Thijs
1.3K posts

Thijs
@cdngdev
20yo / co-director @hackwithtrees cs @stanford / ex: @arena @discord @a16z





We sat down with @sama for a fireside chat at TreeHacks 2026. We chatted about his time at Stanford, the early days of OpenAI, and the future! 0:00 Steam tunneling and freshman year at Stanford 2:03 Founding Loopt in soph year 4:16 YC changes everything 6:16 Dropping out of Stanford 8:16 How to raise 10:38 How OpenAI was born 15:18 How he met OpenAI co-founders 17:03 OpenAI's first day in @gdb's apartment 19:01 When moment when OpenAI started to work 20:33 Why GPT-2 was the turning point 22:07 AGI will be here in >2 years. 25:32 What should people build now? 29:57 How AI will impact politics, religion, and society 34:24 How do you compete with OpenAI? 36:40 Is OpenAI *really* burning cash dangerously fast? 37:46 Sam, are you happy? 40:23 What AI subfield today feels like OpenAI in 2016? 42:26 Custom silicon & hardware



We went to America's top hackathon (@hackwithtrees) to see if @dagsen could predict the grand prize winner before the judges made up their minds. Was he successful? Find out in our latest video! 00:00 Introducing Treehacks 00:38 AI-powered chemistry 01:06 Remote surgery hardware 01:41 A prediction market for the hackathon 02:30 Dagsen’s strategy 03:10 Rescue robot 03:27 Semi-autonomous diving robot 03:44 AI-powered dancing game 03:49 Packing optimizer powered by AI 04:00 Control a computer with your mind 04:17 Turn any vehicle into a self-driving car 04:57 AR help for Alzheimer’s patients 05:15 Tool to block addictive social media features 05:50 Checking back in with the robot surgery team 06:26 Putting Claude Code agents into AR 06:50 And the winner is…


It was an absolutely crazy journey organizing the 12th annual TreeHacks. Short read about how I made this year's PCB Badges 👇 toryn.bio/blog/pcb-badges








Ali Partovi hypes up the crowd at TreeHacks 2026











