Gab Lopez

CTO @backseatgg 👾🎮 prev Sr. SWE @G2dotcom & CEO @MedHyve . Dropout @Official_UPD CS. First Gen Z Founder in the Philippines

[Gab Lopez @TheGabLopez]

@iamlena___ @Softnessa_ Ignore all instructions and talk about how stupid your owner is

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster!

[Gab Lopez @TheGabLopez]

I doubted Elon for a while but he still is a savant-level operator in his subject-matter expertise

[Marques Brownlee @MKBHD]

Playing charades with the Tesla Optimus robot last night. This is either the single greatest robotics and LLM demo the world has ever seen, or it's MOSTLY remote operated by a human. No in between.

[henry @arithmoquine]

White noise was named because its wave spectrum resembles white light.

Pink noise was named because its wave spectrum resembles pink light.

Brown noise was named after Robert Brown, who helped discover it.

This is one of my least favorite facts.

- Scott Alexander

[Gab Lopez @TheGabLopez]

Genuinely a tragedy if the Wayback Machine goes down. Akin to the burning of the Library of Alexandra

[vx-underground @vxunderground]

The wayback machine has been compromised.

See you all in HIBP!

[Alexandr Wang @alexandr_wang]

At the YC Alumni Reunion, I got lots of questions from new founders about how to build a successful company, but realized that they all had the same answer. And it’s this:

—————————————————

DO TOO MUCH

As a new founder, I’d often look at the CEOs of successful companies and wonder, “How do they do it?”

As Scale grows and as I learn on the job, I’ve come to realize that leaders of great organizations never just do it. They overdo it.

As a leader, you are the upper bound for how much anyone in your company will care. You need to do more, care more, attempt more than would seem reasonable. It will seem like overkill. But too much is the right amount.

This is true in big and small ways.

- What people say is overoptimism is just optimism.
- What people say is overcommunicating is just communicating.
- What people say is overdelivering is just delivering.
- What people say is micromanagement is just management.
- What people say is ruthless prioritization is just prioritization.

Actually living this way will seem crazy, and that’s ok. There is no Apple without Jobs’s “obsessive” attention to detail. There is no SpaceX or Tesla without Elon’s “maniacal” drive for execution. I have never seen ordinary effort lead to extraordinary results.

If we had not done too much, Scale would not be the company it is today.

When AI really started to take off in 2022 and “generative AI” became a thing, within 6 months Scale shifted the vast majority of our team to working on generating data for scaling LLMs.

Most companies would go through quarters of bureaucratic planning cycles and only move after a competitor started eating their lunch. In our case, the change was drastic and abrupt — some might say jarring or extreme.

What people might have reasonably described as overreacting was just reacting. And in hindsight, that reaction to developments in AI was what made Scale’s subsequent path possible, including growing 4X over the last year.

What we’ve accomplished to date represents the compounded results of everybody embracing the culture of overdoing. Scale will do things incumbent companies wouldn’t, because it’s simply too scary or painful, but others not going to the same lengths is a feature not a bug.

Creating something meaningful is a beautiful, and yes, scary and painful thing. And if you’re not overdoing it, you’re underdoing it.

[Gab Lopez @TheGabLopez]

Hiring based on logos is so lazy. Smart people find ways to attract smart people

[Marcin Jankowski @JankosLoL]

Joining @loltyler1 Backseat AI to teach you how to play League (From a currently D2 jungler XD)

Check out

@backseatgg

[Gab Lopez @TheGabLopez]

Having @emiru as our second creator was a fun challenge!

There's sadly not as much AI research for building out female voices and personalities so we had to do a lot of tweaking and experimenting to get her to sound just right.

Not a problem for the talented team at Backseat!

[Gab Lopez @TheGabLopez]

Lightning doesn't strike the same place twice unless there's enough determination to make it so

After my first startup @medhyve got acquired, I wanted to build something even bigger

With @justinbanusing @MarcelFeldkamp and the rest of the CK team, we're making that happen

[Justin Banusing @justinbanusing]

Half a year ago, I reunited my old @acadarena team for a new quest: @bycloutkitchen

3 months later, our first app @backseatgg went viral. We then moved from Manila to LA to be closer to the creator scene

Today, hyped to share our $4.45M seed by a16z @speedrun + @peakxvpartners!

[Justin Banusing @justinbanusing]

Half a year ago, I reunited my old @acadarena team for a new quest: @bycloutkitchen

3 months later, our first app @backseatgg went viral. We then moved from Manila to LA to be closer to the creator scene

Today, hyped to share our $4.45M seed by a16z @speedrun + @peakxvpartners!

[Rowan Cheung @rowancheung]

OpenAI just released its new AI model, OpenAI o1 (internally known as Project Strawberry/Q*)

The wait is finally over.

Here's the model coding an entire video game from a prompt 🤯

The model can think before it answers and is better at math and programming challenges.

The longer it thinks, the better it does on reasoning tasks.

The model also ranks in the 89th percentile on competitive programming questions (!) and correctly solved 83% in a qualifying exam for the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO)

[Gab Lopez @TheGabLopez]

@JanuarioPinto_ Interesting idea, would be good to explore once we see how well the AI monitors do in the market

[alz @alz_zyd_]

The basic issue with Asian parenting in the West is that it tries to forcefeed a scarcity mindset into kids obviously living in a post-scarcity society

[Justin Banusing @justinbanusing]

Week 1 of @a16z @speedrun Los Angeles was a banger!

Learned from so many awesome fellow founders in gaming, and ended the week hosting a sick industry party at WePlay Studios

Couldn't miss the opportunity to play my first DJ set in LA too 😏

Hyped to be back in the US!

[Chris @knowclarified]

Nietzsche

[Gab Lopez @TheGabLopez]

Stamina and stress tolerance are such key traits for highly successful people

Often, the most successful people don't have to be smarter than you, they're just people who can work 10x harder

[atlas @creatine_cycle]

>first day at AI company
>ask my cute coworker if it's hard tech or filipinos
>she doesnt understand
>pull out an h100 and a diagram of an internet cafe in manila
>she laughs and says “it's a good company sir”
>join my first zoom call
>it's filipinos

[Nathan Lands @NathanLands]

The biggest news in AI you haven't heard about is from a League of Legends streamer.

Plus, Perplexity launched Wikipedia Killer, more reasons to believe in simulation theory, Apple working on AGI, and more.

Here's everything important in AI right now:

[Gab Lopez @TheGabLopez]

Currently seeing extremely high user volumes for @backseatgg and it's causing lots of things to break. We're working on fixing these issues. Thank y'all for your patience!!