Guest
Aidan Smith
Co-founder, Flapping Airplanes
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
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”
Aidan Smith6:35 More efficient AI could unlock demand across the economy
“we want to unlock this 90% of the economy, which is untouched right now.”
Aidan Smith11:38 Small labs attract talent by offering meaningful ownership
“At Flapping Airplanes, oh, you own this thing that's really, really important.”
Aidan Smith21:08 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”
Aidan Smith5:48 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”
Aidan Smith14:29 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”
Aidan Smith18:04
The episode
MTSAI Models Will Tap the Whole Economy in 2 Years | Aidan Smith
Aidan Smith · Co-founder, Flapping Airplanes
6:01of 26:11 · Oct 22
