Jake Carlson

People think that YC having a 1% acceptance rate means they're competing with 99 other teams just like them. This. Is. Not. True. There's a goat herder in a basement in Pakistan, who has applied with his time machine idea every batch for the last 5 years. Shoot your shot.

It's interesting how the rise of AI video coincides with the sharp decline of social media content quality. It's much easier to push Sora videos on an audience that watches dance videos than one that watches 60 Minutes. "What you wish to replace, first weaken" -Sun Tzu

for everyone asking how my porsche got totaled, here you go she got a learner's permit (at age 21), flashed it to me, and said she was a professional driver from the department of motors

There’s no one more poised to solve this problem than Shivi and Utsav. They’re both deeply obsessed and have been building in this space, which is in dire need of innovation, since before gpt-4o! You don’t have to go to Florida to see a rocket, just watch these two 🚀

The same thing that happened to EVs will happen to LLMs: 2010-2020 they competed on raw performance: range, speed, battery From 2020+ they split into niches: • Tesla is for people who like tech and self-driving • Rivian is for outdoors-y types • Lucid caters toward luxury

I growth hacked my account from 0 to 2,000+ followers in 1 month, and people keep asking for my agentic workflow. I'm giving it away to 5 people for free. You'll gain >300 real followers in 1 week, guaranteed: forms.gle/NQFX5GajzmBULN… Let's pray the API calls don't bankrupt me🤞

Had a great time giving a talk on prompt engineering to over 100 students at @IBSstats this morning! Humbled to be included in such a cracked lineup! If you're interested in becoming a speaker for the next event, feel free to reach out.

I'm hearing a lot of frustration from senior devs, who feel like managers discourage them from doing startups, but then show a heavy bias toward hiring founders. They spent their prime years building someone else's dream, only to fall behind. Never let haters hold you down.

Had a great chat with @bgusiev about his recent $1B exit and his new venture, @photosonchain They just raised a pre-seed to build "proof of reality" - how do you know something is real when AI is quickly becoming indistinguishable? That's all I can say for now. More to come!

Hot take: soon AI labs will start carving out niches, so they’re not in direct competition with each other. There will be one for academic research, one for vid gen, etc. This happens in every industry when tech starts to plateau. And it'll wipe out startups in legions.

People always ask me if fine tuning/RL are worth it for their use case. My answer: would you get a PhD in AI? Of course not. Things are moving too fast. Just capture the low-hanging 80% of value and wait for GPT-6 to come out. For small apps, the 20% almost never makes sense.

Some mind blowing new job numbers: young people are facing rising unemployment since the launch of ChatGPT, while seniors are actually more employed This is some of the first actual employment data (not just job postings) Remember: never trust a graph if you can't see the axes!

People who aren’t from SF think “homeless problem” means people sleeping on the street “What's the big deal, it’s just an eyesore” In reality, it means unpredictable aggression from crackheads with nothing to lose. You have to walk past exorcists, not knowing what they might do

Banks just lost $170B from AI making it harder to rip people off. That's 9% of their total profit. Absolutely unheard of. And this report was quietly published at 1:00am this morning. This is a massive opportunity for anyone building in fintech. There's $70 trillion in…

Just met with @AyushKarupakula and @aarush_kukreja, cofounders of Aviro (YC X25). They're building self-learning for enterprise agents, so that they can learn from mistakes and continuously improve. These 2 have known each other since 3rd grade- can't wait to see whats in store!

You use Claude to write code, and then fix bugs, run tests, and do whatever it takes to make it shippable. Your job is to take the AI's ideas and fill the gaps by doing whatever it didn't do. But sure, keep telling yourself it's YOUR assistant 🤭

Just did a technical interview for a top AI lab. It took <1 min to jailbreak the model; I passed. Remember, it takes years to develop a process to filter candidates- look at coding interviews in the 2000s. We're living in the golden age where it's extremely easy to land jobs.

Why does the “feels like” always work against you? If it’s 75, the feels like is 91. If it’s 60, the wind chill makes it 49. Why can’t it be 59 but feels like 73 🤤

And this is basic arithmetic. Wait until it encounters actual user data we deal with, like Sarah Accountkey 1 Infinite Credit, Palo Alto, CA

Have you ever had your OpenAI API calls fail, only to check the dashboard and find that the status is green? It's probably because the API is chronically slow, but there's no way to check that. An indie dev made a site for this, that no one knows about: openai-status.llm-utils.org