PPE

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I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED. I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires. My takeaways: 1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices. 2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha. 3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda) 4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general. 5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million 6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works. 7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead. 8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one. 9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders. 10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time. 11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now. 12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly. 13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS. 14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here.... 15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all. 16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol. 17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet. It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED. But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building. We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real. What an incredible time to be building.

Bro wTF $SPCE still going lmao

This is also the case in East Asia, where women’s higher education enrollment rates have surpassed those of men. Because women generally expect their husbands to have a higher level of education and income than themselves, many women choose to remain single. This is bound to further intensify the decline in fertility and the aging crisis.

A kid from Singapore who grew up training to be a concert pianist became one of the most important AI researchers alive, quit Google to start a frontier AI lab with 20 people and $60 million, built a model that competed with GPT-4 in a year, then walked away from the unicorn he created and went back to Google to lead the team that just won the International Math Olympiad with an AI. His name is Yi Tay. Almost nobody outside the AI research world knows it. Here is the story. Yi grew up in Singapore. He earned a classical piano performance diploma from Trinity College London in 2012 and almost became a professional musician. He went into computer science instead, did his PhD at Nanyang Technological University, and joined Google Brain as a research scientist. There were almost no Singaporean researchers in frontier AI at the time. He used to say he was on an uncharted path. At Google he became the co-lead of PaLM-2, the brain behind Google's entire AI stack. He invented UL2, a pretraining method now used across the industry. He invented Differentiable Search Indexes. His work shipped inside Google Assistant, YouTube, and Search. When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, Yi made a decision that shocked the research community. He left Google. In 2023 he co-founded Reka with researchers from DeepMind and Meta. The headquarters was in San Francisco, but the team was scattered across Asia, Europe, and the US. They had no big-tech backing. They had 20 people total. They had $60 million in funding. For context, OpenAI had around 600 people working on GPT-4. Google Gemini had 950 co-authors on the technical report. Reka had fewer than 5 people on pretraining. Yi lived nocturnally for 639 days. Five cups of coffee a day. Takeout twice. He gained 15 kilograms. He had a newborn baby. He worked across time zones his entire team was spread across. He built infrastructure from scratch in places Google had taken for granted. In May 2024 Reka Core debuted at number 7 on the LMSYS leaderboard. The only GPT-4 class model on the planet that was not trained by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or Meta. A 20-person company with 5 people on pretraining had just shipped a frontier model. Alibaba Cloud, NVIDIA, and Oracle became partners. The company hit a $1.3 billion valuation. Then in November 2024 Yi did something nobody expected. He walked away. He posted a quiet note on his blog titled "Returning to Google DeepMind." After 639 days of building one of the most respected frontier labs outside the big four, he went back to the company he had left. He wrote that he had learned more than he ever thought possible. He did not explain much else. Google made an extraordinary bet on him. They let him build something nobody else in the industry has, a DeepMind lab in Singapore. Yi runs it with Quoc Le. The team focuses on reasoning, reinforcement learning, and post-training for Gemini. It started with a dozen researchers. It now has over 300. Last summer, Yi's team led the effort that won the International Math Olympiad gold medal with Gemini Deep Think. The model solved IMO problems in a live competition, the kind that fewer than a hundred humans on Earth can solve under time pressure. His team also drove the work behind Gemini's ICPC 2025 gold medal. Yi still lives in Singapore. He still plays piano when he has time. He calls himself a global citizen who does not identify with any local AI scene. He has been at Google for nearly 14 years if you count the Reka detour. He says the Singapore lab is just getting started. A pianist from Singapore co-led the model that powered Google AI, left to build a frontier lab with 20 people and beat models trained by armies, walked back into Google, and is now running the team that just taught a machine to win Math Olympiad gold. The most influential AI researcher you have never heard of is sitting in a Singapore office right now, training the next generation of models that think.

i just can't unsee this now ..

It’s not like they got time to go travel for vacation anyway 🤣

lol real. But they only do it because they care 🤣

Tech was one of the last paths into the upper middle class without family money, credential laundering, or nepotism. Now those jobs are disappearing too. That is why the layoff story matters beyond tech.

"I think harder, work harder, have greater courage, and am more active than others." "Before starting any project, I spend an enormous amount of time and effort thinking, analyzing, and planning every detail. When it is time to implement these plans, it may look like I am working off the cuff, or even recklessly, but if I hadn't first sat down and planned everything out, the Hyundai Group of today could never have existed." — Chung Ju-yung

As someone who builds institutional quant systems, this Anthropic lecture on Claude for Finance is the closest thing to an HFT research desk I've ever seen released for free. Bookmark & watch today. It's the most valuable 1 hour in quant AI right now. Then read article below.

An ex-Jane Street trader revealed, How Sam Bankman-Fried behaved on day one of his internship. Four years before FTX. Why Jane Street makes millions of tiny trades instead of one big one. What they did in 60 seconds when their model broke in 2008. Why the offer isn't about math. Almost nobody has seen this interview. Bookmark it tonight. Then read the article below.

been almost a year since i made this tweet and honestly not much has changed here's the state of ai in today's enterprise world: - genai POCs are still failing at scale & in large corps - MCP turned out to be pretty fucking useless - multiagents have been disappointing. enterprise workflows mostly reward deterministic orchestration, not autonomous stategraphs - hallucination still remains a core unsolved issue even with the SOTA models - so does memory. maintaining state over long/cross conversations continues to be a challenge - larger context windows & more parameters haven't really achieved much compared to the last generation - tokens are costing more, not less, as models, architectures, and harnesses have progressed - mid-size CEOs are realizing that replacing engineers with agents isn't the best way forward (agents are costing more than humans) - non-tech megacorp CEOs still don't know what to do exactly & are implementing stupid KPIs such as measuring copilot usage to push AI adoption - consultants who are not rebranding themselves as "forward deployed engineers" are having a really hard time - organic ai adoption is bottom-up and not top-down across corps - using tools like coderabbit has become imperative in fighting the thousands of lines of AI slop even senior engineers are committing every day - nobody seems to be writing code anymore - still doesn't mean code is solved. LLMs are duds on large codebases

The FOMO is real. I feel anxious that I don’t have agents running when I’m asleep 🤣 Such a waste of sleeping time not to have something running lol

I don’t think we talk enough about the devastating impact ai has had on people whose real name is Claude 🤣

this isn't much of a prediction but i think you'll see the "AI trade" blow up by end of Q4 of this year majority of fortune 500 CEOs probably only have two quarters max to generate clear ROI from LLM usage they will fail token budgets will be cut its over

This is the critical difference between Singapore versus SEA chinese diaspora. Talk to the chinese diaspora in Malaysia and you'll find that most of them are very fond of China and even think China will save them if shit hits the fan. What makes you think that you, an offspring of chinese ancestors that escaped from the CCP and generations of de-programming, will be seen equally as a citizen of China? Stop being naive and see things only with a racial lens. Fend for yourself, don't expect to be saved. No country owes you anything.

My Claude in Christ

This is Anton Kreil. A kid from Liverpool, raised by a single mom with no money, who walked into Goldman Sachs at 20 and walked out of Wall Street at 28 with the kind of resume nobody believes is real. His prop book at Goldman grew from $25M to over $400M in four years. Lehman headhunted him in 2004. JP Morgan paid him a fortune to run their global pharma, biotech, and chemicals trading franchises in 2006. He retired in May 2007, months before the entire system blew up. The 16 minutes below is the closest thing I've seen to an actual trader explaining how he thinks. No fluff, no charts, just the framework that made three of the biggest banks on Wall Street fight to hire him.

How did they run out of money for legal bills? Also couldn’t they just distribute stock?

From my personal experience, AI has made it 10x more fun to work in finance and look at potential investment opportunities All of the grunt work that used to take up hours of time is now being automated. Instead of having to aggregate data from various sources, I am having Claude or ChatGPT complete these tasks and do research overnight By the time I wake up, I essentially have work ready to be reviewed and then I send the agent back on the hunt for new information and analysis It is literally like having a bunch of qualified interns and analysts under you doing the job, while you get to focus on the big picture and critical thinking, which are the more fun parts of the role anyway My excitement and capacity to do more work have literally 10xed because of agentic AI. Truly amazing.