Another day, another startup telling us what's coming.
Flapping Airplanes is valued at 1.5B with investment from Google and Nvidia.
From day one, they made it clear: the algorithms aren't getting shared.
Their thesis: AI is wildly data-inefficient and that the path to AGI is finding fundamentally different learning algorithms.
They're targeting >1,000x improvement.
Eighteen months ago the founder was openly publishing through Stanford. Now he's sitting on $1.5B of stealth IP.
This is what science looks like in 2026.
And remember, this shift is new.
Research like this used to get published openly.
Now, companies raise a huge amount and need to capture value, so everything stays private.
Sequoia (their lead investor) specifically mentioned their reason for investing: "we are 2-3 research breakthroughs away from an 'AGI' intelligence."
Thoes "breakthroughs" are algorithms.
If those algorithms stay private, whoever owns them owns the future of AI.
We HAVE to ensure they stay open.