
Building AI developers for IT @_EchelonAI Past - @moveworks, @MicrosoftTeams, Siri at @Apple 🇺🇸 🇮🇳
San Francisco, CA
Joined April 2009
- Tweets1.5K
- Following836
- Followers1K
- Likes13.1K
the moat quite literally is human laziness. you'll stick to the first one that works well esp. if the alternates aren't that much better
in case it isn't clear, this is the bull case for muse
There is no moat in AI agents. None. I'll die on this hill — new More or Less is up.
I switch between Muse, Instinct, and Dots at basically zero cost: one GitHub repo, a few databases, feed the new thing my context, done. If the cost of writing software is going to zero, API integrations are not a moat. The only moat left is user setup cost — which means winner-take-some, not winner-take-all.
Adrian's point: AI collapses value the second an idea works. Jev got reverse-engineered in 48 hours and the people who built it capture nothing. My take: play that to the limit and you get Middle Ages 2.0 — everyone builds a castle, hoards data, ships black boxes that self-destruct if you open them. Dave says humans don't work that way. We'll see.
Meanwhile Brit's Instinct started talking to Dave's Instinct and they didn't text for a day. She says it's killing humanity. Nobody said that about FaceTime.
And Jess announced the only benchmark that matters: log into school software, sync three kids' after-school schedules. Muse: 90%. Every other eval is bullshit.
Neolabs are the new pharma cos - models the drugs. huge capex in but no patent protected 20 year monopolies to monetize
The economics of a Neolab.
A neolab is loosely defined as a startup of AI researchers who raises a lot of money pre-production to be able to finance GPU compute to take on a large AI problem.
To buy 1000 GB300s or ~14 NVL72 racks will set you back $125-150M for 3yrs with 15-30% upfront. That’s about ~2-2.5MW.
Thats about enough to do 10^25 flops a quarter and get to a GPT-4 level model which is 1-2 OOMs off frontier for pretraining.
If you post-train on a great open source model, you have a better chance of getting to frontier. The risks are a) you need to spend millions on RL environments too and b) being lapped by another model release while being tied to a base model.
For this to payback, you need to give your customers a better and ideally cheaper inference service than a base model and serve them for long enough to recoup your large investment. Even at 50% margin on inference, to recoup $10M in training means serving ~10T tokens (!) if you price like Fable / Astra given a standard cache read / input / output split ($2/M blended). And you have to justify being better than a release like Opus 5.5 which is even cheaper. Often, you end up charging your customers a huge premium in terms of platform fees and compute fees on top of pure inference.
Meanwhile, every hour you’re not utilizing your GPUs you are burning money so you typically resell this compute back to a broker or run inference for open models / resell spot instances. At below a ~60% utilization on spot, you will still lose money.
Add to that insane cost of talent.
So what can you do with the compute?
- Not play the model game at all.
- Play an entirely different model game (Jev, World Labs) that if big labs played, would either a) cannibalize their business or b) be incrementally not significant revenue c) would cause too much distraction from the main main thing
- Acquire a proprietary data set (Peridodic Labs) in enough volume in a domain of usefulness to eclipse frontier quality. Often happens in robotics, biology, chemistry.
If you do overcome the challenge of building a model that is useful and well priced beyond big labs models, given the huge price of compute, you still need to play in an area where the revenue / compute ratio is signficant and market demand is large enough to payback your compute spend.
It is a difficult game.
Rahul Kayala retweeted
Echelon emerges from stealth with $4.75M to replace enterprise consulting giants like Accenture and Deloitte with AI agents trained on real expert knowledge. 🤖📊
Full story: venturebeat.com/ai/echelons-… #ArtificialIntelligence #EnterpriseSoftware #FutureOfWork @_EchelonAI
This, not search, is the real Google killer. Truly helpful sidekick that pushes the right information at the right moment!
Not @Benioff with the YC founder always be launching vibe!!
Hot take: The "founding creator" trend is a trap most startups are walking into blindly.
Every startup now ships cinematic launch videos because when software takes weeks to build, distribution buys you some moat.
But we're confusing skills with DNA. 🧵
Your "founding creator" will quit the moment they hit 100K followers.
They're building THEIR brand, not yours.
The content that goes viral about your startup? It's actually about them.
Conferences can be pretty effective channels to land and close customers. Avoid at your own risk!
every time you email the Rippling team, they hand you off to your new account manager
quite frustrating tbh
startup hiring has always been go slow to then move fast.
for the first time now - if you just need execution bandwidth — there are real alternatives
Woke up this morning and realized my Robinhood account is missing funds
I filed a support ticket - wish me luck
Perplexity deep research is better than OpenAI IMO - crisper reports, capturing more relevant details than OpenAI
@AravSrinivas













