If you had no concern about market fit and funding, what would you work on?

Let's assume that finding funding is not and issue and you don't need to worry about the current state of the market in terms of existence of a stable customer base or availability of certain goods (e.g. if you'd need thousands of H100 GPUs, you'd find it). The only limitation (and this is probably open to interpretation) is that it should significantly enhance the human civilization in one or multiple domains (so things like rendering Mandelbrot set infinitely faster does not cut it IMO :)

I'd want to build some a generalized community-making/matchmaking system that can bring supply and demand together, but optimized for user satisfaction instead of external profit. For everything like:

* Nonprofit online dating that emphasizes quality matches and relationship satisfaction, not Match Group profits

* Municipal Uber/Lyft that connects drivers and passengers and takes a minimum cut just to maintain the service, with an increased emphasis on carpooling/ridesharing to decrease traffic

* A better Craigslist for apartment finding, with good filters, integrated background/application scoring, etc. that's run as a community service for both renters and landlords, cutting out the profit-driven middlemen and helping both sides quickly and easily find matches

* A better scheduling system for college courses, with integrated calendaring/schedule solving and a much better UX

* Community solar, where different neighbors can come together to buy a small solar farm (like a community garden) and then all share in the power produced without having to install small systems on each home. Much better economies of scale, but higher overhead since you're essentially running a small biz and responsible to multiple stakeholders

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In my mind all of these are essentially the same problems, having a robust graph in the backend, building exceptional UX on the frontend, earning and increasing trust with users through reputation systems and humans-in-the-loop (for things like background checks for rents and drivers)... and most importantly, being able to do so with user-aligned incentives or free money (funding isn't a problem).

All of these are relatively solved problems from a technical angle, but not really from a societal angle, because they're often predatory middlemen services. I wish we could rebuild their whole stacks in a reusable way and federate the services in a FOSS model across municipalities/states/nations. To me they could just be basic infrastructure services that governments provide and maintain for the betterment of their citizens.

I'd love to work on a Von Neumann probe. A machine that could set down on Mars and make a supply chain complete enough to replace itself, AND have enough capacity to allow the creation of supplies sufficient for human flourishing.

I'd start with one that works in my back yard, and extracts metals from the soil in small quantities.

At the moment? Probably some kind of affordable housing.

Music generation. Unfortunately that’s where I need those H100s.