Purva Tendulkar

My name got typo’d on a form, so now "Hi Purvaar" is my new spam detector, plus bonus info because I know exactly where they sourced their data from LOL

Calling the OpenAI deal "awesome" for founders who want to "tokenmax" feels like a serious misrepresentation. YC companies routinely get large credits (AWS, Azure, GCP) without taking ownership. $2M in tokens is not $2M in cash. It's restricted vendor credit that likely costs OpenAI far less, while giving them customers, lock-in, and potential Series A upside without taking normal investor risk. Today, Claude, GPT, Gemini, and open-source models are all competing aggressively. A founder's job is not to be loyal to a model provider. It is to preserve the company's ability to use the best tools available for its product and users. YC lauding this is exactly why founders should be careful treating investor advice as neutral truth. Everyone has agendas. Think for yourself.

If AI will soon match any human cognitive skill, then enhancing your “AI skills” (or whatever similar meme) will not be a moat because using AI is itself a cognitive skill. So where’s your edge? The only thing you really have over AGI is your novelty: AGI can never be you. You have 100 trillion connections in your brain. That’s a lot. No AI will ever precisely replicate those parameters. The training data isn’t there for AI to vacuum up because you are the only entity ever to live your life, and the only one who ever will. The question is whether the sum and total of all that experience yields a novel perspective, where the value is in its uniqueness. Even today those who make a living off their perceived novelty tend to be the most successful. We anticipate a novel (yet often internally consistent) take from a public figure or leader or artist or intellectual we like or respect. Uniqueness and novelty will retain their edge in a post-AGI world because there are virtually infinite possible 100-trillion parameter minds, and even the largest model theoretically conceivable can never capture that whole distribution. At the same time, the once-sterling premium of those skills that no longer make us unique is sinking. Expertise that once distinguished people, like how to code, is losing its edge. But the tricky part is that new skills, like “using AI effectively” are equally vulnerable. All of it just takes intelligence, and that’s the thing that’s being automated. Seeking some new “safe” skillset is a looming adventure in frustrating futility. But what’s still left is your unique perspective. Novelty. No one and nothing can see the world through your eyes. But you have to nurture that uniqueness. Post-AGI, being like everyone else would be the real danger.

the most important AI startups won't be the ones that replace humans... They'll be the ones that help humans figure out what to do next what will humans do next? I think we get a clue when it comes to the discussion around "taste" on one end of the spectrum and verifiability on the other AI is great at verifiable problems. Did the code compile, is the math right. Where it struggles: "was that email rude?" "does this tweet hit hard?" the gap between objectively verifiable and subjectively verifiable is where the most interesting companies will be built, because it's where humans can team up productively with AI

@deviparikh I've found that intention often lives in the thought itself. When you care deeply about something, your expression carries meaning — and the right audience tends to recognize it.

Claude says 2 weeks. I say “Yeah ok, let’s do it in 2 hours” 😂

As a developer, I switch between two extreme personas: the Ideal User 🦸 and the Chaos Gremlin 🦹 “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” versus “What if I smash this button 37 times in a row?”

Everyone says they want general-purpose robots. We actually mean it — and we’ll make it weird, creative, and fun along the way 😎 Recruiting PhD students to work on Computer Vision and Robotics @umdcs for Fall 2026 in the beautiful city of Washington DC!

Your honor, I rest my case 💅 “Big labs have the advantage!” “Small teams can’t compete!” Filling out a form shouldn’t be this hard! 7 minutes later Gemini’s still “thinking and trying.” Vy’s already finished, stretched, and moved on with its life. 🎤🫳 Thanks to @browserbase for getting Gemini integrated. No AI agents were harmed in preparation of this video (just my patience watching 7 minutes of struggle).

TIL the whole "like this." vs "like this". thing is actually a US vs UK difference, not just AI writing tools being weird 😅 #GrammarWars

Talking to friends as user-study “participants” is so fun -- you get to see everyone’s hidden talk show guest energy come out🎙️😂

Ever have a thought, check Reddit, and: (A) the crowd agrees—so you feel validated and move on (B) you're in the minority—and now you're either annoyed... or rethinking everything? Funny how total strangers on the internet can sway how you feel (or what you think) 🧠

@newokbro It had all the info: original price, asking price, product links, and pictures.

@PurvaTendulkar How did it help buyers?

I'm moving cities, so I made a furniture sale spreadsheet. It started as a way to stay organized, but ended up being super handy for sharing with buyers. A stranger on Marketplace said they dug it, which ended up being the highlight of my week 😂

LLMs treat tokens like currency. What if the social internet did too? Fewer words, higher value. Would we become better communicators—or just quieter? 💭

@ImadTaieb @trywindow Looks cool, signed up for beta!

@PurvaTendulkar Check @trywindow when switching models, the portable AI memory. It allows you to use the same memory across models

Something I've noticed: Claude >> ChatGPT for coding. But for writing (ideation, creative drafts, emails), GPT-4x >> GPT-5 > Claude. Anyone else feel this way? Or have I just developed a better theory of GPT's mind for writing?

@OpenAI, request to bring back all legacy models (ChatGPT-4.x) 🙏

Claude’s writing gives big “naive Indian undergrad writing their first Medium post” energy—basically me at 19 🫣

Test-Time Training (TTT) is now on Video! And not just a 5-second video. We can generate a full 1-min video! TTT module is an RNN module that provides an explicit and efficient memory mechanism. It models the hidden state of an RNN with a machine learning model, which is updated via gradient descent. Combined with a Diffusion Transformer, we are able to generate a 1-min Tom and Jerry cartoon. Enjoy our video with input script (not seen before): Jerry happily eats cheese in a tidy kitchen until Tom playfully takes it away, teasing him. Annoyed, Jerry packs his belongings and leaves home, dragging a small suitcase behind him. Later, Tom notices Jerry's absence, feels sad, and follows Jerry's tiny footprints all the way to San Francisco. Jerry sits disheartened in an alleyway, where Tom finds him, gently offering cheese as an apology. Jerry forgives Tom, accepts the cheese, and the two return home together, their friendship restored.