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FiRe 2025 ISSUE: SELECTED HIGHLIGHTS By Evan Anderson
Why Read: This year's Future in Review conference, held for the first time at the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego, was a standout success. From breaking news (really) and top emerging technologies to major scientific breakthroughs and key trends to watch, Future in Review was filled with critical information and connections. Read on for a selection of highlights that came out of FiRe this year that you cannot afford to miss. _______
The Strategic News Service long ago recognized the need to bring together the brain and resource trust represented in our members. While we work to deliver regular analysis in these pages that can help to guide your business and personal decisions, it's often you, our audience, who have the most insight into hundreds of fields. Bringing so many brilliant minds into one space to stimulate, inform, and ask them to work together to solve intractable issues was too good an opportunity to pass up. Thus, in 2003, FiRe was lit. Future in Review started as essentially a summit meeting of the SNS network. It has broadened some in scope, but it has also reached ever higher in the quality and characteristics of its participants.
Much has changed since our earliest days - but so, too, has much remained the same. Those following the evolution of our sister brands over time will have noticed that FiRe has maintained its intimacy, its diversity of expertise, a single stage to maintain coherence, and an underlying cultural feeling that here stands a group of people looking to make the world a better place - and, ideally, to be rewarded by the market in the process. Our model shift this year included venue, partnerships, and, to some degree, tone. After a Fall 2024 postponement due to natural disaster (perhaps appropriate, given our longstanding concern about effects of climate change), we found ourselves back home in San Diego, where we began 22 years ago. At FiRe 2025, with the help of Ramesh Rao, director of the Qualcomm Institute (whose lab was introduced to us by Calit2 founding director Larry Smarr in 2006, including a field trip for awestruck FiRe attendees), the feeling of convening on a top-notch university campus to get things done had an altogether different air. In some ways more serious, perhaps, but playful and innovative, too, QI and UC San Diego presented a perfect collaboration for this new model, and FiRe felt fully at home at the QI labs. So much so that we plan to return next year. But enough by way of introduction. Let's get down to some highlights of what took place, and ramifications for us all.
The speed of technological change is making democracies extremely difficult to govern, but the characteristic of the CRINK nations is that the speed of technological change is making autocracies very effective at controlling their populations. - Sir Richard Dearlove, fmr. Chief, British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)
For them [Russia], achieving chaos is sufficient [] in their disinformation strategy, that is their primary goal. [O]ne of their policy papers that we obtained a couple months ago [] defines their disinformation strategy with the following [...] sentences: "Let's forget trying to make the world like Russia [] that ship has sailed. So let's make sure that they live in existential fear so they don't have the bandwidth to worry about what we're doing internationally. That includes terrorist attacks, that includes false-flag operations, cyber." Talking about cyber, we've got a list of more than 150 targets, valid as of December '24, of their cyber offensive unit within Unit 29155 I'd be happy to share with anyone who's interested. - Christo Grozev, Lead Russian Investigator, The Insider / Der Spiegel
To put it untactfully, I'm trying to bring about the nonviolent overthrow of bad engineering. It's not easy, and you need to be a little sneaky about it. It takes a lot of diplomacy. If, for example, you're designing cars, it would be very presumptuous of me and a bit threatening to tell you a better way to design cars. But if we go over how to design refineries and platinum mines and other stuff that isn't your concern, that's non-threatening. And then a few days later in the shower, you'll probably think, "I could do this in my car," and then it's your idea and you own it. So that'll have much better brain velcro. - Rocky Mountain Institute Founder and Chair Emeritus Amory Lovins,
Everything here is built from the ground up to be interpretable, to be causal, to find stuff that generalizes far beyond the data that was used to train it. [] You want to learn the laws of physics; you don't want to learn Copernican epicycles - you want to learn Newtonian dynamics. And so that's been the guiding principle for Pattern, and with the Pattern Discovery Engine we have now packaged that into Pattern DE, which folks can come and use. - Chief Science Officer, Pattern
A number of sessions this year offered insights that had been previously entirely unreported. From geopolitics to disease treatment to energy efficiency, these sessions paint a dramatically different global picture than what is generally publicly available.
First, a hard-hitting session with former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, interviewed by Mark Anderson, covered machinations and plannings by China, Russia, and Iran in detail.
Highlights included:
Sir Richard noted that the Chinese government maintains the ability to manipulate and use Chinese-made EVs, stating: "If we run into a crisis with China, there is no question that they can immobilize every city in the UK by switching off 1,000 electric vehicles. [] We have had a situation recently confirmed by the security service where a ministerial electric car was being eavesdropped on in Beijing." When asked about cooperation between Iran and North Korea and the possibility, as previously speculated in these pages, that nuclear tests in North Korea are benefiting Iran, Dearlove responded: "I think that's quite possible. I couldn't confirm, but I think it's entirely possible, because basically it's the same technology." Just two days before Israel's first strikes on Iran, Dearlove noted that the real conflict brewing in the Middle East would be centered on Iran's nuclear capabilities. He explained that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to halt the country's nuclear-weapons development was a failed program, and since Iran could now easily and quickly build a nuclear weapon, the real question is what will be done to stop it.
The end of the week brought an extraordinary conversation with Christo Grozev. (For those curious, a long Opinion piece on Grozev's background came out in the New York Times just a few days before FiRe, entitled "The Man Putin Couldn't Kill.")
Grozev pioneered modern open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques, tracking Russian operatives using innovative methods, first with the storied Bellingcat and now with Der Spiegel and the Insider. Grozev noted that throughout his work, it has become clear that Russia's military intelligence (GRU) and federal security service (FSB) are not just advancing their techniques, but also operating as businesses, choosing operations that benefit their business lines as much as for Russian security interests. This recklessness in operations appears to even cause fear in the Russian intelligence community. Topline items that Grozev revealed at FiRe, previously unreported, included:
As promised in the above quote, Grozev provided the following list of organizations targeted by cyber units of GRU Unit 29155:
Grozev noted that in the 2016 US elections, the North Koreans hacked the Democratic National Committee. Russian operatives traded that access for access to the Bangladesh national bank, which was then hacked for money by North Korean actors. In 2015, they hacked Qatar National Bank (QNB Group), then blamed it on a Turkish fringe party that was anti-Erdogan. Erdogan got the benefit of smearing an opposition party, while the damage was actually done to the Qataris who were supporting Syrian rebels. The unit is hiring and training foreigners in sabotage activities and disguising them as refugees to infiltrate Europe. Russian units are now building private military company (PMC) units at a battalion tactical group (BTG) level, mixing cyber, terrorism, poisoning, and sniper units into a comprehensive whole.
A fast-paced session with Rocky Mountain Institute founder and chair emeritus Amory Lovins, interviewed by FiRe COO Berit Anderson, focused on the radical gains in efficiency we're missing out on through improper design. Lovins counted off the ways he has measured potential energy efficiency gains across various industries, many of them potentially achievable quickly and often at the same capital costs as the inefficient methods already in use.
The numbers are remarkable, including:
70% of energy use and carbon emissions in chip production can be removed. Lovins has developed a plan that triples the efficiency of the capital cost for data centers. An outside partner noted that if the client had taken all his recommendations (they did not), they could have saved 95% of the energy and capital costs. Lovins noted that in end-use efficiency, that would pan out to more like a factor of 5 in reduction of energy use. He went on to note that this is "not counting the tripled efficiency you get automagically as a biproduct of switching to primary renewable electricity, because you're getting rid of the huge losses you get at power plants and in internal combustion engines."
The team of Pattern, the explainable AI / new compute unicorn founded onstage at FiRe 10 years ago, brought a lot of breaking news. In a rapid-fire session covering all of the company's latest work, numerous headlines emerged showcasing just how different things look when you can see the forest for the trees, in data.
Noteworthy revelations from the session included:
PatternDE was launched to multiple academic partners selected for their transformative work on everything from neuroscience to bioreactor designs. This allows partners in high-risk environments to actively understand the predictions the Pattern kit makes and the degree of confidence associated with it. This new early access program (EAP) provides the tech to national laboratory systems in three countries and a number of top-tier universities. Interestingly, an early partner has already discovered that the SARS-CoV2 mortality rate appears to be 10-100x higher depending on the soil microbiome of the surrounding area, potentially opening entire new fields of research into the intersection of microbiology and disease burden. Pattern announced it has developed a system that fixes the explainability and trust issues with AI in medicine, allowing its technology to be deployed in medical situations where the results are critical. This solution explains its responses and justifies them, thus allowing practitioners to integrate results into their work and removing AI's "black box" problem. The company's cancer team has found a potential mRNA target owned only by Pattern that exists solely in cancerous tissue. This target is now going into its drug testing phase specifically for CRC. But there are also implications for the team's work on ovarian, kidney, lung, breast, pancreatic, thyroid, uterine, glioblastoma, glioma leukemia, and melanoma cancers The company's technology has now been tooled for use in financial markets through Risk and Confidence XAI (RC/XAI), which can make trading decisions and then explain how the trading signal was generated, as well as providing decision-specific confidence estimates and full audit trails. The company is already partnering with two top-tier Wall Street firms.
From six different data types in the Arivale - your whole genome, three types of blood analytes (proteins, chemistries, clinical chemistries), your gut microbiome, and digital health measurements - we were able then to draw some really striking conclusions about health. In fact, there are five major categories coming from this data that can optimize your health in different kinds of ways. - Lee Hood, CEO, Phenome Health
In here, we have a large team of tech transfer people who actually at one time thought that their job was to evaluate the technology, evaluate the entrepreneur, and figure out how much royalty to charge. And I told them - it was a shock to them - I said, "Your job is none of these three. Anyone comes to you, within less than 24 hours elapsed time and a 90-minute conversation you should sign an MOU, release the patent, take 5% of the company, end of story. No conversation." - Pradeep Khosla, Chancellor and Distinguished Professor, UC San Diego
Our role in the wildfire program is going from that prediction and responsive - what we call reactive - technology, which we need, to more careful design of the landscapes and mitigating what can happen [] going toward understanding through controlled vegetation treatments or designing our communities and interfaces in fire-prone landscapes. - Ilkay Altintas, Chief Data Science Officer,
This year's FiRe conference was perhaps one of the most science-heavy, with many actionable insights. UC San Diego chancellor Pradeep Khosla kicked off the event by talking about how to build a true, intelligent, innovative, VC-like approach to the universty ecosystem, focusing on the critical quality of empowering brilliant people without judging them for their ability to generate over specific outcomes. Khosla also noted that policies that undermine scientific funding in the United States are leading to a strong pull for US academics to move to other countries, and the creative partnerships he is looking at to allow for adjustment and maintain competitiveness, stating: "At the end of the day, the universities didn't wake up one day and say we're going to be the STEM leaders. It was the federal government that created the great American research university, that allowed us to think in terms of American exceptionalism for the university sector. [] It cannot now become the university's problem to maintain that leadership because we don't have the resources." Other key takeaways:
To cap things off, UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Sandin Lab hosted FiRe attendees at its Marine Conservation and Technology Facility for an evening focused on animal and marine conservation efforts around the world. We were shown ways in which digital technologies are enabling conservation efforts, from sensor networks to space-level imaging, in numerous interactive installations detailing researchers' projects from different fields who are using technology to unobtrusively track and protect species more than ever before.
The FiReStarters: New Technologies "I think this is the best entrepreneurial event I have ever been to." - John Pope, President & CEO, Carbon GeoCapture
Since 2007, FiRe has featured an elite selection of "FiReStarters" - startups or existing companies with new technologies working to change the world for the better. This year's cohort provided an exemplary collection of efforts to improve the world using novel technologies. From their onstage presentations to a reception focused on introducing the companies to our community of investors and innovators present, the 2025 FiReStarters were a highlight of the week.
This year's selected FiReStarter companies and their presenters were:
President & CEO: John Pope Carbon GeoCapture has developed a proprietary system for storing carbon using a closed loop "well" that takes advantage of abandoned coal seams. The seams provide a geological "sponge" that can absorb and sequester CO2 and can work with various direct air capture (DAC) technologies to do so. The available geography of coal seams appropriate for the technology also aligns with the data centers, steel production, and many more touchpoints of industry where the highest carbon emissions are occurring. CEO: Rick Bourke Immunolight uses licensed, proprietary technology for transferring and converting energy with implications for solar energy, medicine, semiconductors, and adhesives. The company relies on the activation of light with specific light-sensitive materials to generate desired outcomes out of the line-of-sight. Co-Executive Director: Navya Akkinepally A nonprofit, Learning Equality developed an entire learning curriculum and raspberry pi-based classroom computer to offer top-notch education to global youth who lack an internet connection. The organization's approach allows global educators to offer blended learning experiences and open curriculums to marginalized communities the world over, with 13 million students reached to date. Future in Review is proud to announce that all FiRe content will be offered to students participating in Learning Equality's ecosystem. Founder & CEO: Hari Garudadri NadiWorks is the result of founder Hari Garudadri's frustration with the quality of sound in modern hearing aids. Using his lab at the Qualcomm Institute, Garudadri developed a behind-the-ear, receivers-in-the-canal (BTE-RIC) technology that uses accelerometers, gyroscopes, and inertial measurement units (IMUs) to drastically improve the user experience of the wearer while improving sound quality, something Garudadri demonstrated in person at the event. Additionally, Hari announced that he is looking for further support for his lab research to create more products like this. CEO: Mark Listes Pendulum scrapes video, audio, image, and text content from across the web to detect networks of disinformation and disrupt them. Pendulum is already serving corporate, risk, marketing, and government clients, helping to detect disinformation campaigns as they start and to stop them before they grow out of control. CEO: Madisen McCleary Skip Technology has developed a containerized, non-lithium grid storage solution allowing for the rapid deployment of large batteries, both remotely and to the grid. Its proprietary battery design serves as a "secret sauce" that dramatically outperforms current solutions on the market while avoiding the risk of fire or explosion that comes with lithium batteries - all at scale. As always, please don't hesitate to reach out to us for an introduction to any of this year's phenomenal FiReStarter companies.
Finally - this year's FiReFilms documentary program, created by CEO Sharon Anderson Morris and managing director Sally Anderson, was compelling from start to finish. In a panel moderated by filmmaker Emre Izat, FiRe participants first got to hear from three directors making strides in the documentary world. Sarah Keo described her directorial debut (with award-winning co-director Jeff Orlowski-Yang) with the film Chasing Time, a follow-on to the 2012 FiRe Featured Film of the Year, Chasing Ice. Shot years apart, both docs are focused on the speed of receding glaciers since photographer James Balog began to record glacial movement in real time. Chasing Time chronicles his and his small team's return to dismantle the last of the painstakingly customized and personally installed cameras that had recorded effects of climate change in the most extreme conditions. Emmy-nominated producer and director Kate Bradbury described a current work-in-progress, giving rare insights into how documentaries are born. While filming the recent Los Angeles wildfires and then observing secondary effects of their runoff into Santa Monica Bay, she came to also focus on the unprecedented algal bloom wreaking havoc on local marine-life populations, leading to a new investigative project focused on the multi-pronged effects of wildfire runoff on the environment. The two were joined by filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite (Blackfish), who directed this year's selected FiRe Featured Film, The Grab. The evening screening revealed a story that was nothing short of a tense adrenaline rush, lacing together themes of geopolitical strife, natural resources, and more topics that, coincidentally, were woven throughout the FiRe program. This coalescence with the FiRe 2025 agenda, from investigative journalism to climate issues to the rising role of private military corporations and food and water insecurity, could not have been more poignant. The film is without comparison, tracing the work of investigative journalist Nate Halverson (present for the FiReFilms Breakout and evening Q&A) tracking powerful, moneyed groups seeking to buy up, hoard, guard (at times with armed mercenaries), and export - largely from the United States - the world's food and water resources before climate change makes those resources priceless. For those who missed it, The Grab is available for streaming and will also be featured as the upcoming FiReFilms Marquee film, with FiReFilms members receiving personalized links, ways to help, and a special message from director Gabriela Cowperthwaite, among other subscriber-only information. To become a member in time to receive this bonus, go to www.firefilms.org. Trust us when we say this is a doc worth more than the price of admission.
While this is admittedly a lot, the week's discussions were, in fact, extremely digestible. FiRe 2025 was a year of renewal, bringing an atmosphere of innovation and hope back to everyone involved in the face of rising global threats and a surge in risk. From academia to geopolitics, climate to the technologies changing our world, the event served as a strong message that we must work harder - and in collaboration - to improve our world. It was also a refreshing reminder of how very many brilliant minds are ready to tackle that work. So let's keep it up. Your comments are always welcome.
Sincerely, Evan Anderson With thanks to SNS editor-in-chief & FiReFilms managing director Sally Anderson and marketing director Emma Fields. If you missed this year's conference and the FOMO is killing you, you can sign up now for FiRe 2026 at https://www.futureinreview.com/register to secure EarlyBird pricing.
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