Elco Ian

YC on how to build a company with AI from the ground up:

@ChoyRb Awesome community so far!

If you're spending $10K–$100K+/mo on Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn or Google, this is for you. I just started a private WhatsApp group called Paid Ads Hackers. 200 seats, 56 left. It's split into focused rooms (B2B, E-commerce, Apps, Agencies & Consultants). You join the ones that match your business. Who's in: → Startup CEOs/CMOs running $10K–$200K+/mo on Meta, TikTok, Google, YT → Agency owners managing hundreds of clients and millions/mo in spend → Adtech founders building the next generation of ad tools One example from this week: a member running service-based ads on Meta shared they were stuck in CPM purgatory, and within hours had 6 people diagnosing their audience setup and offering specific fixes. Someone else shared how they automated creative briefing with Claude and cut production time in half. That's the kind of thing that surfaces daily. The rules are short: I manually approve everyone, we're highly selective. English-only. No self-promotion (instant ban). What's said in the room stays in the room. To join: Comment HACKER and let me know (1) your average monthly spend, (2) what you're working on👇 Must be following so I can DM you. Repost if you know someone who should be in this room! I'll DM invites within 48h.

@mert this is great 🫠

i havent laughed at a video this hard for years lmao

Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability. The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code. But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along. So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions. TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.

@jack V cool

Dario has a spine who would have thought?

@WhitePapersPol @grok factcheck

~433,000 Moroccans live in the Netherlands and compose 3% of the population. Each Moroccan in the Netherlands costs the Dutch taxpayer €550,000 over a lifetime. Moroccans have an unemployment rate 3x-5x higher than the Dutch. 30-55% of Moroccans use welfare, compared to 7-12% for the Dutch. 40-60% of 2nd gen Moroccan males have been the subject of a criminal investigation. 5% are arrested each year compared to just 1% of Dutch men. The Netherlands needs remigration.

OpenClaw report. 50 real-world use cases. Generated by @blevlabs' cognitive AI architecture by looking at my AI lists here on X. All via the @xAI API. In other words, it read all of X today and wrote this report. I bet the algorithm didn't show you most of these. docs.google.com/document/d/1pc…

v good ft.com/content/45511a… Europeans need to stop the hypocrisy to thrive

@AGDugin the reason is a techoligarchy needs a purge of the elites to get a foothold and to establish

Why Epstein files were hidden is obvious. Why they are now revealed much less obvious.

I am calling for Congress to haul in every person who emailed Epstein about visiting his island. I will not rest until those who committed these crimes are held accountable.

Powell is a G

President Ursula von der Leyen officially announced the EU–INC today at Davos! A single legal entity for all European founders to grow massive companies in Europe. Online incorporation in 48 hours. No more bureaucratic mess across European borders. All of you made this happen!

@SildidInfo @mjnblack where’s the link to the post? can’t find it

@mjnblack Ycombinators Paul Graham thinks Sacks is the worst of them all

the faux outrage over NYT/David Sacks is so funny bc a) Sacks clearly put out a call for messages of support to half the Valley. would love to see that plea. b) it's a total open secret among even the most pro-AI conservatives that Sacks is doing some "creative accounting" in his SGE role. (this came up in multiple convos when I was in DC recently.) they aren't mad about it but they are aware. anyway, enjoy the piece nytimes.com/2025/11/30/tec…

@paulg @jackmcclelland interesting

@jackmcclelland Bay area founders actually are more ambitious, just as students at the University of Paris were in 1300 or painters in Florence in 1500 or mathematicians at Gottingen in 1880. They encourage one another.

got asked by an investor yesterday: why do bay area founders seem more ambitious than east coast founders? i suggested: perhaps there's some truth to it, or maybe sf founders are better at "playing the game" and saying the right things to say to vc’s…

@RepThomasMassie congrats

I just spoke on the floor before the imminent House vote on the release of the Epstein files. We must deliver justice for the victims.

@0xInari_ @Polymarket so true 😭

@Polymarket At this point the Epstein Files have more hype than any Netflix documentary

BREAKING: Trump says he will sign the bill to release the Epstein Files if Congress passes it.

An interesting trend we're noticing at Stripe: US startups are pulling ahead of their peers elsewhere. These charts show averaged revenue growth for software startups in each location. US startups typically grow somewhat faster than those elsewhere. However, since mid-2023, US companies have accelerated a lot. Interestingly, this is not just because of AI startups: if we strip those out, there's still a big divergence. Our leading hypothesis is that US startups (even those that aren't AI companies as such) are adopting new technologies (AI, stablecoins, etc.) faster than companies elsewhere. (This pattern of faster adoption among US companies was also seen with the internet itself.) Whatever the cause, the pattern is striking. [Methodological note: this pattern appears to hold beyond Europe as well.]