OLD CURIOSITY. NEW TOOLS.RAPHAEL, REMIXED IN PIXELS · 1511 → NOW
MORE ART ✳︎ MORE SCIENCE ✳︎ MORE CRAFT ✳︎ MORE CODE ✳︎ MORE CURIOSITY ✳︎ MORE OF US ✳︎MORE ART ✳︎ MORE SCIENCE ✳︎ MORE CRAFT ✳︎ MORE CODE ✳︎ MORE CURIOSITY ✳︎ MORE OF US ✳︎
01 / THE IDEA
ART × SCIENCE × HUMAN POSSIBILITY
We don’t need to become better cogs.
We need more people with the freedom and ability to make things that matter to them.
The industrial frame asks how much more we can produce, and how few people it takes. That is a small ambition for a technology that can help us compose, design, investigate, and understand.
A second Renaissance is a direction to choose: put powerful tools into more hands. Make knowledge easier to reach. Give people room to cross disciplines, follow a strange idea, and become good at something new.
The measure of progress should include what more of us are able to do.
02 / ALREADY BEGINNING
The tools are here. The possibilities are opening.
Six glimpses of a more creative, more curious, more capable world.
01 / FILM & MUSIC▷
A studio-sized imagination.
A bedroom-sized budget.
A strange new world for your next music video. A short film that would once have needed sets, a VFX department, and someone willing to fund it. More of the picture in your head can make it onto the screen.
See it happening
Robert Gaudette’s A Face Only A Mother Could Love won the 2026 Runway AI Festival Grand Prix. Director Dan Streit uses AI in a wider toolkit of editing, animation, and visual effects. These are works of authorship, not just model demos.
Hardware should be something more people can make. Tools that let you inspect, understand, and change a design with an agent bring a new kind of workshop to the laptop.
Inside the workshop
Backplane is an open-source workspace built around a KiCad fork, with KiCad and FreeCAD viewers and CAD-specific agent skills. You can see the changes and point to individual components. Simulation, review, and physical testing still matter.
Imagine useful software for every small, specific need. Tools you can inspect, repair, adapt, and share. Lowering the cost of building could grow a commons that belongs to everyone.
The commons already has builders
ComfyUI makes visual AI workflows inspectable and reusable under the GPL. Backplane publishes its hardware workspace under the MIT license. Free software is a choice we can make as we build; generated code is not automatically open source.
The musician who learns to code. The nurse who builds a tool for her ward. The teenager who finally gets calculus. Patient explanations and fast feedback can make unfamiliar fields feel within reach.
A tutor, not an answer sheet
Khan Academy’s Khanmigo guides learners through subjects including algebra and coding by asking them to think through problems. The opportunity is to build understanding that stays with you, not just outsource the next answer.
Mathematics is a creative act: conjecture, experiment, surprise, proof. AI can help search spaces too large to explore by hand, giving mathematicians new objects and ideas to investigate.
A result you can point to
In 2025, AlphaEvolve found a configuration of 593 spheres for the kissing number problem in 11 dimensions, improving the known lower bound. It is a specific advance, not a claim that mathematics is solved.
What if a small research group could begin with structural clues that once took years to obtain? Open scientific resources let more people ask better questions, faster.
Knowledge made public
The AlphaFold database makes over 200 million protein structure predictions openly available. Researchers used it with Foldseek Cluster to identify over two million structural clusters. Predictions guide experiments; they do not replace experimental evidence.
