I often get asked “What do you actually do?”. So i'm going to start sharing a bit more detail on how my Startups Applied AI team at @OpenAI partners with frontier startups & shapes OpenAI TLDR - my team has a dual role: ensuring startups get the best out of our models/products, and being the bridge between frontier startups and OpenAI’s research & product teams. I’ve seen sprints result in startups saving >25% of their LLM costs ($ millions), improve latency or eval results materially, and even reducing the startup’s customer cancellations by 40% - not bad for direct impact. And then there’s the feedback that shapes OpenAI’s roadmap. This is a first (high level) post of a few i'll make over the next few weeks, getting much more in depth on various topics. LMK if there are any particular topics you want me to go into depth on!

Today, we're launching Coarena by Coasty, an arena for models to compete in computer-use. Give Fable, Sol, gemini, etc, the same computer task and watch them battle, for free. You only find out who you voted for after you pick a winner.

A company is a planned social order, but one built under pressure from customers, markets, hiring, cash, time, and technical constraint. This social order is maintained via a founder, the institutional idea, and the managers that uphold the order. The founder must generate belief, but ego turns belief into blindness. The institution protects its self-conception as functional. But believing you are functional can make you not function. See: San Francisco during COVID. The manager protects his self-conception as competent. But believing you are competent can make you incompetent. The founder protects his self-conception as visionary. But believing you are visionary can make you precisely not that. Embedded in each is the seed of its own undoing, of its own un-seeing. The war of every founder, institution, and manager is to manage exactly this. To have vision, uphold function, be competent, in the face of real counterforces generated internally by the very operation of what you are trying to do.

Introducing a new, dedicated Image API, including typed dynamic capabilities. Unified access to 30+ image gen models from 8 providers: Google, OpenAI, Black Forest Labs, Recraft, ByteDance, Sourceful, Microsoft, and xAI Plus, a new solution to image API heterogeneity👇

Meet Qwen3.7-Plus, built for multimodal agent execution across GUI interaction, tool use, and coding. From visual input to code and real task execution, it’s designed for long-running, real-world agent workflows. Try it today on Alibaba Cloud with a limited-time 20% discount. 🔗 :