Avery Jaffe

Dad. Rostra. Please consider the environment before printing this email.

[Avery Jaffe @averyjaffe]

Very fortunate to join Rostra with @lulumeservey and @gaby_goldberg.

Thanks @Emily_Sundberg for helping us share the news (and being part of the lore).

[Avery Jaffe @averyjaffe]

Halfway through the year, a contender for the dumbest take of 2026:

[KTVU @KTVU]

A decline in car break-ins across Oakland is being welcomed as a public safety win, but it is also contributing to a downturn for some local auto glass repair businesses. https://t.co/14r7UeCpS1

[Avery Jaffe @averyjaffe]

@RBMD1982 Adams still has a chance, though.

[Avery Jaffe @averyjaffe]

@PeterHamby Spurs never wrote a concession speech.

[Midjourney @midjourney]

Announcing a new division of Midjourney called "Midjourney Medical"

[Avery Jaffe @averyjaffe]

Tune in!

[Midjourney @midjourney]

Midjourney will be announcing its first hardware project tomorrow (Wednesday 6/17) at 6pm PT. Stay tuned for a livestream of our in-person launch event in San Francisco. If you're in town and want an invite, reply below, we have just a few slots left.

[David @DavidSHolz]

you'll wana see this

[Markie Wagner @markiewagner]

Introducing @PoeticHQ: a new AI system that executes complex multi-hour tasks with 99%+ accuracy and 10x fewer tokens than agents.

We raised $50M at $500M from Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, First Harmonic, and Genius Ventures to build AI that does complex work inside Fortune 500 companies without hallucination.

While code is too brittle, agents are too unpredictable. The work that runs the global economy - anti-money laundering, fraud investigations, underwriting - needs extreme accuracy.

So we built a new kind of software that pairs the flexibility of AI with the predictability of code.

When the world stays the same, Poetic runs fixed code: fast, cheap, identical every time. When the world changes, Poetic uses AI to regenerate its approach and find its way back to the objective.

In one year, we went from zero to an eight-figure run rate as a team of four.

Since then, we’ve scaled the team and executed the highest-stakes processes at AIG, SoFi, and Chime. At SoFi, a large US bank, Poetic reached 99%+ quality on fraud investigations in five weeks.

[Deirdre Bosa @dee_bosa]

Get ready to hear a lot more about model routing --matching the job to the model instead of running everything through the most expensive one

"For a lot of the boilerplate work, you can get five times, ten times better cost efficiency using models that are still good enough" -@cognition's @ScottWu46

[Avery Jaffe @averyjaffe]

@lulumeservey This ate

[Deirdre Bosa @dee_bosa]

Essentially an ROI guarantee. And a signal the AI cost conversation has moved from how much you're using to what you're actually getting

is this where AI pricing is headed?

[Cognition @cognition]

AI should earn its keep. Introducing the AI Productivity Guarantee.

If Devin delivers less engineering value than you’re paying for, Cognition will fund your usage until it does, up to $10 million.

It’s time for the AI industry to stop maximizing tokens and start maximizing productive output.

[Avery Jaffe @averyjaffe]

Proving the point…

[Nikki Schwab @NikkiSchwab]

.@DrBiden sasses at former WH spokesperson @AndrewBatesNC, who told the @nypost that he didn't understand "why that painful conversation for the party needed to be publicly reopened right now."

"I want to say to Andrew, call me up and say it to my face." 👀

[Avery Jaffe @averyjaffe]

@alexkaplan0 @cognition @Lux_Capital @generalcatalyst @8vc Eat fresh

[Avery Jaffe @averyjaffe]

@PeterHamby Sorry to hear Elex has Ebola :-(

[Avery Jaffe @averyjaffe]

@gaby_goldberg @lulumeservey

[Avery Jaffe @averyjaffe]

@RobSandIA Excited for your next role as Governor That Guy.

[Avery Jaffe @averyjaffe]

@BrendanPedersen Only one of these can be true.

[Avery Jaffe @averyjaffe]

.@ScottWu46 is a name you should know.

[Colossus @colossusmag]

Scott Wu is the co-founder of Cognition AI, one of the fastest-growing companies in history. He’s also the greatest competitive programmer the US has ever produced. You may have seen him doing impossible card tricks and mental math.

You’ve never seen him asked about weed, Michael Jordan, cancer, and human consciousness over a punnet of strawberries. That is what Colossus editor-in-chief Jeremy Stern did on a recent visit to San Francisco.

For those less familiar with @ScottWu46: In 2nd grade, he entered a math competition for 7th graders, lost, and was so furious he still fumes about it 20 years later. The next year he entered the 9th-grade division as a 3rd-grader and got a perfect score.

Then he won first place at the US national middle-school math competition and three straight gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, where he became the greatest American gold-medalist and coach in history.

Most of the people running the biggest AI companies met as teenagers, competing for their countries on international math and science teams. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Alexandr Wang, to name just a few.

Most agree that the von Neumann among them was Scott Wu.

In November 2023, a few weeks after his mother died of lung cancer, on the day Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI, Wu founded his own AI company: Cognition.

He was 26 and saw earlier than almost anyone that AI would converge on agents that work in the background, 24/7, like coworkers. He shipped Cognition’s AI software engineer Devin in March 2024. It worked poorly, and he took intense public criticism for it.

Now, in its first 18 months of service, Devin has generated $445 million of revenue run rate and usage has doubled every eight weeks. The US Army, Goldman Sachs, and Mercedes-Benz are all customers. Cognition is raising at a valuation around $25 billion.

@JeremySternLA sat down with Wu, the emperor of the nerds, to ask the questions we’d all ask one of the smartest people in America—building the most consequential technology of our generation—if we ever got the chance.

As well as MJ and weed, they talk about the cluster of competitive math prodigies behind so much of AI, what makes us human when AGI arrives, and why Wu believes he was put on this earth to teach AI how to code.

Read the piece below.

[Avery Jaffe @averyjaffe]

@lulumeservey Something big is happening.