SoTA Letters X

Symbolic world models, vibeCADing, trusted swarms, sovereign stratospheric fleets, human-bio foundation models, bio-inspired cryptography, AI formal methods

Jun 16, 2026

Dear friends of SoTA,

We bring you 12 Letters addressed to our members. Our tenth edition spans symbolic world models, vibeCADing, bio-inspired edge cryptography, physical-layer trust for robotic swarms, stratospheric fleets as sovereign capability, human-bio foundation models, and ARIA’s £20m call on AI-enabled formal methods for cybersecurity.

We also share the champions of the first SoTA Commission on Minimal-Shot Autonomy, along with Letters from the teams detailing their work. SoTA is seeking more challenges to deploy SoTA’s engineers and researchers into — please contact commissions@ilikethefuture.com if interested.

Shaping SoTA’s Future

In April, we requested your input on our planned activities. Thank you for your thoughts, conversations, and kind offers to help in shaping this next chapter. We’ll be focusing on more events in and beyond London in the near term, recruiting our first Fellowship cohort.

If these plans resonate, we’d be grateful for your support. Donations directly fund Commissions, Hackathons, Frontiers Nights, and the launch of our Fellowship. Jamie is always reachable to discuss funding and partnerships on jamie@ilikethefuture.com.

And if you enjoy reading the Letters below, please consider upgrading to the paid tier to support their publication.

Donate to SoTA

SoTA Commission I Winners

Congratulations to the winners of SoTA Commission I: Minimal-Shot Autonomy. We covered high-level overviews of the projects in a previous Letter, and they’ve written more about their work in the sixth and seventh Letters below.

We will continue to experiment with Commissions as a format, running asynchronous engineering challenges targeting bottlenecks that could unlock new branches of our tech tree. If you would like to sponsor future Commissions or provide technical challenges, please let us know on commissions@ilikethefuture.com.

Letters X

We asked to hear about making AI understand and operate within our physical reality. Thank you for your submissions.

Prompt-to-Print: Manufacturing in an AI Age, Chris Anderson (ex-Kittyhawk, 3D Robotics, WIRED)
Teaching Machines to Understand Matter, Shamit Shrivastava (Apoha; SoTA’s Self-Driving Labs Frontiers Night)
Physical-Layer Trust, Suet Lee (TU Darmstadt; ARIA TEE1)
From Patching Bugs to Proving Them Gone, Nora Ammann (ARIA Safeguarded AI, £20m call)
Accelerating Robotics at Software Speed, Praveen Selvaraj & Ville Kuosmanen (Safe Robotics; met at SoTA’s Embodied Intelligence Hackathon)
When to Wake a Vision-Language Model, Kyuhwan Yeon (SoTA Commission I Grand Commission)
Autonomy When the Vehicle Is No Longer Itself, Alex Vavelyuk & Mikhail Pershin (SoTA Commission I Prometheus Prize)
On Symbolic World Models, AI Verification and an Addendum to the Bitter Lesson, Otter Quarks & Siméon Campos (Humanis; SoTA’s Cyber-Physical Trust Frontiers Night)
The Missing Layer of Infrastructure is Above Us, James Thomas (Radical)
Biology’s AI Models Stop Short of the Scale We Need, Campbell Wolford (Cambridge University)
Natural Noise, Thane Campbell & Shannon Egan (Living Proof; ARIA TEE)
The Hidden Tax on Research Time, Sara Rasul & Rob Kirk (Unconstrained Labs)

For the next edition of SoTA Letters, we’ll explore what sovereign AI, ownership and assured access mean in practice.

If you are building British capability in energy production, storage and transmission, semiconductor design and fabrication, data centres, data access, model training and inference, or critical minerals refining and recycling, we’d like to hear from you. If you believe that as a middle power, Britain should pick its spots and does not need to own any of the above, we’d similarly like to receive your Letters on letters@ilikethefuture.com.

As a reminder, we don’t care about credentials or seniority — we collect Letters from individuals and teams actively building the futures they wish to see.

Ad astra,

Jamie & Matvey

The Society for Technological Advancement