Qasar Younis

.@AppliedInt Co-founder and CTO Peter Ludwig says "a billion machines will become autonomous or intelligent over the next ten years." "Cars, trucks, tractors, mining haulers, defense systems, warehouse robots, humanoids—the physical economy will be rebuilt around software that perceives, decides, and acts." "The prevailing assumption about how we get there goes something like this: models keep improving, world models mature, foundation models for robotics arrive, and autonomy falls out the other end. Intelligence is the whole game; scale the intelligence and the machines will follow." "The contrarian bet, then, isn't against intelligence. It's that the next order of magnitude in physical AI comes from making the engineering system as intelligent as the models it carries." Full piece on compounding systems and Applied Intuition's newest platform, Dana: a16z.news/p/the-next-ai-…

Applied Intuition's mission is intelligence on a billion machines in the next decade. Qasar (@qasar) and Peter on Dana, their new agentic platform for physical AI that will help us get there faster: "If you ask why don't we have intelligent robots and intelligent vehicles everywhere today, it really comes down to building this stuff is really hard, and that is the limiting factor. Dana really is the culmination of everything we've worked on over the last decade. It makes developing these systems so much easier than it has been in the past. If you wanted to build a delivery robot for college campuses or a little vacuum that cleans your house, it's a pretty daunting thing even for hobbyists and computer scientists. These complex workflows would require switching between 20 different tools in the past... Now with Dana, all of those complex workflows can be very seamlessly orchestrated from an agentic interface. The thing that we really wanna do is just lower the bar. So anybody, starting with engineers, but ultimately really anybody can develop robots."

🟡 NEW: Applied Intuition wants to turn robotics into child's play: “Imagine you have a teenage son who wants to create an autonomous lawnmower, or a room-cleaning robot. You would need a team of probably 5 to 8 engineers today,” said Qasar Younis, CEO and co-founder of Applied Intuition. “We want to push that down to virtually one person.” semafor.com/article/07/20/…

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.@pmarca on founders almost always being too early, not too late: "We almost never see a qualified founder fail because they're too late to market. It's almost always because they're too early to market." "The iPad was like this breakthrough product in 2009... well, there was this thing called the Newton twenty years earlier. It was the iPad twenty years earlier, and it was like virtually the same thing, and the world just wasn't ready yet." "I think that's the permanent curse of the entrepreneur." YC Startup School 2016, with @qasar

.@sama wasn't the first person to talk about a solo unicorn. It was the co-founder of Applied Intuition @qasar, who said that the first billion-dollar company built by a single person will happen in our lifetime. He was a partner at YC at the time and joined me for a fireside chat at the @InfoBipShift conference in Croatia in 2015. I thought it was a bit too ambitious, and hence the Tony Stark quip at the end.