solbier

@factorialfunds

[Kanishka Narayan MP @KanishkaNarayan]

Congratulations @goodwin_ml and team @fractile_ai!

This $220m raise is proof of exceptional British AI bringing investment and jobs to the UK.

Britain has a deep heritage in semiconductors - and we are now renewing it for the age of AI inference 🇬🇧

https://t.co/OmqphnUIdq

[solbier @solbier1]

We’re thrilled to be backing @fractile_ai , solving inference at the edge of what’s possible.

The current AI trend around infra and memory is deeply personal to me. A decade ago, I was part of a small team at Cruise pushing silicon to its limit. We were running perception and planning models on NVIDIA Titan with only 6GB of RAM & 2k CUDA cores.

The chips were on-device, power-constrained, thermally limited. The car's air conditioning wasn't designed to dissipate that much heat so we had to engineer custom cooling. Everything was duct tape and ingenuity. It gave me a deep appreciation for doing more with less, and for founders like @goodwin_ml at Fractile who operate the same way.

If you're the type who stares at the limits of physics and sees a challenge - reach out !

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

Exclusive: The U.K. chip startup Fractile said it has raised a $220 million Series B funding round led by Factorial Funds, Accel and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund https://t.co/V2UctHXjvT

[factorialfunds @factorialfunds]

That change you’re feeling? Like the old way of pricing and modeling entire industries is being turned on its head? It’s been slowly compounding for a while now. When you look at the IGV/SMH ratio (tracking the relative performance of software against semiconductors) you see that this rotation out of software into chips isn’t new. It’s just accelerating.

[solbier @solbier1]

Incredible work @karinanguyen . We can't manage what we can't measure - PostTrainBench is a huge win for the frontier !

[Karina @karinanguyen]

Excited to release PostTrainBench v1.0!

This benchmark evaluates the ability of frontier AI agents to post-train language models in a simplified setting.

We believe this is a first step toward tracking progress in recursive self-improvement 🧵:

[solbier @solbier1]

@Hersh_Desai @natfriedman @danielgross Crushing it Hersh ! We need an AI Grant Day reboot !

[solbier @solbier1]

@aaronburnett 🚀 SpaceX - solving the world hardest technical problems for two decades !

[solbier @solbier1]

Ethan (from Khosla, the true believers in AI before any VC would even take a meeting) posting some incredible insights:

"Hyperscalers which were able to build out incrementally as internet penetration and cloud adoption grew ! " This AI capex cycle is happening much faster.

[Ethan Choi @EthanChoi7]

For anyone who finally want VCs called out on their BS, can I get enough likes and retweets on this for folks who would like @mmurph @deedydas @MenloVentures to be transparent and share the underlying N, firmographic data, and methodology that underpins this study?

[solbier @solbier1]

@jonchu Congrats @jonchu , pumped to have you alongside for the ride ! 🎉

[solbier @solbier1]

@AravSrinivas @KoyfinCharts_ is great for this

[nico @nicochristie]

Need this printed out :)

[solbier @solbier1]

Congrats @AravSrinivas & the entire @perplexity_ai team on the Comet launch. This level of context with LLMs feels the iPhone moment for AI all over again 🚀

[solbier @solbier1]

Congrats on the launch @nicochristie & team. Time to get your team more GPUs 🫡

[nico @nicochristie]

Introducing Shortcut — the first superhuman Excel agent.

Shortcut one-shots most knowledge work tasks on Excel.

It even scores >80% on Excel World Championship Cases in ~10 minutes. That's 10x faster than humans.

Our early preview is live. Just comment for an invite code.

[solbier @solbier1]

👀

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

*ALPHABET SINKS 5% AS APPLE EXPLORES AI SEARCH IN ITS BROWSER

*APPLE'S CUE: SEARCHES IN BROWSER FELL FOR FIRST TIME IN APRIL

*APPLE'S CUE: BELIEVES PERPLEXITY, ANTHROPIC COULD BE OPTIONS

[solbier @solbier1]

When your own portfolio company turns the VC industry into a commodity. How the tables have turned. Great job @perplexity_ai team !

[Aravind Srinivas @AravSrinivas]

Deep Research is now a commodity thanks to Perplexity

[Karina @karinanguyen]

We're excited to introduce Tasks! For the first time, ChatGPT can manage tasks asynchronously on your behalf—whether it's a one-time request or an ongoing routine. Here are my favorite use cases:

1/ ChatGPT checks stock price every morning!

[solbier @solbier1]

New evals are badly needed for next gen LLMs !

[Karina @karinanguyen]

New paper! SimpleQA is newly open-sourced factuality benchmark that contains 4,326 short, fact-seeking questions that are challenging for frontier models.

Designing good evals is hard. But we used the following criteria:

- High correctness via robust data quality verification / human agreement rates.
- Good researcher UX. Easy to grade, easy to run.
- Challenging for frontier models. GPT-4o and Claude both score less than 50%
- Diversity. SimpleQA contains questions from a wide range of topics, including history, science & technology, art, geography, TV shows, etc.

[solbier @solbier1]

Thanks for having us @RagingVentures , all the panels at the event were great !

[Raging Capital Ventures @RagingVentures]

Excited to share excerpts from my chat with Sol Bier at our recent NYC Conference. Sol was an early engineer at Cruise & is the founding partner of Factorial Funds, an AI-focused VC fund. The full interview is available here: https://t.co/anR22uMhW8

A few highlights: 1/4

[Raging Capital Ventures @RagingVentures]

Excited to share excerpts from my chat with Sol Bier at our recent NYC Conference. Sol was an early engineer at Cruise & is the founding partner of Factorial Funds, an AI-focused VC fund. The full interview is available here: https://t.co/anR22uMhW8

A few highlights: 1/4

[solbier @solbier1]

@blondesnmoney Bloomberg has NAIC filings ?