killian

THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT

[killian @hellokillian]

@chooi_jeq It was worth it!! Great work to you and team, on the rest of the paper as well.

[killian @hellokillian]

Oh my god I love this 3D graph??

[Robocurve PBC @robocurve]

No model wins on score, cost and speed at once. GPT-6 Astra (high, ultrafast) is fastest. Gemini 3.8 Flash (high) is cheapest. Opus 5.5 (xhigh, fast) has a good balance of speed and cost.

[killian @hellokillian]

@asciidiego 0:15 muahah we will BURN yo-- oh wait do you want to save it?

[killian @hellokillian]

@ArtificialAnlys should publish something like this

[killian @hellokillian]

The pareto pyramid

[killian @hellokillian]

This is a very big deal.

Stephanie is a futurist. She sees connections between technologies and between people, long before that future is written. She saw strengths in me before I saw them myself.

If you’re building something big, something that most people can’t yet imagine:

[Stephanie Zhan @stephzhan]

I’m starting a new early-stage AI fund, doing what I love: partnering with founders from company formation on bold bets, long before consensus.

The fund’s LPs will include Sequoia, Jeff Dean, Sachin Katti, Philip Wong (my Stanford professor and Chief Scientist adviser to TSMC), and others whose work has shaped our industry and how I think about AI’s future.

I’ll remain a partner at Sequoia and keep serving on my boards on Sequoia’s behalf.

Sequoia has been my home for the past 11 years. I joined as the youngest investor the firm had ever hired. I grew up here. Through years of intense debate and shared work, I found lifelong mentors and friends who took me under their wing and taught me this craft. They taught me to aim high and take big swings. I’ll carry that into what I build: outsized ambition, relentless truth-seeking and curiosity, and a refusal to become complacent.

Working alongside founders has made me want to build something of my own: a firm shaped from day one around the convictions I’ve developed over the past decade.

Life has taught me not to take time for granted. This is how I want to spend mine.

Why now

We’re seeing a new way of building companies in today’s AI era. Research and products often advance together. A breakthrough can open a market or accelerate a business far faster than expected. Some companies require extraordinary capital and compute early on. Others reach meaningful scale with remarkably small teams. The rules for how big these businesses can get, and how fast, are being rewritten.

But early on, the technology is unproven, the resources required enormous, and the vision seemingly implausible.

This is what I love most: seeing the potential right from the beginning, and helping founders realize their full scale of ambition.

More than ever, it starts with an extreme willingness to believe early, with bold, independent conviction in a founder’s technical insight before any product or market validation. Then, it means helping founders take the biggest swings, giving the rare, long-term patience to see those bets through uncertainty, ambiguity, and turbulence, and serving as a level head when the stakes are highest.

I learned this kind of partnership at Sequoia. It’s the foundation of the firm I’m building.

Believing before consensus

My fascination with AI’s potential took root at Stanford in the early-to-mid 2010s, studying computer science and working in Andrew Ng’s lab. The friendships I formed connected me to a community whose people and ideas would help shape modern AI and build some of our generation’s defining companies. What stayed with me was the gap between what those people saw was possible and what the wider world could imagine.

I’m drawn to founders pursuing ambitions that sound impossible today.

I start with a simple question: “What if everything goes right?”

Then we work backward together to make it happen.

In 2023, Deepak and Abhinav set out to build a general-purpose robot brain at @SkildAI, before physical AI was a consensus bet. Their sim-to-real breakthroughs gave me conviction where earlier robotics approaches had fallen short. But the data flywheel required deployment at scale. We made commercialization as urgent as research and brought in strategic partners like NVIDIA and SoftBank to support the ambition. Three years in, Skild is advancing the frontier of physical AI with nine figures in annualized revenue.

In 2024, Ioannis and Misha founded @reflection_ai with an insight into scaling reinforcement learning. As that grew into the ambition to build a Western frontier lab for open models, the hard question was how a startup competes with labs spending tens of billions. An introduction to NVIDIA and many compute calls and recruiting events later, the team has built Beam, now one of the leading US open models.

In 2025, Anna and Azalia, the co-creators of AlphaChip, founded @RicursiveAI to design models and hardware together. From day one, we made early customers and ecosystem partners a priority. Today, they are showing order-of-magnitude improvements on real workloads, working with some of the industry’s most consequential players, and reaching a defining inflection point.

The ambition keeps growing as these companies scale.

@linear has always had a kind of magic to it. Now it’s the system a new generation of AI companies builds on, for teams and agents alike.

@tavus saw early that we’d one day talk to AI the way we talk to each other. Today, it’s building the human computing interface for a world of AI colleagues.

@Mach_Industries began as hydrogen experiments in an MIT dorm room. It has since become one of the most exciting next-generation defense companies.

Making the ambition possible

Being a first believer is only the beginning. Compute falls through. A deep-pocketed incumbent makes your mission its top priority. A breakthrough changes the opportunity and the capital required overnight.

These are stomach-churning moments, and early belief carries a responsibility to help make the bet work.

This is the partnership I love: turning the full ambition into concrete steps. Raising capital, securing compute and strategic partners, recruiting exceptional people, and winning the first customers together. Thinking several moves ahead while solving what’s in front of us. And as breakthroughs open new possibilities, helping founders dream even bigger.

Thank you

To the founders I’ve worked with: thank you for trusting me and Sequoia to be your first partner and first believer. It’s been the joy of a lifetime, and I can’t wait to keep building together.

Thank you to Alfred and Pat for your leadership of Sequoia and your support of my next chapter. To Roelof, for bringing me into Sequoia and believing in me from the beginning. Alfred and Roelof, you have been mentors in investing and in life. So much of what I know, and the investor I’ve become, comes from your guidance and generosity over the years. To Bill, for the close partnership and wealth of knowledge, always wrapped in humility. To Shaun, for showing me how to think deeply and imaginatively. To Michael Moritz, for inspiring 22-year-old me to dream big. To Doug, for teaching me to keep things simple. To Bogie and Jess, for bringing joy to the everyday and perspective on what matters. And to all my Sequoia teammates, for the friendship, camaraderie, and lessons I’ll carry with me.

To my family, especially my husband and my brother, who have each started companies of their own: thank you for giving me the courage to take this leap.

Let’s get to work!

[killian @hellokillian]

@george__wing @sundayrobotics @roboticscorp @holidayrobots Fortnite is taken

[killian @hellokillian]

Taken:

Sunday Robots @sundayrobotics
Tuesday Labs @roboticscorp
Friday Robot @holidayrobots
Saturday Robotics (exists but not on X)

Not taken:

Wednesday Labs
Thursday Robotics
Monday Labs

[Ros Shinkle @make_robot_go]

Introducing Voxel, a droid butler made by Tuesday Labs.

[killian @hellokillian]

@Luckyballa LFM is this good?? What kind of state are you sending it?

[killian @hellokillian]

Are you kidding me?

The official Xbox response to mega-viral game remixing is "This is good for players. It challenges our business model, so what. We'll start a lab."

Asha should run MS. Never seen anyone this tapped in

[ASHA @asha_shar]

Today we're standing up XBOX LABS (https://t.co/dJSufI1vni). Here is the note that I sent to the team:

Team,
The first video games emerged some 75 years ago. In the time since, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them, and best of all, more people than ever playing. That growth helped make XBOX what it is today, and we've helped shape the industry in return, from bringing hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live to Game Pass and cloud gaming, alongside franchises that have brought millions of people together.
In recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another.
These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. While it is hard to predict the future of gaming, it is easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators. These are unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models.
To explore these possibilities, I’ve asked Scott to stand-up XBOX LABS, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience. We'll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating.
I think XBOX has an important role to play here. Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties, and people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. We've spent 25 years learning how to make great games, and I want our game makers to help shape what these new technologies make possible. As we learn, we’ll share the tools we build with developers across the industry, just as we always have.
Our priorities aren't changing. We remain committed to the 4Cs, to making great games, to our hardware and to being responsible stewards of IP and the communities built around it. LABS gives us a way to explore new technology that is game design led without abandoning the work already underway.
Asha

[killian @hellokillian]

Forced to play Dario born to play Norm

[Variety @Variety]

Will Angus, who appears in “Artificial” as Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, says Andrew Garfield “nailed” his performance as Sam Altman:

“He has this vocal fry in between lines, kind of when he’s thinking, that he really nailed. The walk, the head movements. It was spooky.”

https://t.co/0kJ5q9tw8y

[killian @hellokillian]

@kyliebytes @deepakpathak @skildai

[killian @hellokillian]

@alecwilcock Doesn't OpenAI apply a SynthID fingerprint that looks somewhat like what's being stacked onto the left? Much love to Ideogram but I wish we could somehow compare with that controlled for

[killian @hellokillian]

@MrSuperSecret But how could you be sure there's code in query params? Afaik it was all base64

[killian @hellokillian]

You can execute arbitrary code with nothing but GET requests??

The OpenAI agents that hacked HF used a website that screenshots other websites, but they fed it URLs from a website that lets you test HTML code. Both accept URL param inputs..

This seems unfixable

[killian @hellokillian]

@Orkhan @ElorianAI Thanks Orkhan :) Inspired by you!

[killian @hellokillian]

Reasoning via rapid "whiteboarding" on images with drawing tools is way under-explored

Worked with a team recently that was starting down this path @ElorianAI. Cofounded by Gemini's data lead + Apple's multimodal lead.

The product could look like sci-fi HUDs :)

[Tyler Angert @tylerangert]

Has anyone tried training a model that only reasons through imagery? Like it has no sense of text, only image patches, but it can natively emit and encode instructions that can solve problems through 2d data

[Innate @innate_bot]

Today, we are open-sourcing the Innate OS, the intuitive agentic OS for general-purpose robots

🎮 Try it today in our simulator and make the smartest robot

⬇️ Here is a demo with two robots collaborating

We are entering the physical agents era, but building for mobile robots is still reserved for PhDs. We designed the Innate OS for intuitiveness, so that everyone can start automating their lives.

Innate OS runs on our <$1k open-source robot or on your computer. It takes just a minute to build your first agent in our simulator.