Bryan Lee

at AC i’ve learned forward deployed work is among my favorite. a personal favorite memory was getting a high five from a customer after a day in the office and a successful prod deployment. closely collaborating with companies and diving into the nitty-gritty of their systems to make agents work is challenging but rewarding. it’s “full stack” in the sense it involves a eng, research, and understanding customer needs which makes each day different and gets me excited.

We partnered with @DoorDash to train a proprietary RL-powered agent that encodes internal QA standards into an automated grader, turning expert judgment into a scalable training signal. The result: a 30% relative reduction in critical menu errors and a production system now live across all US menu traffic. appliedcompute.com/case-studies/d…

Ready to ship

@appliedcompute ready to ship

Generalists are useful, but it’s not enough to be smart. Advances come from specialists, whether human or machine. To have an edge, agents need specific expertise, within specific companies, built on models trained on specific data. We call this Specific Intelligence. It's what we're building at Applied Compute. We unlock the latent knowledge inside a company, use it to train custom models, and deploy an in-house agent workforce that reports to your team. We work with sophisticated companies that have already captured early gains from general models, like @cognition, @DoorDash, and @mercor_ai. They’re pulling even further ahead with proprietary in-house agents that don’t need to wait for the next public model release. Together, we are building and validating models and agents in days instead of months, achieving state-of-the-art performance on customer evals. Our team has high density and low latency. Our founders all worked on different parts of this problem while they were researchers at OpenAI — @ypatil125 as a key member on the agentic software engineer effort (Codex), @rhythmrg as a core contributor to the first RL-trained reasoning model (o1), and @lindensli as a core contributor on ML systems and infrastructure for RL training. Two-thirds of the team are former founders, and everyone brings a deep technical background, from top AI researchers to Math Olympiad winners. We are backed by $80M in funding from Benchmark, Sequoia, Lux, Elad Gil, Victor Lazarte, Omri Casspi, and others. With their support, we are growing the team, scaling deployments, and bringing to market the first generation of agent workforces built on specific models. In short: 1. We are building Specific Intelligence for specific work at specific companies. 2. That will power in-house agent workforces to support their human bosses. 3. That in turn will unlock AI’s full potential through humanity’s greatest engine of progress: thriving corporations in a free market.

@uzpg_ can attest the product is super cool

would love to chat with people building agents -- with RL on tool use for eg but also just prompting etc making observability tooling that should be quite useful

@ycombinator congrats on the launch!

Nexa (nexa.farm) builds implantable “FitBits” and AI for cattle monitoring, starting with the nearly 90M cattle in America. They empower farmers with early disease detection and reproductive insights to save time and money. ycombinator.com/launches/OAs-n… Congrats on the launch, @ZarifAzher, @zhangalvin_, @kennychan256, and @sam14_xie!

@ycombinator @trace_so @timcherkasov @K1ngArtes congrats on launch!

👾@trace_so is building an AI-native workspace that breaks down existing workflows, assigns repetitive tasks to AI agents, and routes the rest to the right people. ycombinator.com/launches/OAG-t… Congrats on the launch, @timcherkasov and @K1ngArtes!

the scale on this gpt-5 graph is puzzling, 50 < 47?

@ycombinator @aaronchewbani @kavandoc congrats!

Synthetic Society tests your product with AI-powered user simulations. Their agents mimic real users to catch bugs, bad UX, and edge cases. Ship faster, kill manual testing, and build with confidence. ycombinator.com/launches/O7g-s… Congrats on the launch, @aaronchewbani and @kavandoc!

one thing @AnthropicAI doesn't have: github.com/anthropic

just paid for comet. never thought I'd pay for a browser

@treeeckob is the model interpretable

Redwood Research

@ycombinator @CyberdeskHQ Congrats on launch, 🍩 king

Cyberdesk (@CyberdeskHQ) is the computer use agent for developers to automate legacy Windows apps. Customers in healthcare, finance, and more use it to automate EHRs and accounting— combining reliable memorized steps with smart fallback during popups. ycombinator.com/launches/O4a-c… Congrats on the launch, @dope_alan & @mahmoudalmadi_!

@adisingh I love this

My parents came to visit me from Michigan yesterday. One of the most peaceful nights of sleep I’ve had in months, crazy what a difference that makes

@dadiomov a trying period in history

Finished "Silence" by Shusaku Endo, a Japanese historical fiction classic that tells the story of two Portuguese priests who come to Japan as missioniaries in the 1600s, only to be greeted by brutal Japanese repression that tests their faith to no end. A bit melancholy and at times painful to read, but it's beautifully written.

astronomer writes 50% of the airflow code airflow iff astronomer

@finbarr could reflect GBP appreciation

USD devaluation as seen through YTD BTC gain, GBP vs USD.

@michelelwang @AravSrinivas Youre awesome michele

@_brylee10 @AravSrinivas He’s lucky to have met you! :)

bumped into @AravSrinivas in the elevator in my apt yesterday last month i was in nyc unemployed what is silicon valley

@eoinfr @AravSrinivas city of serendipity

@_brylee10 @AravSrinivas gift me some of your luck 🫶