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Bjarke Ingels, Founder and Creative Director, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)
In conversation with: Clay Chandler, Fortune

Fortune Global Forum 2024: Building the Future

Photograph by Michael O’Shea for Fortune

Conferences

Please. Thank you. Ok, we're so pleased to have you uh here. Um There are so many great projects you're working on that. We want to ask you uh about you're uh dividing up your time now between uh between New York and, and Copenhagen. Um You just finished your, your big new studio in Copenhagen. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Actually, we, we, we build our own building at the, at the tip of the pier uh uh inside a small little park. We, we designed sort of reclaiming the industrial port for, for the future neighborhoods of the city and for those of our audience who are New Yorkers, maybe let's take off some of the things that you're most proud of, of your projects in New York. You've done so many. Uh Yeah, like here in the city, we started doing VF 57. It's nicknamed the Court Scraper because it's somehow combining the, the density and verticality of a skyscraper with the communal space of a, of a courtyard building. So, um so it looks kind of a warped pyramid uh on, on the west side highway. If you, if you land in Teterboro, you, you'll you'll see it sort of fly flying in, right. And then the spiral, we, we just finished the spiral, which is the home of pfizer HS BC and, and, and just TPG. Uh and it's essentially a, a classic Manhattan skyscraper, but because we try to make the floor plates as large as possible because tenants really want the largest possible floor plates. Uh We have to, we rub up against the setback requirements. So instead of making a classic zig rod with these kind of incremental steps, we distributed the setbacks in a spiral of uh 66 terraces that cascade up around the building. So each floor has access to their own outdoor garden with trees and plants, but they also have the potential for a double height space. So like one of the tenants have 14 floors and each floor is connected to the floor above and the floor below. So you can actually walk inside the building through throughout the whole office space. So instead of like waiting endlessly at the elevator, you can actually see your colleagues several floors above and, and, and go to them and to them. That's great. Um And I might add that HS BC have found that without changing their company policy, they've gone from uh less than 40% attendance to 80% attendance after moving into the new space because the the joy and and productivity of uh of, of, of being in a better space and, and seeing each other seems to be uh seems to be working more than uh than uh than mandate than badgering people. So, um I want to talk about some of your recent kind of more futuristic projects. But before that, maybe we can go back just like kind of your origins. What drew you to architecture in the, in the beginning because you started very young uh as an architect. You know, I, I wanted to be uh I wanted to be a cartoonist and, and uh the in the absence of a Cartoon Academy in Denmark, the, the, the Royal Danish Art Academy School of Architecture was the closest match. And, and because uh because architecture is free in like education, university is free in Denmark, you can be a little bit more frivolous with your choices. So I thought spent a few years getting good at drawing buildings and landscapes. So essentially drawing the background for the stories I wanted to draw and the characters. Uh and then I, then I became fascinated with the background and uh and, and stayed course on on the plan b marvelous. Um You have a couple of sort of ideas that are associated with your work that are interesting and I hope you can maybe expand on a little bit for us. One is this idea of hedonistic sustainability and the other is a kind of practical utopianism, utopianism. What do those ideas mean? No, it's um the, the, the, the first one, like the first project we ever did uh is actually um uh the Copenhagen Harbor Bath. And it's because uh like two decades ago that because of investments in, in uh in, in, in surface sewers and other things like suddenly the, the port of Copenhagen became so clean that you could swim in it. And our first project was to design the Copenhagen Harbor Bath that essentially extends the life of the city into the water around it. And on opening day, you suddenly saw the Copenhagen is jumping in the port in the middle of the city instead of taking their car for hours to get to the Hamptons or the equivalent of the Hamptons in uh in Copenhagen. And I, I felt this was part of a bigger idea, the idea that the clean port is not only nice for the fish, it's amazing for the citizens that live in that city that the sustainable city or the sustainable building building is not only better for the environment, it's also more enjoyable for the people that inhabit it. And, and we've taken this, we've been pursuing this idea of hedonistic sustainability in various ways. But in um in 2019, uh we, we opened Copen Hill, which which is the cleanest waste to energy power plant in the world in Copenhagen. It's so clean that the steam that comes out of the chimney is actually cleaner than the air of Copenhagen. So, so um, it's, it's a true fact. And so the, the, the, the roof, we designed it, basically the machinery inside steps down. So we designed it with a sloping roof. So, um, the facade is actually the tallest, uh, manmade climbing wall in the world. You need to be a pretty skilled climber, uh, to, to make it to the top. And the roof is an alpine park where you can hike and, and ski downhill all year skiing. Uh I mean, Denmark uh depressingly never gets any medals at the Winter Olympics. Uh But we hope eventually this could change now that the Copenhagen can. This is an extraordinary building. I mean, this shows, I think we've seen videos of this uh Copen Hill. It's actually, it's just amazing. It's a ski resort on top of a recycling plan. Actually, one of the best free solo climbers in the world recently made it to uh to the top without harness. I I'm happy like a very stressful video to watch. Uh OK. So, uh and then practical utopianism. What's, what's that? Yeah. So that's essentially, I, I actually think that fundamentally a lot and I think this transcends the architecture. Uh a a lot of the key breakthroughs in technology or in culture or in, in politics for that matter, could be defined as oxymorons when seemingly mutually exclusive or contradictory elements or ideas become unified. And you can say most people would say Hedonistic sustainability is an oxymoron you, you should either choose enjoyment or, or or the environment, but you can actually have both and sometimes the better, the better the environment, the more the enjoyment of, of living there. Right? Similarly, Pragmatic Utopia is, is essentially this idea that if utopia is this concept of a place so perfect that it can only exist in fiction. Uh And if pragmatism is the idea of dealing with the world as it is, then every project, every building design, every public space, every neighborhood, every master plan has the possibility to be a pragmatic utopia. And actually a great way to explain. I think the significance of architecture is the Danish word for design is a form Ging, which literally means form giving. Because when you're designing something you're giving form to that, which has not yet been given form. In other words, you're giving form to the future because when you're designing a space or building, you are giving form to the world or a part of the world that you would like to find yourself living in, in the future. So, in that sense, and and I think that is essentially the idea of pragmatic utopia that each project becomes a small fragment of the future you would like to see uh see happening. So I want to talk about some of your recent projects which are very much that giving form to the future and not only designing this world but designing other worlds in some cases. Um There is one project that you are working on that is literally a Moonshot. Uh I wonder if we could see some images of that. Do we have we put up uh some slides here or do you have a clicker? Oh, yeah. So um at least we, we see them. Um We have um Yeah, so um we, we're working with um uh it's called Project Olympus. It's part of the Artemis program of uh of NASA. Um Let me see. And um it's essentially working with a, with a 3d printing company icon out of Austin to develop the technology to uh to build the first uh the first building on the moon. Um And it's using solar powered lasers to essentially melt moon dust into a sort of lunar obsidian. So when, when you, when you, when you melt it in a kiln, it becomes a kind of result. And when you sin it with lasers, it becomes what in game of Thrones they would call dragon glass. So like a black glass, like very strong stone. And in 2028 we are scheduled to land or NAS A is scheduled to land. The first laser printer uh that essentially has a mission success is to create the equivalent of a sidewalk tile. And, and if that, if that sidewalk tile um passes the structural tests, uh then it would release the funding for making the first permanent human habitat. Uh on, on the South pole of the moon, uh essentially melting moon dust into the building material of the future. So when, if it clears that threshold, when would kind of construction and design work on that again? Yeah, but that should be 32. No, no, we're, we're designing the, the, the new Philharmonic in Prague. It's scheduled to open in 32 and we, we're designing the, the, the new airport in Zurich. Uh It's gonna be the largest building uh made out of timber actually. Uh but uh it's scheduled to open fully in 2035. So, so uh we, we have projects uh on the moon with a schedule tighter than uh than, than some of our terrestrial work. My gosh, so futuristic but not that far in the future. Um Amazing. Well, um you mentioned that um you know, the 3D technology designed for this very kind of utopian project also has practical uses right here. Uh You know, on planet Earth, you say a word about that. No, exactly like that because the current technology that icon is using. And, and we are, we right now, we're building the first 3d Printed Hotel in Marfa, Texas Cosco. And we just finished the first 3d Printed Neighborhood Wolf Ranch in Austin for Lenar. Um But it's a gantry, a crane. So it has a maximum print height of 11 ft and a maximum width of 30 ft. That's the span of the gantry crane and also you need to send guys out to put down rails. So, so and you need to level the side. So there is a lot of uh handcraft. So of course, here we wanted to land and deploy immediately. So we got the idea of a single pivot and a kind of multi access arm. So to to be able to deliver that technology um icon has developed the Phoenix the next generation and there's a functioning prototype and it's suddenly instead of 11 ft, it can print 27 ft of height. So multi stories, it has a much greater reach and you don't need to level the site. So you can build on, on much more exciting topographies put that out there. So all of this means that you can deliver much faster, spending way less hours. So in a way you increase the design freedom and the quality, but you lower the cost and increase the speed. So you end up having these positive uh earth bounded side effects of trying to solve a very, very hard piece of designing engineering on on the moon. So just like the the the moon race, the space race and and DARPA, uh you're seeing that this, this urge to solve very difficult problems, ends up having fantastic spinoffs on sort of terrestrial application. Um Let's talk about a different kind of utopia. Uh The work that you're doing in in Bhutan is is fascinating. Maybe you could show us some of those images. Let me see. Um Is anyone Benz a ban? Pretty good? Um It's one of the most beautiful countries in the world. Uh say a little bit about this. Yes. So, so these, these are, are different images of um um of a project we're trying to do in Bhutan. It's, it's not a very uh responsive clicker. Uh but, but essentially um they um uh different, different sort of situations from a, from a city we are, we are trying to create in uh in Bhutan called Tele, the Mindfulness City. And um it's, it's Bhutan is this incredible kingdom in the Himalayas. It borders two neighbors, China and India. So they have like 3 billion neighbors in two countries. Uh And they managed to remain sovereign. They are also the most sustainable country in the world. They sequester almost twice as much carbon as they emit their power, almost exclusively with hydroelectricity. They measure their success as a nation in gross national happiness rather than typical economic parameters. But um a year and a half ago, I met the king after the coronation of King Charles, he came to Copenhagen and I found myself sitting next to him at a dinner and he uh he said he actually came to Copenhagen to uh to uh to meet me because he, he was thinking about creating a city on the border of India. Uh because the young generation of Bhutanese, they're, they're well educated, they speak perfect English. Uh they go to Australia and Canada in large numbers to pursue prosperity and the excitement of the modern world. So he wanted to create a special administrative zone uh that could attract foreign investment and retain local talent without losing the values that make Bhutan. So endearing to, to all of us. And what we've tried to do is we've designed a city shaped by the 34 rivers that flow from the Himalayas down to India through the, the sort of tropical plains uh uh at, at the base of the, of the Himalayas. Um This is, this is one of the bridges that crosses the river. You, you saw one that was a market one that was a hospital, one that was a, a university and um uh in, in, in this environment, we're trying to imagine a city that doesn't displace nature, but actually preserves it, that doesn't displace agriculture, but integrates it into the city. A city that is built with the river rocks and the bamboo and the timber you find in abundance on, on the site. Um So essentially try to merge an environment that can attract global investment and and retain local talent and attract international talent. But then also like the entire city will be powered by, by hydroelectricity. Uh The building you see here is almost like a symbol of the project that um imagine it's, it's like an Indian step. Well, so the rivers flow from uh from Bhutan into India. Uh So the patterns you see when you, when you look closer, uh it's actually a series of steps. So anyone who stand who's been standing on the top of the Hoover Dam has felt the excitement of potentially repelling down. Uh But here you can actually stroll down and, and one of the most famous sites in uh in Bhutan is the tiger's nest, a beautiful temple nested on the side of a of a rock. Uh This would be um the, the 21st century equivalent of the tiger's nest that you can descend down to a temple nested on the side of a dam. It's essentially a piece of architecture. You know, a piece of engineering that converts the power of nature into electrical power. It's a piece of engineering that, that becomes a piece of art. It's a piece of energy infrastructure that becomes a piece of spiritual infrastructure. Marvel. So, so we, we hope that maybe this could be for, for Bhutan, what uh what the Eiffel Tower is to France or the Sydney Opera is to Australia iconic. It really does. Um You've mentioned uh 3d uh uh printers. It's something that's really revolutionizing architecture. We've just got a few seconds here. Tell us quickly about how you're using A I, I mean, I, I think so far A I is incredibly good at visuals. So, in that sense, um and I think it's because there is an abundance of, of image data out there. It's also very good at text because there's an abundance of text data. Uh I think um architecture and, and I'd like to say that to take a pic, a picture of the building says as much about the building as a picture of a, of a dish says about the the taste of food. So, so in that sense, we, we need to find ways to feed data. And I think once we have biped robots and other kinds of domestic assistance robots, uh uh you know, of course, we already have robots in the form of cars moving around the streets, gathering a lot about urbanism and, and, and, and traffic and, but I think uh the, the second we start being able to harvest a much higher bandwidth data from uh physical environments, then, then we will really uh have the power to, to, to, to threaten my livelihood in a serious way. And, and, and, and actually, uh with, with, with icon, we have started a project called Vitruvius where we are attempting to use the data that we already have to, to see if we can, we can, we can teach the next generation of, of art architects. And I mean, if, if, if you can't, if you can't, if you can't beat them, then uh then at least we're gonna try to join them. Well, your work is absolutely fantastic. Uh And very exciting that you could be here with us. I suspect you will have plenty of opportunities to use your human skills for years to come, Bianca Ingels. Thank you so much for joining us. Pleasure. Thanks.

Tom Brady, Seven-Time World Champion and Entrepreneur, Nitin Nohria, Executive Chairman, Thrive Capital, In conversation with: Alyson Shontell, Fortune

Fortune Global Forum 2024: Trust And Teamwork - A CEO Playbook

Joshua Kushner, Founder and CEO, Thrive Capital
In conversation with: Alyson Shontell, Fortune

Fortune Global Forum 2024: Big Bets

So Josh, thank you for joining us today. I know you don't usually do interviews. So we're lucky to have you live in person. Um The first thing I wanna talk to you about is you said we're in the biggest paradigm shift of your career. Granted, we're both middle aged now. It's not the longest career ever, but there's still a long career for you 20 years in venture about. Um Why do you say that what's going on right now? Yeah. So when I started thrive, uh we were in a very exciting moment and that the internet was starting to kind of gain a tremendous amount of distribution through mobile phones and cloud infrastructure was taking off right now with a I, I think it's a very exciting moment. Uh Primarily because the foundation for the entire ecosystem uh has been set. Um I think as a firm, we get incredibly excited about this moment just because of one, you know, the 2nd and 3rd order implications of a lot of this technology in terms of how impact consumers, how impact enterprises. But also we're kind of living in this exponential moment where things are just happening so much quicker and I think the rate of progress uh that is ahead of us is just going to be tremendously exciting. So there was one other paradigm shift that happened last week uh in the United States, a lot has changed. Uh We have now an idea of what we know now who our next president will be. It'll be President Trump. Um There was a lot of feelings in Silicon Valley and in the tech world about Trump versus Kamala. And a lot of people are saying Trump is great for little tech. First of like, what the heck is little tech and what does this mean for the beer and start up community? Yeah. So I think, um you know, my vantage point is, you know, irrespective of who our president is. Uh it's very important that we're all patriotic. And I think, you know, America's greatest export is innovation. And I think uh in this moment, it's really important that we continue to kind of lean into thinking about how we can all support the ecosystem in every single way possible when I think about how the technologies that are built here impacting the rest of the world. Uh I think it's a moment for us all to kind of, you know, rally behind uh the technology uh industry to kind of make sure that we're pushing the world forward in the right way. But it should be a good thing for the industry. I mean, there's a lot of people who felt like there's no exit happening. The IP IP O market is down, mergers and acquisitions are getting blocked. This feels like maybe this could be good for venture, you know, I think the, the industry at large, um, you know, you have to kind of like disconnect uh liquidity from progress in terms of technology. Um If you think about uh public markets, there are good times, there are bad times. Um It kind of doesn't matter, you know, what administration is involved when you think about kind of the rate of progress in terms of the things that are being built. I would say the last couple of years have been amongst the most exciting uh in my career. Uh You're seeing founders dream in terms of what is possible. And when you think about some of these things, whether it be robotics or life sciences or some of the things that we're all using every day with regards to A I uh things that seem somewhat impossible a couple of years ago, feel very, very, very real uh and, and, and in front of us. And um I'm very excited about kind of what is being built and, and the impact that it's gonna make on the world. Great. Um So I wanna talk about the uh one serve in particular, of course, open A I Elon Musk is now the Center Force of Business in the White House. We just came out with our most powerful people in business list today. He was indisputably number one. Um He has a competitive start up to open A IX dot A I raised billions of dollars. Um He does not like Sam, your founder for Open A I, Sam Altman. They are in a, a quite a public spat in lawsuits and things. Are you worried about your investment now? Like, what does this mean for open A I that Elon is there? Um So first off, I have like deep admiration and respect for Lan. Um and you're a SpaceX investor, uh We feel very grateful to be. Yeah. And I think, you know, my understanding of him, first off, uh he has defied expectations on everything that he's ever been a part of and no pun intended gravity. And um you know, my core belief is that he leads uh with intentionality and with an orientation with regards to kind of what is best for humanity and for everyone. Um my interpretation, my interpretation of uh his excitement to kind of participate in the government is very much driven by his desire to do right by everyone and based on what I know of him uh and to be self aware, uh there are others who know him better. I think he always leads with good intentions and I have extreme confidence uh that he is always gonna do what he thinks is right for all Americans. Well, maybe we'll broker a treaty between the two of them. Some peace between Elon and Sam. I know for certain that both Sam and Greg have deep respect and, and an immense amount of gratitude for, for all that Elon has done for not just open A I but for uh the rest of the world in humanity. So OK, let's talk about what's going on in open A I and the valuation do you guys just put in 1.25 billion, not the first billion dollar check. You've written this company. Um That's more than Microsoft put in in this last round, more than NVIDIA, more than Kla. I mean, you are like all in on this company. Uh I know that you have a rigorous back and forth at thrive. Should we invest? Should we not invest? What's, what's the case for this $157 billion valuation where you all your chips are in versus um I'm sure there were people arguing the other side. What are both sides? Yeah, it might make sense to kind of take a step back to explain who we are and what we do. Um So we started the firm in 2011 and uh when I started uh everyone that I met with on the investor side said no to us. So we kind of took a step back and said, OK, given that we have nothing to lose. What is the right strategy for us? And we kind of created this uh vehicle that was incredibly opportunistic, it was agnostic to stage sector geography. And since day one, as a firm, we have been very much oriented towards being extremely concentrated in people and ideas. Uh We have been of the belief uh that there's a very small end of companies that one should be a part of. You need to be their most meaningful partner. You need to be extremely long term. And, you know, we've always believed in the MGER buffet way of the world. Uh power of compounding one of the wonders of the world and hold these companies for a very long period of time. So since then day one, we've incubated businesses, we've invested early and in extremely concentrated ways, uh we've invested in later stage businesses. Um And over the last couple of years, we've written multiple billion dollar checks in companies like stripe and others uh that, that you're aware of with regards to open A I. Um our framework has always been that there are really four things that matter in this new paradigm shift. Um There's research and talent, uh there is compute and capital, uh there's data and there's distribution uh from our framing open A I is the number one model and research company. It's not the number one enterprise company. Uh And it's also the number one consumer company with a half a billion people using their product when we kind of think about the valuations associated with some of these large language models, obviously, you can value the enterprise business. Um But our orientation has always been uh towards kind of the application layer and the capacity for consumers to kind of utilize these products in ways in which are improving their life. And the exponential growth of that user base um has been quite stunning and is fairly unprecedented compared to anything else that has existed to kind of frame it in the context of numbers. Um If you kind of look at cloud infrastructure, I think there was about 12 billion of spend uh about a decade ago. Now, it's about a 220 billion run rate that should yield about $2 trillion of enterprise value. And I think that will grow towards five trillion uh over the next five years. If you kind of project forward, our view is there's going to be multiple winners in this space. Um uh We have deep respect for uh Google and, and, and Meta and Xa I. Uh but our belief is that open A I is going to be one of those and we feel very lucky to be partnered with them. You have an approach that's about quality and that quality is scarcity, right? Like you have a a thing you say about Fifth Avenue, always invest in Fifth Avenue, you always are paying a good price for it. Yeah, I think uh you know, one of the things uh that I, that I've once told Allison is, uh I always try my best to kind of explain to my mom what I do. She gets it now, but a couple of years ago she thought I fixed computers for a living. And, um, you know what I try, my best to kind of express to her was, you know, at the earlier stages, we're looking for the new and upcoming community. Uh These are areas that people uh are just starting to find interesting. Um And at the later stages, our view is uh you wanna invest in Fifth Avenue, you want to be in the high quality companies that you want to own for decades to come uh in our world. Uh You know, there's an ephemeral to technology. Uh those assets are, are, are family fairly limited. Uh But I think most importantly, it's so driven by the person who's running those businesses. Um We kind of live in a world in which the founders of these companies are really the heroes. They are really the ones deserving the credit, they're the ones who are operating these businesses. So as I expressed earlier, we're both concentrated in, in, in ideas and in people. Um A lot of people who do what I do think that if they were to be involved in something, it would make a difference, we try our best to be unrelentingly supportive uh to those that we work with and do our best to support them in every way possible. But we have a tremendous amount of self awareness that at the end of the day, they're the ones who deserve all the credit and, and, and deserve to be on stages like this. Yeah, I think, um, a smart investment philosophy is to invest in people and the people running companies. And clearly you were Sam's first phone call when he was raising venture capital and it goes back to a relationship you guys have had for a dozen years. Um I imagine that you had a not so minor heart attack when he was almost fired, he was fired for 48 hours. Um And to me, if I'm you, that's like, oh my God, my investment might just go totally to zero. That's a big proof for my LP S. What did that moment teach you about investing? Yeah, I mean, Microsoft looks like they were like, we're never gonna let that happen again. They diversified. But you're still, I know you have other A I investments but you're still like all in. Yeah. Listen. Uh uh my wife jokes with me all the time that I'm calm and collected uh at most times and uh I don't know if it's a feature or a bug uh to use an engineering term. Uh But, you know, my framing is uh every problem has a solution and uh you know, there's no hope in a better past and there's uh nothing you can gain from freaking out about anything and you just have to kind of look at the play on the field. Um And do your best to kind of write things uh to where they ultimately should be. So, um feel very grateful that uh we were able to play a small part as others were in that very specific moment and we try our best to kind of do that for all the people that we're lucky enough to work with uh in moments of crisis. OK. Last opening eye question, I promise, will you be on the board after it's done transitioning to for profit? And how's that going? No comment, no comment. OK. Maybe, maybe I take that as a, maybe that's my analysis. OK. We'll, we'll, we'll stay tuned. Um OK. So one thing about the firm, you guys are very young. Uh And that's why on purpose. Now, at first I think we talked about in a story that I wrote on you. It was uh sort of like the feature nut bug. Um It was hard to recruit, but now you actually look for people with less than four years of investing experience. Why like don't people benefit from pattern recognition in investing, seeing cycles, knowing cycles. Yeah. So when I started the firm, I was 26 years old and uh we were fortunate enough to uh be seated by the Prince and Endowment and they really believed in us uh and, and what we uh stood for in our approach and orientation as we started to meet with other investors, uh people pushed us to kind of hire people with more experience. And my line at the time was anyone who has experience that is talented, will never want to work with the 26 year old. So there's an adverse selection dynamic associated with the types of people that we could ultimately hire. So what we ended up doing was just kind of aggregating the smartest people that we knew that were our ages, our close friends from college people that they knew from, from, from, from different work experiences. And I think, you know, if I were to orient back to kind of what has gotten us to where we are today, um It's been driven by first principal thinking humility, like an incredible drive to do whatever is necessary to kind of understand uh different topics, uh be there for founders. And we have found that instead of trying to hire the experienced person today, we'd rather just find that young, hungry person who's willing to run through walls like we were 10 years ago and teach them our way and help them grow um and help them become the best version of themselves. That's great. Um So in the time that we have left, I wanna know two things. Really one Sam gave an interview recently and he said, what are you excited about in 2025. And he said first, I'm having a kid. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. Um Two is he thinks that A G I is coming in 2025. Can you explain what is a G I to everybody? And is it coming next year? Um I think uh there's a lot of different interpretations of what A G I is. Um But I think the most simplistic way to uh describe it is this idea that uncertain uh tasks, computers will be smarter than humans. Um And it feels uh like we're making a tremendous uh amount of headway towards that being uh the case. Um And I think as a result of that, um there, there's going to be a tremendous amount of innovation that is going to occur. And, you know, my framework on life is that with any innovation, there's good and bad, I'm an optimist. So I focus on the good things when I think about uh what de S at deep mind has done with alpha fold and the impact uh that protein folding can make in terms of drug discovery that is like an extraordinary innovation that's coming out of large language models, uh things that can come with regards to robotics and uh you know, other things like that. So we're very excited about the transformations that are, that are, that are happening. And um obviously, uh as I expressed, there's gonna be a tremendous amount of exponential growth ahead of us, but um we have a tremendous amount of confidence, not just an open A I, but the other people who are kind of pushing forward on this frontier that they're gonna steer it in the right direction. Well, I was gonna ask you about what's next, but you sort of answered it there with the robotics. So Josh, thank you so much for the time for being here today. Thanks to you.

Presenter: Professor Tom Oxley, Founding Chief Executive Officer, Synchron

Fortune Global Forum 2024: Mind Meld - A Breakthrough in Brain Powered Communication

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm very excited to be here to talk about what uh is an upcoming space and what promises to be um potentially uh very sh ground shifting for humanity in ways that are hard to appreciate right now. My name is Tom Oxley. I'm the CEO of Synchron. I'm an Australian neurologist. I moved to the US about uh six years ago. Um But about 12 years ago, I started this journey with funding from US Defense agency DARPA in what's now been a critical infrastructure investment in this now emerging space. We are five years into human clinical trials at this point with the num with 10 patients that have now been implanted without technology. And the initial application for this technology is in uh the need for people who have paralysis. We anticipate. This is going to be a very large um area of medical device uh which uh has not yet been addressed by any currently available technology. Paralysis is a wide ranging medical condition from a range of um afflictions of the body. And as as just mentioned, there's a, a prediction that this first generation healthcare t is going to be in the range of $400 billion. As a neurologist, I've been looking after patients who have suffered from injury or disease. And one way to think about how the problem is going to be solved is how does the brain engage with the world around us? You may not appreciate this, but there is a huge amount of information coming into the brain limited information going out at the bottom of that diagram. There is the brain stem which carries all the information out of the brain. So we already engage in a in a digital world every day. We all use our devices to engage with our day to day activities. So one way to think about this is that we can expand our capacity to engage in the world if we have multiple avenues of outputs from the brain. In other words, a virtual nervous system that can engage with the brain. So with people who have paralysis or disease, the brain is often intact and it's how the brain engages with the outside world that needs to be corrected for people who are suffering from that. It's a horrible way to live when you're locked inside your own skull. So the world is now ready and you might have heard about BC I. It's getting a lot of attention in mainstream media now, but this is happening off the back of decades of neuroscience research now, infrastructure that enables edge computing, um very active global leadership from the FDA, especially David mcmullan and now mainstream awareness. Many of you have probably heard of Elon Musk's Neuralink. And I would certainly say that over the course of fundraising over the last 12 years, there's been a big flip in how venture capitalists are thinking about the potential for this space. But there's been one piece missing which relates to how this technology can scale because most people think about open brain surgery for brain computer interfaces. And so what at Synchron we've done is we've looked back to take cues from the medical device field with what enables technology to scale out into market. And so the problem with open brain surgery right now is that none have scaled up to this point, cochlear devices for hearing deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease. Oops. Um if we just get over that, please and then uh epilepsy are in the order of around 10,000, uh 10,000 cases per year, um 10,000 cases per year per annum. These are tiny numbers relative to what we've seen in medicine before. And that's not going to be the solution for brain computer interface to go to treat the potential problem at hand. Instead, transcatheter is what unlocked cardiac treatment over a period of decades, going from open heart surgery to now, transcatheter therapies. We've seen a change um from, from the seventies to now, the year two, the year 2024 low hundreds of thousands to now millions of procedures being performed every year. And this happened over a period of decades from balloons, stents, pacemakers and valves. There's now 1 million cardiac stents being delivered in the USA. The key really has been to get out of the operating room and really no other area in medicine has grown like this over the past several decades. So Synchron asked the question, how can we take that revolution into neurotechnology and deliver technology at scale? So this is an example of how we deliver our first technology. We come up the Venus system through the jugular vein using a catheter to come up to the top of the brain and then deliver electronics into the inside of the blood vessels that can interface with the brain from the inside. We utilize a lot of the materials and knowledge that have been the basis for solutions in cardiac over a number of decades. And we've repurposed that to sense brain activity and turn that into outputs that are useful initially for people with paralysis. This is our first generation system. We are calling it sync one and it hopefully will become the first in class implantable brain computer interface. We've conducted two clinical trials over five years with 10 patients implanted. The best way to think about this is a brain controlled system that enables you to navigate through your personal devices without having to use your hands. You may not need this in the audience today, but for paralysis patients. This can be life changing where there is currently no available therapy. So here's one of our users, the system goes in it switches on, you start trying to move your arms and legs. We train the system how to move very simple things around the screen. This is not yet at the level of control of what you can do with a mouse and a keyboard, but it does enable basic use of ios. So we've been using control of Apple products to engage in navigate and select as a minimal viable product. This is where the technology will be starting with our first generation system. We've now engaging in the development of a novel BC IH ID Bluetooth profile. And the best way to explain this is that the example of Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs didn't like the idea of the large iphone because your hand or your fingers could never reach all the way around the screen. He thought all phones should be reachable by any finger at any point in time. So that speaks to the idea that our devices are currently constrained to the built form factor of our human bodies. BC I is going to be constrained not by the physical form factor of the human body, but by the constraints of the brain. And I think we all know that there is more going on in your brain than what you can express. Maybe fighting with your partner or trying to express your emotions. There's far more things happening in your brain than your body can get out. So coming back to the virtual nervous system, I just want to explain how we're thinking about this problem. Probably the most common question I get asked by investors is how is this field going to progress and semiconductor chips? That was the that was the mechanism of Moore's law in in computers. So how do we think about progress over time with BC I? The prevailing theory or thinking has been that the number of channels or electrodes inside the brain think of them as sensors um is is the limiting factor. So more electrodes into the brain, more horsepower, more bandwidth. But we don't believe that to be true, we actually believe that optimizing brain diversity from a data perspective is what's going to drive compute. So compute versus bandwidth. And I want to explain that concept to you today. This is the motor cortex. This is where BC is beginning. It's the most relevant area to begin because it's the most constraining in our body. This is the command center of your brain. It takes up about a third of the real estate in your brain about the size of an A four piece of paper. If you, if you unwrap it, our first device only covers about 0.04% coverage of the whole motor cortex. It's a tiny amount. And we've done that with 16 electrodes that we deliver into the brain. You might have heard of the. And so as I mentioned, uh minimal viable product is navigate and select. And we're doing that on Apple I OS products. The Neuralink device is now being implanted in two subjects, has a much larger number of electrodes. But the idea had been that if you put in a much higher number of electrodes, you can get much more data out of the brain. Navigate select is also the same uh same control mechanism. But something we we noticed something interesting in that first neuralink device, 900 channels were lost in the first month. And that's been publicly reported. And then the system came back online with about 100 channels, about 10% of the number of channels and the function of the device didn't change. And it got us asking the question. OK. So if you had 1000 down to 100 there was no performance change. Why is that? Why were there was there redundancy in the system? And so we've had a theory for some time that there is a optimized amount of information. And the reason for that is that brain function is preserved in packets of neurons around the brain. So neurons that are next to each other do the same thing. The best analogy I can give is listening to a symphony orchestra, you put 1000 microphones on one violin and you're trying to hear the whole orchestra, you lose 900 of them. You're not losing that much information about what you're hearing in the room. So the question became, if you're trying to optimize a system for commercial manufacture and commercial scale, how do we think about redundancy and optimization? And we have a belief that at about the level of one millimeter, you have information redundancy in the brain. So it's not just horsepower of electrode count. it's have you spaced your electrodes in the brain at the right amount. So what we're saying is that at the microscopic scale, there's redundancy. The mess scopic scale is where we think there's the right optimization of naturalistic brain function. So with that in mind, we are building a system with multiple generations. And I want to explain how I think this field is going to progress over time. Firstly, maximizing brain coverage diversity. Secondly, people like their skulls. So leaving the normal physical architecture intact as much as possible. And finally, delivery scale, which I've covered already from the cardiac analogy. So at Synchron, our second generation system is utilizing the blood vessels and the blood vessels are like branches of a tree, they go down in order of size and they reach further and further. So we are minimizing and miniaturizing our electronics into the brain. A second generation system at a maximized at a maximized spacing is going to cover about 1% of coverage of the brain. We predict that will lead to 3D control of robotics. And then our third generation system, we're going to be targeting around 15% coverage in the brain. We don't exactly know what that's going to lead to. But we estimate that at that point, we're getting to full humanoid avatar control capabilities. And it's got us thinking a lot about where this field is headed in the next couple of decades and what it means from a data perspective and it hasn't been obvious because so the the recent the recent A I revolution has shown us that a massive data source can label you to do these incredible things with natural language processing. But from ABC I perspective, we don't have the advantage of having huge amounts of brain data, we actually have a time series brain data set. And what we've realized is the way the brain reacts is only relevant in the environment that it's reacting to. So you need to know how is the brain adapting to the environment? What is the context of how the brain is reacting in that moment? And can we build recursive uh A I platform that is going to enable this virtual nervous system to flourish? So here's our vision of the future axes on one hand model model fidelity over time and on the other hand, diverse brain region coverage, a previous couple of clinical trials with our prototype has got us beyond click one D click to two D and click which with our first commercial system as we move towards a miniaturized second generation system, getting towards 3D control and robotics and then finally moving towards an area that we don't fully appreciate yet. But what I can say is that we will pass the precipice of improving that which the human body can do. And so you know, the 400 billion Morgan Stanley number comes around 12 million user market potential. Beyond that, it starts to get up to an economy that looks a lot like the automobile industry to me. And it got me thinking about how do we think about where this is going to go and what it could mean. So I've been reflecting on the ethics and the morals of where this is going to take us. And it's this might not happen for a period of decades. But it does seem obvious to me that once we have enabled the ability for the brain to engage at the level that it can naturally process and not be limited by the muscles in our bodies, we are going to go on to the precipice of being able to achieve a level of human productivity that hasn't been possible. And I think we will look back as we all are now and think how slow we were. And so what does that make you think of or what it made me think of was something we've seen before, improved exponentially improved human productivity, functioning beyond the physical limit of the body and coming with a minor risk that requires a procedure. Now, the procedure risk, um, is probably less than what we take risks in our daily lives. And it made me think about the fact that when automobiles first appeared, appeared, um, there was huge blowback from the community. Why would you get in a motorized car and risk your life? Then we had flying and the same question were asked about, why would we take those risks and take that on? I think what's going to drive BC I out into the future is the need and demand for human productivity. And I think that's where BC I is going to take us in the future. Thank you.

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