Benjamin F Spector
152 posts
@bfspector
stanford cs phd student. i make ml go brr.
Our teams have been building with a 2.5x-faster version of Claude Opus 4.6. We’re now making it available as an early experiment via Claude Code and our API.
Announcing Flapping Airplanes! We’ve raised $180M from GV, Sequoia, and Index to assemble a new guard in AI: one that imagines a world where models can think at human level without ingesting half the internet.
A conventional narrative you might come across is that AI is too far along for a new, research-focused startup to outcompete and outexecute the incumbents of AI. This is exactly the sentiment I listened to often when OpenAI started ("how could the few of you possibly compete with Google?") and 1) it was very wrong, and then 2) it was very wrong again with a whole another round of startups who are now challenging OpenAI in turn, and imo it still continues to be wrong today. Scaling and locally improving what works will continue to create incredible advances, but with so much progress unlocked so quickly, with so much dust thrown up in the air in the process, and with still a large gap between frontier LLMs and the example proof of the magic of a mind running on 20 watts, the probability of research breakthroughs that yield closer to 10X improvements (instead of 10%) imo still feels very high - plenty high to continue to bet on and look for. The tricky part ofc is creating the conditions where such breakthroughs may be discovered. I think such an environment comes together rarely, but @bfspector & @amspector100 are brilliant, with (rare) full-stack understanding of LLMs top (math/algorithms) to bottom (megakernels/related), they have a great eye for talent and I think will be able to build something very special. Congrats on the launch and I look forward to what you come up with!
The best part of my job is the privilege to partner with extraordinary founders. It’s especially rewarding when those founders are people you’ve long admired and respected. I’ve known @amspector100 since our college days, and I’ve gotten to know his brother, @bfspector, through the Prod community, where Ben helped shape a generation of founders and young talent. So when Asher mentioned to me on a walk that he and Ben were thinking about starting something together, I could barely contain my excitement. It felt like a moment that had been building for an eternity. Today, that conviction has taken shape as Flapping Airplanes, a new foundational AI research lab led by Ben, Asher, and @aidanmantine, exploring radically more data-efficient approaches to learning. We’re thrilled to co-lead this investment alongside @GVteam and @sequoia, and to partner with my dear friends Ben, Asher, Aidan and the rest of their all-star team.
Today, I'm excited to announce our investment in Flapping Airplanes, and our partnership with @bfspector best known for being a founder of Prod, and @amspector100, a former debate champion and Stanford statistics PhD.
Announcing Flapping Airplanes! We’ve raised $180M from GV, Sequoia, and Index to assemble a new guard in AI: one that imagines a world where models can think at human level without ingesting half the internet.
Announcing Flapping Airplanes! We’ve raised $180M from GV, Sequoia, and Index to assemble a new guard in AI: one that imagines a world where models can think at human level without ingesting half the internet.
Day 12/365 of GPU Programming Studied GPU hierarchy in terms of GPCs, TPCs, SMs, etc on various Nvidia architectures Also pretty interesting to see what's on the hardware level vs pure software abstractions
🔮 see the future 🔮 2026 prediction episode: Jensen Huang, @jainarvind, @winstonweinberg, @ScottWu46, @raizamrtn, @zackmziegler, @levie, @MishaLaskin, @polynoamial, @joshim5, @bryan_johnson, @_sholtodouglas, @bfspector @amspector100, @dylan522p (and your hosts Sarah and Elad)
Introducing Ricursive Intelligence, a frontier AI lab enabling a recursive self-improvement loop between AI and the chips that fuel it. Learn more at ricursive.com
Happy 🦃 Thanksgiving weekend! 🍂 This year, we cooked up a new recipe for juicy fact-storing MLPs. Instead of picking apart trained models, we asked: Can we construct fact-storing MLPs from scratch? 🤔 Spoiler: we can & we figured out how to slot these hand-crafted MLPs into Transformer blocks as modular fact stores! 🧩 New work with @garctrob @ronnygjunkins @jerrywliu @dylan_zinsley @EyubogluSabri Atri Rudra @HazyResearch! 🧵👇
