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This week, the Silicon Valley was carried into Washington DC in the form of fresh-faced engineers, allegedly leading the government. THE Bombshell wired report He said Elon Musk quietly selected at least six engineers, the oldest of which is said to be 24 to help him operate the department of government efficiency.
The group’s secrecy and the inexperience of the identified six were attracted to the Washington facility. “The American people will not stand as a non -chosen secret group to run rapidly through the executive power,” the leader of the minority senator Rubbing He said on Tuesday.
But most of all he triggered six new mysteries. Because engineers are said to be younger than 25 years of age, their digital footprints are limited and, in real musk, avoid the most media in fashion. Musk even said that the public name of these people Was a “crime” the amount of doxxing. So the country was left to wonder who these young people are and what motivated them.
At the end of 2023, I spent an hour with one of the newly crowned Powerbrokers: Luke Farritor, a then-21-year-old “running counting scientific professor” at Nebraska-Lincoln University. Vesuvius challenge. This is an effort by Nat Friedman by the AI investor to use AI to decode ancient rolls. Farritor, the Thiel guy, was like many young men in the Peter Thiel poem: polite (called “lady), tends to touch recent civilizations and, above all, committed to technology.
Our conversation is primarily about the Vesuvius challenge, so I did not ask, say, what methods to disassemble the federal government when it is called in the future. However, Farritor emphasized that the project showed him the power of coding – how the technology made him a problem that had been abusing experts for decades. “Even if you are just a scrawy kid from Nebraska, you can work hard and have an effect,” he said.
“We’re here to help”
When Farritor joined SpaceX at the beginning of 2023, as a trainee worker on the StarShip starter, he followed his father’s steps. His father, Shane Farritor, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and co-founder of Virtual Cision Surgical Robotics Company. Farritor shared his father’s passion for technology and worked long hours to facilitate the start of the starship. “I just worked super hard at night and day all seven months,” Farritor said of his internship, describing it for “a lot of fun”.
One day during his work, he heard Friedman -ta Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast, describing the mystery of the Vesuvius rolls: the papyrus documents buried in AD 79 because of the outbreak of Vesuvius Mt. The coils looked like charcoal blocks, but Friedman and a handful of professors thought they could read them with 3D modeling and AI technology. He offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to anyone who was successful.
Farritor studied Latin and was fascinated by ancient civilizations. “I’ve always read about increased archeology, and it’s like I am really involved in a project with Richard Janko,” he recalled, referring to the classic scientist who was a judge at Vesuvius Challenge.
After listening to the podcast, Farritor went home to the Texas apartment and started working and made software that recognizes samples on charred paper that correlate with leaves. He went so much that he made his own test rolls, bought the paper from Amazon, and burned it in the oven of his father’s robotic company.
Friedman announced some of the money-making recipients on a live broadcast and just before starting the starship, where the Farritor’s job was to check all 60s in Mission Control. “I have this very distinctive memory where I hold this NAT live broadcast in my left hand,” he said. “And then, with my right hand, I go from a computer to a computer and turn on each thing during mission control.”
Farritor and his friends would eventually bring home the $ 700,000 grand prize, which Farritor told me to “buy the new iPhone” for his parents’ mortgage, “and probably” start the company “.
His plans were far from his current concert at that time, where Wired reported that he received a government Eil and access to the physical office of general services administration.
However, the time spent in Vesuvius Challenge included entry into the university facility. He described the organizers of Vesuvius Challenge, who give heads with university bureaucracy when they tried to access certain high -tech scanners. The opinion is why the team should get the desired access: they tried to help.
“Yes, we are a lot of silicon -valleys tech bros, but we are here to help and build a kind of good will,” he said of the project’s university affairs. – This is a very fine balance, right? People are very complicated creatures. ”
