Decibel

3 Days. 100% Founder Vibes. A New Tiger Cage. Are You Ready??? 🔥 Excited to announce our inaugural “Founder Festival” at the Children’s Creativity Museum next to Moscone during the RSA Conference! Our doors are open to founders and early adopters seeking fresh ideas in our “Founder Oasis” 🌴 We'll have fireside chats, live podcasts, product demos, and our epic “Tiger Cage” competition 🎉 Guests of honor: * Alex Pall (@alexpall, @TheChainsmokers, Mantis VC) * Bipul Sinha (@bipulsinha, Founder of @RubrikInc) * Francis deSouza (@fldesouza, COO, @GoogleCloud) Pat Opet (@patopetciso, CISO, @JPMorgan) Shoutout to our partners partners: @AshishRajan (Cloud Security Podcast), @calebsima (WhiteRabbit), @clintgibler (tl;dr sec), @DanielMiessler (Unsupervised Learning), @riskybusiness (Risky Business) 🙏 Full lineup & schedule link below!

Introducing Duet - the best way to run Claude Code and Codex in the cloud - Everyone gets own server - Slack-like interface - Add coworkers for multiplayer prompting - Switch between Claude Code & Codex mid session - Built in image / video / audio gen skills - Schedule w/ cron

🎉teamed up with @AISupremacyNews on a massive AI year-in-review: "2025: The Year the Old Rules Broke" 🌊 "just scale it" — DeepSeek said no "distribution wins" — Anthropic beat everyone "america leads open source" — china shipped 9 models, meta shipped 2 🇨🇳 link 👇

Big week: ⚡ Google ships Gemini 3 Flash + Deep Research API + MCP + Disco 🎨 OpenAI Image 1.5 claims #1 on LM Arena 🧑‍💻 GPT-5.2-Codex drops No one's sleeping through the holidays 🫠👇

Thrilled to announce @DecibelVC is backing @unconvAI and the legendary @NaveenGRao 🏎️ I first met Naveen in 2022 when I had the privilege to back MosaicML – a pioneer in open source AI that first taught the industry to think about proprietary data, specialized models, and training efficiency. Before that, he founded Nervana to rethink AI training from first principles. Now he's back with his boldest bet yet: AI training is still shackled to the GPU, an architecture designed for graphics, not intelligence. Unconventional is building silicon that runs neural networks on the physics directly – targeting biology-scale efficiency. The human brain runs on 20 watts. We're going to need something closer to that if AI is going to be everywhere. I cannot imagine a better founder to tackle the most important AI infra problem of our generation. But more than anything, Naveen is just someone I genuinely love working with. We've closed more Vegas bars at infra conferences than I can count, gotten way too deep on cars and racing, debated endless open source hot takes, and he's gone out of his way to champion rising researchers, new voices in the industry, and even my own growth as a VC. One-of-one founder. Honored to join this Unconventional journey.

🚨 This week in AI: OpenAI in crisis mode, Claude reclaims coding crown, Anthropic eyeing $300B IPO, and reasoning models now account for 50% of all inference. A year ago that last stat was near-zero 🤯 Read more 👇

Loved this conversation, @GayatriSab! ✨Always a treat to sit down with a friend and talk about where AI is headed and what founders should be thinking about as the landscape shifts.

Bangers after bangers this week! @sundarpichai must be having the time of his life. - Gemini 3: 1501 Elo (highest public rating ever) - Nano Banana Pro: solved text rendering - Antigravity IDE: coming for Cursor - Pricing: +60% over Gemini 2.5 (done racing to the bottom!) Google's legitimately back. The AI game of thrones continues 👑 Plus: @grok 4.1 held #1 for ONE glorious day before Gemini knocked it back down (lol), @OpenAI shipped GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, @AnthropicAI did a 3-way partnering with @Microsoft + @nvidia & raised $15B Full breakdown in this week's blog, link 👇

Turns out I love robot dogs too 😂

0/ Reporting live(ish) from the @aiDotEngineer summit 🫡 - here are the most interesting things I heard this morning across @AnthropicAI, @Replit, @zapier, and @Sourcegraph / @AmpCode. 🧵↓

Let’s go @aiDotEngineer Day 1! So fun to have a mini @DecibelVC portco meetup with @joshdevonai & @mjamei + after-party with the @sondera_ai team 🔥 🍺

Sam Altman: "I don't care if we burn $500M, $5B, or $50B" SoftBank: sells entire NVIDIA position to fund OpenAI Markets this week: "wait what are the actual economics here" 📉 🧵↓ 1/ The AI infrastructure party started when everyone saw the bill Leaked: OpenAI spent $5B on Azure inference in H1 2025 Their revenue? Less than half that

Thank you to our friends in Singapore for hosting us this week at the Cyber SG Innovation Summit! AI is a powerful tool in the cybersecurity sector and is leveraged by both hackers and defenders in rapidly evolving ways Though we can’t slow down the adoption of AI, but we can collaborate to ensure that the best practices for defending ourselves against novel attacks are shared around the world We are grateful to Singapore’s Cyber Security Agency for the invitation to participate in this important event. Startups and security researchers have always played a critical role in modernizing our defenses, and we look forward to working together with your community in the years to come!

We hosted our first event in Miami this week with our founders and early adopter CISOs in the security community. The theme for the event was “changing the game” in the era of AI… CEOs wants LLMs to be deployed at a fast and furious pace. Every cyber team must evolve their playbooks to keep up with a technology that can’t be slowed down I am grateful to our special guest Derek Jeter who shared his views on how elite baseball teams play great defense on the field - his advice that transcended sports and security: **Analyze your opponent closely to learn their methods of attack (where do they usually hit the ball?) ** Position yourself in the right place to increase your odds of success (even a few steps can determine whether you catch the ball) ** Trust your human intuition to make faster decisions on the field (don't rely only on data - trust your gut when it counts) Thank you to all who joined our event including Tuna Moore (US Cyber Command), @daveaitel (OpenAI), @mattjay (Vulnerable U), and our friends at Daversa and Guidepoint- look forward to our next event together!

The perfect hat doesn’t exi-

Just like chocolate and peanut butter, runZero and BloodHound are an amazing combination. Today we are introducing runZeroHound - an open source toolkit for bringing runZero Asset Inventory data into BloodHound attack graphs: runzero.com/blog/introduci…

The @dwarkeshpodcast + @karpathy interview had a genuinely fascinating thread that everyone missed: LLMs need to learn how to dream. 💭 Wrote about that + this week's moves toward smaller, specialized models ✨ full blog link👇

Golden jacket next for the best @tanyadargel #HallOfFame

🧠 Claude codes for 30 hours straight. 🛒 ChatGPT takes payments. 🎥 And Sora can now film you into the metaverse. The line between model, app, and channel is gone. In this week's AI Pioneers at Work: - Anthropic’s long-horizon agent and context engineering - OpenAI’s Sora 2 (physics meets TikTok) - DeepMind’s Veo 3 and chain-of-frames reasoning - ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout and agentic commerce - Thinking Machines’ first launch Full piece in comments ↓

“Game Respects Game” - We honored our partner Tanya Dargel (@tanyadargel) with Decibel’s first “Lifetime Achievement Award” this past week at our Annual Meeting. It was a very special ceremony, and presenting the award was NFL Hall-of-Famer Steve Young (@SteveYoungQB) who has known Tanya for nearly two decades. Steve and his wife recognized Tanya’s talents early on - they saw her unique skills and recruited her into their family business years ago, which ultimately paved her path to Decibel. It was fun to look back and share stories of her creativity, warmth, and relentless energy that finds its way into everything she does. Startups are built by people who do extraordinary work, and Tanya sets an example at Decibel that inspires us all. She puts founders first. She never gives up. She makes magic happen. She is always there when you need her most. Tanya, CONGRATS and thank you for what you do for Decibel. This moment was very special and I hope we can share many more in the years to come! (@dannguyenhuu @FanaHOVA @jesslionness @staceywueste @LaurenIpsen @staceyernestvc)