datacenters in space sound incredible, but when you breakdown the eng, they seem less impossible than simply ambitious
the tradeoff: the sun is a giant fusion reactor that already exists with free abundant energy
but you pay for expensive transport + difficult cooling/comms
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something interesting is happening for big models, it is easy to generate candidate solutions for code but *verifying* that they 100% work is not
no fixed reward function is durable for a strong generator
more exciting work to be done around verifiers that coevolve with generators
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an underrated source of good startup devtool ideas: taking an old boring API, then make it angent native + oss and have LLMs default to recommending it
proved by this paper 2 yrs ago
watch our og startup sites be roasted then fixed by @ployai
excited to have @golda and @greybaker join as GPs who have a deep tech bench
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 a million engineers rely on every single day— and sold it to GitHub. Then he co-founded Pincites (S23), which was acquired by Filevine.
As Visiting Partners, both have already spent multiple batches working closely with founders. Now they're doing it full-time.
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I was 37 when I did YC and it transformed my company
woah first time oss models are leading
BREAKING: GLM-5.2 is now 1st on Design Arena.
With an Elo of 1360, GLM-5.2 has jumped ahead of the now unavailable Claude Fable 5.
And it's open weights.
This is an improvement of 4 positions and 27 Elo points to achieve one of the highest Elo scores in our code categories since Design Arena started.
Huge congratulations to the @Zai_org on the release!
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today is YC Demo Day.
back in 2023, our Demo Day goal was $10k MRR.
we ended up at $2k...
a reminder that your destiny is not determined by a 3-month sprint.
still, going through @ycombinator was the best thing we could have done.
always set scary goals for yourself.
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1/ fast AI inference is about to replay the history lesson from search engines on why low latency is so important
How to Earn a Billion Dollars:
I'm deeply grateful and honored
YC has changed my life twice: first as a founder, and now as someone who gets to back and support ambitious talent that's unproven
feel lucky to do this work, and even luckier to do it with people I admire so much
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We're excited to announce Diana Hu (@sdianahu) as YC's newest Managing Partner.
Diana co-founded Escher Reality (YC S17), which was acquired by Niantic, where she shipped AR to the 100M+ people playing Pokémon GO. Since returning to YC as a partner, she has worked with nearly 230 companies that are now worth a combined $7 billion.
Few people have built a startup from zero and also shipped at global scale. Diana has done both.
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Brex co-founder and CEO Pedro Franceschi believes most people still underestimate how much AI will change the way companies are built. AI isn't just another tool, it's a new foundation for building products, teams, and companies.
In this episode of @LightconePod, @pedroh96 explains why we're only months into a platform shift as significant as the invention of electricity, why the CEO needs to be the chief AI officer, and why founders should rethink what's possible when intelligence is available on demand.
01:13 – How Pedro Became AI-Pilled
04:08 – The Electricity Analogy
05:21 – Free the Claw
06:56 – Making AI Safe for Enterprise
10:57 – Why Most Companies Are Behind
13:09 – AI Teammates, Not Chatbots
14:22 – The Case for Tokenmaxxing
18:24 – The Company of One
20:54 – The One Thing AI Can't Replace
28:06 – Building Customer World Models
32:58 – Rebuilding Brex Around AI
39:02 – The CEO Must Be the Chief AI Officer
43:50 – Building Company AGI
51:43 – Why We're Still So Early
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The limit of AI in your enterprise isn't the model. It’s what the model knows about how you operate.
beyond model size, the more interesting frontier is a thin layer on top: a coding agent that writes an executable world model, checks it against observations, and compresses it toward the *simplest program that fits.
it rides every base-model gain for free. A new s-curve sitting on the bitter lesson
*"simplest program" is what ARC-AGI measures in "skill-acquisition efficiency"
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People are often surprised how many hard-tech companies YC funds, and for how long we've been doing it. It's been about 10% of the batch since 2014 when Sam became CEO.
