Vivek Jayaram

Overdue life update: I recently joined @sesame where I lead AI safety for the real-time conversational systems! Smart glasses + voice is the future. After trying Sesame’s upcoming glasses, I was blown away. It’s also the most realistic conversational AI I’ve seen. Real-time voice AI introduces entirely new safety problems and I'm glad to be focused on making our AI safe and aligned. We're hiring like crazy, so if you're interested in conversational voice systems or safety research then reach out!

Hearing that another prominent startup is about to get “Windsurfed” in the coming days. Leadership and research joining a lab, everyone else told to fuck off, despite tons of money in the bank. We need a new startup contract, where everyone is in it together. One of the reasons I joined sesame is that everyone is in it for the long haul.

@samuel_571 @sesame I can't give an exact date but we'll be launching much more widely soon beyond beta! A big focus of ours has been adding intelligence and skills to Maya and Miles, so that they can be your everyday conversation partners and thought partners.

@vivjay30 @sesame any upcoming updates on your voice models? was just checking and it's been a year already!

Overdue life update: I recently joined @sesame where I lead AI safety for the real-time conversational systems! Smart glasses + voice is the future. After trying Sesame’s upcoming glasses, I was blown away. It’s also the most realistic conversational AI I’ve seen. Real-time voice AI introduces entirely new safety problems and I'm glad to be focused on making our AI safe and aligned. We're hiring like crazy, so if you're interested in conversational voice systems or safety research then reach out!

@mark_k @OpenAI This literally happened to me after I had aced 4 technical interviews for a RS position.

Rumors are surfacing of potential headcount reductions at @OpenAI. Reports on Blind suggest a shift in hiring momentum following a recent OpenAI town hall, with some candidates noting a sudden silence from recruiters. While unconfirmed, it’s a notable development for a company that has been in a period of aggressive expansion.

Moondream moving from Seattle → SF is a bummer, but also not surprising. Seattle startups still feel like hard mode compared to SF, especially at the zero-to-one stage. Maybe CA’s asset tax finally shifts things? Or wishful thinking?

@rohindhar The wealth of several gulf states is being plowed into SF real-estate indirectly via AI investments and secondaries. It’s only going to get worse as AI companies start to IPO.

This living room in San Francisco just went into contract after almost three years

@Austen It’s actually more significant than that because additional income in California goes through both federal and state tax. Somebody making 250k in Washington takes home the same as 300k in California (~20% difference way more than the 10% state tax).

I wonder how many founders in California know that if you are making $250k/yr and move to Texas or Florida you pay $2500/mo less in taxes. Switching state of residence will save enough to cover rent.

Work led by @JingweiMa2 and collaboration with @kemelmi, Brian Curless, and Steve Seitz. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2506.13756 Webpage (Interactive Demo): ultra-zoom.github.io

🚀 New paper we just published at SIGGRAPH Asia! Introducing UltraZoom, capable of 25x super-resolution while preserving true high-resolution object details. This means no hallucinations of the underlying object texture. We accomplish this via a single additional guiding close-up image.

@ns123abc The issue isn’t whether the employees did well. It’s about normalizing this new type of acquisition where the leadership do well and the employees might not.

BREAKING: ~90% of Groq employees will join Nvidia and be paid cash for all vested shares; most shareholders will get per-share payouts tied to the $20B valuation Everyone gets paid. A lot

@RyanDanz A friend of mine lived in that building and saw three homicides from his window in one year. There’s a reason it’s so much cheaper to live in downtown Seattle than anywhere in NY, and it’s not the weather.

How much would this flat in Seattle be if it was in NYC? A billion? Because it’s 600k and I think we need to have a serious discussion at home …

@TomasReimers @graphite @cursor_ai Congrats!!

AI means that more code will be written... which necessarily means that more code will need to be reviewed. Excited to announce @graphite is joining @cursor_ai ! x.com/graphite/statu…

@gregmfoster @TomasReimers @MerrillLutsky Congrats!!

Graphite is joining Cursor! @TomasReimers, @MerrillLutsky, and I started Graphite in 2020. Back then it was the three of us, an apartment that doubled as an office, and a fold-out plastic table where I interviewed candidates between debugging sessions. Five years later, Graphite is a team of 75+ people, and we’re joining Cursor to build the future of software collaboration faster than we ever could alone. I co-founded Graphite for two reasons: good people and a love for dev tools. First: I wanted to work with wonderful people. Tomas was my CS partner in college and one of my closest friends. Merrill was years ahead of us at Harvard and had already taken the leap into startups. From day one, we wanted to build with people we genuinely admired, and that started with each other. Second: I’ve been obsessed with how software gets built since I was 15. It started with hacking together iOS apps as a teenager in Reno, then turned into devtools work at Airbnb, and eventually became Graphite. Software engineering itself is high leverage, but creating better tools for software engineers is exponentially impactful. Graphite began with a simple insight: the best ways to ship code were trapped inside private tools at the biggest companies. Stacked diffs, PR inboxes, merge queues, the whole “outer loop” of engineering. We wanted to make those workflows accessible to every serious software team, with the same taste and rigor you’d expect internally at the largest engineering orgs. Then AI hit, and the pace of change in devtools went vertical. Cursor is building the best code creation experience in the world. Graphite has been building the best system for reviewing, integrating, and shipping code. The inner loop and the outer loop. Separately, these tools inevitably collide. Together, they can become one coherent system, end to end, designed to feel great and move fast. I’ve never seen two puzzle pieces fit this cleanly. What I’m most proud of is our team. We’re a bunch of nerds who care an unreasonable amount about craft: speed, polish, reliability, and sweating the details that make engineers smile. Teammates like Xiulung and Nick, who joined just months after we started, helped set the bar early. And dozens more who poured years of heart and risk into Graphite. Watching this group build something that teams like Datadog, Shopify, Robinhood, Figma, and thousands of other orgs rely on every day has been one of the great privileges of my life. For our customers: Graphite isn’t going anywhere. We’re continuing to build stacking, the PR inbox, merge queue, and AI code review. Nothing is getting sunset. If anything, this gives us more leverage to invest and ship faster. Many of you already use both Cursor and Graphite, and you’ll see your tooling get even better. On a personal note: I’m thrilled to work shoulder to shoulder with the Cursor team! I’ve admired their culture for a long time. They’re kind, intense, and have a high-quality bar. Our offices are literally across the street from each other. This is going to be insanely fun.

Excited to present UltraZoom at SIGGRAPH Asia next Tuesday (Dec.16)! UltraZoom converts sparse phone captures of an object into a single gigapixel-resolution image that you can seamlessly explore. Threads below. Website: ultra-zoom.github.io Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2506.13756

Had an awesome time presenting CDIM at Neurips! Yes the conference has become massive, but that means even more people come by and engage with your work.

2/3 Project Page: grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/cdim/ Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2411.00359 Demo: huggingface.co/spaces/vivjay3… Neurips Poster: neurips.cc/virtual/2025/l… Joint work with @jwthickstun @kemelmi and Steve Seitz

1/3 Exact recovery of constraints means that inpainting doesn't change observed pixels, and colorized results project back to the exact grayscale input. This is important for reducing hallucinations in image generation, which you might get with Nano Banana or other methods.

Excited to share that I'll be at @NeurIPSConf presenting our paper: Linearly Constrained Diffusion Implicit Models! We use diffusion models to solve inverse problems like inpainting and colorization 10-50x faster than other methods and with exact satisfaction of constraints 🧵

@tydsh Meta seems truly lost.

Several of my team members + myself are impacted by this layoff today. Welcome to connect :)