code for the website, agent-driven research methodology, and enrich each outcome with the findings. Please get in touch if you’re interested in this!