Absurd (YC F25)

Software for ambitious films

[Absurd (YC F25) @withabsurd]

The Poison Taster

[Absurd (YC F25) @withabsurd]

48 hours till The Poison Taster

[Absurd (YC F25) @withabsurd]

Sappho's Odyssey

[Ali Ansari @aliansarinik]

the micro1 robotics lab:

real world data for intelligent models that co-exist in the physical world.

we’re in-the-wild across 75 countries in 6,000+ unique environments collecting data. diverse movements, objects, and settings.

the future of AI is as human as you can imagine. join us to start training robots today (link in comments).

[Ali Ansari @aliansarinik]

Excited to introduce micro1 Cortex, a contextual evaluation, visibility, and improvement platform for enterprise AI agents.

Foundational models are trained for general intelligence, but enterprises need agents that perform reliably inside their unique context: workflows, policies, data environments, and edge cases.

Cortex brings trust to enterprise AI by leveraging domain experts and real-world scenarios for any use case to test, diagnose, and improve how agents behave in production.

[Ali Ansari @aliansarinik]

The U.S. MUST win the AI race

We’ve implemented a clear policy at micro1: we will only work with U.S. AI labs and its allies.

We made this decision because the AI race is not just about better products. It is about who controls the intelligence layer of the global economy, and whether frontier capability is used to strengthen the free world or to empower adversarial states.

AI will be the most important technology of our lifetime. In the fullness of time, it will automate most functions across the economy. Not just software tasks, but coordination, production, logistics, judgment, and execution. As those functions are automated, human time is freed up to invent new ones. Those new functions then become candidates for automation themselves. This loop compounds.

As this trajectory continues, output per worker increases dramatically. Entire categories of work become cheaper and faster to perform. Manufacturing reshoring becomes economically viable not because of policy intervention, but because intelligent systems operated domestically outperform global labor arbitrage. Goods and services trend toward lower marginal cost, while distribution improves through better coordination of supply and demand.

That is the upside. However, this is impossible without deep integration of intelligent systems. For AI to meaningfully automate real-world functions inside enterprises or governments, it needs full context of any given enterprise. That means read and write access to its core databases. There is no credible path to automating high-impact functions without granting frontier systems that level of access.

If the United States does not win the AI race, enterprises eventually face a constrained choice. Either grant that access to Chinese models controlled by an adversarial government, or rely on sub-optimal intelligence to automate functions that still must be automated. Both outcomes are not acceptable. And ultimately, this becomes the greatest national security risk the United States has ever faced.

AI models are trained by humans. The judgment embedded in pre-training data and especially in expert post-training data largely determines how a model behaves. While emergent behavior exists, a useful approximation is that a model reflects the weighted aggregate of the human judgment distilled into it.

Assisting foreign actors—who will naturally prioritize expert tasks aligned with their own interests—to dominate data creation embeds those interests directly into the intelligence layer itself. Once encoded at scale, these interests propagate through every downstream applications that relies on that intelligence.

Here’s how we win.

First, leverage is in software. China is ahead in hardware for physically intelligent systems. Catching up there is a long and difficult battle. Software, both large language models and robotics models, remains the bottleneck. Advancing the brain (AI models) is the fastest way to increase the usefulness of existing hardware and deployed systems.

Second, the U.S. must 100x its investment in structured human judgment. Continued investment in compute and algorithmic efficiency is critical. But that investment is ultimately a bet on very high future inference demand. For that bet to pay off, models must unlock many new capabilities, and in practice the only way to unlock those capabilities is through expert human data.

Historically, experts like doctors and lawyers were never incentivized to produce high-quality reasoning data in a machine-verifiable format. There was no reason for a doctor to generate precise, structured simulations of patient interactions, diagnostic reasoning, or treatment tradeoffs. There was no reason for a lawyer to document complex legal reasoning paths in a way that could be programmatically evaluated.

AI systems now require exactly this kind of data. The incentive finally exists because this data directly improves systems that operate at massive scale, and experts can be paid well to produce it. Once expert judgment is encoded into models in a structured, verifiable way, it compounds. Those who delay do not just lose time. They lose the ability to catch up.

Third, distillation from Chinese labs must be stopped. AI labs must do everything they can to prevent Chinese labs and models from distilling frontier models. Simply calling frontier APIs, or even interacting through UIs, lets Chinese model companies rapidly generate high-quality supervised fine-tuning datasets and close the gap at a fraction of the cost.

This method does not put you at the frontier, but it does let you catch up quickly, which is what we saw with DeepSeek. The West significantly overreacted to DeepSeek’s headline capabilities, but underreacted to the underlying dynamic: frontier access itself becomes a training set at a fraction of the cost. Human data platforms also have a duty to help prevent this distillation.

Lastly, the U.S.government should set the standard for AI Evaluation that leads to real production usage.

AI agents are under-deployed relative to what the technology allows because they are probabilistic systems that require a fundamentally different QA approach than deterministic software. Generic QA is insufficient; safely shipping agents requires explicit evaluation frameworks that assess their full action space. Organizations must clearly define which functions an agent is allowed to perform, how quality is measured for each function, and which domain experts are qualified to judge outcomes. With these frameworks in place, agents can be rigorously tested using structured human data, deployed to production with confidence, and continuously improved over time.

The U.S. government should be the first large enterprise to implement rigorous evaluation systems across every function. If the government leads on evaluation-driven deployment, adoption across the private sector accelerates naturally.

This is how American workers become more powerful. Each worker operates digital or physical agents that expand their effective output. Recruiting, manufacturing, logistics, and other domains shift toward human judgment overseeing autonomous execution. Reshoring occurs because it becomes economically rational. Work becomes more meaningful.

This is a race to determine who controls the intelligence layer of the global economy.

And that must be us. 🇺🇸

[Replit ⠕ @Replit]

Exciting present for the Holiday season 🎁: You can now convert your ideas into apps right from ChatGPT using Replit!

Tag Replit in any chat and instantly turn your idea into a real, working app- right inside ChatGPT. No copying prompts, no context lost.

Christmas Magic ✨

[Whop @whop]

Whop 🤝 micro1

We’re excited to announce Whop is now the official payments network for micro1.

[TBPN @tbpn]

YC Demo Day startup Absurd makes AI-generated, Super Bowl-quality video ads.

Founder @dopadealer says they charge up to $30k per video, average 300k views for every company they work with, and that they're getting demand for as many as 1,500 videos a month from single clients.

[joe scheidler @Joe_Scheidler]

bet against America

I dare you

[Ali Ansari @aliansarinik]

Today I’m excited to introduce micro1 Intelligence, the world’s most advanced platform for training frontier AI models.

Achieving AGI is bottlenecked by one main thing: high-quality data.

Data based on real-world environments that capture human expert workflows, complex decision-making, and reward signals models need to learn.

With micro1 Intelligence, frontier labs can train on RL environments across every subject matter all in one place.

[Absurd (YC F25) @withabsurd]

@dopadealer @PJaccetturo @damian_chng Greg influenced the election

[Philip @dopadealer]

Our Kalshi AI ad got 1M organic views in <24 hours

We started making AI videos because we saw @PJaccetturo’s Kalshi ad and thought it was the coolest thing ever

One of the best things I’ve worked on with @damian_chng

Follow for a detailed thread soon!

[Max Brodeur-Urbas @MaxBrodeurUrbas]

shoutout to the guys at @trydune for making this

probably the company in the current YC batch I’m most excited about

[Max Brodeur-Urbas @MaxBrodeurUrbas]

this launch video was 100% ai generated

there’s definitely some rough edges but it feels like a peek into the future of content

storytelling and taste will be all that matters in ~1 year from now

[Absurd (YC F25) @withabsurd]

@ritv3999 thank you guys! was awesome working with you

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

Absurd (@trydune) makes absurd AI launch videos —  turning raw authenticity into absurdity that actually spreads. Their autonomous agents plan, generate, and edit every scene for clients in a live Figma-like canvas.

Their first launch video hit 450K+ views on X.