Qasar Younis

1 person in 8 billion.

[Qasar Younis @qasar]

After 16 years and 10 months -- I'm finally writing my first...X? Also, will start writing more regularly.

My first post is, ironically, on why I'm posting. https://t.co/C0itme9LKX

[Qasar Younis @qasar]

@michael_hazard_ Lets goo!!

[Applied Intuition @AppliedInt]

E2E driving is bottlenecked by data. Imitation needs fleet-scale logs that barely cover the safety-critical long tail. Closed-loop RL in photoreal sim pays per-step rendering and backbone cost.

TerraTransfer++ removes human demonstrations from every stage and achieves state-of-the-art driving performance across open-loop and closed-loop benchmarks. 🧵

Paper: https://t.co/4xp25sQu78
Website: https://t.co/URwh0l9209

[Qasar Younis @qasar]

@Chance72585451 too much CJ. too much haha

[Qasar Younis @qasar]

Extra extra! Read all about it!

[Applied Intuition @AppliedInt]

Applied Intuition has been awarded a contract by the @USNavy to scale Data Engine across its fleet.

As the infrastructure layer for maritime autonomy, Data Engine collects operational data through passive navigation capabilities installed on Navy ships.

Here’s how the loop works:

🔵 Collect data from ships at sea
🔵 Curate it and train perception models
🔵 Evaluate the models
🔵 Deploy them back to vessels over the air

The result is what one ship learns now reaches the entire fleet – a threat encountered by a single vessel is turned into an improved model and deployed over the air, so every ship can detect it.

Our goal is for each military service to run its own Data Engine, tailored to its domain and feeding into a common infrastructure.

Learn more about our work with the U.S. Navy here:
https://t.co/YievJ6zCuf

[Qasar Younis @qasar]

❤️

[Cosign @cosign]

The Cosign Awards judges:

- Qasar Younis (@qasar)
- Amjad Masad (@amasad)
- Anish Acharya (@illscience)
- Garry Tan (@garrytan)
- Scott Belsky (@scottbelsky)
- Josh Elman (@joshelman)
- Gagan Biyani (@gaganbiyani)
- Andrew Chen (@andrewchen)
- Shuo Wang (@shuooo)
- Avichal Garg (@avichal)
- David Haber (@dhaber)
- Fidji Simo (@fidjissimo)
- Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi)
- Ryan Hoover (@rrhoover)
- Justine Moore (@venturetwins)
- Olivia Moore (@omooretweets)
- Sriram Krishnan (@sriramk)
- Packy McCormick (@packym)
- Gokul Rajaram (@gokulr)
- Ben Silbermann (@8en)
- Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan)

[sarah guo @saranormous]

the silliest way to lose a lot of money in 2026 is to hold onto stupid priors for dear life

the second silliest is to make “safe” bets behind prestige vs. first principles evaluation of tech/business. if a company has fancy pedigree but is just losing…don’t fight the tape

[Qasar Younis @qasar]

thats an understatement. they are terrible because the models aren't good, the compute is limited and the historic way to make a car (years of advance planning) doesn't gel with SW. Not to mention great models are very regularly updated. It used to be more of an org issue (i.e. eng leads in OEMs didn't know or care about how important SW is, etc.) but thats not the case anymore. now it's just the platforms they are built on are not very good

[Qasar Younis @qasar]

Everyone’s been talking about Mission S vs flying Roadsters and the physical part of their design BUT the human-machine interaction matters just as much, if not more.

Like you see and interact with your car from the inside most of the time. So then why are most in cabin experiences far from magical, seamless AI driven interactions? Because historically there wasn’t a platform to build on

[Applied Intuition @AppliedInt]

When software shapes the car, what’s left for design?

The human. See how we’re building the next generation of intelligent cars with @Stellantis.

https://t.co/2NFEkVAu3K

[Applied Intuition @AppliedInt]

When software shapes the car, what’s left for design?

The human. See how we’re building the next generation of intelligent cars with @Stellantis.

https://t.co/2NFEkVAu3K

[Qasar Younis @qasar]

Simulation is still our bread and butter and it’s only becoming clearer that it’ll unlock robotics at scale

[Prithwish Dan ✈️ CoRL 2026 @prithwish_dan]

Exploration is hard for RL when training high-DoF dex hands ✋

X-Reset makes generalist object-centric RL easier by resetting to human hand-object states 🙋‍♀️

We mitigate the exploration problem, and train a single policy to manipulate a variety of objects to any goal pose 🧵

[Qasar Younis @qasar]

👀

[Varun Nair @_varunnair]

Spoke to an early eng at @AppliedInt yesterday and they already built an internal version of this called Dana

[EO @eo_build]

“I don’t believe you can be very successful and not read a lot.”

4 books @qasar recommends, the ones that helped him build @AppliedInt, a $15B physical AI company:

📍I Am That, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
📍Sam Walton: Made in America, Sam Walton (with John Huey)
📍The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Mahatma Gandhi
📍Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela

[Qasar Younis @qasar]

One day I gotta write all these ideas down. Maybe a book with a catchy title like "Things I learned from building a venture backed technology company in Silicon Valley"

[EO @eo_build]

Qasar Younis, Co-founder and CEO of @AppliedInt, on the mistake first-time founders make with product-market fit.

"They think it's like a destination and product market fit is really more like a state. It can go away."

[Qasar Younis @qasar]

Individually, these are massive relationships, spanning Vehicle OS, developer tooling, and system integration.

Taken together, it underscores how Applied has become the go-to software partner for the world’s largest companies that make machines.

Two of Japan’s largest OEMs, both software foundations powered by Applied’s Vehicle OS

[Qasar Younis @qasar]

Not 1 but 2 mega announcements to share!

#1: We’re partnering with Honda to build the software platform powering their next-generation of AI-defined vehicles.

https://t.co/6v41Vdv5Mq

[Qasar Younis @qasar]

#2 We’re partnering with Nissan— to also build the software platform powering their next-generation of AI-defined vehicles.

https://t.co/cQhVBtlcoB

[Qasar Younis @qasar]

*Fantastic* talk hot off the press by the formidable Jon Gray from @blackstone on what is happening in technology world. Actually watched the whole thing. Chock full of interesting stats:

1/ BX-linked companies went from $25M to $525M in annualized spend with Anthropic in one year (21x)

2/Hyperscaler capex is up 9x in five years; chip-company capex hasn't doubled

3/$55B per gigawatt, all-in (power + data center + chips)

4/ SK Hynix trades at ~4x earnings after a 500% run; Cisco was at 150x in 2000

5/ PE software deals are down 66% (!)

https://t.co/Z3uYuJiVIQ

[Qasar Younis @qasar]

Does anyone have strong thoughts on this?

There is this strange information cascade that is happening: everyone's spending on tokens because everyone else is spending on tokens, assuming somebody upstream did the math.

I'm a bit skeptical on this 'agents run freely are creating huge value for us'. We have 1,000+ engineers and ...it's not always clear. There are some actions you can take that can cost $1 or $100 and you just don't know, and the ROI could be wildly positive or negative and require a bunch of cleanup. And the clean up matters if you're pushing to actual safety systems, which is most physical AI.

We're definitely in this weird time period where the cost controls and ROI are all over the place and few people up and down the stack have incentive to rein it in.

[Qasar Younis @qasar]

@kimberlywtan @AshwinSreenivas This is when we're telling the audience how we're actually related (if it's not obvious)

[Applied Intuition @AppliedInt]

At this year’s Agentic AI Summit hosted by @BerkeleyRDI, our Chief Scientist, @Wei_ZHAN_ shared some of the cutting edge research he has been leading in the physical AI space.

As the industry races to deploy L2++ ADAS with imitation-learning-based E2E, Wei tackled a key question: what if end-to-end autonomy could be trained without imitation at all, relying only on reinforcement learning? An idea that runs against the current status quo.

Here are some of his insights

🧵