As model companies absorb more product surface area, the strongest startups may be the ones that can prove an AI output is correct. That’s the verification moat. I wrote about why it could be AI’s most durable advantage.

Once you see the enterprise world, every startup in SF looks like a baby.

Is AI actually speeding up drug discovery? According to new McKinsey research, there are early signs that it is: all of these candidates were AI-enabled, with discovery time cut by ~15-80%. (Incredibly bullish)

when a designer gets access to Jev

Any pursuit of superintelligence has to be grounded in the core principle that if the AI we build is not helping humanity and under human control, it's not worth pursuing. We also need to accelerate and spread the benefits of AI, such that they are diffused broadly across countries, communities, and companies. This requires a frontier ecosystem in which both closed and open-source models can thrive. And for firms, it’s imperative that they retain full control over their unique and tacit knowledge. Every organization should be able to build its own continuous learning loop/hill climbing machine, without becoming dependent on any one model provider, and have the ability to embed its own knowledge into models and weights they control. So, in this context, we welcome the research, focus, and deliberate pacing needed to get alignment right as the design goal. We also welcome ideas like "embedded evaluators" and the broader efforts to develop the mechanisms to make this more than just talk. The key is that this cannot be controlled by a handful of entities, but must have broad representation across the ecosystem, countries, and fields, including academia. This is the approach we are taking: broad access and choice at every layer of the AI stack; enterprise control of learning loops and models; and the “Code of Conduct” that underlies our own first party MAI models that we’ll publish tomorrow for public consultation.

Startups used to own urgency. Not anymore. No one can afford to be slow. A month into @Microsoft and the pace here is nothing like what I expected from a big company.

We just hit 75.2% on Agent's Last Exam in Physical Sciences, the highest score of any publicly benchmarked agentic system!🔥 techcommunity.microsoft.com/…

Your entire life will change when you realize energy is the most attractive human trait. Not looks, wealth, or status. Energy. Start walking into rooms with genuine enthusiasm, curiosity, and interest. Watch what happens. You become a magnet for the highest quality people. Energy is contagious. Spread the kind you’d want to catch.

Don't join a startup just because you feel, the corporate life looks boring and you're not moving. You will be surprised, startups also have politics, manager drama and pointless meetings. And for a long time, you won’t know whether the company is early, growing or running out of money. Your job description will change every few months and it will confuse you. You may be hired for marketing but will be asked to do cold calling and reply to customer support and you've to leave your ego in your closet before getting to work. Nobody will give you complete instructions because nobody has complete answers. You need high agency and low entitlement which means you must pick up problems that don’t may not belong to you. Choose the founders more carefully than you choose the startup. Watch how they behave when things go wrong, because things will go wrong. Choose a honest founder, they may share genuine and useful stuff online. And not the ones doing video reels. Join them because you want to learn how to think, build, sell like them. The greatest upside of working at a startup might not be the equity but the person you become while earning it. A startup is not a smaller corporate. It is a half built company where your job is to help finish building it while everything looks like a struggle. Choosing the right people you are willing to struggle with is your decision.

What’s your advice? I asked @mecolalu when I started my co. “Always remember” he said, “nobody knows anything.” Couldn’t be more true now than ever.

Excited to be speaking at @AIBoomi alongside some incredibly talented operators. See you there 👋

Pretty spot on.

Two weeks ago, I announced I was winding down my company. Today, I'm excited to share what's next. I'm joining @Microsoft to build Discovery, its AI for Science platform. AI is going to compress a century of scientific breakthroughs into a handful of years: new medicines, new materials, clean energy and more. Microsoft is one of the few places with the ambition, talent and compute to make this possible. Excited to shape this frontier, it's time to build.

I love agentic coding harnesses, but they shouldn't be primarily terminal-based. The terminal is great for quick and precise commands, but information density is extremely low and UI affordances are minimal. Maybe provision of TUIs is worthwhile for occasional use (when establishing a tunnel is too annoying, or something), but it feels very strange for this to be the default modality. It took a long time for dynamic language REPLs to break out of the terminal (Jupyter notebooks and similar); I hope we don't have to wait as long for the harnesses.

to put ai progress in perspective: 9 months ago: most developers wrote code by hand now: misaligned multi-agent swarm finding and collaborating on 0-days undetected (OpenAI/hugging face) 9 months in the future likely much crazier

I see so many people founding because they want to be founders. Almost all lack a contrarian thesis for why the world should be different. There are about a dozen companies that matter each decade and meaningfully shape how the world works. You should generally optimize for contributing meaningfully to one of those.

A sunny day in Mountain View. Like every other day. Jeff, Sanjay, Oriol and Quoc walk into a VC office on Sand Hill. The VC is on his second oat latte and has fourteen minutes blocked for this. Jeff: So. We decided to build our own company. VC: Okay, great, love that. Who's "we"? Jeff: The four of us. VC: ...All of you? Jeff: Yes. VC: All four. In one company. Together. Jeff: That's right. VC: I'm giving you $100 million right now. Jeff: We haven't shown you anyth- VC: You know what, forget it. A billion. One billion dollars. Sanjay: We prepared a deck. VC: I don't want the deck. Jeff: It's only eleven slides. VC: Two billion. Oriol: Slide one is the mission. VC: Three. Oriol: "Automate machine learning, science and engineer-" VC: FOUR. Four billion. Stop reading. Quoc: Should we talk about the market? VC: If you say the word "market" I will go to five and I have not cleared five with my partners. Jeff: We were also thinking about being a Public Benefit Corp- VC: Five. Jeff: Do you want to hear the technical approach? VC: Six billion. Please leave. Please leave... Jeff: Nice to talk with you! VC: Seven, please go 😥 They leave. It's still sunny. It's always sunny. The deck was never opened.

After seven years, we are winding down Zams (prev. Obviously AI). I'm grateful to our team, customers and everyone who believed in what we were building. Here's the email I sent to our investors.