Three 20-Somethings Just Raised $180M to Flip AI on Its Head

When Youth Meets $180 Million: The Anti-Scaling Bet

While OpenAI and DeepMind burn billions scaling their models bigger, three young founders just raised $180 million to go the opposite direction. Flapping Airplanes—yes, that's really the name—believes the future of AI isn't about feeding models the sum total of human knowledge. It's about teaching them to learn like humans do: efficiently.

Brothers Ben and Asher Spector, along with Aidan Smith, aren't your typical AI lab founders. No PayPal exits, no decades of experience. Just a radical thesis: current AI is fundamentally wasteful, and there's a better way.

"We don't see ourselves as competing with other labs because we're looking at very different problems," says Smith, formerly of Neuralink. "When you look inside the brain, the algorithms it uses are fundamentally different from gradient descent."

The Brain as Existence Proof

Here's the kicker: it takes a brain one millisecond to fire an action potential. In that same time, your computer can perform countless operations. Yet somehow, humans learn new skills with a fraction of the data that transformers need.

"Current frontier models are trained on the sum totality of human knowledge, and humans can obviously make do with an awful lot less," explains Ben Spector. "There's a big gap there, and it's worth understanding."

Their company name isn't just cute—it's philosophical. Think of current systems as Boeing 787s, they say. They're not trying to build birds, but rather "flapping airplanes"—something that borrows the best of biological intelligence while working within silicon's constraints.

Research First, Products Later (Maybe)

In an era where AI labs race to ship products, Flapping Airplanes is taking a different approach: pure research, at least for now.

"I wish I could give you a timeline," admits Asher Spector. "I wish I could say, in three years, we're going to have solved the research problem. I can't. We don't know the answers. We're looking for truth."

But they're not research purists. All three founders have commercial backgrounds and believe in eventually putting their discoveries "in the hands of people who can use it." The key word: eventually.

"If we start by signing big enterprise contracts, we're going to get distracted," Smith notes. "We won't do the research that's valuable."

The Economics of Efficiency

The commercial implications are staggering. A model that's a million times more data efficient could be "a million times easier to put into the economy," as Asher puts it. Think robotics, scientific discovery, enterprise applications—all domains where data is scarce or expensive.

This isn't just about building better chatbots. It's about unlocking AI applications in data-constrained environments where current models simply can't operate effectively.

The timing feels right. While established labs optimize their scaling recipes, there's room for fundamental rethinking. And with $180 million in runway, Flapping Airplanes has the luxury of thinking long-term.