Raj Kunkolienkar

building -- hotel savings for family vacations. twin dad. prev. co-founded @StoaHQ

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

The Ghosts We Inherit: India's 'New Money' Story

My mother reuses tea leaves until the water runs clear. My friend's father keeps a wooden box in his closet, with carefully folded bills arranged by denomination. Another's maintains a small diary tracking every household expense down to the last rupee. These aren't quirks – they're battle scars from a generation that survived on less.

We are their children. We carry their financial trauma in our wallets, even as we tap them against sleek payment terminals at craft coffee shops.

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

@SatanAtWink can you answer that question in 200ms, though?

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

@dillon_mulroy The speed / cost is doing most of the work here. Lets me take The weight of the prompt and roll with an underpowered base model.

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

@SubhamS____ Making the @paperplane_club WhatsApp agent behave exactly the way I want it to.

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

what was hard to enforce through prompts has now become very cheap to do so with jev. incredible product.

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

@subodhkolhe Hearing of them for the first time

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

Want to firstly test how good this is at tool discovery. Seems like an appropriate application?

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

big!!

Looks like Jev will make it 500x easier + cheaper to bake human judgement and guardrails into harnesses.

I’m expecting reliable intelligent workflows to now truly flourish.

[Diogo Almeida @CompleteSkeptic]

After co-inventing ChatGPT, I kept asking myself: why have superhuman chat models not led to AGI?

I’ve spent the last 2 years in stealth building a new way to train models (RLCD), and a new type of frontier AI model that we are releasing today: Jev

• 20-200x faster
• 40-400x cheaper (w/ output tokens free)
• Frontier composable intelligence optimized for decisions

AFAICT the shortest path to AI-based economic revolution

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

@vardhankoshal @bizaditya Took him 3 days to find the right photo to capture the feeling…

[Aditya Kulkarni @bizaditya]

modern parenting in a metro can feel like a very well furnished prison.

I know how that sounds. 3/4BHK (and EMI), cook, car, two incomes. Nobody is coming to feel sorry for anyone. But it still feels heavy.

my parents raised me where almost all neighbouring families knew my name. there was always some neighbour who cared to feed me lunch when mom was late. summers in grandparents' place. nobody was paid for any of it. that was the village. it was free and it was everywhere.

then folks (who are now in their late 30s/40s) moved to Bengaluru/Gurugram/Pune for work, kept the kids, and lost the village.

so now two adults run an operation that a dozen used to share. and the way you run it is : you buy the village back.

nanny, daycare, a school that picks up at 7 30 am and drops the kid back by 3-4pm, the extra bedroom for the grandparent/nanny.

get the drift? a kid in a metro costs more precisely because every hour of care that used to be free is now a line item.

the part I keep chewing on is the double income. it is not greed. it is the only way the math even works. but it comes with its own bill - two people on 9pm calls, family time under attack, and a mental load that no amount of hired help absorbs.

the alternative is one parent pauses. that pause usually lands on the mom. not because anyone sat down and chose it, but because the salary gap, the maternity leave, and the fifteen "who will pick up" moments a week all point the same direction. I don't think that is a choice families are making. it is a default the city hands them.

and the third option - grandparents move in - means two 68 year olds give up their friends, their evening walks, their own city, to be free labour in one they didn't pick.

every version costs someone. money, a career, presence, or a parent's retirement. there is no configuration where nobody pays. we just get to pick who.

Families raising kids in the cities are today one of the most under-served segments of society - they have all the comforts without the care young families need.

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

@JustJake @championswimmer @Railway oh wow, didn’t know that. This looks solid, more incentive to take a look :)

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

@CompleteSkeptic want to take it for a spin for a travel agent usecase. hook me up? have applied.

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

big!!

Looks like Jev will make it 500x easier + cheaper to bake human judgement and guardrails into harnesses.

I’m expecting reliable intelligent workflows to now truly flourish.

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

@championswimmer @Railway I think we’re now on Vercel purely for developer experience on staging builds + CDN / image optimisation for our frontend.

Migrated out everything else onto Cloudflare. I use Railway for ancillary stuff.

Will take you up on this when we’re cooling down a bit!

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

@RohanPaliwal7 If you’re serious about stuff, you need both of them. And it’s not always about usage limits 😃

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

@HarveenChadha Will more people shift loads to Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor tier then? Might as well get something out of it.

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

Irony would come a full circle when someone says they’re building Instinct for X where X happens to be Uber.

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

@ruthvik_sl Picking the right usecase to solve for is everything 😬

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

A-musing how the owner of WhatsApp spins out a fresh app for their agentic bet while the world is trying to build agents on WhatsApp���

[Itai | dynamic.xyz @turbahn]

Love both products, but I’m starting to think @Muse is materially better than Instinct. Like how it pops up a mini browser when it hits something it can’t do. Gives the user back control instead of stalling. Thoughtful, human-centric AI design.

[Kevin Rose @kevinrose]

fantastic product (!!)- you're hitting on something bigger than Instinct: it's not just the giants who can eat your lunch anymore. anyone can.

three years ago, building something was grabbing a couple of people, raise a little seed, put your head down, and ship in three or four months. That window was the moat. Three or four months of creativity with a little wind at my back, enough to build momentum so that by the time anyone cloned us, we were already two steps ahead.

Now, two things scare the shit out of me.

first, (online)social connectivity is at an all-time high. ideas propagate wider and faster than they ever have, and they reach the right people.

second, AI has 10-20x'd output, and it did it without seed capital. seed money was its own barrier. you had to know high-net-worth people, pitch them, and close the round - now I can point AI agents at any app, catalog every feature, and have a working clone in a day or two max. and we're at the very beginning. what takes AI days today will take hours in a few months.

so where's the moat? brand. trust and loyalty, and most likely to individuals rather than companies. If @tferriss launches a productivity app, you take it seriously in a way you never would with a random App Store listing. If @hubermanlab ships a longevity tracker, you're checking it out. In the short term, brand trumps everything.

which brings it back to Instinct. there's no question every major AI player has already spun up teams to build a competitor e.g. Muse. that's what makes this moment so exciting: the barrier to entry is next to nothing. It's also what makes it terrifying: the barrier to entry is next to nothing.