very proud to host this session opening night!
if you work in tech but have never heard of Touchy Feely, you are exactly the kind of person that needs to see this. You have no idea the shocking number of tech leadeds on here are secret @LITfellows alums and i have seen first hand how strong the bonds you form are, it blows my engineer mind.
FREE ADMISSION, application in link reply
Joyce Zhang: I’m excited to partner with @swyx to host a workshop at the @aiDotEngineer World’s Fair with Carole Robin (Distinguished @StanfordGSB Teacher of “Touchy Feely” & Co-Founder of @LITfellows) on developing effective relationships.
Building human relationships (including romantic
It starts with a prompt — it’s a whole lot of work to get here — but it starts with an idea.
Congrats Yousef and team!
FaZe Apex: Have spent all of 2026 building something new post-FaZe. Excited to join @ycombinator this summer as I continue on this next chapter.
Ten years ago I was 20, moving out of the FaZe House in New York to our new place in Newport Beach.
This week I turned 30, and I’m feeling the
Starting an X Chat group for http://eve.dev feedback. If you’re deep into building an agent and have high quality critical feedback or requirements to share, DM me and I’ll add you to a group with eve engineers
btw Zai IPO'ed in Jan at HK$120 a share. when I first met @louszbd nobody really knew anyone using GLM's.
now they have beat deepseek with the world's undisputed top open model and in some respects (see @ml_angelopoulos) say top model period, and are returning to SF @aidotengineer on top of the world and open for business!
excited for @Thom_Wolf and @ZixuanLi_ to chat onstage!
Lou: Made it to SF! The love for GLM-5.2 has been incredible. We are bringing team out for the AI Engineer World’s Fair, where we’ll be sharing some of our recent work. It’s our first time showing up in the Valley. So excited! And thanks to @swyx and @aiDotEngineer for having us.
What is design if what’s accessing your product is just an agent looking for an api or CLI?
Alex Volkov
hahaha Token Billionaires are a whole thing at @aiDotEngineer this year, with a golden card, a private lounge and everything!
Thanks @swyx for shouting out my ZL Continuum talk! Don't miss it, Wed July 1, 10:45am Room 3020 (Tokemaxxxxxing track)
If you're spending over 1B tok/day, you need to be there!
AI Engineer: 6️⃣ Things to Know about
AI Engineer World's Fair 2026
- It’s bigger than all previous AIEs
- 4x Larger Expo with 4 Expo stages
- Researchers: Poster sessions & Poaster sessions
- AI Leadership: Token Billionaires & Off the Record
- AI Verticals: Healthcare, GTM, FDE, AGC,
Sina 🗝️⚡ BI Report
The most fascinating thing I have read this whole month. Paired with the actual code on github this is a learning gold mine.
Garry Tan: http://x.com/i/article/2052898104039657472
Hugo
You don’t need the gstack when you have @garrytan by your side
shoutout @standoutwork
https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k14/k14ej1ucqu
Maik Taro Wehmeyer
We raised a $110M Series C to power AI transformation in financial services.
Led by Goldman Sachs, with participation from @balderton, @IndexVentures , @dig_ventures, @tigerglobal, @VisionariesVC, and @ycombinator.
Great news for banks and insurers.
Tough news for fraudsters and money launderers.
Tough news for credit processes that make businesses wait weeks for an answer.
Tough news for onboarding workflows that reject good customers.
Tough news for claims processes where a single review takes days.
We’re serious about solving our customers’ problems, so we hired the toughest people on the planet to get the word out:
New Yorkers.
If they didn’t convince you yet, here’s what we want everyone in our industry to know:
AI can now reliably automate the decisions that define performance in banking and insurance. This was not true just 6 months ago - and it creates huge opportunity for efficiency gains and better customer experiences.
But model capability is not the full solution.
The challenge is making every AI-driven decision reliable, controlled, and ready for the most regulated industry.
That’s what we’re building at @taktile_org.
From New York to the world.
To our customers, partners, investors, and team: thank you for getting us here. Very excited to collaborate with the @GoldmanSachs Asset Management team on the next chapter.
Learn more: https://taktile.com/series-c-announcement
Congratulations Tom
There is a way out, a way up, and a way back to life. Our modern society should prioritize and raise up treatment and recovery as the primary thing we do to help people in the throes of addiction
T Wolf 🌁: Today, I'm 8 years clean and sober. My name is Tom and I'm a grateful recovering heroin and fentanyl addict. Recovery gave me a new life full of faith, hope and love. I now understand what gratitude means. Thank you all and thank you God.
Lawfare
Re https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/tulsi-gabbard-s-fauci-files-don-t-prove-what-she-says-they-prove
Randall Balestriero
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a JEPA! Congrats on that great work that brought SIGReg and JEPAs to the sky--in the real world! Check out the paper!
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23444
Pratyaksh Rao: What should a world model for agile quadrotor control actually provide?
📄 Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.23444
🌐 Project: https://pratyaksh10.github.io/skyjepa-project-page/
💻 Code: https://github.com/arplaboratory/SkyJEPA
Excited to share SkyJEPA:
Learning Long-Horizon World Models for Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Control of
Zachary Foster
we only know about a fraction of Israeli atrocities because Palestinians know if they speak out they’ll punished, arrested, tortured or raped to death
Saul Staniforth: "The hardest decision we had to make in completing this report was.. not to name the Palestinian children, whose deaths, injuries & suffering we describe.. we didn't name them because we feared the consequences for their families"
He means Israel would go after them too.
There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days.
Quake was overly ambitious technically. We could have done all the great multiplayer and modding work inside a Doom++ engine, allowing the designers to work with a more stable base instead of rug-pulling everything out from underneath them a couple times. The follow up game could have then brought in full 6DOF environments and characters.
I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Quake was also where I really had to accept my personal limits. I was working pretty much as hard as humanly possible, and I was still slipping past my goal points.
On all of the founders’ shoulders, our original corporate stock arrangement and buy/sell agreement was a mistake, and resulted in bad incentives. We wanted to ensure that all ownership rested in the hands of people working hard on current projects, but the Silicon Valley standard approach of vesting stock would have worked out better.
One real problem that I don’t accept the blame for is that we were insisting that level designers be not just game designers, but also have strong visual design esthetics. They needed to make things that not only played well, but looked awesome, and it got more challenging as the technology provided a richer palette. Romero covered that well, which set our company expectations early on.
We should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier, but there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t.
Sorry, Sandy.
Sandy Petersen 🪔: How Quake ruined id Software.
There has been a lot of praise of Quake of late, with its 30th anniversary, and it's deserved. Quake is an amazing feat of art, programming, and design. I worked on it, and everything came together almost perfectly from all of us. We ended up with
happy karpathy agent day for those who celebrate
swyx 🔜 @aiDotEngineer: Inspired by @karpathy’s words on why you - yes YOU - should work on AI Agents
Peter Yang
I love using Hermes from @NousResearch as my 24/7 AI chief of staff because it's reliable, free, and open source.
Here's my new 45-minute free course that covers how to:
→ Install Hermes safely
→ Connect Telegram, voice, Google Workspace, and more
→ Create routines like morning briefing, business review, and health check
📌 Watch the full course now: https://youtu.be/2ZacwCbiLjg
We aren’t doing this trash in San Francisco because we saw what these kinds of ruthless politicians do to the citizens
Asian elders killed
Public education dismantled
If you start counting their bodies and talking about their abdication of duty, the hard left can’t win
Lit News Network: NEWS: Three Democratic Socialist candidates won primaries in New York, cementing a big shift in the Democratic party.
Here is a summary of each of the candidates and their radical stances:
Claire Valdez (NY-7): Grant citizenship & voting rights to illegals, use taxpayer funds
AI Engineer
Thinking about AI Engineer World's Fair? Apply to be an Associate! It's a great way to connect with fascinating people across the AI ecosystem, build new relationships, and be part of one of the most exciting AI gatherings of the year.
https://www.ai.engineer/associates
Introducing Jalapeño — designed from scratch for LLM inference over nine months, accelerated by our models. Perf per watt looking incredible.
OpenAI: We’ve designed and built our first AI chip: Jalapeño.
Designed from the ground up by OpenAI and brought to production with @Broadcom, Jalapeño is purpose-built for the LLM workloads powering ChatGPT, Codex, the API, and future agentic products.
Chips are foundational to the AI
Joyce Zhang
One of my big dreams when I first started out was to teach engineers to talk about their feelings at massive scale at Dreamforce, AWS re:Invent, etc
I was blown away when @swyx asked me to host an event at @aiDotEngineer this year. Get a free pass: http://bit.ly/connect-ai-2026
swyx 🔜 @aiDotEngineer: very proud to host this session opening night!
if you work in tech but have never heard of Touchy Feely, you are exactly the kind of person that needs to see this. You have no idea the shocking number of tech leadeds on here are secret @LITfellows alums and i have seen first
Harj Taggar
Deploying voice agents in the enterprise needs the same testing discipline as self-driving cars. You can’t just put autonomous them into production and hope the edge cases behave.
Coval understood this early, brought the Waymo simulation mindset to voice AI, and is becoming the infrastructure layer for reliable voice agents.
Congrats Brooke and team on the Series A!
Brooke Hopkins: I’m excited to announce @covaldev raised a $28M Series A, led by @NorwestVP with participation from @Base10Partners, @twilio Ventures and @ycombinator, among others.
I started Coval with the belief that the simulation and evaluation approaches that made autonomous vehicles a
Vivian Midha Shen
rounds MBB -> YC founders raised in 2026 so far:
> announced today: @taktile_org $110M series C led by Goldman Sachs [McK]
> @StiltaIP $10.5M seed led by a16z [McK]
> @ProsperAI_HQ $30M series A led by a16z [Bain]
> @nourish $100M series C led by Menlo Ventures [Bain]
> @Avoca $125M combined seed - series B led by KP, GC, Meritech [BCG]
> @Starcloud_ $170M series A led by Benchmark, EQT [McK]
and of course massive @WeAreLegora $600M series D led by Accel [McK]
have a few MBB folks this summer - the prognosis is good
The data of tokens and uptime recovered by @vercel AI Gateway is truly astonishing
Joe: At @goodtacoai we switched from using the Anthropic API to using @vercel AI Gateway for better reliability. Super cool to see this data displayed on the dashboard so we don't have to do anything to figure it out ourselves.
David Lieb
Maybe you weren't meant to have a boss.
https://www.ycombinator.com/apply
Justin Poehnelt: Two months ago I was fired by Google for creating the Google Workspace CLI. It went viral, hit #1 on Hacker News, gained thousands of GitHub stars and many thousands of actual users in just a couple days.
It was an incredible, confusing journey, from directors and leaders asking
Nicolas Dessaigne
I sat with a founder this week running a Series A company of 45 people, almost all engineers. A year ago that was right: by Series A or B you wanted your engineering team to be your strongest asset. Not so anymore. The teams pulling ahead keep eng small and scale through agents. The signal isn't a big team that ships anymore. It's a small team that's learned to make the machine ship for them.
We are honored to share that Project Genie has won the Cannes Lions Grand Prix for AI Craft! 🏆 To our awesome Labs community, thank you for being on this journey with us!
Jack Parker-Holder: Huge congratulations to the Project Genie team on taking home the Cannes Lions Grand Prix for AI Craft! 🎉 Thank you @Cannes_Lions for recognizing how Genie pushes beyond conventional creative limitations to achieve outcomes unattainable without frontier AI… Another unexpected
Ihtesham Ali
Elon Musk built one of the largest AI compute clusters on earth. Yann LeCun just explained why xAI now rents it out to rivals instead of winning with it. Musk has antagonized so much AI talent he structurally cannot hire the people he needs.
LeCun is not a critic on the sidelines. He won the Turing Award and ran AI at Meta for a decade. When he talks about who can and cannot build a frontier lab, he is describing his own world.
His verdict on xAI was blunt. He called it kind of a failure and did not soften it.
His reasoning had nothing to do with money. The founding team left or was fired. There is some uncertainty about which. Either way, the people who started the company are gone.
That is the part that matters. A frontier lab is its researchers. Lose them and the compute is just hardware.
By March, all eleven co-founders Musk recruited in 2023 had walked out. Researchers who came from DeepMind, Google, and OpenAI. Musk himself posted that xAI was not built right the first time and had to be rebuilt from the foundations up.
So Musk is left with one of the biggest clusters on earth and no way to win with it. He rents it out to other companies to recoup the cost.
The most expensive infrastructure in AI, built by someone who can no longer staff it.
Asked directly if xAI can compete at the frontier, LeCun gave a one word answer.
No.
What do you guys think about this?
Source: CNBC International Live
Kenneth Roth
More than 4.7 million people in the US have lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, also known as food stamps, since Trump’s signature tax and spending law took effect last July, with Arizona the hardest hit. https://trib.al/O6iE9mn
Harj Taggar
It’s remarkable how true this is. Investing can be frustrating for every investor when you don’t win a deal but the high quality ones never take it out on founders and the low quality ones routinely do via rants about prices being too high / founders being naive.
conor brennan-burke: one thing i’ve noticed is the stronger the investor, the better they tend to treat founders during fundraising
i think there are two reasons for this
first, genuinely secure people rarely feel the need to play status games
second, the best investors are heavily pre-filtered.
Andrew Curran
Re
Y Combinator
Brooke Hopkins (@bnicholehopkins) is the founder and CEO of @covaldev, a simulation and observability platform that helps enterprises test, monitor, and evaluate AI-powered voice agents at scale.
Coval works with customers like Perplexity and Deepgram to process tens of millions of calls per month and has just raised a $28.2M Series A.
Brooke sat down with @harjtaggar to talk about how leading evaluation infrastructure at Waymo turned out to be surprisingly transferable to voice agents, why voice is emerging as the first productionized use case for autonomous agents, and how she narrowed a broad evals idea into a focused enterprise platform—including the moment a customer offered to pay her before she'd written a single line of code.
01:16 — Why Voice Is the Killer AI Interface
02:37 — How Enterprises Are Adopting Voice
05:44 — The Missing Infrastructure for Voice
06:58 — Where Voice Agents Fail
12:32 — Lessons From Waymo
16:38 — What Product-Market Fit Actually Feels Like
18:20 — Why They Bet on Enterprise
25:35 — Leaving Waymo to Go Solo
29:02 — What's Next for Coval
Recall Jackie Fielder
Jackie Fielder spent 104 days in hiding after facilitating a crypto PUMP-and-DUMP scheme and committing municipal ESPIONAGE.
She has been out of office longer than any Supervisor in the history of San Francisco, collecting over $50,000 in taxpayer dollars while doing NOTHING. While she hid from ethics complaints over promoting the $KITKAT memecoin scam right after a cat died, and from the City Attorney investigation into her leaking a confidential memo to sabotage the RESET fentanyl center, District 9 was abandoned to open drug markets, rising overdoses, and ZERO leadership.
She told reporters, “At the end of the day I’m a human being.”
What about all the human beings who have died from fentanyl overdoses in her district? HUNDREDS of lives lost to a crisis she helped fuel by shielding dealers and blocking enforcement.
When she walks back into City Hall on Monday, we will serve her with a Notice of Intention to recall. We have already assembled an army of volunteers prepared to collect all 9,911 signatures necessary to remove her from office.
She is not fit to serve. Jackie Fielder must resign or be recalled!
Exa
Introducing Exa Connect: connecting agents to data beyond the public web.
Available today with ZoomInfo, Crunchbase, Similarweb, and many other leading data providers.
http://exa.ai/connect
Big improvements to GPT-5.5 Instant, including being much more fun to talk to. Give it a try:
OpenAI: We have a new version of GPT-5.5 Instant for you, and it's much more fun to talk to.
Our most-used model is now better at understanding the intent behind a question and adapting its response accordingly.
It also handles complex constraints more reliably and makes shopping and
Jo Kristian Bergum
I’m headed to San Francisco for AI Engineer World's Fair next week. Two things. I'm giving a talk Tuesday, June 30: "The unreasonable effectiveness of BM25 for agentic search." GPT-5 is shockingly good at search, and that changes the BM25-as-a-baseline story. Search & Retrieval track, 11:10 AM, Room 2003.
And Monday night, we're hosting a Hornet meetup on agentic retrieval where I’ll talk about code mode for retrieval, and of course BM25 too.
Monday, June 29, 5:00 to 9:00 PM, a short ride from Moscone. RSVP: https://luma.com/ypnd3grq
Really fast GLM now live
Vercel Developers: GLM 5.2 Fast via Wafer is now available exclusively on Vercel AI Gateway.
2x faster token throughput vs other providers in internal benchmarks.
𝚖𝚘𝚍𝚎𝚕: '𝚣𝚊𝚒/𝚐𝚕𝚖-𝟻.𝟸-𝚏𝚊𝚜𝚝'
https://vercel.com/changelog/glm-5-2-fast-via-wafer-now-available-on-ai-gateway
LOTS of alpha in this pod:
- Why Databricks beat Snowflake (! a straight answer!)
- Why everyone is building a metaharness now
- Why the @neondatabase made so much sense (so much @nikitabase glazing its not even funny)
- How LTAP solves the HTAP dream I discussed with @ankrgyl in our @braintrust pod
- What happened to @MosaicML + DBRX
- How to maintain research/startup culture in a $175B megacorp
- What's more important knowledge/experience in the race to the agent cloud: databases, operating systems, or.... networking!
very honored to be invited to @Data_AI_Summit to interview two of the top people in our industry and somehow be able to jam on everything from the @bennstancil modern data stack theme to @alighodsi's amazing keynote aura
Latent.Space: Why the Frontier Ecosystem must be Open — Matei Zaharia and Reynold Xin, Databricks https://www.latent.space/p/databricks
@databricks cofounders @matei_zaharia and @rxin explain why Databricks is moving into the infrastructure layer for enterprise agents, how Omnigent creates a shared
Declaring bankruptcy on my Codex threads, too many to archive manually
RT Rodney Brooks
Daniel Lurie 丹尼爾·羅偉
Config, a tech design conference hosted by @figma, has brought 10,000+ designers, developers, and product builders from nearly 90 countries to San Francisco. Dylan, the Co-founder and CEO, moved Figma to San Francisco because he knew that this was the place to be.
This conference builds on the momentum we’re seeing at Moscone Center and downtown this year. Conferences and tourism drive economic activity that helps fund services across our city.
Robby Soave
Worth noting that, as far as I can tell Darializa Avila Chevalier is the first modern campus radical to be elected to Congress. By which I mean, she was active in the new, 2010-now period, encompassing intersectionality and wokeness. (AOC was not prominent until after college.)
She could be just the first in a wave of activists who have to try to squirm away from statements they made very recently about police, white people, Western civilization, etc.
https://reason.com/2026/06/24/darializa-avila-chevalier-will-be-this-congress-first-campus-radical/
I've known @berman66 for awhile and it's awesome to see him and the team build @runlayer to become the fastest onramp for enterprises to become AI native.
Andy Berman: Today, we’re announcing Runlayer has raised $30M from Felicis and Khosla Ventures to help companies go all in on AI.
Runlayer is the golden path for AI: enablement, security, and control in one platform.
So, how does it give your team the right tools for AI? 🧵
The Washington Post
An independent U.N. commission said that the Israeli military had deliberately targeted children in Gaza, amounting to genocide.
The commission said it found a pattern of behavior that reflected a strategy to destroy the future of Palestinians. https://wapo.st/4xOF8zN
Armand Domalewski
Just utterly depressing that the Democratic party is about to send someone to Congress who opposes interracial marriage for "woke" reasons, sided with Russia's invasion of Putin, and cannot answer a basic question about prison abolition despite being asked four times in a row
