Andrew Hsu

@speak cofounder/CTO - AI language learning

[Andrew Hsu @adhsu]

@blader I follow @simonlast too! 😛

JK - this has been a big unlock for me as well, and I often tell it to call the task review subagent with a different model and to try to reduce complexity

[Andrew Hsu @adhsu]

Strongly agree with this K-shaped divergence happening on software teams. It's existentially urgent to move faster here than what many consider reasonable, because a decent-sized gap today will compound into an insurmountable chasm in output and execution speed and quality by the fall.

This means your team must simultaneously buy into the vision of what is possible and will be possible soon, while also being in the trenches on a daily basis wrestling with and steering agentic systems that still often make mistakes, overcomplicate things, and don't always do what the user is envisioning. Navigating this takes strong, continuous leadership that's also in the trenches.

We're doing a lot at Speak to stay on the cutting edge here as a team - a few examples:
- Continually thinking about what we're still doing manually and following that signal to agentify our repos and processes
- Retooling our engineering hiring process to explicitly test for agentic engineering skill and mindset
- Explicitly trying to build production features while keeping manual code as close to 0% as possible

If you're working at a company that isn't all-in, you should leave before it's too late. Accelerate!

[Eric Glyman @eglyman]

https://t.co/0VslhlEfIe

[Andrew Hsu @adhsu]

@anvisha Congrats @anvisha !!!

[Andrew Hsu @adhsu]

@brackin @GradientVC LFG, congrats Brackin and Darian!!!

[Andrew Hsu @adhsu]

As we all know on X, agentic AI coding crossed a capability threshold at the end of 2025 such that the era of software engineers writing code by hand was over. @speak, we're urgently embracing this fundamental change to the way we develop software. I wrote up a snapshot of what we’re observing and learning, and where we think things are going:
https://t.co/T74bl2Si8x

[Andrew Hsu @adhsu]

@justindross @roelofbotha @rabois LFGJD!!

[The Neuron @theneurondaily]

Can voice AI actually get you to fluency?💡

Join us LIVE Wednesday at 4PM CST with Andrew Hsu, Co-founder & CTO, @speak — the voice-first AI language tutor that’s hit $100M ARR and 15M+ downloads.

We'll see you here on X soon!📷

#AI #LanguageLearning

[Connor Zwick @connorzwick]

Thanks @RashiShrivast18 for telling the @speak story!

We’re pushing hard to make the world’s best AI language tutor available to everyone. Super excited for the slate of new feature launches coming later this year! Stay tuned.

https://t.co/uX64S0E7JJ

[Andrew Hsu @adhsu]

@dylan522p @jxnlco Brutal :/

[Andrew Hsu @adhsu]

House of Hsu

[Patrick Hsu @pdhsu]

Thrilled to share that I’ve joined @ThriveCapital as a Venture Partner, where I will be helping to build and invest in companies that can push the boundaries of science and technology. 

I’ve known many of the Thrive team for years and have always admired their warmth, intellect, optimism, and boundless ambition to be the most meaningful partner to founders across every stage and sector. 

My work has been guided by the belief that alpha is always found at the frontier, with AI starting to achieve human-level performance in generating independent work products, robotics transforming the physical world, biotechnology becoming engineerable, and energy abundance within reach… 

This is an incredible time to invent and build new companies and I’m excited to get going. I’m grateful for the last few years investing at NFDG across seed to growth. Oh - and @arcinstitute will still be my main gig! My science isn’t going anywhere :)

[Andrew Hsu @adhsu]

@shyamalanadkat @OpenAI LFG @shyamalanadkat !

[Andrew Hsu @adhsu]

@zoink this is what you get when you drop out of college

[Andrew Hsu @adhsu]

@benln We’ve done this for years @speak :)

[Andrew Hsu @adhsu]

Congrats @OpenAI! Some thoughts from testing the new GPT-5 models @speak over the past several weeks:

- Significant leap in the reasoning frontier - your strong assumption now should be that it can crush most real-world complex tasks across a giant context window/dump, and if it doesn’t, it’s more than likely that your prompt isn’t good enough or you need to provide more clarity. Your ability to think in a structured manner and write with clarity is the big bottleneck now.
- We were the most impressed by GPT-5's pattern recognition and reverse engineering capabilities across giant context dumps. It’s super good at systematically understanding and generalizing from examples to create structured workflows or playbooks.
- Example - over the years, we’ve developed a highly opinionated and structured pedagogical methodology for functional language fluency that we call the Speak Method, but have struggled for years to distill and document it into a playbook clearly enough. Gemini 2.5 Pro and o3-pro couldn’t do this, but GPT-5 did an amazing job analyzing a large dump of our curriculum/content and breaking down/generalizing the principles necessary to scale our content. This was really surprising and felt superhuman.
- We've found previous reasoning models both slow and inconsistent in their logical leaps. GPT-5 feels far more consistent and accurate on reasoning tasks, which is transformative for our curriculum scaling process and language tutoring capabilities.
- Zooming out and speaking as an extremely heavy user of both ChatGPT and the API, I’m super excited (and relieved!) that the constellation of models is going away and everything is getting unified. It’s absurd that the full model is priced ~same as o3/4.1 and 5-mini is 5x cheaper! This day has been coming for a long time, and we expect to switch all of our realtime usecases over with reasoning=minimal.

Huge congrats to the OpenAI team and we can’t wait to bring all this to our users this quarter!

[Andrew Hsu @adhsu]

@juliusai Congrats!!

[Connor Zwick @connorzwick]

A special bit of silicon valley is that everyone is willing to help each other.

Back in 2015, we pinged @karpathy for AI help and (within 2 min!) he offered to meet up w/ us the next day.

One of a few formative convos that led to us doing AI research and starting @speak.

[Andrew Hsu @adhsu]

Thanks for having me on @latentspacepod @swyx!

[Latent.Space @latentspacepod]

🆕 Personalized AI Language Education, with @adhsu, CTO of @Speak!

https://t.co/CUSp8zTR8S

For the first time, Andrew tells the story about building the next generation of AI Language Learning, starting pre-Transformers, getting advice from @karpathy, and why they went bet hard on South Korea and on personalized, realtime, conversational fluency as the ultimate language learning goal!

"It took much, much longer than we expected to build a great product and find good PMF. The first few years were very painful. And I think without this really compelling vision of the future, we would have quit."

[Andrew Hsu @adhsu]

@zebulgar LFG!!

[Andrew Hsu @adhsu]

Thanks for having me on @ashleevance - was a very fun convo!

[Ashlee Vance @ashleevance]

Full episode with @adhsu on life as a child prodigy, being one of the first Thiel Fellows and building @speak

Timestamps

00:00:00 - Intro
00:03:05 - Started college at twelve
00:05:34 - Homeschooled by immigrant parents 00:08:30 - Three degrees by sixteen
00:19:53 - First Thiel Fellowship class
00:21:07 - Dropping out Stanford PhD
00:25:01 - Why not cure cancer
00:34:47 - Building Speak with AI
00:38:00 - Deep learning winter thawing
00:41:25 - Three failed product launches
00:42:07 - Choosing South Korea market
00:43:03 - Product takes off rocket
00:48:00 - ChatGPT threatens language learning 00:51:15 - OpenAI partnership and investment
00:56:16 - AI completely changes learning