cooking hard AI | autistic cofounder @starpowerworld | @alliancedao alum | you are the mountain of yourself

Sydney
Joined October 2014
King 🤝 King
We asked @usv's Nikhil (@uninsightful) one question: why NYC? 0:25 How Nikhil joined USV 1:15 Showcasing the USV office 1:54 Lessons learned from @fredwilson 2:50 SF vs NYC from a builders perspective 3:46 USV's investing approach 4:40 NYC's culture & lifestyle 5:42 NY is the place to get customers
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A lot of my success has been luck.
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Humanity is just a fingersnap in the universe.
i enjoy watching chronological empire-border videos so i made worldbyyear.com
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We are investing $8,000,000 into 20 teams. Some founders come from SpaceX, Stripe or Google DeepMind. Others come with an idea and no logo. We back both.
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Laser Ding⚡ retweeted
市场营销激进一点可以,但利用和上升到人身攻击,甚至损害人家未来职业生涯发展,没有必要。直接打官司也比披露不必要的细节好。希望能够妥善解决。互相尊重!🙏
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十年成王
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Congrats from ALL13
Alliance ALL17 Demo Day is happening today. Join us for live one-on-one conversations with the founders and an investor roundtable featuring: - @reganbozman from @latticexyz - @MariaShen from @ElectricCapital - @willnuelle from @galaxyhq - @uninsightful from @usv - @mdudas from @6thManVentures Tune in at 12pm EST: xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1jxXggoao…
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If you want to be a winner, this is the first step.
Less than 24 hours left to apply, get $500,000 and prove everyone wrong → alliance.xyz
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We’re partnering with @Samsung, @_GentleMonster_ and @WarbyParker on new intelligent eyewear. Here's a sneak peek at two designs from this fall's upcoming collections. #GoogleIO
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Laser Ding⚡ retweeted
Excited for Paradigm to co-lead this $110M investment in SendCutSend alongside @andrew__reed, @patrickc, and @collision. 24h turnaround manufacturing that your favorite robot, defense, space, and car companies all use. Grateful that @jimbelosic allowed us all to get involved.
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🔸 Why the AI frontier is shifting from digital to physical
Caitlin Kalinowski (@kalinowski007) helped engineer the original unibody MacBook Pro and was technical lead on the MacBook Air and Mac Pro at @Apple, was @Meta's first consumer electronics hire and went on to lead their AR glasses and VR hardware teams, and most recently was at @OpenAI helping build their robotics and hardware teams from scratch. In our in-depth conversation, we discuss: 🔸 Why the AI frontier is shifting from digital to physical 🔸 How the technologies built for VR became the foundation of modern warfare 🔸 Why humanoid robots are still just prototypes, and what’s most gating mass deployment 🔸 The coming memory price shock and why she’s telling startups to pre-buy now 🔸 Lessons from Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman 🔸 Why she walked away from OpenAI after the DoD deal Listen now youtube.com/watch?v=G5WTgB87…
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We plan to bring a new AI hardware before YC demo day.😜
72 hours after YC demo day, I moved to Shenzhen for 8 weeks 🤠 I'm headed back to SF with new hardware in hand (sharing more soon), but some takeaways documented below: > If you have even the slightest ambition to found a hardware company, visit SZ. Pre-raise, pre-team, pre-idea, pre-job departure, it doesn't matter. Just go. > Plan your visit according to a major conference that interests you. Use that conference as a supplier meeting springboard - that's your ticket to any factory under the sun. > At the factories, ask about lead times, don't ask about cost (wait on this). Your iteration rate is driven by the lead time on the longest lead time item in your assembly. It pays to identify these parts early to build project timelines. > Visit Huaqiangbei (read: this is a mini-city, not a building). Robotic subassemblies, batteries, chassis's, electronic parts. They all have buildings where vendors are tightly clustered. Plan to spend 4-6 hours walking around before you find exactly what you're interested in. > Business relationships are valuable commodities. Treat them as such. Pay attention to people, learn about them. Bring thoughtful gifts. Wait for them to sit first. With Baiju, fill the glass but with tea leave some room. Cultural customs are fun to learn, but also convey a seriousness towards the working relationship. > Suppliers fit cleanly into discrete buckets. Level of complexity and execution on past projects indicates what is in scope for them. Trivial, but important to level your build expectations. It is easy to design a part with 12 subsequent manufacturing processes, exceptionally hard to find a supplier to fill this order. If you need coffeeshop recs, food recs, or hotel recs I have a few. Move to Shenzhen! Get to building!
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饭得一口一口吃。
Jane Street just showed the inside of their AI training data center in Texas. 4,032 GPUs. 56 racks. 8,000 km of fiber. liquid cooling running through every server because air cooling can't handle the heat anymore. but the part that got me was the origin story. Ron Minsky, who co-heads their technology group. said their first compute cluster was literally six Dell boxes stacked on top of each other at the end of a desk row. they called it "the hive." the trading systems sat out in the room with the traders because they wanted to be able to unplug them if something went wrong. at one point, someone vacuuming the office unplugged a live trading system in the middle of the day. from six Dell boxes and a vacuum cleaner incident to a liquid-cooled GPU data center processing trades in under 100 nanoseconds. that's a 20-year arc.
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So actually a big team came.
Replying to @ClementDelangue
Currently in china 🇨🇳
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Me too.
Replying to @whyyoutouzhele
我的儿子正在学习普通话
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Laser Ding⚡ retweeted
Altcoins see a broad resurgence over the past month. Sector Gainers - Privacy (+45.04%) - SOL DeFi (+35.12%) - Memecoins (+33.57%) - ETH DeFi (+24.19%) - DePIN (+20.67%)
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AI is quickly evolving and saturating the software world and its utility is becoming more and more valuable in the hardware world. The good thing(for us) about hardware world is that it takes time and it needs efficient supply chain, experience in the merge among hard/software AI
I've left OpenAI and the Codex team to build Blackstar: A new hardware company building the future of human-computer interaction. We believe that software is solved. Building apps is now easy, but the next meaningful improvement in human-AI communication requires changing the OS & hardware. That's why we're building a new device entirely. I'm also excited to announce our $12m seed round led by @AbstractVC, with participation from @naval, @SVAngel, @chapterone, and Timeless, among other amazing angels who've supported us from the old Alex days.
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if you’re into robotics or AI, picking up Chinese is a good move. Native speakers make up ~50% of top researchers - I’ve lost count of how many times I was the only non-native speaker at a table, and being able to follow the nuance of the conversation was huge. You’ll be fine w/o, but having it lets you jump into a ton of Chinese-only dialogues you’d otherwise miss. It only has to be conversational Chinese because all the technical terms will still be in English. – at San Francisco, CA
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Daniel Edrisian 宣布离开 OpenAI Codex ,转身去做 Blackstar Computers,就在 OpenAI宣布完升级到GPT5.5 的同时。 Blackstar Computers刚拿到 1200 万美元种子轮。 OpenAI 是过去几年最接近 AI 金矿中心的地方。Codex 又是其中最直接改变程序员工作方式的一条线。一个在这里写代码的人,突然跑去做硬件,做一台“new computer that knows you”, 这说明一个可能正在冒芽的趋势: 一些最聪明的程序员,已经开始感觉到应用层软件的红利到顶了。 说“软件到头了”,不是说软件不重要了。恰恰相反,软件太重要,以至于可以直接嵌入基座大模型变成基础设施的一部分了。 Cursor、Devin、Replit、Claude Code、Codex各种 Agent 框架,把做 App、写原型、接 API、搭工作流的门槛压低了一大截。 以前一个产品团队要花几个月做出来的东西,现在一个强一点的工程师,带着 AI 工具,可能几天就能跑出第一版。 这对个人开发者是好事。 但对创业公司来说问题也来了:如果大家都能很快做出一个 AI App,那做 AI App 本身就难以形成竞争壁垒。 真正难的东西开始继续往下沉。 沉到 OS。沉到权限。沉到本地推理。 沉到传感器。沉到设备形态。沉到你每天拿在手上、戴在耳朵里、贴在手腕上、放在桌面上的那套计算入口。 Blackstar 的官网说的很克制,要解锁人和 AI 交互的重大改进,需要一台新电脑。 招聘页就更直白表示要从头重建 computing,包括硬件、软件,以及两者之间的交互。 岗位横跨软件、机器学习、电气硬件、嵌入式、机械、工业设计, 地点横跨旧金山和深圳。 这就不是一个“再做一个 AI 助手”的故事了。 这是一个从程序员视角发出的判断,如果软件生产已经被 AI 大幅自动化,那么下一轮稀缺资源会回到系统和硬件。 谁能定义入口,谁就能定义体验。 联系前几天苹果宣布,硬件工程出身的John Ternus将在 9 月 1 日接任 CEO。Ternus 过去25年来一直负责 iPhone、Mac、iPad、Apple Watch、AirPods 等产品线的硬件工程。 而同时Johny Srouji 被任命为 Chief Hardware Officer。Srouji 是 Apple silicon 的关键人物,现在接管硬件工程和硬件技术组织,芯片、传感器、显示、相机、电池、调制解调器这些关键部件都被推到更中心的位置。 所以呢,苹果这个动作不能简单理解成一次 CEO 交接。 Cook 时代的关键词是供应链、运营、服务、生态和全球规模化。Ternus 接棒,Srouji 扩权,像是在预告,AI 时代苹果的重心要压在自己最擅长的硬件、芯片、系统设计、端侧体验。 苹果肯定暂时在云端大模型竞赛里缺位了。但如果 AI 要变成一种日常能力,进入耳机、手表、手机、Mac、眼镜、家庭设备和通知流,仍然很难绕开苹果,而苹果似乎也意识到这一点了,开始积极准备卡位。 因为真正的 AI 体验,光有模型不够。 模型知道你问了什么,设备才知道你在哪里、在做什么、能不能被打扰、有没有权限调用摄像头、麦克风、日历、支付、联系人和本地文件。 聊天框解决的是问答。硬件和 OS 可以解决上下文。 大模型公司应该也已经意识到传统产品界面正在限制 AI。电脑已经能看、能听、能推理,但用户还被困在 App 图标、输入框、按钮和通知红点里。 AI 如果继续只是一个窗口,它就很难成为下一代个人计算。 所以 Blackstar 和苹果其实是在两个方向上靠近同一个问题。 Blackstar 要从零开始赌一台 AI 原生电脑。 苹果是拿现有生态,把 AI 一点点塞回硬件和 OS 的骨架里。 一个是小团队冒险,一个是巨头换挡。 但真正值得追的不是“谁先发一个 AI 硬件产品”。比如Humane 已经证明了,硬件加 AI如果没有高频场景、稳定体验和低摩擦交互,会死得比软件产品更难看。 更值得关注的是谁能先把闭环做出来。 模型给智能。传感器给感知。芯片给低延迟。OS 给权限和调度。供应链给迭代速度。 这几个东西要合在一起,才会变成真正的下一代入口。 这样的话,可能深圳华强北的又一个春天要来了。 苹果可以继续把部分制造分散到印度、越南和美国,但 AI 硬件的原型、小批量试产、元器件撮合、结构件调试、模具修改、供应链试错,短期内仍然绕不开深圳和珠三角。 所以这波 AI 硬件复兴,可能同时带来深圳的工程化加速。 到时候一旦进入硬件设计打样生产上规模阶段,谁跟东方关系好,谁才有前途, 所以,生态里有硬件的马斯克黄仁勋都在牢牢捧住中国,老黄还不顾身份在播客跟主持吵了起来, 这样的战略眼光,像anthropic的阿迪王这样没做过硬件,是不具备的。
I've left OpenAI and the Codex team to build Blackstar: A new hardware company building the future of human-computer interaction. We believe that software is solved. Building apps is now easy, but the next meaningful improvement in human-AI communication requires changing the OS & hardware. That's why we're building a new device entirely. I'm also excited to announce our $12m seed round led by @AbstractVC, with participation from @naval, @SVAngel, @chapterone, and Timeless, among other amazing angels who've supported us from the old Alex days.
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