Thomas Mathew

co-founder & cto @ percepta | previously product @ palantir

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Detroit impressions:

• The downtown is full of beautiful buildings. All of them seem to have been built specifically in the 1920s. I guess that is after the city had accumulated enough auto wealth but before the twin hits of Modernism and the Depression. (I hadn't known that the GM Renaissance Center, built as a revitalization project, was at the time the largest private development in US history, and also at the time the world's tallest hotel. It may be large, but it is not pretty.) The downtown is surprisingly depopulated -- both the streets and the sidewalks feel empty. That said, it didn't feel at all unsafe. There are lots of great homes in the suburbs.

• The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation is amazing, and it's worth visiting Detroit for it alone. Among many (many) other things, it contains the oldest known surviving steam engine in the world, the actual Montgomery bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, a deconstructed Model T, a deconstructed Eames Chair, and many great cars, agricultural equipment, locomotives, industrial specimens, and more. (They have the Lincoln Continental that JFK was riding in when assassinated -- which, apparently, was returned to service and used by several subsequent presidents.)

• The museum made me wonder why American car design peaked in the mid-60s. (This fact is very evident at the museum.) The LLMs blame the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. (Not quite https://t.co/ox5TEECH6N, but close.)

• Good food exists but it is hard to find.

• The Heidelberg Project also exists and is unique.

• We stayed at the Dearborn Inn, which is wonderful, and contains cottages modeled after the homes of significant American figures. Dearborn (and Hamtramck) are now predominantly Muslim, apparently for reasons that go back a century to Henry Ford's $5 wage. Dearborn felt noticeably prosperous (we stopped for coffee at a fancy Japanese cheesecake cafe); Hamtramck did not.

• https://t.co/OOkCI7DbAz says that the Hispanic population of Michigan is just 6%. Coming from California, the absence is very striking.

• The Detroit Institute of Arts is remarkable, particularly the room with the American landscapes and the section with the Dutch masters (especially The Visitation). An obvious question is why there is nothing quite like it in the Bay Area given how much richer the latter is than Detroit ever was -- we techies are just so uncultured by comparison. The Diego Rivera murals are amazing (and quite strange; you can see why they were controversial).

• Detroit is full of historic plaques -- they are truly everywhere. This is presumably due in part to the fact that Detroit has a lot of history, but it still has many more than places with comparable historical depth. Some research suggests that it might be related to generous tax credits for historic preservation. Whether or not that is true, Detroit persuades me that other places should engage in more plaquemaxxing.

• I recommend a visit! You overall leave with some sense for how exciting America must have felt in the early 20th century.

[Hirsh Jain @hirshjain]

Aka join @percepta!

[Hirsh Jain @hirshjain]

Reupping this seeking architects in new york. Come build the future w us. Healthy referral bonus to anyone who we hire as a staff platform eng :)

[Hirsh Jain @hirshjain]

https://t.co/AZra0rINxA

[Hirsh Jain @hirshjain]

Percepta is opening in Europe.

We've worked w EU customers since day 1. I visited 13 times last year. Each trip I'm left with conviction that we need to invest more.

@colin_dv (our Head of Europe) addresses the "once-in-a-generation opportunity" in a new post below. Join us!!

[Hirsh Jain @hirshjain]

This is what a company transforming itself and its offering looks like!!! Always inspired by @cityblockhealth & @toyinajayidoc, proud to be a partner in this work

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

@ChristosTzamos Wait this is so awesome!! Both 1) the C compiler to LLM weights and 2) the logarithmic complexity hard-max attention and its potential generalizations. Inspiring!

[Athul Paul Jacob @apjacob03]

What does encoding an interpreter INTO the weights of an autoregressive transformer + O(log N) attention get you? A transformer that executes arbitrary programs, Sudoku solvers, optimization algorithms, and more, with 100% accuracy across millions of tokens, exponentially fast

[Christos Tzamos @ChristosTzamos]

1/4 LLMs solve research grade math problems but struggle with basic calculations. We bridge this gap by turning them to computers.

We built a computer INSIDE a transformer that can run programs for millions of steps in seconds solving even the hardest Sudokus with 100% accuracy

[Athul Paul Jacob @apjacob03]

Our recent results show that autoregressive LLMs CAN in fact do constraint satisfaction extremely reliably.

[Athul Paul Jacob @apjacob03]

1/N Over the past year, one thing that has become increasingly clear to me is that timelines are compressing very very quickly.

That changes what is worth attempting. The problems that would have sounded too early, or too ambitious even recently are starting to look tractable.

[Hirsh Jain @hirshjain]

4/6 Perhaps most importantly… Palantir does not have a monopoly on applying AI. No one company does or should. It's terrifying for the future of global innovation if we let companies do things like this.

[Hirsh Jain @hirshjain]

1/6 Palantir sued 3 of Percepta's employees (including me) last week. They're trying to bully us. We should all be concerned when a $400B+ giant is attacking a 35-person start-up over baseless allegations.

[Hirsh Jain @hirshjain]

percepta dot ai

[Eugene Vinitsky 🦋 @EugeneVinitsky]

We're finally out of stealth: https://t.co/mRieBSLG0j
We're a research / engineering team working together in industries like health and logistics to ship ML tools that drastically improve productivity. If you're interested in ML and RL work that matters, take a look 😀

[Athul Paul Jacob @apjacob03]

Today marks an important milestone.

I’m launching Percepta together with @htaneja, @hirshjain, @tmathew0309, Radha Jain, @marisbest2, @KonstDaskalakis and an incredible team, with the goal of bringing AI to the core industries that run our economy. For AI to deliver transformational impact, we need a strategy that orchestrates multiple disciplines. The most meaningful work of my career has been with strong interdisciplinary teams who take on ambitious challenges.

That’s the kind of team we’re building at Percepta.

Two pillars key pillars our work:

First, we deeply partner. Our researchers, product managers, and engineers work inside our partners’ operations - shadowing workflows, mapping decision points, building AI systems, and ultimately owning outcomes.

Second, we believe organizations revolve around decisions, and we’re reimagining decision-making to orchestrate AI agents and humans. This is our core research focus, blending foundation models, reinforcement learning, and optimization. The unique challenges of these domains won’t be solved by mimicking human data or finding a better prompt. Decision-making has many distinct elements, and our research team brings complementary skills to the challenge: collectively, we’ve built superhuman bots, deployed RL agents at scale, trained large language models to reason, proved fundamental results in learning theory, and released algorithms and tools used by the field every day.

We’ve already seen outcomes that change behavior: step-function productivity improvements in financial services, material enterprise value in care delivery organizations, and orders-of-magnitude cycle-time reductions in public-sector processes.

A bit over a year ago today, I joined @generalcatalyst - compelled by @htaneja vision to partner with him and help establish the early workings of Percepta. Since then, we’ve been quietly building a team of 25+.

We’re based in NYC and Boston and growing quickly. I’m grateful to the broader @generalcatalyst famiglia and especially @quentinclark, Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, @marcbhargava, David Fialkow, and @teresacarlson for being early partners in our journey.

We’re working against an incredibly ambitious mission. If this excites you, let’s chat!

Learn more:
https://t.co/d2syuKXNgY
https://t.co/HNPS7EAmKY

[Thomas Mathew @tmathew0309]

@nabeelqu Doubt we’ll go self-hosted for this but wouldn’t be surprised if Claude/Gemini release a portable memory protocol similar to MCP to put pressure on oai’s lead here - exportable chat files, long term memory files, etc. Similar to how Notion, etc have to support md export.

[Thomas Mathew @tmathew0309]

@JMGregorchuk wq free

[Thomas Mathew @tmathew0309]

Very bullish on @credal_ai. Great team working on answering “what is happening / has happened at my organization”. Managing knowledge across an explosion of SaaS tools - Slack, Asana, Outlook, etc - is very expensive today and generative AI is going to be a game changer here.

[Greg Kamradt @GregKamradt]

4/ @credal_ai

"AI written Cliff Notes on what your team got done."

I love this as a starting point to being the brain for a company. Knowledge base 2.0

Tons of unstructured organizational knowledge locked away in docs, slack, teams, recordings, knowledge base

[Thomas Mathew @tmathew0309]

@nabeelqu I often find it hard to communicate these lessons with future versions of *myself* (words in journal entries, etc) let alone trying with other people. Same reason - {your experience + your state at the time} is non communicable and is constantly evolving.