This week Silicon Valley came to Washington, DC. A Bombshell Wired Report said Elon Musk had chosen at least six engineers, of whom the oldest is supposedly 24 to help him lead his Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).
The confidentiality of the group and the inexperience of the identified six pulled anger from the Washington facility. “The American people will not stand for a non -chosen secret group to be widespread through the executive” Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday.
But mostly it has produced six new secrets. Since the engineers are reportedly under 25 years old, their digital footprints are limited and have avoided all media in a real muscle way. Musk even said that these men are named publicly Was “a crime”, in the amount of doxxing. So the country has wondered who these young people are and what motivates them.
At the end of 2023 I spoke to one of these newly crowned Powerbrokers for an hour: Luke Farritor, a then 21-year-old “run of the million dollar champions” at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who works at work Vesuvus challenge. This is an exertion of the AI investor Nat Friedman to decrypt ancient scrolls with AI. Faritor, a Thiel scholarship holder, was like many young men in Peter Thiel-Vers: politely (he described me as “Ma’am”), tended to tangent about past civilizations and was particularly committed to technology.
In our conversation it was primarily about the Vesuvuus challenge, so for example, I did not ask which methods he would use to reduce the federal government should be asked in the future. But Farritor emphasized that the project showed him the power of coding – how the technology made it possible for him to solve a problem that has exceeded experts for decades. “Even if you are just a drought child from Nebraska, you can work hard and have an impact,” he said.
“We are here to help”
When Farritor came to SpaceX as an intern at the Starship Launch Pad software in early 2023, he entered his father’s footsteps. His father, Shane Farritor, is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and co-founder of the virtual incision of the surgical robotics company. Farritor shared his father’s passion for technology and worked long hours to facilitate the Starship starts. “I only worked super hard for seven months,” Farritor said about his internship and described it as “a lot of fun”.
One day on the way to work, he heard Friedman in Dwarkesh Patels Podcast and described the secret of Vesuvius scrolls: Papyrus documents that were buried in 79 AD by the outbreak of Vesuvius. The scrolls looked like charcoal blocks, but Friedman and a handful of professors believed that with 3D modeling and AI technology, someone could read them. He offered everyone who was successful hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Farritor had studied Latin and was fascinated by old civilizations. “I have always read about archeology when I grew up, and it is how, wow, now I can actually be involved in a project with Richard Janko,” he recalled and referred to the classics scholar, the judge for the Vesuvius Challenge was.
After Farritor heard the podcast, he went home to his Texas apartment and started working to create software that could recognize the patterns on the charred paper that would correlate with letters. He went so far to scroll his own tests, buy up Papyrus from Amazon and burn in his father’s robotic company in the oven.
Friedman announced some of the cash prize recipients on a live stream before a starship start, in which Farritor’s task was to check all 60 computers in Mission Control. “I have this very clear memory in which I speak this live stream from NAT in my left hand,” he said. “And then I take my right hand from the computer to the computer and switch on every thing in Mission Control.”
Farritor and his friends would finally take home the main prize of 700,000 US dollars, which Farritor told me that he would use his parents’ mortgage to buy the new iPhone “and probably bring the rest into” Start of a company “.
At that time, his plans were far from his current appearance, in which WIRED reports that he had a government -e -mail and access to the physical office of General Services Administration.
But his time at the Vesuvius Challenge included run-ins with the university company. He described the Vesuvius Challenge organizers who put their heads with the university bureaucracy when they tried to access certain high-tech scanners. His view why the team should acquire access that they wanted: they tried to help.
“Yes, we are a bunch of Silicon Valley Tech Bros, but we are here to help and build all this good will,” he said about the project’s university transactions. “It’s a very sensitive balance, isn’t it? People are very complicated creatures. ”
