Arthur Etchells

Love learning, building and hard challenges. Grew an eCommerce AI company from 0 to 8-figure ARR. Building what's next.

[Arthur Etchells @asketch]

Apparently Jensen does believe in 1:1s

https://t.co/jvvixiZRME

[Arthur Etchells @asketch]

@danh_trang Woah big moves! Always enjoyed our conversations @ SPC - stay in touch!

[Deedy @deedydas]

Maybe it’s just me but I’d rather live in a world where people yearn to put an end to cancer in 10 years over one where people make fun of those who dare to dream.

[Arthur Etchells @asketch]

@adityaag Favorite examples?

[Arthur Etchells @asketch]

It’s been amazing to see @danjohnhunter and Steve build electrical grid intelligence at warp speed and get field validation within the first few months.

Proud to be along the ride as a small investor in @nyquishq. LFG!

[Daniel J Hunter @danjohnhunter]

Excited to share that @nyquishq has raised $6.3M, co-led by @gigascale and @spc.

Like an EKG for the grid, Nyquis helps utilities spot hidden faults and plan for growing demand. We’re already monitoring 800 miles of power lines.

Watch our launch film below.

[Arthur Etchells @asketch]

@danjohnhunter @nyquishq @gigascale @spc @SovereignsCap @PickensAllison @taro_f @aaroncbailey @joshpuckett @scriptcapital An important problem and impressive solution - It’s been incredible to see what you’ve accomplished in a short while. LFG!

[Arthur Etchells @asketch]

✅

[TJ Parker⚡️ @tjparker]

@marcbaghadjian Because after trying every hobby under the sun and buying everything reasonably imaginable, you eventually realize there are few things more fun than solving hard problems. Same reason I like playing golf or skiing or whatever. But it’s even more fun.

[Arthur Etchells @asketch]

@ellyshin_ What if firms respond to increasing demand for CRO and CDMO slots by… increasing supply of same?

[Arthur Etchells @asketch]

Get it @michaelfanous1!

[Chris Barber @chrisbarber]

I asked 36 people in AI who to talk to if you're selling a private dataset, like a shut-down startup's data:

19 votes: micro1 (@aliansarinik)

9 votes: Mercor (@BrendanFoody, @adarsh_exe, @suryamidha)

5 votes each:
- Handshake (@GarrettLord, @benmchristensen, @scottringwelski)
- SF Data (@brandonguo, @faizsiddiqii)

4 votes: Surge (@echen)

3 votes each:
- AfterQuery (@CarlosGeorgescu, @spencermateega)
- Ooak Data (@PLouisV, @ThomAub, @adeRL_g)

2 votes each:
- DataVendor (@seeklis, @parth220, @jayendra_ram)
- Grepped (@eriknewsha)
- Nyne (@michaelfanous1, Emad Fanous)
- Standard Data

36 people voted. People couldn't pick a company they work at or founded. Grepped received one negative vote as well. Disclosure: on this list, I'm a small investor in AfterQuery, Fleet, Ionic, Nyne, Ooak Data, Patronus, and SF Data. I didn't vote.

Continued:

[Arthur Etchells @asketch]

@zeta_globin Say more…?

[zeta @zeta_globin]

underdiscussed background to GLPs is the lack of murine work that fueled its success - anglerfish? yes! gila monsters? yes! mouse ko models? luckily no!!!

[Doris Tsao @doristsao]

1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness.
New preprint: https://t.co/K8BwiHXvXg (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)

[Arthur Etchells @asketch]

Always good to see friends tackle entertaining side quests. Read the full writeup for an amazing primer on RL for embodied AI!

[Eric Gu @ericyuegu]

1/ I trained an AI to be top 1% in the world at Super Smash Bros. Melee by watching 80k hours of human replay.

Meet HAL.

[Emma Camp @emmma_camp_]

These NYC apartments are standing empty, not because the owners don't want to rent them, but because rent stabilization laws prohibit them from charging enough to earn back the costs of necessary repairs.

My latest for @WSJFreeEx

[Arthur Etchells @asketch]

@DanielLurie Can you please cut this red tape?

https://t.co/tEr4YQ8BdF

[Thankful Brian Graham 🦬🦃 @iroasmas]

This suddenly popped into my head

[Jonathan Fischoff @jfischoff]

Terance Tao: Imagine prescribing a drug no one understood.
Medical community:

[Arthur Etchells @asketch]

@doodlestein Would be amazing if my old units worked flawlessly as AirPlay speakers too!

[Jack Henneman @jbhenneman]

Texas: Where nobody will admit climate change is real, but policy responses do more to add green energy and build resilience against temperature volatility than just about any other American state.

Doing matters more than talkin'.

[Arthur Etchells @asketch]

Not sure this is the whole story...

Cursor used turbopuffer to save LLM inference costs, not (just) improve user metrics.

For all the complexity of Cursor mirroring every user's codebase to a cloud database, publicly-discussed lift in Cursor's metrics was marginal.

The thing that changed around July was Cursor's access to ~infinite, cheap compute from the SpaceXAi acquisition.

[Simon Eskildsen @Sirupsen]

(turbopuffer co-founder) yeah, Cursor called us in July and told us their new model code evals didn't show the same gain from semsearch as previous models. selecting the right piece of context in a single turn used to be huge, but modern code-local agents can answer complex questions with simple search tools like grep(1)

in local code bases, with a low-scale amount of data to search, and when you need a full copy of the data on your machine anyway (to edit and run), offloading to search infrastructure is overkill. grep works fine, and is how it's been done by expert programmers for decades

search engines are necessary if you have lots of data to search over, and want to select the right context for the task rather than downloading all of it to your agent's disk. search engines also let you spend compute up front to save turns at search time. large datasets or high qps are where it shines

we are close to the Cursor team, and will work with them on more large-scale search in the future :) we'd have done the same thing