Contrary Research Rundown #99
Hadrian's vision for the factory of the future, plus news on the hype around AI agents, the Pentagon's plans in the Taiwan Strait, and more
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Research Rundown
The US industrial base saw massive build-up during WWII, with many considering this capability to be a key turning point in winning the war. That capability also enabled the US to become responsible for 40% of global manufacturing by the 1950s. But not much has changed about aerospace and defense manufacturing since then.
The US defense industrial base is dependent on thousands of “mom and pop” machine shops, representing more than $60 billion of spend. But the age of the average machine shop operator is 63 years old. As a generation of these operators retire we could see a collapse of the industrial base in the US.
And this collapse couldn’t come at a worse time. We’re in the midst of both a Space Race 2.0 and an industrial boom that hasn’t been seen in decades. Funding for space startups in 2023 was $17.9 billion, with the total value of space companies exceeding $4 trillion. With SpaceX’s enabling innovation around reusable rockets, the cost of launches has plummeted. That has created a massive opportunity for dozens of industrial categories to operate more in space.
But with the explosion in demand for precision manufacturing from space, aerospace, and defense, the existing industrial base just doesn’t have the flexibility to meet it.
That’s where Hadrian comes in. Hadrian is a manufacturing company that has built vertically integrated technology for high-precision manufacturing, with modules including quoting, programming, machining, and inspection. Hadrian’s goal is to build factories to accelerate the pace of American manufacturing by delivering parts in ”less time, on time.” The way they do this is by building a semi-automated approach to manufacturing, effectively building “five software companies and a robotics company” internally.
Over the last month, Contrary Research has gone deep on Hadrian’s business. This includes a 12K+ word deep dive on the company’s evolution as well as an hour-long conversation with Chris Power, CEO and founder of Hadrian. Enjoy!
OXOS Medical is positioned to take advantage of the growing demand for point-of-care diagnostic imaging and the increasing adoption of radiology technology. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
There are no current job openings. Please check here for updates.
Hadrian is a manufacturing company that has built vertically integrated technology for high-precision manufacturing, with modules including quoting, programming, machining, and inspection. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Backend Software Engineer - Los Angeles, CA
Lead Fullstack Software Engineer - Los Angeles, CA
Check out some standout roles from this week.
Ramp | San Francisco, Miami, New York or Remote - Software Engineer (Backend), Senior Software Engineer (Frontend), Director of Engineering (Infrastructure)
Glean | Palo Alto, CA - Software Engineer (Frontend), Software Engineer (Fullstack), Software Engineer (Security)
Mistral AI | Paris, France - Software Engineer (Full-stack), Site Reliability Engineer, Software Engineer (Back-end)
Benchling | San Francisco, CA - IT DevOps Engineer (High Seniority), Software Engineer Backend (Domain Graph & APIs), Software Engineer Data Platform (Search)
Google has appointed Noam Shazeer, the former CEO of Character.AI, as the co-technical lead on its Gemini AI initiative, which aims to compete with OpenAI's GPT language models.
While Zapier has over 400K customers using AI for automation, most applications are emerging from the synergy between AI's capabilities and Zapier's deterministic workflow engine, suggesting that the true potential of AI in automation is just beginning to be realized.
Cohere Co-Founder and CEO, Aidan Gomez, sat down with Harry Stebbings on 20VC to talk about AI development, industry trends, and business strategies in the AI space. In their conversation, Aidan said the hype around AI agents is 100% justified as they promise to transform productivity by independently carrying out work over long time horizons.
The annual cost of having an AI language model listen to everything a person says has dropped to about $3.50. “The cost of LLM inference has come down by 100x over 2 years (~$50 to $0.50 per 1M tokens).”
The Pentagon plans to turn the Taiwan Strait into an "unmanned hellscape" by flooding it with thousands of drones to delay a potential Chinese invasion. In response, U.S. companies, like Saronic, are scaling their autonomous forces.
Yoshua Bengio, considered one of the "Godfathers of AI" has completely changed his mind about the pace of AI development, now worrying that we may not have a decade to get AI regulation right.
Cursor has gained popularity among developers at leading AI companies like OpenAI and Midjourney, who use its AI-powered code editing and autocompletion tools.
AWS CEO Matt Garman believes that most developers could stop coding soon as AI takes over many coding tasks, suggesting a shift in the role of software developers towards more innovative and customer-focused work.
Researchers are testing the use of mRNA to get damaged livers to repair themselves, which could one day lessen the need for organ transplants.
YouTube is expanding its partnership with Shopify to take on TikTok Shop, allowing creators to sell products directly on YouTube.
The AI podcast, Unsupervised Learning, conducted a survey with 40+ leaders at organizations building AI products to better understand the ways they’re building applications and the tools they’re using. Their results showed over 1/3 of the builders surveyed switched AI models in the last 3 months, suggesting the AI landscape is rapidly evolving.
Nvidia is facing an antitrust investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice over accusations of anti-competitive behavior, including how it bundles its products.
Grafana Labs, the open-source company behind the popular operational dashboarding tool, is now valued at over $6 billion after raising $270 million in a funding round.
Hugging Face acquired the company XetHub, a Seattle-based company founded by Yucheng Low, Ajit Banerjee, Rajat Arya who previously worked at Apple where they built and scaled Apple’s internal ML infrastructure.
Primer, an edtech startup, successfully lobbied for legislation in Florida that could allow microschools to operate in over 50K new locations like museums and churches, potentially disrupting traditional education models.
Private equity firms are seizing the moment to acquire more startups, as the IPO market looks shaky and corporate M&A activity has declined.
Procreate, a popular illustration and animation app, has announced that they will never integrate generative AI into their products, despite the technology's potential creative applications.
Klarna, the buy-now-pay-later fintech, is seeing "solid sales in the US" and expects its US business to hit $1 billion in revenue "pretty soon", according to their CEO.
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