Thibault Sottiaux on what's top of mind: “If you have a company and still use Opus instead of Sol, why so? Does price not matter to you?”
Thariq: “Watermarking without quality loss is a bit unintuitive, doesn't feel like it should work. I made this artifact with Claude to help me understand how it works, sharing in case it's helpful.”
Guillermo Rauch: “I think people don’t realize how much of the success of React is actually @shadcn. I once referred to React as the actual “LEGO brick for adults.” But in reality it was more the description of the ...”
Aditya Agarwal: “America turned 250 years old earlier this year. India turns 80 today...80 years young.”
Today's featured podcast: AI & I by Every — “Why the Next Hit AI Product Will Be Social Why the Next Hit AI Product Will Be Social (Best of the Pod)”
in case you’re not living in the tech bubble, as a general rule i’ve been surprised by how infrequently top tier folks actually meet/know each other. as an outsider i might have assumed that everyone is in secret illuminati group chats. those exist, but are very much short lived exceptions rather than the rule. what you see of the major headlines is pretty much what they also see. i guess one way to interpret this is also simply that most effort is still on doing the work rather than working the narrative or the gossip. and that, to me at least, is genuinely quite reassuring, this far in to my career.
On tokens and prices per token.
I said I’d write more about this, so here goes: an OpenAI token != another model’s token. We compare AI prices in dollars per million tokens as if a token were a standardized unit, like a gram or a kilowatt-hour. It isn’t. Different models use and produce the exact same text using different numbers of tokens, which means a lower price per token does not necessarily mean a lower bill.
Imagine two identical pizzas. One is cut into 8 slices at $2 each. The other is cut into 16 slices at $1.25 each. The second place advertises cheaper slices, but the whole pizza costs $20 instead of $16. Bummer ... your stomach doesn't actually care about the number of slices you just ate.
I know you are hungry now, but back to tokens. In one small comparison spanning English, technical, multilingual, and numerical text, the tokenizer we use for GPT-5.6 Sol used 766 tokens versus an estimated 1,170 for Claude Opus 5. That's a very significant difference of about 34.5% fewer tokens. You can get the same exact text, but pay for all those extra tokens. The price per token doesn't really tell this story.
Even correcting for tokenizer differences misses the bigger point. What actually matters is price per successful outcome, and for that you can use benchmarks as a starting point, but really you have to try it and measure on your own use cases.
That's all. May the tokens flow.
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I am a fan of Grok Bot but @X is the #1 differentiated data source that it should have access to and it doesn't seem to work?
The connector doesn't work and I can't even login to X on the cloud computer.
Am I doing something wrong? https://t.co/O5OI9OhETb
Sr Director, AI at Meta; Prev: Google - Led Gemini, Veo, Nano Banana.
There is no longer an excuse for B2B software to have such poor UX.
Thanks to AI, every software product can and should be as easy to use as the best consumer software.
The argument that “AI structurally centralizes power” because it’s currently compute hungry ignores 125 years of super exponential growth in compute price-performance.
Improvement in algorithms and continued hardware efficiency gains means there is no reason to assume AGI-level capabilities will always require a data center to run.
Scaling laws are not laws of physics. They’re simply empirical relationships observed for particular architectures, objectives, datasets etc. Change any one of those factors and you get a different scaling curve.
If the brain is any guide, true AGI will likely be very efficient. In fact, current scaling laws might a bug and not a feature. It shows how inefficiency of the ML algorithms we discovered so far.
President & CEO @ycombinator —Founder @garryslist—Creator of GStack & GBrain—designer/engineer who helps founders—SF Dem accelerating the boom loop
Whitepill timeline cleanser:
Progress and abundance looks like record production of crops, year on year, progressing upwards and to the right. This is the output of markets and technology working together for millenia.
https://t.co/LXe01sF5G4 https://t.co/VZct22uHUF
partner @fpvventures - investing in seed/A. previous: early hire @meter, @opendoor, @atlassian & others. love @shimoleejhaveri + 👦👧
Last week I’m sitting across a stealth portfolio founder working in a deeply unsexy space (at least from Bay Area standards)..
They’re lamenting about how how some of the critical contracts and partnerships that would give them credibility (and revenue and network effects) are basically stuck at the 1-yard line. This is a massively fragmented market. And this is btw just straight up pure bureaucracy. The champions, terms and everything is lined up. It’s purely a win win situation but summer and one random clause is the issue. And, it might cause them to not reach their ambitious timelines.
And I’m sitting there smiling and eventually laughing and at some point they ask what’s funny. I tell them “do you know how long it’ll take anyone to do the same thing as you” - and this is with leverage and relationships that they already have.
And, this in the short term is painful but in the long term becomes such a strong moat. That they’ll look back and laugh why they were worried about a few days when in the long term this is what will make them one of the biggest companies in the world.
Unnecessary and 996 performative pain is not the moat. But building entrenched software and relationships that take a lot of pain is a moat :)
General Partner @SPC, Co-Founder @Bevel_Health | Ex: Early Eng @facebook, CTO @Dropbox, Board @Flipkart | Optimist, Builder, Dad
America turned 250 years old earlier this year.
India turns 80 today...80 years young.
Building countries is really hard. 80 years in...America was struggling with a civil war.
Indians should be damn proud of the country they have built.
Like America, India wants more. She wants to be better and stronger and more successful. She will get there.
