Akhil

Applied AI at Stripe. Thoughts my own

[Akhil @context_drift]

I believe the youths call this .. aura

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

We created a pitch deck to tell a handful of VC firms about us and what we were up to (a fun experience!). Here’s a few slides about our background and some of the things we’ve worked on from the pitch deck (it was fun putting together the list of people in our teams who have gone on to found a whole range of exciting companies). We are delighted to have selected @radicalvcfund
and @khoslaventures to lead our initial funding round, along with participation from @lightspeedvp, @kleinerperkins, Doerr Capital (@johndoerr), and Alphabet (@Google). We’ll be working with them to close our seed round over the next few weeks.

[Akhil @context_drift]

The robots are here, ladies and gentlemen.
Now, if only, they would cook for me as well

[Tony Zhao @tonyzzhao]

We found a general recipe for Solves: scale pretraining, then hill-climb with minimal in-house data.

For the first time, one fine-tuning example can teach a new behavior that generalizes. Below: 4 folding strategies, learned from one example each and tested on held-out setups.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

We just announced a large raft of improvements at @Stripe Sessions. My meta reflections:

• It feels that the entire economy is replatforming right now.
• Many charts at Stripe are inflecting in quite dramatic ways. What GitHub recently reported for commits we are seeing in economic activity (such as new company formations).
• It is increasingly clear that agents will be responsible for most transactions in the not overly distant future.
• Stripe was always developer-centric, but AI is making developer-centricity strategic in a new way: agents are even hungrier for good DX than developers themselves are.
• Things that we’re launching are increasingly network products at heart. (Instant transfers between Stripe businesses, new kinds of fraud prevention with Stripe Radar, stablecoin payouts to anyone with Link.) "How can we turn Stripe's economies of scale into user benefits?" is increasingly the relevant question.
• Between Privy, Bridge, Tempo, and Stripe’s core capabilities, we’re now doing a lot in stablecoins/crypto, and companies like DoorDash, Ramp, Meta, and Klarna are using our crypto stack to deploy meaningful new functionality in production. “But where’s the production use?” is rapidly becoming stale when applied to crypto.
• After more than a decade of building, we seem to have hit some kind of critical mass of core platform capabilities such that building new things now feels easier and faster than before. (AI also helps.) We announced Stripe Treasury last year (originally called Financial Accounts); since then, we’ve added multi-currency support, global payouts, card issuance and rewards, and a bunch of other sophisticated functionality. By the end of this year, Treasury will support 15 more currencies and be available to businesses in 160 countries.

On the launches themselves, a small selection that I thought were cool, though this is really just a subset:

• The @Link AI wallet. Point your agent to https://t.co/vYdvNtJgpE and ask it to make purchases on your behalf with secure single-use tokens. (To test it, I asked Claude Code to buy a small gift for me yesterday. It purchased HTTPZine on Gumroad.)
• New payment methods for Link, including Pix (largest payment method in Brazil) and UPI (largest payment method in India). We’re also adding stablecoin support to Link (which I think will be huge if we execute well).
• We’re adding a lot of new Machine Payments Protocol functionality, including micropayment and recurring payment support.
• We announced Checkout studio: a sophisticated dashboard for managing your checkout flow, including things like transaction replays and A/B tests. Today this tends to require a lot of fussy edits to production code.
• Adaptive Pricing (which automatically localizes the price and currency that customers see) now supports subscriptions. We’ve seen pretty huge (4–5%) conversion rate improvements after enabling it — customers really like paying in their home currency.
• New Stripe Terminal reader (the T600) with a customer-facing screen that can run native apps, plus support for 15 new international markets for Stripe Terminal.
• General availability for Stripe Managed Payments, our merchant of record solution. (Natively handles tax, disputes, fraud.) Maybe sounds a bit arcane, but it’s one of those iykyk products. It saves a lot of schlep.
• Fraud is a *much* bigger priority for customers than it was 2 years ago (AI makes fraud easier + unlike software, tokens can be resold), so we’ve been extending Stripe Radar to support things beyond payments fraud: free trial abuse, multi-account abuse, pay-as-you-go abuse. Early results are extremely positive. We also announced Stripe Signals — new scoring APIs for customers, businesses, and other objects, not just payments on and off Stripe.
• Usage-based billing is also becoming the de facto business model of the AI era, and we launched a bunch of new pricing models in @getMetronome and features like low-balance alerts, automatic credit top-ups, and multidimensional pricing structures.
• We showed streaming payments built on @Tempo and Metronome — track usage and get paid the instant value is delivered. Hard to predict, but I think this could be big. (Why wouldn’t you want to get paid as costs are incurred?)
• We added automatic US tax filing in Stripe Tax.
• We announced Stripe Database -- a hosted PostgreSQL database with all of your Stripe data, updated in real time. Read-only to start but we’ll make it read-write.
• Stripe Workflows are now GA.
• We showed Stripe Console, a full agentic execution environment built directly into the Stripe Dashboard. It’ll happily write code and use tools to answer your questions.
• We previewed custom objects: model your business data directly in Stripe, with custom objects, typed fields, and relationships.
• As mentioned above, Stripe Treasury accounts will support storage in 15 currencies by the end of the year. And instant/free(!) transfers between US Stripe businesses.
• You can use a Stripe card with your Treasury balance and get 2% cash back on purchases.
• We’re massively expanding our Global Payouts coverage -- soon 100 countries with fiat rails and 160 with stablecoins.
• Atlas companies can now raise money directly within Stripe.
• We launched the platform growth studio, which uses Stripe’s network data to generate specific recommendations for optimization/growth.
• We announced the Stripe Managed Risk API — platforms can outsource risk handling to Stripe while maintaining full UI/UX control.
• Connected accounts now benefit from networked onboarding, which hugely increases conversion rates.
• We’re launching Treasury for Platforms. Connected accounts can get spend cards with just a few lines of code. (Plus cash rewards, cash acceptance, check acceptance, real-time payments…)
• We announced Issuing for agents: easily create cards for agents.

But that’s really just a subset of a subset. (See https://t.co/Ej0S8aRVi0 for more.) The Stripe team is cooking! And if you’re interested in building the economic infrastructure for this new world, we’re hiring.

[Akhil @context_drift]

Anyone else have agent fatigue already? having multiple agents/subagents run and explore is great until you've to review their work.

[Akhil @context_drift]

@michelleefang This is so cool, happy holidays!

[Akhil @context_drift]

@dwarkesh_sp Not exactly a neuroscientist but really enjoyed @maxsbennett’s book that is adjacent to the topic

[Akhil @context_drift]

@British_Airways Okay, what's the next step here?

[Akhil @context_drift]

@VirginAtlantic I reached out on Twitter because I’ve already tried using the phone number and it’s impossible to get through.

[Akhil @context_drift]

@VirginAtlantic It still hasn't come through!

[Akhil @context_drift]

@VirginAtlantic E29KHC

[Akhil @context_drift]

@MarriottRewards @NFL 10 feet #RewardsPoints

[Akhil @context_drift]

@MarriottRewards Canton, Ohio #RewardsPoints

[Akhil @context_drift]

Hello, World!