jchonphoenix

Wasn't this originally HN?

PG hasn't been in the bay for a long time so he doesn't understand what the ecosystem is like anymore.

For example "startups make the best stuff" is just wrong these days. I almost always assume the startup's product today is going to screw you or is hacky, because they prove over and over again they cut corners for growth. Very few startups still take the mentality PG has in his era and now ship half broken hacked stuff.

Much of yc advice is correct. But much of it is also dated as you're noticing

It was likely done by claude

You miss the major factor in your compensation: pricing pressure due to supply/demand.

By removing all the junior engineers, you've fundamentally changed the market forces longer term and most people expect that to negatively impact you in the supply demand curve regardless of whether or not the statements you've made above are true, which they most likely are for senior engineers.

This is CMU so they would be at the bleeding edge just like MIT/Stanford. But I think all the schools are behind today

Zico is Chair of the ML Department at CMU, which arguably has had the largest contribution to foundational ML academia.

OpenAI board member is his least interesting credential

The author misses the forest for the trees. He's accurately articulating the current state of tools he's using but isn't acknowledging or extrapolating the next derivative I.e the rate of improvement of these tools.

That being said, everything is overvalued and a lot of this is ridiculous.

This entire post smells like someone who's salty and trying not to face reality. I might not even disagree entirely with what's being stated here but the framing is just clearly wrong

Anysource.dev is the answer

Data engineering completely automated by a startups technology. This dataset sells for hundreds of thousands a year and can be fully cleansed and prepared from raw data purely with AI.

My guess is the telemetry data.

OAI spends gobs of money on Mercor and Windsurf telemetry gets them similar data. My guess is they saw their Mercor spend hitting close to 1B a year in the next 5 years if they did nothing to curb it

Meta tools are best in class when the requirement is scale. Or that the external tools haven't matured yet

OpenAI initially raised 50m in their institutional round.

1b was a non profit donation, so there wasn't an expectation of returns on that one.

This is another inflection style "acquisition." Highly unethical of the founders and screws over all your employees and investors who are left holding the bag.

For those asking, c.ai has very high cost and looks like a typical consumer company that burns money for use, so they were decent on revenue but not near profitability.

"Low level python" is an amusing statement

Technically the Field's medal is the top honor in mathematics.

But who am I to talk.

As an alum, if the students don't love it, they can withdraw. Someone needs to foot the bill for research and education and CMU does not have a large endowment fund

Arguably one of the earliest consumer use cases that found footing was AI girlfriend/boyfriend. Large amounts of revenue spread across many small players are generated here but it's glossed over due to the category.

I think this is why we're seeing that the type of founders YC usually funds in these industries aren't going through YC and choosing alternative methods of getting started.

Hawaii has a lot of sun. Not sure they can be a model for any of the mainland that doesn't look like their weather.

None of this matters if they can't get the hardware stack to work correctly.

The media keeps missing the real lock in Nvidia has: CUDA. It's not the hardware. It's the ability for someone to use it painlessly.

I have seen them do so in the past. But they need to be very targeted similar to surgery. There's some tumor in the company and you need to identify what that is and remove all of it.

I've seen it effectively done once.

20% of the company

Given how it sounds like Brex is doing, they're likely going to need to cut again. This isn't deep enough to really solve any systemic or structural problems. It will likely work though if the product vision and execution are on point and they just need more runway/less bloat.

Index Ventures has the money. But the truth of the matter is that even most US VCs aren't willing to shell out 2B valuations for a company with no revenue.

The message is arrogant but it seems very direct to me. He directly asks if you know what you're talking about. And assumes you don't, offering a way to help.

This is blunt and uncaring, but is in no way passive aggressive. The engineer probably didn't even mean to be aggressive. I read this as he fully believes the consultant has no idea what he's talking about.

I've been a manager for quite some time. This person shouldn't be in software management.

This is just how a lot of software engineers talk. They are factual, direct, and speak their mind from their perspective with no regards to your feelings. If you can't handle this, you shouldn't work on the industry in any function required to work with SWEs

We were the first investors in for-profit OpenAI.

OpenAI is a completely different story and setup than Mistral.

Million dollar salaries paid in PPUs that are no longer worth millions.

I'd jump ship too if I were them.