AJ’s AI

President & Executive Director @aicollectiveco - growing the world’s largest AI nonprofit community!

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

Zero to $100M ARR in 8 months.
Acquired by Meta today.

Huge congrats to @Red_Xiao_, @hidecloud, and the entire @ManusAI team.

I’ve personally helped oversee 122 events in 2025, but this one stuck out as my favorite.

It was the day of our first event together.

At 9:00 AM, OpenAI dropped “Agent Mode."
Our event was at 5:00 PM.

Every other startup would have been frozen like a deer in the headlights. The largest player in the AI space just dropped a feature that could make your startup obsolete.

The @AICollectiveCo + @ManusAI team hopped on a call immediately.

We pitched a narrative shift: "The Battle of the Agents."

They didn’t hide from the news.
They put it on the big screen.

Manus showcased a LIVE demo of their agents vs. OpenAI’s release on stage that night.

And the Manus agent won.

Fast forward, and they achieved $100M ARR quicker than any startup in history.

That level of fearlessness is exactly why they won.

This was almost as fun as the first time we worked on their original product launch, but that’s a story for a different day. ;)

Huge kudos to the team on this massive milestone!

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

@imaanxsultan @llama_index huge congrats @imaanxsultan and the @llama_index team!

[Imaan Sultan 🇵🇰🇸🇦 @imaanxsultan]

my first launch at @llama_index !! 🦙

OCRia-1 is named after a cria, a baby llama. they’re walking within about an hour of being born, usually somewhere high and cold and not very forgiving

felt right for a model built for the worst documents. i'm so excited for this to be out into the world and for people to see truly how insane this model is :) ocria-1 is the most accurate in the game ! 💥

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

AI Collective Podcast Live — Thu Oct 22 https://t.co/Yo4CaFde23

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

@AICollectiveCo @catrosemcmillan @Adobe @Roblox @qdrant_engine Find an AI Collective event near you 👇
https://t.co/5ieD4xvoMv

Which city should we feature next?

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

🧵: Here are all the events happening at @AICollectiveCo today around the world

6 events. 3 time zones. 1 day 🌍👇

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

🎛️ San Francisco goes beyond text at Multimodal Engineering Night

Tonight at 5:30 PM PT at Patchworks, engineers working on images, 3D scenes and game state gather for six talks and demos.

- @Roblox on understanding 3D worlds without rendering them, and @qdrant_engine on beating video games with vector search
- Walmart Global Tech on efficient VLMs, plus @LangChain on voice models and evals and @SAP on multimodal models for databases
- Space is capped at 70 with host approval, and hosts include @AshKumra, with Code & Coffee

Register early 👉 https://t.co/Sv5zckQ679

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

@Recursive_SI @RichardSocher @GoogleResearch @AnthropicAI @claudeai @deepseek_ai @nvidia @Huawei @baselabs @baseten @MarathonFusion @CERN Get the full breakdown, tools, and quick news in today's newsletter:
https://t.co/GckoxnDjB1

Which of these are you testing first?

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

🧵: Here's everything that happened today in the world of AI, 10/22/2026

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

⚛️ A fusion startup says it made gold, and now it's building a reactor in San Francisco.

@MarathonFusion says it turned mercury into "real, stable gold" last month at 10x @CERN's record rate, and is building a reactor to hit record power density.

- Its 2025 paper used simulations to show a fusion plant could make about 2 tonnes of gold per gigawatt-year
- Runtime Wire notes the post offered no experimental data, so the gold claim is still unverified
- Its earlier lithium-6 enrichment result was certified by testing lab Covalent

Energy is the battlefield AI has to win first, because cheaper AI means we use more compute, not less.
Watch for Marathon's data release before you repeat the gold number.

[AJ’s AI @AJs_AI]

The best founders have something in common that has nothing to do with their pitch decks.

They have a reason they can't quit.

Josh Constine, Venture Partner at SignalFire and former TechCrunch Editor-at-Large, always asks founders this question: "What's your superhero origin story?"

What happened in your life that made this problem impossible to ignore?

Because building a startup means facing rejection, setbacks, and countless reasons to give up.

A great pitch might get you a meeting.

But a deeply personal connection to the problem can give you the resilience to keep building when everything goes wrong.

Founder-market fit is about more than industry expertise.
It's about obsession.