I turned the fly bisexual Inspired by Kallman et al ('15), I blocked mAL output in a 166,606-neuron fly model and measured responses in 8 candidate P1 male courtship neurons. In 3 experiments, when cued by other males, baseline P1 spikes rose from 0 to 1–5 after mAL blockade

Some personal news. After nearly three years, I stepped away from FRL & Shortcut earlier this month. In 2023, I dropped out of my mba at MIT to cofound FRL with Robert, Shuying, and Andrew. Cofounding a company is all consuming, and they have been the best cofounders I could have ever asked for. Robert/Shuying never mentioned it again, but I had a pregnant wife at the time and little savings, and Shuying helped cover my bills for months while we were still fundraising. I’ll forever be grateful. I was a former professional basketball dunker and self-taught dev, suddenly building with MIT professors, phds, and programming medalists. We immediately built a brand for far-out and inspiring applied research, building the first AI agents that people could play with in Minecraft. We even simulated a civilization of 1,000 agents with Project Sid (I still think this was the most fun / forward looking multi agent work until OpenClaw). On Oct 22, 2024, Anthropic released the CUA preview and Robert made the call for us to tackle OSWorld. He had the vision to lean into codegen and to build what we called “skills”(!!) to separate the hands from the mind at the time. Shuying set up the infra to run massive parallel evals so we could get dozens of scores a day. We beat SOTA in 1 week and more than doubled it in 5 weeks. It’s a huge regret that we did not open source and publish our research. We raised a $30M+ Series A less than one month later and went all-in on building CUA inspired products. Unfortunately, our first two products did not stick at all, and we found ourselves in the hardest chapter of our company history. At this point, each of the cofounders had performed what felt like mini-miracles except for me (Andrew beat the voyager benchmark with Altera agents!). I felt the enormous weight of the moment, I insisted that i build my own product for us. With a very small team, I built and launched Shortcut… and it made quite an impact. I put all of my love and care into Shortcut over the last 18 months. It took some time for our research lab to reorient after launch, but we found our stride soon after. We created an entire ai product (and startup) category and i don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say we changed the way people use Excel. Shortcut is growing rapidly (4x in 2026!) and we are live in many of the biggest investment funds in the world. The product has clearly entered its next phase as a scaled product with a killer team at the wheel. And with this new chapter, the time has come for me to take a step back after pouring my heart into this company and product. The world looks really different than it did in 2023, and I'm excited to go back to the drawing board. I’m deeply grateful to my cofounders, teammates (too many of you to name, but thank you for your trust and for carrying the torch forward), investors, customers, and our users. You are in awesome hands. Most importantly, I’d like to thank my wife, Melanie. Thank you for building our family, for your strength, and for your confidence in me that far surpasses my own. You are the reason for anything we accomplish, and the reason any of it at all matters in the end. Nico

Opus 5 is a shocking step up from Fable 5 and 5.6 Sol for spreadsheets Almost couldn’t believe our evals at first A step function increase in intelligence, while as efficient as Sol Feels like another Opus 4.5 moment for knowledge work

We have been testing GPT 5.5 on the hardest spreadsheet tasks in the world (100k-1M+ cell complex models). It is the Pareto frontier for spreadsheets -- SOTA accuracy, the fastest and the most efficient public model across effort levels. OAI really cooked here