Siqi Chen
not a single person on this list was born a billionaire
the world that i want to build, live and vote for is a where this will continue to be true every generation, except the numbers keep getting larger
We need more amazing martial arts movies (and I need 10% of my feed to be about martial arts, anime, and games 😅). Go watch The Furious it's amazing.
James Gunn: Oh boy! Just went with a bunch of #ManofTommorrow cast & crew to see #TheFurious. I didn't think Kenji Tanagaki could outdo himself after the spectacular Walled In, but man The Furious really showed him as one of the best action filmmakers working. We all loved it!
Meg Bear (she/her)
Sense making right now requires getting close to the work and being close to the tech.
Garry Tan: In AI most people are still trying to use old maps on a new territory.
Throw the maps away. It's time to draw new ones. The only way you can do it is walking the land.
YOLO
Garry Tan: @tabflows Don't spend so much time thinking about how people think about you
We're all going to die
Who gives a fuck
Daniel Jeffries
This ugly reality is staring us right in the face:
Americans will have walled AI gardens where we beg for access from a few East India companies, open source will get banned on national security grounds, and 6 billion people who aren't American, aka the rest of the world, will standardized on a Chinese AI stack.
Bloated. Broken. Slow. Ugly.
There's still time to change it but it's slipping through our fingers like fast running sand.
Read this passage below from Bill Gurley because it's about to become our hideous reality if we don't change course quickly.
"If a credible Western open frontier player does not emerge, the consequences cascade quickly.
This is the inverse of the early Internet wave. In the 2000s and 2010s, Western companies — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft — dominated globally while China carved out its own walled garden. The AI version flips that dynamic on its head. Without a credible Western open frontier player, the only open models capable of running entire economies are made in China. If U.S. policy further restricts Chinese open-weight access on national-security grounds, the U.S. ends up with two or three closed Cathedrals serving the U.S. market — and the rest of the world picks the AI stack that is free, capable, self-hostable, and not embargoed. Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, India, the Middle East. Roughly six billion people. Chinese open models become the global default by 2030, and the United States ends up technologically isolated from the majority of the world’s AI users. We would have done it to ourselves."
Fully essay in replies.
Paul Graham
How to Earn a Billion Dollars: https://paulgraham.com/earn.html
toly 🇺🇸
Democratic slopulism: states that do not want to build housing or datacenters or anything productive and have self inflicted high costs for everything as a result will want to tax the people of states that build housing and rockets and electric cars and datacenters, to pay for the self inflicted high costs of everything
I would pay extra for a Spotify subscription for my agent so it stops having so many refusals the second I quote some lyrics to it
Elite admissions select for one trait: getting the known answer faster than anyone else. 18 years of optimizing against an answer key someone already wrote.
AI just made the answer key free. Everyone has it instantly now.
So the kids trained hardest to win spent their whole lives mastering the one thing that's now a commodity. The premium moved to the questions with no answer key yet.
We need a new training.
The new training is about one thing:
How to be the first person standing in a new land, exploring it, preparing it for the coming billion people who will need it. The future will be built by these people.
And there is a lot to build.
Peter Yang
"I'm not an engineer but somehow I'm able to ship things of value, which is crazy and weird and still blowing my mind."
Here's my new episode with @mvanhorn, a non-technical founder who has contributed to 100+ open source projects and reached 44K+ GitHub stars despite not knowing how to code.
We cover:
→ How he uses Compound Engineering to build without reading code or plans
→ How you can use Printing Press to give your agent access to almost any website or app
→ How he contributed to Python, Go, OpenClaw, and other top repos
Some quotes from Matt:
"My favorite tool for building anything is Compound Engineering. The killer skills are CE plan and CE work."
"What if anyone could print their own CLI? Google Flights and Kayak don't have an official API, but Printing Press lets you find all the secret APIs that exist."
"Just build, just launch. It's okay even if you build something for yourself. Even if I had no users of Agent Cookie, I get value out of it."
📌 Watch now: https://youtu.be/BxEf3RqIHkw
Thanks to our sponsor:
@RiversidedotFM: All-in-one AI studio for podcasts and video https://creators.riverside.com/PeterYang
@wisprflow: 4x faster than typing with your voice https://ref.wisprflow.ai/peteryang
voided intern
MrBeast reveals why a 10% better video gets you four times the views, not 10% more
"I mentor YouTubers a lot. One of the people I've been mentoring recently, he was doing $24,000 a month and then he recently had a $400,000 a month on YouTube."
"He was doing 4 million views a month, 24 grand. And then probably like seven, eight months into it we got him up to 45 million views."
"It's much easier, as weird as it sounds, it's much easier to get five million views on one video than a hundred thousand views on 50 videos."
"You could upload one great video a year and get more views than if you uploaded 100 mediocre videos."
"If you get people to click your video 10% more and watch a video 10% longer than mine, you don't get 10% more views. You get like four times the views. A 10% better video is four times the views, not 10% more views."
Paul Graham
Re @blader Fortunately this is already happening. Between 1982 and 2020, the number of the richest 100 Americans who got their money by inheritance decreased from 60 to 27.
https://paulgraham.com/richnow.html
Hey so could we start building housing again in SF, that'd be great thanks!
Rohin Dhar: Buckle up folks
Rent control subsidizes demand
We need to dramatically increase supply
Anyone who tells you otherwise just wants your rent to go up
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-does-economic-evidence-tell-us-about-the-effects-of-rent-control/
Rohin Dhar: Rent control in San Francisco is not going anywhere. If anything, cases like this will eventually cause it to expand dramatically in San Francisco
The mistake: Using AI for simple tasks
You should use it for complex, multi-stage tasks that involve lots of people and moving parts
Rohan Paul: MIT, Stanford, New York Univ, Princeton paper says AI can make people feel more efficient even when they are not actually becoming much more efficient.
that people often use AI for simple tasks because it feels like it saves time and effort, but the measured benefit is often
Re We're so early and nobody knows how to actually use this stuff yet
This is the most inspiring positive-sum vision for AI in the enterprise.
Satya Nadella: http://x.com/i/article/2065582894790365184
The Gestalt Prayer by Fritz Perls
I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful; if not, it can’t be helped.
Olivia Moore
Nothing more energizing than a week of meeting with @ycombinator companies!
Congrats to @garrytan and the whole team for another fantastic cohort - and to the founders taking big swings.
YC is often a few months ahead of the market - trends I noticed from the batch 👇
1. "Real economy" AI is here. Manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, etc. We have agents that can reliably operate across platforms, plug into legacy equipment, and scrape data from systems of record. Businesses that haven't bought new software in decades are now customers of AI.
2. The broker and the agency are becoming software. Founders are taking businesses that have always run on human middlemen and rebuilding them as agent-run platforms. This both unlocks labor budgets + allows you to own transactions and get outcome data that can be further used to improve the product / build a network.
3. Vertical AI is (often) routing around incumbents, not integrating with them. For many founders, the new playbook is to skip the official API entirely (computer-use, front-end reverse-engineering) so legacy software can't shut you off. Fragmented industries with no dominant platform are suddenly wide open.
4. Founders are going upmarket early, not eventually. ACVs for the first few customers are going up. Founders are starting on enterprise logos from day one and treating SMB as validation they've already outgrown. This might mean 1-2 $100k + ACV customers in the first 6 months versus a long tail of $10 - $20k logos.
5. Everyone is moving to the US - fast. A striking number of teams are international and already have real traction in their home markets, but are relocating to the US within weeks (visas in progress) post-YC to chase the bigger market. Yes, there will be outliers who build massive cos locally - but SF is the center of gravity.
6. Self-improving products are here. Teams are spinning up companies operated by agent "org charts" - who can not only run the product but proactively and autonomously make it better over time. Customers can prompt their own workflows...or the product will start to do this intelligently over time (on a per-product basis).
urban cowboy
I'm so glad we have "progressive" stalwarts like @saikatc that throw their massive wealth and resources behind anti-transit, anti-housing NIMBY candidates when they lose 😂
888.8k followers
lucky day
Y Combinator
Happy Alumni Demo Day!
Zhengyao Jiang
We benchmarked 7 frontier models on 3 categories of autoresearch tasks: ML engineering, harness/prompt engineering, and algorithmic discovery.
Fable-5 won overall even under cost constraint, but on ML engineering, the open model Kimi-K2.7-Code surpassed frontier models.🧵(1/5)
Ankit Gupta
I learned today that several YC series A companies are so profitable with tiny teams that they beat quant salaries for top new grads
gm 🥋
The permissioned path does not arrive as tyranny. It arrives as convenience.
A society can lose its freedom this way without a single dramatic moment, simply by routing more of its thinking through infrastructure that answers to someone else.
We must protect open source and open source models
Aaron Wright: http://x.com/i/article/2065906192170274816
Re Satya on loops as IP:
https://x.com/satyanadella/status/2066182223213293753
> This is the first time we can create a real cognitive loop between people and digital systems. That is a mind-bender, because it changes how we even conceptualize work inside an enterprise.
> This means the real opportunity is not in picking the best model but instead in building a learning loop on top of models where human capital and token capital compound. You can offload a task, or even a job, but you can never offload your learning
> In my view, our priority has to be building a frontier ecosystem, not just a frontier model, so value flows broadly across every company, every industry, and every country. One where every organization can own the learning loop that encodes its institutional knowledge, compounding its human and token capital.
Satya Nadella: http://x.com/i/article/2065582894790365184
The housing NIMBYs and the datacenter NIMBYs are all the same people
Hate tech, hate prosperity, subsidize demand, block all supply, be surprised when everyone ends up poor with no jobs
Swann Marcus: Seattle is banning new data centers despite the fact their entire economy and tax base these days is literally just the tech sector and nothing else after they killed every other industry
Legit impressed by their record-breaking “Become Detroit - Any% speed run”
Re Veto supply through process, socialize the costs, then act shocked when prices climb and jobs leave.
The fix is the same too: reform the review process, build the housing, build the grid and datacenters.
If we do the fix, we'll have prosperity. If we do what the NIMBYs want we just get cost disease and more market failure.
There seem to be two main groups
1️⃣ Those who post all day long about using coding agents but don’t seem to ship anything
2️⃣ A small group whose output has dramatically increased and are constantly shipping valuable things
The irony is that the ratio of these probably remains unchanged from before AI even existed. It also seems 2️⃣ can outship 1️⃣ even more so the “ship-rich will get richer” so to speak.
I have 🇯🇵 winning 2-0 ⚽
Nicolas Dessaigne
A founder pitched me this week with spectacular numbers. But they opened with a two-minute backstory... By the time the traction slide came up, the room had half-decided they were ordinary. They weren't.
Mehul
the older you get, the more this feels right
Garry Tan: @tabflows Don't spend so much time thinking about how people think about you
We're all going to die
Who gives a fuck
http://skills.sh has passed 700,000 skills. wild!
all organic and community-driven.
the open⎵ai ecosystem!
Diana
1/ fast AI inference is about to replay the history lesson from search engines on why low latency is so important
Open source is the escape hatch for businesses to be able to continue to control their own destiny long term
dom: My interpretation of this:
Right now, Anthropic and OpenAI are making a killing by selling enterprise FDE services to F500s, building workflows for them on top of proprietary models, then using the traces and context from this to build RL envs to improve the models.
This is
x.com