[Sakos]

I was wondering how they could afford 8000 H100’s, but I guess I accidentally skipped over this part:

> We’ve raised a total of $465M, including a recent investment of $320 million from new investors Eric Schmidt, Jane Street, Sequoia, Atlassian, among others, and existing investors Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross, Elad Gil, and CapitalG.

Yeah, I guess that'd do it. Who are these people and how'd they convince them to invest that much?

[IHLayman]

Assume around $3/hr per H100 (pretty generous pricing for GCP), that is $2250/month-gpu, or for their fleet of 8000 comes to $18MM/month or around $216MM/year in just compute costs alone, not looking at SSD, bucket storage, or egress. At their initial investment of 465-320=$145MM that means they can’t have operated that cluster for longer than 6ish months without their funds running dry or the got massive discounts somewhere.

Something doesn’t add up here.

[Sakos]

Honestly, the more I look at this the more I'm mystified. Magic was founded in 2022 and they received their first funding round of $20 million a year later. Before that, the co-founder/CEO had founded some climate science education program called ClimateScience which he ran for 2 years:

> Then, it hit them. They thought, “What if we create bite-sized information, following the same scientific standards of peer-reviewed journals, to empower people to solve climate change?”

> Together, they started combing through climate science articles and turning them into social-media friendly content under the name ClimateScience. After two short months, ClimateScience went viral and grew to 40,000 followers on Instagram. People started sending in private messages, asking how they could help. A team of curious, kind and passionate people quickly grew, all dedicated to making climate education more understandable for everyone.

> Just a few years later, ClimateScience has grown into the world’s biggest climate education platform! We create educational courses, videos, resources and tools to improve climate understanding and education. It’s all completely free and just a few clicks away on any device.

According to LinkedIn, they have 50-200 employees. Is that plausible? How many of those are actually FTEs? Where is their revenue coming from if it's all completely free? Looking at the team page, this feels off, like it's a bunch of university students padding their CV.

That was after dropping out of university, 1 year into a bachelor's in computer science. During which he apparently had a 5 month contract at Facebook AI where he "lead the development of 'DREAM', an algorithm that's 100x more data-efficient and trains faster than the previous state-of-the-art in model-free multi-agent Deep RL. Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.10410".

How does this lead to Magic.dev and third-parties investing $500 million? Either this guy is a prodigy or this is the next Theranos.

edit: I looked into the other co-founder just now and I feel like I'm in the twilight zone.

[thelastparadise]

> edit: I looked into the other co-founder just now and I feel like I'm in the twilight zone

likewise, especially as a profitable bootstrapped founder

it's like these people don't play by the same rules as the rest of us

[koolala]

Interesting, I hope they merge the two passions and create a Earth AI from weather / climate / environmental data.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

For those names (access to $billions), curious how much due diligence they do any more. Just make a “chump change” investment in every hot trend? One phony AI startup pitch deck will look identical (if not better) to one with a real edge.