Four For Friday | June 5, 2026
LF222 | Funders need to pay for tech, Steven Johnson on "cognitive uploading", NewLimit raises $435m for new livers, the longevity organ + AI tool: Hebbian
Welcome to this week’s Four For Friday. Four topical stories on systems change, healthspan and AI for impact, and a bonus for Second Brain geeks. Enjoy!
1. Philanthropists should fund tech to build leverage
Philanthropy learned to demand proof: meals served, students tutored - a largely admirable move to focus on results. But there’s a downside; Ayna Agarwal argues that same instinct now starves the sector of leverage.
The World Food Programme’s SCOUT procurement AI saved $2m in West Africa in 2024, yet few funders would touch it, because it isn’t a programme. Charity Navigator’s overhead obsession, born in 2001, taught everyone to treat technology as waste; now just 11% of nonprofits receive meaningful foundation money for tech.
The scale gap is stark: global venture capital poured over $100bn into AI in 2024 against roughly $1.2bn in philanthropic funding.
The So What: In a charity, the efficiency gain is the impact. Fund the multiplier.
2. Cognitive Uploading: Using AI to get smarter
My (smarter and more famous) namesake, Steven Johnson helped build what in my view is one of Google’s best products, NotebookLM. He has a piece that goes against the grain of those fretting that AI is making us all dumber.
AI certainly has the potential to dumb us down, but also to elevate our thinking with access to an unimaginable knowledge and ability to be a thought partner. His piece points out that UC Berkeley's law school has all but banned AI: no drafting, editing, or exam use, with citations to non-existent sources presumed to be cheating.
Despite the worries about "cognitive offloading", calculators and search engines offloaded drudgery and sharpened minds rather than dulling them. Harvard's Larry Lessig went the other way, building 110 NotebookLM notebooks for his constitutional law syllabus. The neglected question, the author argues, is not what AI thinks for us, but what it gives us to think about.
The So What: Ban the chatbot and you also ban every new idea it could help birth.
3. New Limit raises the roof with a $435m round
Longevity startup NewLimit, co-founded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, just raised an eye-popping $435 million to launch its first clinical trial.
The company has been moving rapidly, securing this Series C funding after reportedly demonstrating age reversal in human liver cells. The new capital will fund clinical trials of a liver medicine, marking a major step from theoretical epigenetic reprogramming to actual human therapeutics.
The So What: Epigenetic reprogramming is moving out of the petri dish and into human clinical trials faster than anyone predicted.
4. The forgotten organ that could predict how long you live
A large study of 25,000+ CT scans revealed that the thymus - a small immune organ previously thought to become irrelevant after childhood - is actually a major predictor of adult longevity.
Researchers at Mass General Brigham found that adults with healthier thymuses had a 50% lower risk of death from any cause, a 63% lower risk of cardiovascular death, and responded significantly better to cancer immunotherapy.
The So What: The secret to a longer life might be an immune organ we’ve been ignoring.
AI Startup of the Week: Hebbian
I’ve been going down the rabbit hole of second brains, and this one is a Belgian startup pitching itself as the "digital brain" for companies. The premise: the bottleneck on AI quality is no longer the model, it's the context that it has access to.
Hebbian turns scattered knowledge across Slack, Notion, Drive and PDFs into one organised company memory that every AI tool you already pay for can read, plus a private brain for each person. Access is governed by role and enforced server-side, with a full audit trail of where each fact came from. Data sits in the EU as plain markdown, exportable to your own GitHub or S3 whenever you like. As they put it, Notion ships personal memory, Glean ships company memory; Hebbian ships both, connected.
That’s all for now, happy weekend, everyone.
- Stephen