Raj

14+ minutes on hold with United Airlines. 90 seconds of my time. Week 2 of building AskRanger.com in public. After a March family trip to Hawaii, I realized I forgot to request a refund for the non-functional Wi-Fi on our United flight. A month passed. Trying online failed, which meant calling, which meant hold music, which meant it would sit on my to-do list for another month. Instead, I texted Sara (my personal agent from AskRanger): "Call United and get a refund for wifi that didn't work on flight UA694." Sara called United. Navigated the automated phone menu. Waited on hold for 14+ minutes. Got a rep on the line and explained the situation. The rep needed my MileagePlus number to verify my identity. Sara texted me: "They need to verify your identity - want me to patch you in? Text JOIN or tell me what to say." I replied JOIN. Sara connected me directly to the rep and dropped off the line. I confirmed my info, and the refund was approved. A full credit of 800 miles back the next day. My total time: 90 seconds. Sara handled the 14+ minutes of hold music I was happy to miss. Thank you to our early users and everyone on the waitlist - we're opening more spots as we harden the product. Still in private beta. Text GO to (510) RANGER1 or DM me for an invite code.

The base humanoid platform- dual arms, head - is going to be adapted to a lot of different use cases. This is a great example of taking a basic humanoid and specializing it with swappable arms and specialized locomotion

This is such a great watch! "Be a good scientist, copy homework ;)" @DrJimFan 🤫

Local open-weight AI on a laptop has been improving more than twice as fast as Moore's Law! Between May 2024 and May 2026, the most expensive MacBook Pro you could buy stayed at 128 GB of unified memory. The hardware ceiling barely moved. But the smartest open-weight model from @huggingface you could actually run on it went from a score of 10 (Llama 3 70B) to 47 (DeepSeek V4 Flash on @antirez's mixed-Q2 GGUF) on the @ArtificialAnlys Intelligence Index. That is 4.7× in 24 months, or a doubling of intelligence every 10.7 months. Moore's Law (transistor count) doubles every 24 months. Local open-weight AI on a laptop has been improving more than twice as fast as Moore's Law, on completely unchanged hardware.

@Scobleizer @miramurati Looks super cool! But as we’ve all learned in robotics, there’s often a huge gap between impressive demos and something you can actually use day-to-day. Really hope this one delivers... will be watching for the actual release.

The demo of this model is cool. Interacts with multiple people in multiple languages. On multiple tasks. Now we know why @miramurati got the big bucks.

@thinkymachines This looks really good but when can we try it? I can use Realtime 2.0 and Live 3.1 now... any target release date...?

People talk, listen, watch, think, and collaborate at the same time, in real time. We've designed an AI that works with people the same way. We share our approach, early results, and a quick look at our model in action. thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interacti…

@thinkymachines This looks really cool but can we use it? I can use Realtime 2.0 and Live 3.1 now... any target release date for this?

The technical report includes our motivation, early evaluation results, and technical approach. thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interacti…

Lili and Martin get some help controlling themselves.

@pitdesi What a great story! How do you find all these little nuggets...I barely get time to browse X!

A fun underreported story is that Ted Weschler, who manages a big chunk of Berkshire's $300B+ portfolio, got the job by bidding on the Buffett charity dinner twice ($2.6M each time). Warren offered him the job at the 2nd dinner. He rarely speaks publicly but appeared on the Nebraska Furniture Mart podcast. I happened to discover it because I was randomly on the same podcast once to talk Buffett trivia. Ted's episode is a really fun listen for any Buffett fan (linked below). Buffett started the charity auction for Glide, a church in SF that does a lot in the community, back in 2000. His first wife Susie volunteered there. Ted actually visited Glide to vet the organization before bidding, then paid $2.6M in 2010 and $2.6M again in 2011 to have dinner with Warren (the auction is called a "lunch" but Ted asked to do it in Omaha instead of NYC and they ended up doing dinner at Piccolo's). At the second dinner, Buffett asked if he'd want to work at Berkshire, then personally drove Ted to the airport and tried to convince him. Ted said no. He had his own $2B fund, kids in school, didn't want to move to Omaha. Warren replied saying "You can manage money from the moon" and sent a letter laying out how it would work. Ted eventually said yes a few weeks later and never moved to Omaha. He still commutes from Charlottesville 2-3 days a week. I'm bidding on the auction this year, wish me luck :)

This is the autopilot thesis written cleaner than I've seen it elsewhere. The wedge is consumer - real-time outcomes that prove the AI works. The destination is vertical services where the seat-to-result transition is most painful (medical AR, real estate ops, industrial sourcing, anywhere humans currently sit on hold for hours). Same infrastructure, different buyers. The interesting question is which vertical pulls the consumer infrastructure into managed services first.

5/ Stop selling the seat. Start selling the result. Full piece on when this transition makes sense, what changes, and why waiting is the bigger risk: emcap.com/thoughts/shoul…

1/ Two weeks ago I took a walk with the CEO of a SaaS company with hundreds of millions in ARR. He told me he's pivoting the entire business to a services model. Can't share who yet. Soon.

Deployment is what matters. Deployment is not solved.

Hear what we @DynaRobotics learnt from the bitter lesson in the past 10 months in production

@jasonlk You’re right at SaaStr’s or later stage. As a solo founder, build is still my preference… preserving runway matters, and agents let one person do what used to take a team. The buy/build line moves with company stage and team size, and it will towards buy more as products mature.

Maybe but I don’t think so We don’t have the time to make those workflows as strong and reliable and bulletproof. And there is only so much time. We just don’t have any more time to build any more core, complex agents ourselves. Almost always cheaper to buy than build, if you include soft costs. IF it’s actually available to buy.

I just pulled SaaStr’s Replit bill for last month. Our two AI VPs cost us $254 for the entire month. Combined. - 10K (our AI VP of Marketing): $94.51 - Qbee (our AI VP of Customer Success): $159.55 Two human VPs at the same level would run $500K-$800K a year, all-in. A few things before anyone takes shots at it: The $254 is real. But it’s only true for agents we built ourselves on Replit. Our third-party AI agents (Artisan, Qualified, Agentforce, Momentum) run $25K+/yr each. Apples to oranges. The $254 also doesn’t include the soft costs. We update 10K daily. Qbee a few times a week. Budget as much as 0.2 FTE of human attention per production agent. The “deploy and forget” pitch is wrong. Buy don’t Build / Vibe it yourself … if you can. If it exists and meets your needs. But even with daily improvements and maintenance, managing these two AI VPs is still less time than managing one human VP, much less two. No 1:1s. No comp conversations. No PIPs. No backfill recruiting. The maintenance IS the management. Every hour tuning the app directly ships output. A few more numbers from the bill: – Total Replit bill: $2,324/mo – Runs 6 production agents + 14 published apps – 1.9M+ requests served/mo – Whole stack costs less than one mid-tier SaaS tool We run SaaStr with 3 humans + 20+ agents. Revenue went from -19% YoY to +47% YoY in the same period. The full cost of running an agent-augmented business in 2026 is more like $50K-$200K/month, not $254. Still dramatically less than the human-only equivalent. But the headline is real: two AI VPs. $254. One month. That’s the new baseline. (And we’ll show you how to build your own AI VP Marketing + AI VP Customer Success at SaaStr AI Annual 2026, May 12-14 in SF Bay. Join us!!)

@levie Agree it’s a utility. The interesting design question is whether utilities benefit from relationship-style interfaces (memory, continuity, name) even when users intellectually know they’re tools.

In general, we should treat AI like a utility, not like a being. The more we confuse what AI is the more we will make ourselves go crazy with analogies that will never fully hold true.

I think Founder-CEOs do care, but most are 5 layers deep in their org and the data has to climb through everyone before it reaches them. At my last company (Flock, sold to Paychex), I'd ask eng for a dashboard and wait 2 weeks. Now I spin one up in hours with an agent. The CEOs who can navigate their own org and build their own business monitoring will eat the ones who wait.

@hrhraj I think the reality is no one cares Customer Success is dead, and some churn is inherent to all models They should care. So much cheaper to keep a customer than acquire a new one. But most don’t

We stealth-churned off Notion months ago. We didn't realize it. We didn't tell Notion. It's just ... our agents have no need for it. They're doing the work now. Stealth churn is the under-discussed agent risk. Usage drops to zero quietly. The renewal email never even goes out.

@andrew__reed From Barbarians at the Gate to kk-arrrrrrr..... the evolution is complete

what's the best pirate equity firm? kk-arrrrrrr

@naval All movement is not progress....

“What did you build this week?” is the new “what did you get done this week?”

@andrew__reed Or like this ... Senedd, Wales

Saved me personally about 15 mins of hold time with United for a wifi refund. The refund value was $8 / 800 miles... but my 15 mins - priceless. Also sourced the viral 'mystery dumpling' toy by calling 4 stores.. found when it's in stock.. saved me 32 mins, and now my daughter thinks I am a hero.

@hrhraj How much money do you save everyone?

Describe your product in exactly one sentence. No buzzwords, no fluff, just the core value. If I can’t understand your business in ten seconds, I’m not investing. Hit me & i'll be in your DMs