a16z (@a16z)

"Cursor and SpaceXAI are a deep cultural fit with one another. They both work with a pace and intensity that borders on the absurd. And they’re both defined by iteration." "It doesn’t matter if you get it wrong the first time, or the second, or the third—even the tenth or the twentieth. Just keep on going. If you’re moving in the right direction faster than anyone else, you’ll probably win." "Cursor reinvented itself as a company not once but twice: first, from email client to tab-complete IDE and token reseller; and again, from tab-complete IDE and token reseller to AI lab and token creator." "And it did all of that in less than four years." "They really, really want to win." Full piece from @sarahdingwang, @BornsteinMatt, and @martin_casado on Cursor + SpaceXAI:

Garry Tan says we'll see a wave of exceptional older AI-native founders: "There's going to be as many Patrick Collisons as ever, but one mega trend that we're seeing is the 35, 40, 45-year-old founder who's been around the block, built a lot of engineering." "Peter Steinberger is a perfect example of that. He's been around the block. He knows what to build." "If you take that person, suddenly there's 400 of those people. You can outperform an entire department of any Mag 7." @garrytan @illscience

Simon Mo and Matt Bornstein on why open-weight models matter: cost and control. "Open weight absolutely matters in the ecosystem. The world cannot just be controlled by proprietary APIs, where open weight, open development and research of these models are blocked or banned." "There's almost two pieces to this. There's the cost thing, where the closed models are too expensive, and then there's the control thing, where I want to be in control of my infrastructure and in control of the model. If I need to extend it or put on my own guardrails or anything." "Control matters a lot over the last few years, and then cost just started to matter over the last few months... It's about controlling the system performance against what they're paying for." "For a voice agent company, they want to control their own model so that it can make sure the model actually responds by the required time... This sometimes is only you can do with your controlled intelligence... versus signing up for relying on your critical infrastructure with a proprietary API where they might go down any time." @simon_mo_ @BornsteinMatt

.@Mintlify grew 10x in a year. CEO @handotdev shared what's in their internal AI stack: Code: @claudeai @cursor_ai @tryreplicas Design: @replit @lovable Personal agents: @gumloop Code review: @cursor_ai @greptile Agent ops: @slackhq @temporalio Support triage: @parahelp_ai @plainsupport @linear Sales intel: @tryattention @salesforce @meetgranola Knowledge base: @notionhq @mintlify

"I was speaking to a grandmother in rural Tennessee, and she was taking care of her eleven-year-old granddaughter. So she wakes up, she walks into her room, the bed's empty." " Detective arrives, no sign of force. There's nothing, except one thing that he remembers. There's a Flock camera just down the street. So he pulls out his phone and runs a search for the night and finds one car. He runs that tag, and it's his worst nightmare. It's a registered sex offender. So he logs into Flock, and he's looking for this car, and he sees the car is traveling down I-75." "The person's on the highway. The detective doesn't know what to do, so he does what every hero does, is he moves into action. He jumps in his car and races down I-75. As he approaches the interstate line, he sees the vehicle." "A violent struggles ensues, and at the end, he hears crying. And the girl's in the back. She's bound, but she's alive. They went on to go search the suspect's house, and the nightmare got scarier. Everything one would need to not only assault, but dispose of the body was there." "Now that girl's alive today because the detective had two things: He had a license plate, and he had direction of travel. This, for me, is one of thousands of stories I sadly hear about every day in America. I started Flock nine years ago because of this exact type of problem." @glangley at @TEDTalks

a16z's Josh Elman says the Roblox generation will expect to remix all the software they use: "We have a generation of kids growing up that grew up on Minecraft and Roblox. And they were used to playing a game where they controlled the world." "They're going to expect more and more experiences like that, that are rich, that value that sense of control, that sense of ownership, that sense of tinkering." "Once they've got the thing that does most of those functions, they're going to want to tinker with it. They're going to want that flexibility." "The apps that will win in the next generation will give people that sense of ownership at the end." @joshelman @illscience

Cursor CEO Michael Truell on the future of writing code: "Our goal with Cursor is to invent a new type of programming." "It looks like a world where you have a representation of the logic of your software that does look more like English." "You can imagine kind of an evolution of programming language towards pseudocode. You have written down the logic of the software, and you can edit that at a high level." "It won't be the impenetrable millions of lines of code, it'll instead be something that's much terser and easier to understand and easier to navigate." @mntruell with @lennysan on Lenny's Podcast

World Labs CEO Dr. Fei-Fei Li: "The world is not made of words." "Language models have given machines an extraordinary command of concepts, vocabulary, and reasoning, but the physical world, virtual or real, runs on a different substrate." "Where language models learn the statistical structure of text, world models learn the statistical structure of space and time: how light falls on a surface, how a garden looks from an angle no camera has captured, how objects respond to force and follow the laws of physics." "Language gave machines a way to talk about that world. World models are how machines will finally come to understand, imagine, reason and interact with it." Full piece: