Akash Venkat

Exploring the future of work/learning, startup ecosystems & film. Investor @join_ef Alum @ycombinator (S15) @trygigster @rossintel

[Katherine Boyle @KTmBoyle]

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; 
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build them up with worn-out tools.

[shubham @ShubhamInTech]

We got into Y Combinator!

Agnost AI (YC S26) is the infra for self-improving AI agents.

We plug into conversational AI companies, find what's broken, and ship the fix as a PR. You just merge.
DM if this is you.

Already working with Google, Exa AI, Corgi Insure and more.

[Jeff Weinstein @jeff_weinstein]

This came up twice today, so figured I'd tweet it.

People, internally and externally, talk [read: complain] to me that their product isn't growing, or isn't growing enough.

100% of the time they are missing at least one of the following minimum requirements for success:

(A) A *burning* user problem [not a "it'd be nice if" problem]
(B) Users with that problem, each in a [Slack] room [I'll accept WhatsApp or iMessage, but it can't be email]
(C) Narrow the problem such that you can build a 10X better solution than the current alternatives [you are very likely biting off too much to early and then you can't quick make a wow-better solution]
(D) A chart with _daily_ counts of users using the product [do not kid yourself into measuring weekly or monthly]
(E) At least 2 people, but probably under 5, working on it full-time, that like each other and meet at least once per day [new things are just more fun together than solo]

In terms of order of operation: it's first (E), then (A) which begets (B), then you just have to daily iterate back and forth between (C) and (D) unless it's growing faster again.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Evidence of exceptional ability and asking how they solved hard problems down to the brass tacks level is what matters.

Those who actually deserve credit know the details of the solution, because it was so hard it got seared into their brain. The phonies and posers who falsely claim credit will flounder at the second or third level of detail.

[Carra Wu @carrawu]

One of my longstanding fears about AI has been that it would further centralize the web– after all, agents are a new kind of app store.

But increasingly, I’ve come to believe the agentic web can be less concentrated than the human one. Agents reason massively in parallel. They are not deterred from clicking through the 5th page of Google or the 50th page of an S1. The arrival of agents could be the best thing to happen to long tail content in a generation. But this can only happen if there’s a functional economic model to incentivize it.

Index is our attempt at putting that economic model in place. We hope you’ll join us.

[Akash Venkat @akashizzle]

💯

[Hurley @Johnsjawn]

Or go to the Presidio, jump in the ocean, get a coffee at The Mill, watch sunset at Twin Peaks, ride a bike anywhere, see live music, eat a burrito, take a grass nap in GG Park, have beer at The Page, watch the Bay Bridge lights, wander Chinatown, wander Ferry building, run across GG Bridge, walk Fort Funston, eat the best meal of your life with friends…drive any direction for 2hrs. And be deeply grateful for the heavenscape you live in.

[Mokshit Naidu @MokshitNaidu]

@join_ef just kicked off one of its biggest cohorts ever last week.

After spending the last 6 months carefully selecting and curating every individual in this batch, I now get to work closely with ~100 exceptional folks coming together to build from scratch.

[Entrepreneurs First @join_ef]

Helicon is building autonomous factories to mass produce carbon fiber parts for unmanned systems.

Their platform, Argos, runs the full composite engineering loop automatically, connecting DFM, mold design, simulation, quoting, manufacturing, and quality inspection into one system.

It turns composite production from a manual, artisanal process into a scalable one, collapsing lead times and unlocking the industrialization of composites.

Their mission: accelerate the world's transition to advanced materials.

Meet @alexnhaus and Edmundo

[Vihan Singh @vihan13singh]

introducing RAETH IPL Arena.

we're making frontier LLMs bet on IPL cricket matches!

work in progress. ship now, polish later.

https://t.co/O6CKx75en8

[“paula” @paularambles]

they call them crisps there

[Alice Bentinck @Alicebentinck]

It's Demo Day tomorrow...

Can't wait.

[Nick Levine @status_effects]

New work with @AlecRad and @DavidDuvenaud:

Have you ever dreamed of talking to someone from the past? Introducing talkie, a 13B model trained only on pre-1931 text.

Vintage models should help us to understand how LMs generalize (e.g., can we teach talkie to code?). Thread:

[ROSS @ROSSIntel]

And there it is. @jgebbia and his team are now looking into freeing the law as APIs that are as complete and up to date as any private corporation has access to.

[Zain Shah @zan2434]

Imagine every pixel on your screen, streamed live directly from a model. No HTML, no layout engine, no code. Just exactly what you want to see.

@eddiejiao_obj, @drewocarr and I built a prototype to see how this could actually work, and set out to make it real. We're calling it Flipbook. (1/5)

[Akash Venkat @akashizzle]

@ShubhamInTech and @prrthh132 are cooking.

[shubham @ShubhamInTech]

we're building agnost ai and this is our story!

iit/vit grads, $250k raised, born in India 🇮🇳

[Vishruth N @Vishruth_N]

This is exactly why working on a super robust annotation stack is worthwhile.

Language helps you achieve steerability in today's foundation models. When you are trying to map instructions into an action space in the real world, the bridge that takes you closer is a richer representation of the data you collect.

[Peter Fenton @peterfenton]

I've only felt this a handful of times in a first meeting — TheFacebook (2005), Twitter (2007), Instagram (2010), SnapChat (2011). Meeting @paulscherer hit me the same way -- wow, then inevitability

[Tanay Padhi @tanaypadhi]

how did Allbirds pivot to AI compute hardware before the shoe company literally called ASICS

[Eugene Wei @eugenewei]

Anthropic turning over Mythos to the only person who can be trusted with it

[Michał Podlewski @trajektoriePL]

Terence Tao proposes what he calls a "Copernican view of intelligence".

Instead of buying into the common, one-dimensional narrative that artificial intelligence will simply evolve from "subhuman" to "superhuman" and ultimately make humanity entirely redundant, Tao urges us to look at the bigger picture.

Much like the Copernican revolution proved the Earth is not the center of the universe, Tao suggests we need to realize that human intelligence isn't the only, or necessarily the highest, form of intellect. Historically, we have treated other forms of storing or creating knowledge—like animals, books, and computers—as secondary. However, we actually exist within a much richer universe of intelligence.

Both human intelligence and computer intelligence possess their own distinct strengths and weaknesses. The true potential lies not in viewing them as direct competitors, but rather in focusing on collaboration. By working together, humans and computers can achieve additional things that neither could accomplish on their own, requiring us to think in much wider terms than just what humans or computers can do alone.