Rishi Taparia
8.7K posts
@taps
Co-founder at @GarudaVC and host of the @brickxbrickpod. Fully leaned in to suburban dad life.
We’re excited to introduce the Brick by Brick podcast, where we learn how startups were built directly from the people who built them!
A mini-rant abut AI and longevity. They say "Artificial Superintelligence would take only a few years to cure cancer, solve longevity, and defeat death itself'. This is a common claim by pro-AI lobbyists, accelerationists, and naive tech-fetishists. But the claim makes no sense. The recent success of LLMs does NOT suggest that ASIs could easily cure diseases or solve longevity, for at least two reasons. 1) The data problem. Generative AI for art, music, and language succeeded mostly because AI companies could steal billions of examples of art, music, and language from the internet, to build their base models. They weren't just trained on academic papers _about_ art, music, and language. They were trained on real _examples_ of art, music, and language. There are no analogous biomedical data sets with billions of data points that would allow accurate modelling of every biochemical detail of human physiology, disease, and aging. ASIs can't just read academic papers about human biology to solve longevity. They'd need direct access to vast quantities of biomedical data that simply don't exist in any easy-to-access forms. And they'd need very detailed, reliable, validated data about a wide range of people across different ages, sexes, ethnicities, genotypes, and medical conditions. Moreover, medical privacy laws would make it extremely difficult and wildly unethical to collect such a vast data set from real humans about every molecular-level detail of their bodies. 2) The feedback problem. LLMs also work well because the AI companies could refine their output with additional feedback from human brains (through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, RLHF). But there is nothing analogous to that for modeling human bodies, biochemistry, and disease processes. There are no known methods of Reinforcement Learning from Physiological Feedback. And the physiological feedback would have to be long-term, over spans of years to decades, taking into account thousands of possible side-effects for any given intervention. There's no way to rush animal and human clinical trials -- however clever ASI might become at 'drug discovery'. More generally, there would be no fast feedback loops from users about model performance. GenAI and LLMs succeeded partly because developers within companies, and customers outside companies, could give very fast feedback about how well the models were functioning. They could just look at the output (images, songs, text), and then tweak, refine, test, and interpret models very quickly, based on how good they were at generating art, music, and language. In biomedical research, there would be no fast feedback loops from human bodies about how well ASI-suggested interventions are actually affecting human bodies, over the long term, across different lifestyles, including all the tradeoffs and side-effects. It's interesting that most of the people arguing that 'ASI would cure all diseases and aging' are young tech bros who know a lot about computers, but almost nothing about organic chemistry, human genomics, biomedical research, drug discovery, clinical trials, the evolutionary biology of senescence, evolutionary medicine, medical ethics, or the decades of frustrations and failures in longevity research. They think that 'fixing the human body' would be as simple as debugging a few thousand lines of code. Look, I'm all for curing diseases and promoting longevity. If we took the hundreds of billions of dollars per year that are currently spent on trying to build ASI, and we devoted that money instead to longevity research, that would increase the amount of funding in the longevity space by at least 100-fold. And we'd probably solve longevity much faster by targeting it directly than by trying to summon ASI as a magical cure-all. ASIs has some potential benefits (and many grievous risks and downsides). But it's totally irresponsible of pro-AI lobbyists to argue that ASIs could magically & quickly cure all human diseases, or solve longevity, or end death. And it's totally irresponsible of them to claim that anyone opposed to ASI development is 'pro-death'.
Introducing our biggest upgrade to @googlemaps since the original launch, featuring Ask Gemini (with personalization), Immersive Navigation, and much more!! 🗺️
@ItzSuds @Bfaviero Really good LPs know the difference and care, as do really good GPs. Funny enough they’re also the ones who don’t run away when the heat dies down
we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company. #### today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone. first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay. we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly. i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures. a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers. we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold. to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward. to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow. jack
Today, @trymirai is announcing a $10M seed round led by @uncorkcap , with participation from an incredible group of angels including @dps, @FrancoisChauba1, @marcinzukowski, @matiii , @gokulr, @scooterbraun @krishnanvijay , @benparr, @MattPRD, @adityajami and others. This funding accelerates our mission to make on-device AI inference accessible to every developer, turning what requires specialized systems teams today into something that integrates in a few lines of code. Every modern phone and laptop has AI silicon, but most developers can't access it. @trymirai removes that barrier. With this round, we're focusing on working with model makers to bring their models on-device across text, voice, and vision. As cloud inference costs become unsustainable for real-time workloads, on-device execution offers better economics, eliminating per-inference costs while improving latency. Models running on-device are becoming a new capability layer where developers can build system-level experiences independently. Inference becomes the programmable layer. We're building the infrastructure layer that enables that future. There's so much more to build, and we're just getting started. Excited to have Uncork Capital and this incredible group of investors and angels joining us on the journey. More on it at our blog: trymirai.com/blog/mirai-rai…
We raised $10M led by @uncorkcap to make on-device AI inference accessible to developers building on Apple Silicon. We're using the funds to expand model coverage across text, voice, and vision, working directly with model makers to bring their models on-device where latency, cost, and privacy favor local execution over cloud. Our proprietary inference engine is up to 37% faster than Apple's MLX with up to 59% faster prefill. Developers integrate it in a few lines of code without needing specialized systems expertise. The runtime supports hybrid deployments, routing inference between device and cloud seamlessly. Models running on-device are becoming a new capability layer where developers can build system-level experiences independently. We're building the infrastructure that enables that future. The round includes participation from an incredible group of angels including @dps @FrancoisChauba1 @marcinzukowski @matiii @gokulr @scooterbraun @krishnanvijay @benparr @MattPRD @adityajami and others. More on it at our blog trymirai.com/blog/mirai-rai…
EXCLUSIVE: Monark Markets, a startup that helps brokerage firms offer alt assets like pre-IPO shares in OpenAI and SpaceX, has raised $8.1M to scale. I spoke to its Gen Z CEO about why he wants more retail investors -- including his young peers -- to be able to invest in alts.
