Jack Altman retweeted
Tendrils has raised $30M led by @benchmark to rebuild general-purpose computing. @jaltma is joining our board.
At Tendrils, we believe that the future of general-purpose computing lies beyond legacy architectures for legacy software.
So thrilled to back @nilscmr and the team at Tendrils, who are taking advantage of advances in AI to rebuild the CPU.
Absolutely brilliant and ambitious founders who I feel lucky to be around.
Tendrils has raised $30M led by @benchmark to rebuild general-purpose computing. @jaltma is joining our board.
At Tendrils, we believe that the future of general-purpose computing lies beyond legacy architectures for legacy software.
Jack Altman retweeted
Jack and I spend much of our day discussing the latest in tech with our partners and figured why not extend that conversation to our friends on the internet. Let us know what you think!!
After 58 episodes of Uncapped it was time for a little format refresh.
Benchmark Breakfast, where @EverettRandle and I will talk about whatever's on our mind or in the news as though it's our monday partner meeting. Sometimes with guests sometimes without.
Here's the first one, let us know what you think 🤗
(0:00) Intro
(0:45) Introducing Benchmark Breakfast
(2:09) Anthropic S-1 drops
(3:59) The revenue vs. compute chart
(6:19) Growth volatility and consumption-based revenue
(7:11) The race for the best model
(10:21) Code gen saturation and software factories
(13:39) The AI-bottleneck trade
(17:39) Code gen as the most impactful PMF in history
(21:27) Durability is hard to call
(23:36) Investing in the trend vs. calling the next one
(26:09) Circular revenue vs. outside customers
(28:15) Open source vs. closed source steelman
(34:25) Own your intelligence
(36:29) Open source as a % of frontier spend
(40:52) AI and cybersecurity
(44:35) Abliterated models
(48:08) Bio, robotics, and physical abundance
(51:52) Why physical feedback loops are slower
(54:12) Ev’s dad and the promise of bio
(55:13) Halloween plans and the iPhone Duo
After 58 episodes of Uncapped it was time for a little format refresh.
Benchmark Breakfast, where @EverettRandle and I will talk about whatever's on our mind or in the news as though it's our monday partner meeting. Sometimes with guests sometimes without.
Here's the first one, let us know what you think 🤗
(0:00) Intro
(0:45) Introducing Benchmark Breakfast
(2:09) Anthropic S-1 drops
(3:59) The revenue vs. compute chart
(6:19) Growth volatility and consumption-based revenue
(7:11) The race for the best model
(10:21) Code gen saturation and software factories
(13:39) The AI-bottleneck trade
(17:39) Code gen as the most impactful PMF in history
(21:27) Durability is hard to call
(23:36) Investing in the trend vs. calling the next one
(26:09) Circular revenue vs. outside customers
(28:15) Open source vs. closed source steelman
(34:25) Own your intelligence
(36:29) Open source as a % of frontier spend
(40:52) AI and cybersecurity
(44:35) Abliterated models
(48:08) Bio, robotics, and physical abundance
(51:52) Why physical feedback loops are slower
(54:12) Ev’s dad and the promise of bio
(55:13) Halloween plans and the iPhone Duo
I get the worry about AI taking all the jobs but it sure seems like engineers are harder to get and more expensive than ever 🤔
Jack Altman retweeted
ngl i don’t understand the Blacksmith valuation cause they have outages so often and they don’t respond to their support email
we migrated over to @PeakInfra and have easily decreased build times by 30% at least while getting infinitely better support and volume
Jack Altman retweeted
From Benchmark leading the seed to an $8.8B valuation in 2.5 years, the Legora team has led the industry by bringing the best products to lawyers around the world. Thrilled to be joined by our friends at Atreides, Baron Capital, Capital Group, Fidelity, JPM, and many others!
We have raised a $550M Series E at an $8.8B valuation, led by Atreides.
Every major existing investor is back in, and we’re welcoming Baron Capital, Capital Group, Fidelity, Glade Brook and J.P. Morgan. We picked investors who think in decades. Several of them work with law firms and legal teams every day, so they can see where the work is heading.
Lawyers are moving from AI assistants to agents that do multi-step work. The money goes there. We’re growing our teams across North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific, and going deeper on the Legora aOS.
Thank you to the 1,000+ people at Legora, and to the 140,000 legal professionals who use what we build.
I say this a lot because I believe it: it’s the best time in history to be a lawyer. We're thankful to be a part of it.
Full story: legora.com/blog/series-e
Jack Altman retweeted
Today Monaco is launching Agent Matrix.
Monaco unleashes countless agents working together, goal seeking, with one outcome in mind: accelerate revenue growth.
If you don’t have an army of agents working 24/7 to accelerate revenue growth, you’re living in the past.
Apply for early access now.
Jack Altman retweeted
series b
Greptile has raised a $50M Series B led by Menlo Ventures. The round values the company at $750M.
Greptile reviews and tests more than 1% of all PRs opened on GitHub every day. Thousands of engineering teams including Nvidia, Coinbase, Decagon, and Vanta use Greptile as their independent and central validation layer.
Fewer than 50 people, we are a small, talent-dense team of engineers and researchers in a quiet corner of San Francisco. If you’re interested in joining us, we’d love to hear from you.
Jack Altman retweeted
Exa just passed $100m in annualized revenue.
We've grown almost exactly 10x per year for 3 years. We now handle 2 billion requests a month from 200k+ teams. And it’s still so early:
We predict agents will search 1000x more than humans by 2030.
Agents don't search like humans. They write long, complex queries and want all the world's data, not just the web. We've spent 5 years building a search engine designed for them.
We now serve personal agents, AI labs, coding agents, GTM agents, really any agent. Exa gives these agents access to 100s of billions of web documents and tons of proprietary data.
Our customers are increasingly noticing that information is the bottleneck to agent performance. While the world seems close to perfect intelligence with models like Fable and Astra, we are very far from perfect information.
To our small but legendary team, thank you for getting us here, from engineering to research to GTM to ops.
To our customers, it is an honor to serve you. We have some exciting releases coming soon and can't wait to share them 🫡
Jack Altman retweeted
Today we announced an agreement to acquire Bumble.
Over the past six months, we’ve looked at hundreds of companies, asking which businesses would become more valuable as AI advances.
Bumble stood out.
As intelligence becomes more abundant, we believe connecting with the right person and forming meaningful relationships will become even more precious. And frontier technology can help more people find and build those relationships.
Our purpose at Ithaca is to apply frontier technology to things that matter. We acquire enduring businesses, transform them with technology, and hold for the long term. We focus on businesses not only for their financial potential but their ability to enrich lives.
Whitney and her team have built something extraordinary. Millions of relationships began on Bumble, and we’re honored to help take it into its next era. Together we intend to build the best company in the world for helping people find each other.
Let’s get to work.
Jack Altman retweeted
Today we’re announcing Personal Agent Protocol — an open standard @Meta and @SierraPlatform are developing along with industry partners at @Genesys, @instinct, @RocketOTD, @Shopify, @stripe, and @Walmart. It will help define how personal agents interact with businesses and is open for anyone to implement.
Read more: sierra.ai/blog/introducing-p…
Jack Altman retweeted
Thrilled to announce Benchmark’s investment in Furientis! This is a remarkable team building incredible technology to produce scalable, low cost interceptors.
Excited to announce @Furientis @DeptofWar OTA contract for 100mi interceptor and $25M Seed raise led by @benchmark!
This couldn't have happened w/o our incredible engineering team testing at industry best pace. Join us- we're hiring across all disciplines!
furientis.com/careers
As someone who usually does the hosting it was very fun to get to go on 20vc with @HarryStebbings @jasonlk and @rodriscoll 🤗
The best products are created by people solving a problem for themselves.
I wanted a podcast that discussed the biggest news in tech, every week, with amazing analysis and left the politics and ego aside.
This is the result and the only show you have to listen to every week.
- Instinct Raises $1B at $10B Valuation
- AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B
- Meta Poaches MongoDB's CEO
- Oura Pulls IPO
- Nubank Eyes $8–12B Monzo Takeover
My notes below with @jasonlk, @rodriscoll, and @jaltma
1. It Is BS to Think That Open Source Runs Away With It by Being Cheaper
Open-source models will not win on price alone because frontier labs hold structural advantages in compute scale, distribution, and revenue. Closed providers can subsidize lower-tier models aggressively enough to match open-source pricing. Open source will still capture a meaningful share of developer workloads, but frontier labs will compete hard on price to defend their position.
2. Why the Personal Assistant Space Is Very Reminiscent of the AI Coding Space
Consumer AI assistants like Instinct represent an "aggregator of aggregators" shift similar to Cursor's impact on coding. Instead of acting as passive chat boxes, these autonomous agents can execute complex, multi-step actions across the live internet. By fundamentally reshaping how consumers interact with software and services, this new paradigm creates room for both startups and incumbents to build enormous value.
3. Tyler Cowen's Prediction for the Future of Venture
AI is driving greater variance across venture capital, concentrating returns around an even smaller number of breakout winners. As Tyler Cowen put it, "Variance is gonna go up with AI, and many of you will fail." Traditional compounding strategies are becoming less reliable as capital and value creation cluster around outliers.
4. Why Will We See Many More Neo Lab Acquisitions?
Foundation model labs and semiconductor giants like AMD are actively acquiring Neo Labs to expand technical capabilities and defend strategic positions. Few of the roughly 100 existing research labs are likely to survive as independent businesses. Those with differentiated technical assets and specialized domain models could become highly valuable acquisition targets.
5. Seed Round Should Still Be $2M to $3M
Despite the hype around $50 million seed rounds, $2 million to $3 million remains the atomic unit of early-stage investing. AI development tools now allow lean founding teams to achieve as much operational progress on $2 million to $3 million as startups required far more capital to achieve a decade ago. Outside capital-intensive research labs, disciplined initial rounds help limit dilution and preserve healthy fund mechanics.
6. Should We Invest in Jev at $10 Billion?
Running top-tier frontier models for 10 to 12 hours a day is economically unsustainable for many enterprise workflows. Lower-cost alternatives like Jev, operating at a fraction of the price and up to 100x the speed, are already capturing significant token volume. As compute budgets become more constrained, specialized efficiency models could represent a major venture opportunity.
(links in comments)
Jack Altman retweeted
When people ask whether "this" or "that" will be successful in AI, the answer is very often both.
OpenAI and Anthropic together represent the fastest, largest success in the history of business. They + SpaceXAI + Cursor add more revenue per month than any hyperscaler other than Amazon. Up until now, headlines like these have been driven effectively off coding applications alone. We are very early.
Thank you @jaltma for having me on!
Loved the conversation on Uncapped with @DavidGeorge83, head of growth investing at a16z. He's an incredible investor and can go deep on a huge range of topics.
We talked all about investing at this point in the AI cycle and we covered a lot of ground -- frontier vs. open source, what could make it all keep running vs. slow down, application vs. infra, robotics and autonomy, narrative and vibes, and lots more.
Hope you enjoy!
Timestamps:
(0:00) Intro
(0:23) The answer to every AI question is "and"
(1:27) Where we are in the AI buildout
(4:55) What would stop the train
(7:16) Sellers vs. buyers of tokens
(10:39) Frontier labs vs. open source
(13:18) App investing and the coding blast radius
(14:01) Legal as a category
(20:46) Consumer AI
(22:14) From reactive to proactive
(25:52) AI, autonomy, robotics, bio health
(27:49) Autonomous driving and why it's underappreciated
(30:46) Robotics and what comes next
(33:25) Benchmark's new growth fund
(34:11) Why growth investing is compelling now
(34:53) Half of private market returns happen at growth
(37:57) Product cycle vs. capital cycle
(41:54) The importance of narrative
(43:14) Why vibes really matter
(46:20) Never short a messianic founder
(49:39) How big can Andreessen Horowitz get
Loved the conversation on Uncapped with @DavidGeorge83, head of growth investing at a16z. He's an incredible investor and can go deep on a huge range of topics.
We talked all about investing at this point in the AI cycle and we covered a lot of ground -- frontier vs. open source, what could make it all keep running vs. slow down, application vs. infra, robotics and autonomy, narrative and vibes, and lots more.
Hope you enjoy!
Timestamps:
(0:00) Intro
(0:23) The answer to every AI question is "and"
(1:27) Where we are in the AI buildout
(4:55) What would stop the train
(7:16) Sellers vs. buyers of tokens
(10:39) Frontier labs vs. open source
(13:18) App investing and the coding blast radius
(14:01) Legal as a category
(20:46) Consumer AI
(22:14) From reactive to proactive
(25:52) AI, autonomy, robotics, bio health
(27:49) Autonomous driving and why it's underappreciated
(30:46) Robotics and what comes next
(33:25) Benchmark's new growth fund
(34:11) Why growth investing is compelling now
(34:53) Half of private market returns happen at growth
(37:57) Product cycle vs. capital cycle
(41:54) The importance of narrative
(43:14) Why vibes really matter
(46:20) Never short a messianic founder
(49:39) How big can Andreessen Horowitz get
youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=4H1FbNRd…
spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/5Fc…
apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
1
7
9,705
Jack Altman retweeted
The best products are created by people solving a problem for themselves.
I wanted a podcast that discussed the biggest news in tech, every week, with amazing analysis and left the politics and ego aside.
This is the result and the only show you have to listen to every week.
- Instinct Raises $1B at $10B Valuation
- AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B
- Meta Poaches MongoDB's CEO
- Oura Pulls IPO
- Nubank Eyes $8–12B Monzo Takeover
My notes below with @jasonlk, @rodriscoll, and @jaltma
1. It Is BS to Think That Open Source Runs Away With It by Being Cheaper
Open-source models will not win on price alone because frontier labs hold structural advantages in compute scale, distribution, and revenue. Closed providers can subsidize lower-tier models aggressively enough to match open-source pricing. Open source will still capture a meaningful share of developer workloads, but frontier labs will compete hard on price to defend their position.
2. Why the Personal Assistant Space Is Very Reminiscent of the AI Coding Space
Consumer AI assistants like Instinct represent an "aggregator of aggregators" shift similar to Cursor's impact on coding. Instead of acting as passive chat boxes, these autonomous agents can execute complex, multi-step actions across the live internet. By fundamentally reshaping how consumers interact with software and services, this new paradigm creates room for both startups and incumbents to build enormous value.
3. Tyler Cowen's Prediction for the Future of Venture
AI is driving greater variance across venture capital, concentrating returns around an even smaller number of breakout winners. As Tyler Cowen put it, "Variance is gonna go up with AI, and many of you will fail." Traditional compounding strategies are becoming less reliable as capital and value creation cluster around outliers.
4. Why Will We See Many More Neo Lab Acquisitions?
Foundation model labs and semiconductor giants like AMD are actively acquiring Neo Labs to expand technical capabilities and defend strategic positions. Few of the roughly 100 existing research labs are likely to survive as independent businesses. Those with differentiated technical assets and specialized domain models could become highly valuable acquisition targets.
5. Seed Round Should Still Be $2M to $3M
Despite the hype around $50 million seed rounds, $2 million to $3 million remains the atomic unit of early-stage investing. AI development tools now allow lean founding teams to achieve as much operational progress on $2 million to $3 million as startups required far more capital to achieve a decade ago. Outside capital-intensive research labs, disciplined initial rounds help limit dilution and preserve healthy fund mechanics.
6. Should We Invest in Jev at $10 Billion?
Running top-tier frontier models for 10 to 12 hours a day is economically unsustainable for many enterprise workflows. Lower-cost alternatives like Jev, operating at a fraction of the price and up to 100x the speed, are already capturing significant token volume. As compute budgets become more constrained, specialized efficiency models could represent a major venture opportunity.
(links in comments)