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- On A Mission - 2025 - Driving the Engine Forward
On A Mission - 2025 - Driving the Engine Forward

We had a lot of fun attending the SuperAI conference this month. A central takeaway for me was that there were a lot of "platforms" - "We're the AI Operating System", "We're the Agentic Workflow Platform", "We're the blockchain meets AI platform", etc - but that these are relatively hard to sell to buyers.
The opportunity I see is building upon these, but focusing on specific domains and industry verticals. "We're the maritime law specialists", or "We're the SE Asia accounting and corporate secretary specialists" would make the sell easier. Then once you own the niche, expand.
Those specialist applications may well sit upon the general platforms above, but that means the generalists ought to be explicitly selling to the specialists. B2B2B.
A friend commented that it felt like web conferences in the late 1990s - before the various 'groupings' of end user products, tools for devs, infrastructure, etc had stratified. I like the analogy.

Someone recently postulated that even if our AI models get no better than they are today, the impact of deeper implementation in organisations will be deeply impactful (and disruptive). Timah Partners was recently announced as a newcomer to Asia, with a warchest of $50 million to buy family owned SMEs that don’t have a clear successor. The opportunity to integrate this approach with an AI operating system is clear, and surely the strategy for many looking for deals. We have a pretty good engine, time to drive it.

MISSION+ Update
For those in Singapore, we try to do a Tech Tuesday each week. We recently held a demo, debate and drinks around the AI Enterprise platform Airia.
We love meeting people, so if you have an idea for an event you’d like to run with us, submit it here!

Reflections On The Mission
We assume the right tech turns up at the right time, and oftentimes that’s true. We invent technology as the prerequisite knowledge is made available to us; an inexorable, relentless march of progress. Discovery → invention → adoption.
But every so often, we see an example that proves this thinking wrong. This guy got the open-weight AI model Llama working on a Pentium II with 128MB of RAM. As Andreessen notes, “We could've been talking to our computers in English for the last 30 years.”
Well, probably not - since model training needed modern GPUs. But the point is exciting: what other technologies were available to us, if only we’d looked?
The Antikythera Mechanism is an analogue computer which could predict solar eclipses. In 150BC Greece. The gearing technology was lost, and didn’t reappear for another 1,500 years. One can only imagine where we would be as a civilization if it hadn’t, or if we had rediscovered it earlier!
A form of printing press with movable type was invented in China a few hundred years before Gutenburg. But Chinese characters are a pain, with tens of thousands of characters. As such, it never really took off.
Perhaps the most philosophically interesting “what if?” comes from Hero’s aeolipile. In 100AD Alexandria, a Greek experimentalist (appropriately named Hero, which he certainly was!) created a steam turbine. It wasn’t particularly effective, and people saw it as more of a curiosity than anything else. It was mostly ignored.
Steam turbines powered the First Industrial Revolution. Sure, the aeolipile was no Watt engine - but it could have been the beginning of an evolutionary lineage that kickstarted the revolution by a few hundred years! Food for thought.
Finally, take the Wright Brothers and their flying machine. Nothing they used in the construction of their airplane was new - on the contrary, it was mostly a bunch of old bicycle parts, wood and canvas. It could easily have been built a few decades earlier.
I wonder what future essential technology will be invented that could have been assembled today. Sometimes it’s not about scientific breakthroughs - it’s the application of what we already have in new and interesting ways.

Interesting Articles
MAS, ABS announce new entity to oversee Singapore’s eight national payment schemes - interesting to watch how the government has responded to the proliferation of payments, by consolidating the user experience through SGQR, and now attempting to streamline the regulatory oversight.
Fal.ai - get ready-to-use access to the latest generative AI models in one easy platform. I have become a little obsessed with testing every model with videos of aliens eating pizza.
Chinese AI outfits smuggling suitcases full of hard drives to evade U.S. chip restrictions — training AI models in Malaysia using rented servers - I enjoyed the book Chip War. I look forward to a sequel covering the geopolitical AI War, and the AI Talent War.

This Is The Way


Feature A Fractional


We’re On A Mission




Until next month. Together, We Build {+}
Ned & the MISSION+ team
P.S. If you would like to bring the MISSION+ team into your organisation to help, please reach out to [email protected]!