2026-05-01

Paging YC application reviewers.
If you're looking at applications related to the energy - here's some frameworks for how to think about the KPIs for energy systems.
LCOE – Levelized Cost of Electricity (lifetime cost per kWh generated)
VALCOE – Value-Adjusted LCOE (cost adjusted for grid value & timing)
EROI – Energy Return on Investment (energy returned vs energy invested)
WTW – Well-to-Wheel efficiency (full fuel/energy chain efficiency)
LACE – Levelized Avoided Cost of Electricity (revenue it actually earns)
System LCOE – Integration costs of variable resources on the grid
LCOS – Levelized Cost of Storage (real cost per discharged kWh)
LCA/CED – Life Cycle Assessment + Cumulative Energy Demand (full cradle-to-grave energy & material footprint)
EPBT – Energy Payback Time (years to recover invested energy)
ELCC – Effective Load Carrying Capability (reliable capacity credit)
Exergy – Second-Law efficiency (true useful work potential)
Grid Stress / Reliability Metrics:
LOLE – Loss of Load Expectation (expected shortfall days per year)
LOLH – Loss of Load Hours (hours at risk of blackouts)
PRM – Planning Reserve Margin (% capacity buffer above peak)
N-1 – Contingency Analysis (system survives loss of any single major element)

I have been testing DeepSeek-V4-Pro with the Pi coding agent.
I am mindblown by how well it works out of the box.
A few notes:
I spent a few hours building an LLM wiki with an agent powered entirely by DeepSeek-V4-Pro on @FireworksAI_HQ inference.
This is the first time I feel like there is an open-weight model that can reason at the level of Claude and Codex. And it does this in a cost-effective way with support for 1M context length.
To be clear, I am using DeepSeek-V4-Pro inside of Pi without any special configuration. It works out of the box. It's exciting that there is a model that can just be plugged into a basic harness like Pi, and it just works. I've never seen that before. Most models require lots of configuration and setup.
@deepseek_ai's DeepSeek-V4-Pro is clearly good at agentic coding (probably the best from the open-weight models), but the model is also great on knowledge-intensive tasks where reasoning matters. The agent pulled agentic engineering best practices from different company docs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Stripe, Meta, Modal, DeepSeek, Mistral, Cohere), searched and digested Reddit and HN threads, summarized arxiv papers, and surfaced trending GitHub repos. Then it distilled everything into actionable tips across categories. I love the Wiki it built. The quality is really good. Here is a snapshot of what the wiki looks like: https://github.com/dair-ai/dair-workshops/tree/main/agentic-engineering-wiki
DeepSeek-V4-Pro handled the task without breaking stride. Multi-step research queries, code generation for scaffolding, context-heavy reasoning across disparate sources. For coding specifically, this is the first open-weight model that genuinely feels like a Codex or Claude Code experience. It compares in capability and actual multi-turn agentic work.
What made the loop feel so responsive was Fireworks' inference speed (the fastest in the market) and the fact that they actually validate models at the systems level before shipping. No corrupted reasoning traces. Just fast, reliable iteration. The hybrid CSA and HCA attention design cuts KV cache to just 10% and inference FLOPs by nearly 4x at 1M-token context. This is what makes the agent loop actually fast and cheap enough to run in practice.
For devs who've been watching open-weight models close the gap but haven't found one that actually delivers in practice, this is the closest I've seen.
Try it here: https://app.fireworks.ai/models/fireworks/deepseek-v4-pro

I think the expression is “pulling the ladder”! All labs trained their models by distilling (at the very least distilling the web) which allowed them to become the fastest growing businesses in the history of humanity and now that they have armies of lawyers and lobbyists, they are trying to prevent others from doing the same thing.
Dan Zhang @ ICLR: does anyone else remember how Jacob Devlin went to the media about how Google was supposedly distilling from ShareGPT (it was not) and the resulting blowback? How times have changed 😅
https://futurism.com/the-byte/google-denies-bard-openai

Bush destroyed Clinton's economy.
Obama fixed Bush's mess.
Trump destroyed Obama's economy.
Biden fixed Trump’s mess and now Trump has destroyed what Biden fixed.
The biggest lie that Republicans have gotten away with is that they are better for the economy.

Unpopular opinion: SCOTUS whiffed hard when they had the opportunity to blow up gerrymandering and didn't.
Gerrymandering is one of the worst practices in American politics— D/R safe districts turn the primaries into the generals, rewarding extremism over centrism.

This is so dumb. China will collect all the soft IP and thoughts of US biotech researchers at this rate.
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc: How it feels to do biotech in 2026

Hi Singapore 🇸🇬, meet Codex 🩵
With Codex, ANYONE can build and create.
We’re turning that energy up this May.
We’re a diamond sponsor 💎 at @aiDotEngineer Singapore, at a bunch of events, and hosting sessions for builders at every level. Plus, @thsottiaux will be in town.
There's something for everyone:
> Intro workshops if you’re just getting started.
> Hack nights if you want to go deep & tokenmax
> Demo nights if you want to see what people are building.
May is going to be fun, and we're just getting started.
+++++++++++++++++
3 May: Emergency Codex Hackathon https://luma.com/zprbhtzyTogether with @brianchew
4 May: Codex Hack Night - Design & Frontend https://luma.com/bw3rpffqTogether with @cleondesigns

5 May: Codex Demo Night - GPT-5.5 & ImageGen 2 https://luma.com/tu1yajd5Together with @Lorong_AI and @yongquanYQ
7 May: AI Engineer UnConference https://luma.com/3binn6ce
No talk there, but I’ll be hanging out. Come find us.
Together with the @65labslah crew
9 May: AI Engineer Singapore Hackathon
Link is TBA
Together with the @65labslah crew
9 May: Codex workshop at The Good Hack https://lnkd.in/gYrUMj3g
Thanks for inviting us GoodHub SEA (Joanne Tan), Open Government Products
11 May: Codex Hack Night - Computer Use https://luma.com/pbk5bb32
Together with @Lorong_AI and @yongquanYQ
13 May: Codex Hack Night - TBC 👀 https://luma.com/4v97ndhxTogether
Together with @Lorong_AI
TBA: Intro to Codex for Everyday Work - Workshop
15 May: AI Engineer Singapore - Codex Workshop
16-17 May: AI Engineer Singapore - Keynotes + Codex Booths
and more ...

Every argument of “because of the smartphone” or “the Internet” or “social media” is cope, to avoid confronting the catastrophic collapse of incumbent institutional competence over the same timeframe.

All the Doomers and hawks are lining up behind this distillation "attack" farce because they want to see open source banned.
It's really as simple as that.
They want to take away your right to choose, and take away businesses' rights to fine tune and make your products cheaper and better.
The end state here, if we let these short-sighted people win, is a horrible place for America:
They will look to ban Chinese models under the guise of national security grounds and conveniently leave only proprietary American companies standing in the USA. The only real "attack" happening is closed source companies attacking open source the same way Microsoft once tried to attack Linux to create regulatory capture.
If you can't win in the market, win in Washington is their strategy.
Do not be fooled by this regulatory capture and saber rattling nonsense. It's a bait and switch.
The goal is to rob you of choice. That's it.
These short sighted policies will make America weaker, not stronger.
These are the very folks whose shoot-us-in-the-foot policies lost NVIDIA 100% of the market share in China, driving it to basically 0%, while kickstarting the moribund Chinese chip ecosystem. It was dead in the water, and now it's awakened from its deep slumbers. Old state sponsored dinosaurs are reborn as emerging chip powerhouses.
The demand for Chinese chips is accelerating and it will only get stronger.
When Jensen is proven right a few years from now (he's the best long term thinker in business today) and you have hundreds of cheap Chinese models running optimized on Chinese chips and those models are now hard to run on NVIDIA hardware you can thank these folks.
If you're banned in the USA from using these models and these chips, do you think the rest of the world will be?
Nope.
They'll happily adopt the cheaper, faster, good enough models that we kickstarted with our short-sightedness. 1 billion people in the west will be banned and using closed/gated/sluggish/censored/surveilled models that destroy your privacy while 6 billion other people use the now dominant Chinese ecosystem and your NVIDIA retirement shares lose money.
When you can't use open source anymore because it gets banned for Americans, you can thank these short-sighted, foolish folks.
When your API bills is a billion dollars and burns your budget in three months instead of 12, you can thank these folks.
When all your personal intimate, personal data flows threw a few tight gateways and choke points mandated by law, you can thank these folks.
Chris McGuire: Sorry but that just isn’t true—distillation attacks are illicit activity, not an industry standard. They are against the terms of service of all frontier AI labs. There is a reason OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all put out reports warning about it: none of them do it.

http://x.com/i/article/2047335757291962368

I love how AI tools can enable contextual feature discovery
Following my first /officer-hours session with the @garrytan's gstack, after I got a plan, it then suggested /plan-eng-review as the sensible next step.
I can focus on building and just learn about the tool on the go. What a time to be alive 🥹
Tanin: gstack from @garrytan is so incredibly well though out and powerful. My fav commands are
👨‍💻/qa - headless browser is genius. It's light weight, gets the job done so I won't have to manual test, one more human bottleneck removed
👨‍💼/office-hours - already finished 1 session.

codex now has a built in Ralph loop++:
Matthew Lam: Codex 0.128.0 is huge, even better than a @thsottiaux reset.
Codex is moving more goal oriented with a new /goal command, think Ralph loop on steroids:
- /goal <objective> to set a new goal
- after agent turn finishes, Codex injects a message nudging the model to pick the next

Anyone who says California's housing crisis can't be solved isn't trying hard enough. In San José, we built affordable homes and cut homelessness by a third. When we change our perspective, we can change our future. Check out my new ad:

Drug enforcement arrests rise sharply in San Francisco this year:
“The increased enforcement is part of a broader effort by the Lurie administration to improve street conditions and deter open-air drug use”

Pretty incredible chart from Stripe Atlas showing an acceleration in founders starting companies.
Personally, I love talking to solo builders and learning about how they work with AI.
I interviewed @tibo_maker recently (scaled 5 AI businesses to $1M+/month) and have alot more great AI builder interviews coming.
No BS - just practical tactics.
📌 If you missed it, check out my interview with Tibo here: https://youtu.be/0UnZnonMN9o
Peter Yang: &#34;I shipped 9 failed products before one took off...now I'm doing $1M+/month.&#34;
Here's my new episode with @tibo_maker, a solo founder who bootstrapped 5 AI products to $1M+ / month.
Tibo walked me through his exact playbook:
✅ How to validate ideas and fail fast
✅ Why his top

A 7-million parameter model outperforming models a thousand times its size on tasks like ARC Prize. That's what recursive reasoning unlocks.
In this episode of Decoded, YC's @agupta and @FrancoisChauba1 break down two recent papers on recursive AI models, HRMs and TRMs, that are achieving state-of-the-art results with a fraction of the parameters of today's largest models.
They explain why standard LLMs hit a fundamental ceiling on certain reasoning tasks, how recursion at inference time gives small models the compute depth to break through it, and what happens when you combine these ideas with the power of large-scale foundation models.
00:35 - Model Foundations
01:15 - RNN Limits and LLM Contrast
02:36 - Reasoning Limits and Sorting Analogy
04:22 - HRM Paper Introduction
05:25 - HRM Architecture and Intuition
07:36 - HRM Results and Outer Loop
09:46 - TRM Paper Overview
11:20 - TRM Training and Fixed Point
13:30 - Detailed HRM Summary
20:46 - Comparing HRM and TRM
34:45 - Future Outlook

Brb making slides for everything now
Replit ⠕: You're going to be embarrassed by the slides you made before AI
Meet Replit Slides
The first AI slides with stunning design

Don't join a company or industry that has contempt for its customers. You can make a lot of money that way, and of course it gives you a feeling of superiority, but you'll never do great work for a market you despise.

Don't join a company or industry that has contempt for its customers. You can make a lot of money that way, and of course it gives you a feeling of superiority, but you'll never do great work for a market you despise.

Re @garrytan I started playing around with it and created a set up video for GBrain: https://youtu.be/j55r_higKIo?si=2m2zoOrxrvpBnuVl

This was a really fun deep dive into HRM and TRM with @FrancoisChauba1.
we got the feedback that some of our videos were getting too technical and we decided to ignore that user feedback and do our most technical video yet, a close look at 2 exciting new papers, complete with an architecture deep dive and code.
if anyone needs a reminder why your data structures / algorithms course is useful, check it out
Y Combinator: A 7-million parameter model outperforming models a thousand times its size on tasks like ARC Prize. That's what recursive reasoning unlocks.
In this episode of Decoded, YC's @agupta and @FrancoisChauba1 break down two recent papers on recursive AI models, HRMs and TRMs, that are

Jensen is one the smartest and most far seeing folks the world.
&#34;If an AI scientist warns people that AI is going to permeate across radiology and radiologists are going to get wiped out, it might seem helpful but it's hurtful. If we convince everybody not to be radiologists and we now need radiologists, that actually is hurtful to society.
&#34;It is hurtful to convince all the young college graduates not to study software engineering because we are going to need more software engineers than ever.
That's hurtful.&#34;
&#34;Scaring people with nonsensical things, which are not going to happen, that this is an existential threat, there's a 20% chance that is is existential, that's ridiculous.
&#34;That it's going to wipe out 50% of college level jobs.
&#34;That is it going to completely destroy democracy.
&#34;These kinds of comments are not helpful. They are made by...CEOS. And you become a CEO, maybe you adopt a God complex and somehow you know everything.&#34;
Brutal.
And right.

10 years of Replit. One day of free vibe coding for everyone.
On May 2nd, all users get access to Agent on us. $0. Build anything, anywhere.
The idea is yours. The build is free.

Looks like my dad is just as obsessed with Replit as I am 😂
24h free Replit means getting thousands of engineering hours for free.
@amasad is the GOAT.
Shawn Sully: My 62 year old father who hasn’t coded since 30 years just started building an app for seniors now.
That’s the magic of @Replit
GG @amasad

🐛🍎🐛🍊🐛🍌 i love making whimsy apps with @Replit !!!!!!

We now know the Iran war price tag is more like $50 billion - hundreds of dollars per household - and counting.
It's enough to cover all the health insurance premium credits that the Republicans got rid of for this year, and next. It could save rural hospitals, pay teachers, fix roads.
Don't let this White House insult your intelligence by blowing your money on war, then saying America can't afford nice things.

🗣️ The full conversation is here! Tune in to watch @demishassabis and @garrytan talk about what still needs to happen to reach AGI, Demis's advice for founders on staying ahead of the curve, and what the next big scientific breakthroughs might be. 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNyuX1zoOgU
Google for Startups: When @GoogleDeepMind’s @DemisHassabis and @YCombinator’s @GarryTan sit down, it’s worth paying attention. 📝👀
They discussed exploring the path to AGI, the future of @GeminiApp, how startups can find alpha through atoms, and so much more.
Conversation coming soon. Founders,

Introducing Flue — The First Agent Harness Framework
Flue is a TypeScript framework for building the next generation of agents, designed around a built-in agent harness.
Flue is like Claude Code, but 100% headless and programmable. There's no baked in assumption like requiring a human operator to function. No TUI. No GUI. Just TypeScript.
But using Flue feels like using Claude Code. The agents you build act autonomously to solve problems and complete tasks. They require very little code to run. Most of the &#34;logic&#34; lives in Markdown: skills and context and AGENTS.md.
Flue is like Astro or Next.js for agents (not surprising, given my background 🙃). It's not another AI SDK. It's a proper runtime-agnostic framework. Write once, build, and deploy your agents anywhere (Node.js, Cloudflare, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, etc).
We originally built Flue to power AI workflows inside of the Astro GitHub repo. But then @_bgiori got his hands on it, and we realized that every agent needs a framework like Flue, not just us.
Check it out! It's early, but I'm curious to hear what people think. Are agents ready for their library -> framework moment?

The deadline to apply for the YC Summer 2026 batch is this Monday, May 4th at 8pm PDT.
All you need is an idea: https://ycombinator.com/apply

So much for that American exceptionalism, but you just keep on voting against your own interests MAGA.

Grok 4.3 on Vercel
Vercel Developers: Grok 4.3 is on AI Gateway.
xAI's latest model, with improved tool calling and instruction following.
Try it now with 𝚖𝚘𝚍𝚎𝚕: '𝚡𝚊𝚒/𝚐𝚛𝚘𝚔-𝟺.𝟹' https://vercel.com/changelog/grok-4-3-on-ai-gateway

Really enjoyed this conversation - thanks again @garrytan for hosting!
Y Combinator: Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis) has had one of the most extraordinary careers in tech.
He started as a chess prodigy and video game designer at 17 before getting a PhD in neuroscience and going on to found DeepMind. His lab cracked Go, solved protein structure prediction with

What YIMBYs should realize is that Matt Mahan *is* the abundance candidate.

Supervisor Connie Chan was arrested at SFO today.
It’s ideological performative BS like this that explains why she has accomplished so little as our City Supervisor.
Her ‘recovering’ pal Jackie F was there today too, but fled before the police started arresting protestors.
#UselessLeaders
@bettersoma @whentoletgo @garrytan @griffinlee415 @tdwhalenho @MylesPynchon @Twolfrecovery @GrowSF

Most teams celebrate what's working.
Replit goes looking for what isn't.
Haya on &#34;Seek Pain,&#34; the cultural principle behind how they ship, live with @southpkcommons ⠕
https://x.com/rsanghvi/status/2047370391996219782
Ruchi Sanghvi: At @Replit they’re empowering a new wave of million-dollar founders.
Cofounders @amasad and @HayaOdeh joined us at @southpkcommons to discuss:
– The rise of AI-native founders
– New AI models and their capabilities
– And why most founders quit too early
Full Minus One

what if i told you... computer use can be faster on local models
moondream3 with its photon update today that gives it mac support can see your screen and use it with 1s latency, ty @vikhyatk
here we have whisper+qwen+moondream triple model pipeline working offline flawlessly

Also funny.
Jackie wants you to go to jail for her bullshit but can’t be bothered to stand with you.

Replit’s Amjad Masad on the Cursor deal, fighting Apple, and why he’d rather not sell https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/01/replits-amjad-masad-on-the-cursor-deal-fighting-apple-and-why-hed-rather-not-sell/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

I've been listening to the @ycombinator Startup Podcast for years.
Amazing to see an episode land from our YC x @GoogleDeepMind event w/ @demishassabis and @garrytan on AGI, Gemini & Gemma, 1000x Engineers, Future of Agents and &#34;How to Build the Future&#34;.
I hope you enjoy listening -- it's a special one!
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-build-the-future-demis-hassabis/id1236907421?i=1000764458246
@OfficialLoganK @joshwoodward @DynamicWebPaige @harrisonfjobe @samsheffer @ammaar

you can sign in to openclaw with your chatgpt account now and use your subscription there!
happy lobstering.