2026-06-16

California is turning UC Berkeley — the best public university on earth — into a remedial high school. At least half the students now entering its primary STEM sequence aren't even proficient in precalc:

Strange to think that there are still little corners of academia and nonprofit world where people use words like "minoritized"
Garry's List: UC Riverside has managed to "significantly improve student outcomes" not by helping students perform better on their finals, but instead by making the finals count for less of the grade:

With today's 20% SpaceX pop, Elon made more money today than Warren Buffett made in his entire career

I just got home and there were about 30 people in their twenties outside the property across the street waiting to see it and rent it. This is an awful property too, yet such is the nature of the rental market in SF.
We could literally add 10% housing capacity to the entire city and would still have people desperate to rent.
What’s the so-called progressive movement, as best represented by Saikat and Connie Chan doing about it? Jack shit. They would rather have people go homeless than building homes.
Peak SF vibe based politics. Claiming to be for the people while at the same time promoting the laws that put people on the street.

Re @moriah_bridges Jesus does this multiple times with his disciples. It’s deeply effective when done from a place of best intentions and belief the person can get there.

remember: when you don't build new luxury housing, luxury buyers outbid for down-market units and convert them.
this makes housing more expensive for everyone, and it's why building all housing (regardless of price) is critical to reduce prices
Alex Armlovich: Nolan is 100% correct, and Bay Area media has been bad on this
SF should permit dozens of supertalls to redirect all this wealth away from existing neighborhoods
Instead every dollar will be used to renovate mansions (or even deconvert duplexes & triplexes into mansions)

If this really is the "jailbreak" that got Fable shut down I'm deeply unimpressed
The Atlantic: "American companies and the U.S. government itself cannot use what’s perhaps the most powerful AI in the world—and the reasons why are hazy at best," argues @matteo_wong. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/trump-anthropic-export-control-ai-race/687555/?taid=6a306fd0e656e500013c6f66&utm_campaign=WigwamQuan&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

Re @amasad

Doing a lot of pitch practice lately. I saw a founder this week who'd engineered his pitch so investors couldn't interrupt with hard questions. He thought a clean, unbroken pitch was the win.
It's the opposite. A great pitch invites the hard question early, because you have the answer, and watching you handle it live is what actually convinces them. A pitch built to prevent questions reads as a pitch that can't survive them.

Build an app. Fund the Dream.
Elias Reyes: I posted this a year ago.
Today, I took my and my wife to watch Spain at the World Cup using the funds from Dial Moments: Audio Guestbook 🙌🏽 built with @Replit , I’m so happy that I was able to make my dream come true.

The best marketing campaigns cost almost nothing.
Corgi: Don't Uber to YC Demo Day. We've got you.
Here's our YC Demo Day bus route tomorrow:
> 7:00am: Leave Corgi Cafe (9 Claude Lane)
> 7:30-9am: The Landing -> Avalon Dogpatch -> YC (shuttle 🔁)
> 6 pm: Pick-up
We'll have free coffee and Thai Teas at each station for founders.

Pretty easy to see how UC Compact is in the process of utterly destroying the UC’s reputation among employers. Admitting ‘equitable’ students and then guaranteeing their graduation is … an extremely quick way to destroy the value of the degree.
Chris Hoofnagle: I just published this essay on Garry Tan's site---A Funding Deal Is Hollowing Out California’s Public Ivies https://garryslist.org/posts/a-funding-deal-is-hollowing-out-california-s-public-ivies

I'm proud to say there's now a "Jared Mode" in @conductor_build

This is the best explanation I've seen of how mechanical watches work. https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/

#Invité
@ylecun, ancien responsable de recherche IA au sein de Meta et fondateur de la startup AMI, sera ce soir l’invité
@le20hfrancetele
Il répondra aux questions de @LeaSalame à l'occasion de l'ouverture aujourd'hui de VivaTech
▶️#France2 & http://france.tv

If you want something from someone, make it clear what. It's not imposing to ask explicitly for something; it's imposing to be vague and make the recipient work to figure out what you want.

Learning Sparse Latent Predictive Foundation Model for Multimodal Neuroimaging
This paper introduces Neuro-JEPA, a foundation model that combines a latent predictive objective with a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to encode brain MRI across core T1w, T2w, and fluid-suppressed FLAIR imaging (FLAIR).
Neuro-JEPA was pretrained on 1,551,862 scans from 428,647 studies after modality-specific preprocessing with data curation across three core structural brain MRI sequences.

The frontier labs are coming to World's Fair.
@OpenAI, @AnthropicAI, @Google DeepMind, @amazon AGI Labs, @Zai_org, and @MiniMax_AI are all on the program this year.
The people building the models, in the same place as the people building on them.
June 29 to July 2 in San Francisco.
http://ai.engineer/worldsfair

🔍 Introducing Phish Guard
To kick off my AI builder journey, I built a tiny Chrome extension with Codex that warns you inside Gmail when the sender doesn’t match the company the message claims to be from.
It runs locally on your computer and does not upload your emails. I built this because I was tired of people scamming my parents and friends. This could just be a Gmail feature honestly but in the meantime you can use this extension for free.
Installation instructions in this GitHub: https://github.com/petergyang/phish-guard
Let me know what you think!

You can now build with Replit and deploy straight to Microsoft Fabric. 🙌
Code is the easy part. The backend is the hard part: identities, storage, schemas, governance. You build in Replit, and the app and data deploy into your enterprise-managed Microsoft Fabric tenant.
MSFT CEO Satya Nadella announces in his Microsoft Build 2026 opening keynote.🔥
Replit ⠕: Announcing our new collaboration with @Microsoft
Organizations can now build internal tools, workflows, or data dashboards in Replit and publish directly to Microsoft Fabric with security, authentication, and governance built in

One thing you don't realize till you have haters is that haters are also stalkers. They're obsessed with you, and in practice this obsessiveness is more disturbing than the nastiness of what they actually say. It's so creepy.

today is the @ycombinator P26 Demo Day.
on days like this, I like to reflect on how much YC has given to us. joining the YC community was a major inflection point for Mosaic and for me personally. so much has happened in a really short span of time. and it all really started with getting into YC.
in particular, I remember Launch Day.
YC always says launch early and launch fast, but as a founder, you want everything to be perfect before you share your company with the world.
i’m glad that part of our work at @mosaic_so now is about helping other YC startups navigate that special launch moment with confidence. for this current batch alone, we helped 6 startups tell their story.
to all those who have ever thought to apply — do it.
to all those that applied but didn't yet get in — don't give up.
to all those taking the stage today at Demo Day — best of luck.
and, if you just got into the new YC summer batch and are looking to launch fast, DM me. would love to help show the world what you're building.

In the age of AI, human ingenuity becomes even more valuable. The likes of @elonmusk @spacex, @nvidia, @anthropic, @OpenAI were founded in the U.S. for a reason.
Over the years, I've met thousands of talented founders, engineers, and technologists, and many left everything familiar for the chance to build something new.
So we sat down to hear their stories.
First Landing 👇

DEMO DAY SPRING 26
let’s gooo

So excited to be joining YC as a General Partner!
Y Combinator: We're excited to announce Christopher Golda (@golda) and Grey Baker (@greybaker) as YC's newest General Partners!
Chris co-founded BackType (S08), sold it to Twitter, then built their entire ad business from zero to $1B+ in revenue.
Grey co-founded Dependabot, a developer tool

The Southern Poverty Law Center being the largest sponsor of American neo-Nazism is the funniest political reveal of the decade and it’s not even close.
New York Post: SPLC boss funneled $1.2 million to lover in neo-Nazi group - pair even had joint bank account https://trib.al/7wnuofS

Progress in AI is driven by approaches that make weaker assumptions, which allows for better scaling
But representation learning has relied on strong assumptions like augmentations, masking, cropping, etc... until now!
🎬 Introducing Temporal Difference in Vision (TDV), a new paradigm for representation learning built on a single assumption: causality
TL;DR:
- We introduce TDV, the first approach to learn good representations without any augmentations, masking, cropping, or pixel-based reconstruction
- TDV matches SOTA recipes like DINO and iBOT on dense spatial tasks
- We show that as data scales, weaker assumptions work better
🧵Thread:

Amazing news. Christopher @Golda is one of the best angel investors I know. He was a great friend, sounding board and collaborator to me over all my years of running @WayfinderVC and founders are lucky to work with him at YC.
Y Combinator: We're excited to announce Christopher Golda (@golda) and Grey Baker (@greybaker) as YC's newest General Partners!
Chris co-founded BackType (S08), sold it to Twitter, then built their entire ad business from zero to $1B+ in revenue.
Grey co-founded Dependabot, a developer tool

Summary of @saikatc:
> goes Harvard, works at world’s largest hedge fund
> moves to SF for YC co, makes $100M
> buys mansion, kids to private school
> “I’m a socialist now!”
> “PACs are evil!”, spends $10M on his campaign
> loses
> “I have started a PAC”
Mission Local: Saikat Chakrabarti just converted his campaign into the "SF Solidarity" PAC, which can spend on behalf of other candidates.
He may back Connie Chan, who is facing Scott Wiener in the runoff for S.F.'s congressional seat.
via @io_y_g
https://missionlocal.org/2026/06/san-francisco-saikat-chakrabarti-pac/

Today, we’re announcing that we’ve closed our Series C and raised $100M to continue automating the world’s most complex phone calls.
We grabbed some guy named Paul to talk about it because nobody else in the office wanted to. 🧵

Chris and Grey both have a rare combination of broad knowledge across technology, product, getting customers, fundraising and hiring while also being able to go deep on each of them. I'm excited to welcome them into the YC partnership!
Y Combinator: We're excited to announce Christopher Golda (@golda) and Grey Baker (@greybaker) as YC's newest General Partners!
Chris co-founded BackType (S08), sold it to Twitter, then built their entire ad business from zero to $1B+ in revenue.
Grey co-founded Dependabot, a developer tool

Most crowded YC demo day I’ve ever seen. Standing room only from before presentation start.

When YC bet on me as a founder, it changed the trajectory of my life. Grateful to be in a position to help founders who are just getting started!
Y Combinator: We're excited to announce Christopher Golda (@golda) and Grey Baker (@greybaker) as YC's newest General Partners!
Chris co-founded BackType (S08), sold it to Twitter, then built their entire ad business from zero to $1B+ in revenue.
Grey co-founded Dependabot, a developer tool

Extremely powerful and MIT open-source. Mutuals who had early access are giving it great reviews.
Z.ai: Introducing GLM-5.2: Frontier Intelligence, Open Weights
- Significant improvements in coding and agentic tasks
- Strong long-horizon capabilities with a 1M context window
- Two levels of reasoning effort: GLM-5.2 (max) pushes the limits, while GLM-5.2 (high) strikes a strong

🔴🗣️A quoi ressemblera notre vie dans 10 ans ? "Tout le monde sera une sorte de patron d'une équipe de personnes virtuelles qui nous aiderons dans notre vie de tous les jours", selon Yann Le Cun , fondateur de la start-up AMI Labs. #JT20h

It’s @ycombinator Demo Day!! Amazing founders + investors. Go @garrytan & team!!

House of Tan is so vibrant 🌎

We built an AI that can draw on your screen.
It's a true personal tutor.
Using Claude Opus we're able to draw polygons, point with pixel perfect accuracy, and walk users through complex steps directly on their screen.
Here's me learning Pythagorean Theorem + FL Studio.
Demo:

Tasklet (@TaskletAI) went from $300k revenue at the beginning of the year to $7M revenue run rate at YC Demo Day.
Highest revenue of the P26 batch.
And no coincidence: @startupandrew is a top YC founder, previously founder of Firebase in my S11 batch.

The AI in GTM track at @aiDotEngineer is shaping up to be SO good - keynotes on building GTM brains, engineering AEO, dealing with governance, permissions and security when giving AI access to GTM data at scale, moving from reactive to proactive GTM agents and beyond.
Speakers:
Everett Berry (@retttx) from @ClayRunHQ
Arman Vaziri from Ramp @tryramp
Jeff wang (@jeffzwang) from @ExaAILabs
Flora Liu from @NotionHQ
Bil Erdenekhuyag from @fin_a (just got acquired by @salesforce )
Aliisa Rosenthal (@aliisarosenthal) from @AcrewCapital, past head of sales at @OpenAI
Alex Bauer (@alexdbauer) from @UpsideGTM
Stephanie Jarmak (@sgjarmak) from @sourcegraph
Christopher Burns (@BurnedChris) from @Inth

Jackie Fielder voted to block 82,000 new homes despite 74% voter support.
She demands every new development be 100% affordable, knowing full well that cross-subsidization from market-rate units is the only way to finance housing in San Francisco. Her rigid “social housing” purity test makes projects mathematically impossible to build, creating a de facto moratorium while only 9% of the city’s housing stock meets her impossible standards.
In December 2025 she joined the obstructionist blockade and voted NO on Mayor Lurie’s Family Zoning Plan. The measure would have upzoned neighborhoods to meet state mandates and avoid losing millions in transit funding. She sided with wealthy Bernal Heights homeowners who want to protect their property values over young renters and working families desperate for housing.
This wasn’t principle. This was NIMBYism dressed up as progressivism. She sacrificed the city’s housing future and her own district’s renters to maintain ideological purity and keep rich homeowners happy.
Jackie Fielder is the architect of the scarcity she claims to fight.
She must resign.

Re I put the whole batch in one place: revenue, standout founders, and press coverage for every P26 company.
Explore it here: https://ycbatchwatch.com/p26

1.4M-5M ARR demo day revenue is insane!
Abby Grills: YC Spring 2026 Demo Day is here.
...and the revenue is like nothing we've seen before.
• Tasklet — $5M ARR
• Gojiberry AI — $1.4M ARR
• Kinro — $1M ARR
• Plena Health — $1M ARR
32 companies have already disclosed revenue. 👇

California’s billionaire tax has made for some very strange bedfellows.
For:
SEIU-UHW
Bernie Sanders
Ro Khanna
Against:
Gavin Newsom
Sergey Brin
Planned Parenthood
California Teachers Association
Peter Thiel
And now: YIMBY
https://cayimby.org/blog/why-california-yimby-opposes-the-billionaire-wealth-tax/

One of our best ML engineers used to run his own YC startup.
@jtjenkins18 built a marketplace for trading Pokémon cards and took it all the way through Y Combinator.
He's also, somehow, one of the best Tetris players in the world. Top 0.8% in sprints, which I didn't even know was a thing you could rank in until I met him.
A couple years ago, the obvious move for someone like him was to either work at one of the big tech companies or keep raising and run his own company.
He chose to come be a founding ML engineer at Crustdata instead.
Now he gets to work on genuinely hard ML problems and shape the direction he wants to go himself. He ships things over a weekend that would have been a full quarter of roadmap two years ago.
And I think a lot more of the most talented founder-types are about to make the same call.
The most fun place to be right now is right next to the actual building.
Genuinely lucky to have him!
Jonathan's also hosting an ML event here in SF this Thursday. Some of the best ML and infra engineers in the city, bouldering at Dogpatch then dinner in NOPA, all on us.
If you're an ML engineer in SF, join us!
RSVP in the comments!

did you get your tickets for AI Engineer SF?
I'll be giving a talk (and following tibo) as well as a workshop on setting yourself up with success with codex

Today we interviewed @ycombinator Demo Day founders.
Here's what the batch is building:

Exo 0.14.0 is out today with Day-0 support for GLM 5.2 (from @Zai_org) and @opencode harness support. GLM is the first open model that achieves comparable performance to Opus in my internal eval, and runs at approximately the same speed on @ollama cloud.
it's now my default model for my own email client, with practically unlimited usage via ollama.
this release also ships support for the @opencode sdk for the sidebar agent instead of requiring claude agent sdk. This is a big step towards making the app model agnostic.
Ankit Gupta: Fun update: I got tired of disliking every email client I’ve ever used and built my own. It’s called Exo (for exoskeleton). It’s Claude Code for my inbox. It manages my inbox for me, and it’s open source. Link to repo + some notable features in thread!

There's a YC startup at Demo Day with one of the cleanest exponential revenue charts I've seen in a while.
Most see 85k MRR. Investors see log(10, 1.7) ≈ 4.3
That's how many months it'll take to get to 10M ARR at this rate. And the company is doing something incredibly noble.
Paul Graham: How to Earn a Billion Dollars: https://paulgraham.com/earn.html

"Emil Michael and our friends in the Trump administration are changing everything. It's a new Department of War."
@garrytan says the admin is making real strides toward dismantling the cost-plus procurement structure to the benefit of leaner, faster, more innovative firms:
"Cost-plus was originally designed to be something that created more innovation. But what was needed 50 or 80 years ago, that's the wrong thing now."
"The defense primes are just not innovating. They can't. It's structural."
"What makes me mad is, there are service members who are going to die in service of our country — to defend liberty — and they're giving their lives because defense primes are not doing the job they're supposed to be doing. They're not innovating, they're not bringing new technologies to the fore."
"Credit to the Department of War. For the first time in decades, they're actually open to a team of 10-20 people, whether it's in Boston, Austin, SF, or Gundo."

T-16 hours until vibecon 🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩 @Replit

Y Combinator's @garrytan says he wants his new project GBrain to be the Postgres for agents:
"The thing I realized is, a human can only keep 7, plus or minus 3, things in their head. But a computer with an LLM can keep about three Harry Potter books in its head."
"Then, when you think about what most computer systems are, you should think of the Library of Alexandria — thousands, maybe millions, of books. It's even bigger than that. It's the whole internet."
"You could basically take all the relevant info about customers, or any person that anyone at the company has ever even met. You can have that in like, 100,000 or a million markdown files that comprises everything that the business is. That's basically what GBrain can do."
"The magic moment for GBrain is basically being able to take any 'book' that exists in your entire business, and making sure the 3 books that really matter for the thing you're trying to do are loaded."
"And that's basically ASI. You don't have to write software anymore. You can just straight-up use Hermes agent or OpenClaw plus GBrain."
Garry Tan: Humans can keep 7 +or- 3 things in their head
Your AI agent can keep 3 whole Harry Potter books in context
You could have 300,000 books in your library
GBrain will make sure your AI agent has the 3 books out of 300,000 loaded in context for your task presently
Big unlock