@ycombinator built AI versions of its partners to help more people work through their startup ideas.
For its Office Hour Simulator, the team needed useful answers delivered quickly enough for a spoken conversation. They had been testing lightweight Gemini and OpenAI models before moving to GLM-5.2 on a dedicated Wafer endpoint.
YC then compared that deployment with GPT-4.1 mini on OpenAI and Gemma 4 31B on Cerebras, evaluating answer quality, latency, and conversation duration.
The Wafer configuration delivered 31% lower average LLM latency than OpenAI and 44% lower than Cerebras. Users spent 2.5 minutes longer talking to YC’s AI partners when using Wafer.
Read how YC built the experience and landed on Wafer
🧵 link in thread
6
5
10
544
DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash is live on @OpenRouter!!
pick @wafer_ai as your provider
(ss taken 9.12.26)
3
3
12
1,119
Wafer is now integrated with @getbifrost
Build using Wafer's endpoints with less infrastructure to maintain.
With the Bifrost AI Gateway, your team can manage credentials and spending across applications, freeing up engineering time for the product.
Docs in the comments.
1
1
53