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Aidan Smith

Co-founder, Flapping Airplanes

Co-founded Flapping Airplanes, a data-efficient AI lab that raised a $1B Series A; ex-Neuralink ML researcher.

Flapping Airplanes@aidanmantine(opens X in a new tab)

Real Alpha has cut 6 moments of Aidan Smith (Co-founder, Flapping Airplanes) talking, from an interview on MTS published Oct 22, 2026.

What Aidan Smith said

  1. MTS ·

    AI Models Will Tap the Whole Economy in 2 Years | Aidan Smith

    6 moments · 16 min

    1. 6:01

      Whole-brain emulation has two difficult bottlenecks

      “the first is how do you get the data of what the heck's going on in the brain”
      at 6:35
    2. 11:05

      More efficient AI could unlock demand across the economy

      “we want to unlock this 90% of the economy, which is untouched right now.”
      at 11:38
    3. 20:22

      Small labs attract talent by offering meaningful ownership

      “At Flapping Airplanes, oh, you own this thing that's really, really important.”
      at 21:08
    4. 2:57

      AI algorithms should be designed around their hardware

      “everything fits to the hardware that it's given everything is downstream of the primitives that you give it”
      at 5:48
    5. 13:32

      A new AI lab can compete beyond verifiable code

      “we do not have to focus on the same areas where everyone else is really having this dogged competition”
      at 14:29
    6. 17:22

      Models cover far less real-world data than their scale suggests

      “We think that we have 99% of data in the world in these models, but we really have under 1%, because there's so much individual knowledge”
      at 18:04

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