Marco Mascorro

Researching LLMs | Roboticist | Prev: Partner @a16z (inv @cursor_ai, @thinkymachines, @bfl_ml, etc), cofounded Fellow Robots, @BMW Research

[Marco Mascorro @Mascobot]

Jensen came to our @a16z's Runtime event and he signed our very first personal GPU AI Workstation Founders Edition (4x RTX 6000 Pro Blackwell)

"To a16z Builders of Tomorrow!" - Jensen

[Marco Mascorro @Mascobot]

🚨 New: We built @a16z's personal GPU AI Workstation Founders Edition

- 4x NVIDIA RTX 6000 PRO Blackwell Max-Q (384GB total VRAM)
- 8TB of NVMe PCIe 5.0 storage
- AMD Threadripper PRO 7975WX (32 cores, 64 threads)
- 256GB ECC DDR5 RAM
- 1650Watts at peak (runs on a standard 15Amp/120V circuit).

For training, AI research, and deploying models locally. A datacenter-class AI rig you can keep under your desk.

We are planning to make a limited number of these a16z AI Workstations.

Build guide + how you can make your own 👇

[Marco Mascorro @Mascobot]

Go @MillionInt, @_arohan_ & @coreauto Team!

[Chris Barber @chrisbarber]

I asked people which neolabs under $10B have the highest talent density:

32 votes: Core Automation (@MillionInt, @_arohan_)

26 votes: Periodic Labs (@LiamFedus, @ekindogus)

20 votes: Flapping Airplanes (@spectorb, @amspector100, @aidanmantine)

18 votes: Standard Intelligence (@G413N, @devanshpandey)

8 votes: Ricursive (@annadgoldie, @Azaliamirh)

5 votes each:
- Ineffable (David Silver)
- Mirendil (@bneyshabur, @HarshMeh1a, @shayan_, @tararezaeikh)
- Recursive (@RichardSocher, @_rockt, @timshi_ai, @josh_tobin_, @CaimingXiong, @jeffclune, @tydsh, Alexey Dosovitskiy)

3 votes each:
- Applied Compute (@ypatil125, @rhythmrg, @lindensli)
- Isara (@ezhang7423, @hegasz)
- Prime Intellect (@vincentweisser, @johannes_hage)

2 votes each:
- Elorian (@AndrewDai, @yinfeiy, @SethInternet)
- Goodfire (@eric_ho, @DanJBalsam, @banburismus_)
- Inherent (@tantumscollins, @edwardfhughes, @LouisKirschAI, @kallyaleksiev)
- Trajectory (@rronak_, @QuantumArjun, @MichaelElabd)
- World Labs (@drfeifei, @jcjohnss, @BenMildenhall, @chlassner)

People couldn't pick a company they work at or founded. Disclosure: I'm a small investor in Applied Compute, Factory, Standard Intelligence, Trajectory and Wafer. I didn't vote.

Continued:

[Marco Mascorro @Mascobot]

This is a great convo and a must listen with @_sholtodouglas & @the_marwell:

[Joe Lonsdale @JTLonsdale]

Some of my friends will be mad I recorded this, and comms people at Anthropic objected to releasing certain parts (and delayed it).

But it's important for leaders to make these conversations happen. And I have a lot of respect for these two.

Over a month ago, I sat down with Anthropic's key technical leaders @_sholtodouglas & @the_marwell for an optimistic insiders’ view of the AI frontier, with hard questions too: open source, regulatory capture, slowing down USA vs China, and more.

[Marco Mascorro @Mascobot]

@0xSigil @underdogdotai Congrats Sigil - you are a generational founder :)

[Marco Mascorro @Mascobot]

I’ve been using @underdogdotai and it’s pretty neat. It runs all locally and it’s the best private/personal AI I’ve tested with my email.

Kudos to @0xSigil & team for they launch:

[Sigil Wen @0xSigil]

Introducing Underdog, your Private Personal AI on devices you already own

Today we're announcing our backing from @a16z @khoslaventures @HummingbirdVC Anthology (@AnthropicAI @MenloVentures) @patrickc @naval @rauchg @polynoamial @Thom_Wolf @Mascobot @tszzl @OfficialLoganK and other top AI leaders

Our mission is to provide free, capable, reliable and private AI to billions of people.

Underdog’s Law: today’s frontier intelligence reaches your devices in six months.

We’re starting with fast, capable AI that runs on consumer hardware. By co-designing models and inference engines, we’re pushing the frontier of capability, speed, power and data efficiency.

Our research also spans agentic commerce, confidential inference, and how AI will reshape the internet economy.

Privacy and capability no longer needs to be a tradeoff. If you believe in this future, join us. Time to build.

[Thomas Wolf @Thom_Wolf]

seems obvious that most personal AI should run on your device

love what Sigil is building with Underdog - powered by the Hugging Face hub

[Sigil Wen @0xSigil]

Introducing Underdog, your Private Personal AI on devices you already own

Today we're announcing our backing from @a16z @khoslaventures @HummingbirdVC Anthology (@AnthropicAI @MenloVentures) @patrickc @naval @rauchg @polynoamial @Thom_Wolf @Mascobot @tszzl @OfficialLoganK and other top AI leaders

Our mission is to provide free, capable, reliable and private AI to billions of people.

Underdog’s Law: today’s frontier intelligence reaches your devices in six months.

We’re starting with fast, capable AI that runs on consumer hardware. By co-designing models and inference engines, we’re pushing the frontier of capability, speed, power and data efficiency.

Our research also spans agentic commerce, confidential inference, and how AI will reshape the internet economy.

Privacy and capability no longer needs to be a tradeoff. If you believe in this future, join us. Time to build.

[Marco Mascorro @Mascobot]

@MehdiHacks Oh you need then a pixel pump! https://t.co/uYFrLuVmrP

[Marco Mascorro @Mascobot]

@martin_casado @drfeifei Congrats @drfeifei, @martin_casado @jcjohnss, @BenMildenhall & team!

[Marco Mascorro @Mascobot]

@ivanburazin Huge

[Marco Mascorro @Mascobot]

I'll be at IROS this week - ping me if you want to chat about robots, VLAs, actuators & simulation

[Marco Mascorro @Mascobot]

@RyanGreenblatt Congrats!

[Marco Mascorro @Mascobot]

@yachty66 @chacon Best person to get this done :)

[Robin Rombach @robrombach]

Today we release FLUX 3 Action - an open-weight 7B world-action model, achieving SOTA performance and efficiency on various leaderboards such as RoboLab.

I am incredible proud of the team - and both backbone and embodiment-specific finetunes are open weight, alongside the training recipes!

[Marco Mascorro @Mascobot]

@alexgshaw Nice!

[Marco Mascorro @Mascobot]

Congrats @alex_conneau & team! It was an honor to work with this team.

[Alexis Conneau @alex_conneau]

Big update: @WaveFormsAI was acquired by @Meta.

Today at #MetaConnect, you’ll see a little of what we’ve all been building. ✨🤖

[Alexis Conneau @alex_conneau]

Big update: @WaveFormsAI was acquired by @Meta.

Today at #MetaConnect, you’ll see a little of what we’ve all been building. ✨🤖

[Sigil Wen @0xSigil]

when i was 17, i flew 4,236 km to san francisco and turned down the most selective Ivy League program

instead of college, i lived out of wework, hacked on AI models, while figuring out how to get an o1 visa as a teenager 🇺🇸

luckily i met @DavidSHolz who was kind enough to give me a place to sleep and warm clothing. while there i watched him quit his job to start a discord server... i thought mf was crazy. that became @midjourney

at 18, i joined a hacker house and lived with @karpathy, @polynoamial. @Mascobot, and other brilliant ai researchers, scientists, engineers, founders

it was amazing- whenever a new ai model dropped (whisper, dalle, stable diffusion) we invited our friends over to hack.

in 2022, @8enmann (founder of an new ai lab) came over to our house to hack and invited us to try his new Slackbot as one of its first users. that became @claudeai, which launched publicly in 2023

i learned how to build by making dumb projects with cool tech alongside dope people - like putting stable diffusion into a minecraft server and showing karpathy homeless mark zuckerberg generated in real time with blocks

my projects proved to other ppl that i could build stuff, which got me the opportunity to work with @naval who sponsored my o1 visa (ty 🐐)

after much visa anxiety getting my o1 and airchat getting acquired, I started giving out "Alien of Extraordinary Ability" hoodies as a meme which serendipitously started @extraordinary. now Extraordinary helps the smartest people in the world come to 🇺🇸 and powers frontier companies like @Ramp, @Cognition, @llmh, @a16z

building in san francisco has been incredible. There's no other place like it in the world - the concentration of genius talent is insane. ppl are so willing to help you if you are earnest. i couldn't be where i am today if i stayed in Canada or went to college!

today @gaganbiyani, @bhorowitz, @pmarca, @eriktorenberg and @a16z are launching the Horowitz Andreessen Acadamy

man i wish i had something like this when i first came to san francisco. it was so hard doing it myself

i'm honored to be a mentor for the upcoming college opt-outs who want to spend their time building frotnier technology and making a dent on the universe! LFG

[Sigil Wen @0xSigil]

Meet Husky: a Model-Specific Inference (MSI) engine up to 4.5× faster than Apple's MLX

Woof, Underdog's Pareto frontier model, now runs up to 730 tokens/sec on a MacBook

Finally local models are as fast & capable. Try it now in https://t.co/hAWKvlClUC - your personal private AI

[Marco Mascorro @Mascobot]

@Thom_Wolf Yep

[Marco Mascorro @Mascobot]

We really need a 'Millennium Prize' for alignment.

MATS and the Ant Fellows Program are already great starts for folks that want to get into it, but I know many folks would be heavily incentivized to pursue independent research if the incentives were better aligned for everyone, including with folks at the AI labs.

[Marco Mascorro @Mascobot]

This is a very cool project from @rtwlz - great project to work with him and the @coreauto team!

[Riley Walz @rtwlz]

Some news: 5 months ago I joined @coreauto, a small research lab focused on new ways for models to learn. I’m also hiring four interns to do something my younger self would've loved.

It started with a pretty unusual project. We set up a handful of small online businesses, and put an agent in charge. We gave each business some initial funding and a seed idea, and off they went, trying to sell real things to real customers while we watched. It’s about as open-ended and unforgiving a task as you can probably give to an agent, with countless decisions to make and effects that take time to become clear.

Each business got its own bank account, a debit card to pay suppliers, a web browser, an email inbox, a domain name, cloud infrastructure and a schedule. Every few hours, the agent woke up and decided what to do. It might update a landing page, adjust an ad campaign, reply to a customer, and then go back to sleep.

The agents built actual storefronts and apps. They bought ads, attracted visitors, and even made some sales. The agents acted as operators that kept a business moving, but we noticed they never really stepped back to strategize about what might move the needle. If people weren’t buying, why? Was the landing page unappealing? Or maybe the offer itself was the problem?

One amusing example was the very first order a customer placed. Our supplier had run out of stock. But it’s a dropshipping business, and thankfully tens of other suppliers carried the same product. Instead of trying another supplier, the agent almost immediately sent the customer a polite apology and attempted to issue a refund. Gah! So close!

The agents could handle much of the work of getting a business up and running. What they struggled with was deciding what to change when it wasn’t working.

That’s what we want to understand. We also want to see what changes when people take the lead. What does a business operator actually do all day when agents can do so much? What new work does this allow them to do? Which decisions can’t be delegated?

—

So this winter we're hiring 4 interns as Associate General Managers. Associate Product Manager internships are programs that give early career generalists a product to own. We want to try something similar, but with entire businesses.

You’ll create and grow businesses, with agents handling the routine work so you can focus on figuring out what matters. Each AGM gets a budget and our agent infrastructure that’s designed for this. Which ideas to try is up to you. Put more money behind what finds customers and keep refining.

Where you step in tells us what agents can't do yet. You'll be in our SF office with me and people I’m so fortunate to work with, like @_arohan_, @joannejang, @MillionInt, @marksaroufim and @juliacvillagra

We don't care much where you went to school or what your resume looks like. We’re looking for enterprising people with a drive to create, who’ve made money on the internet before and already use AI extensively to enable their ideas. If that sounds like you: https://t.co/GfiGCVtMYU