Deedy (@deedydas)

Every single startup working on next-gen AI chips (July 2026) Every approach attacks data movement differently to break Nvidia’s dominance: – eliminate DRAM (Groq) – eliminate the interconnect (Cerebras) – eliminate the compute/memory split (d-Matrix) – eliminate the server’s compute-centrism (Majestic) – eliminate generality (Etched, Taalas, MatX) – or eliminate the $400M litho machine (Substrate)

The story of AI in the next few years is going to be compute: an essay on the future of AI. K3 in 2 days is already #10# on OpenRouter with ~140B tok/day, and it’s infra is crumbling. Throughput is down from 30tok/s to 13tok/s, E2E latency is up to 72s and time to first token is >20s! It would cost a minimum of $500k to buy the 8 B300s it would take to serve even quantized Kimi K3 and ~$4M for the more recommended GB300 NVL72 rack. I don’t think Moonshot has the compute available to scale to their demand! In fact, even the US based inference providers will likely not be able to scale capacity as much as they’d like even if they were to host it: a 2.8T model is no joke. GPU providers (neoclouds etc) are doing 3yr and I recently hear 5yr commits with an ungodly 30% down, and customers are chomping it up. Prices continue to go to the moon. The two big labs, hyperscaler clouds, Grok and Meta have compute deals locked in prior, and the rest are fighting for scraps. Tier 1 neoclouds (coreweave/nebius etc) are rumored to not even small “smaller” customers. Meta is the biggest wildcard here. With ~7GW of compute by eoy 2026 and no clear big model ties, they either get to frontier on their own or can host the most Kimi K3 capacity (unless they sell it to the labs). Even though the price of models has fallen over time, it’s worth noting that the price of frontier has not. 3yrs ago, GPT-4 released at $60/M, o1 at $60/M, Opus 4 at $75/M, GPT5 at $10/M, Fable at $50/M and now Sol at $30/M and K3 at $15/M. Even if you consider K3 frontier, that’s only a 4-5x flux in 3yrs. In that time, frontier demand has increased at least 3+ ooms and frontier intelligence performance has gone 32x at least by task time by METR. Essentially, so long as a) the demand for frontier intelligence continues to grow to near infinity, b) the frontier continues to grow in performance, even as c) if the price of frontier declines a little, the value accrued to frontier grows significantly! And there’s a tremendous bull case for those who have locked up compute if you’re bitter lesson pilled and believe larger models will always be smarter models.

The world is deeply unfair. Some of the most talented people I know are stuck in dead end desk jobs while some of the snarkiest narcissistic tyrannical workhorses are in positions of great power. This has always greatly saddened me. After a lot of analysis, I think there are 5 reasons this happens: 1. Refusal to believe / fear of failure. Loss of belief that where there is a will (to enact change), there is a way e.g. “I am just a cog in the wheel. If I say something, no one will listen.” or “if I do this, I will upset somebody” 2. Lack of purpose. You don’t really understand what you’re fighting for and what you believe in. You fight for inconsequential, often selfish, goals. e.g “Will doing this get me a promotion? Should I completely change everything to do this other project cause it will get me a promotion?” 3. Lack of self awareness. I will stand up to this thing I believe in and they will listen to me. e.g intern saying: “why doesn’t the ceo like my view on company strategy?” 4. Refusal to play. The failure to acknowledge that your worldview is only as powerful as your ability to influence others of your worldview OR a complete repudiation of the will to interact with those who don’t share your worldview e.g. “these guys just do what they want. They won’t listen to me. what will happen if I do this?” 5. Refusal to strategize or concede. The unwillingness to play and win a side quest that will ostensibly further your vote because you find the interim goal pointless. Or the inability to concede a battle to fight the war. e.g. “this direction is wrong. I need to fight it (even though it’s a small issue)” Almost everyone who is bitter or feels stuck in their career boils down to one of these 5 failure modes 1, 2 and 3 are the most common. Many suffer consequences of 2-5 and end up in 1. I’ve personally seen some of my sharpest friends land up in 1 because they just don’t believe they can win. One privileged part of my job is getting to interact with people who are willing to, against all odds, believe in something heretical, know why it’s important, know what needs to be done to make it real, do it, and make side quests to get it done. I think it applies to everyone doing anything.

Every single AI startup with $500M+ revenue run rate (excluding the big 3 labs): Lovable - $500M ElevenLabs - $500M Perplexity - $500M Manus - $500M* Cognition - $500M* Kling AI - $500M Crusoe - $500M* Midjourney - $500M* Higgsfield - $500M Lightning AI - $500M+ Replit - $525M* Baseten - $600M* Lambda - $760M* Fireworks - $800M* Together AI - $1B Surge AI - $1.4B* Scale - $2B* Mercor - $2B** Cursor - $4B 22 total companies (including big labs) *estimated / unconfirmed **gross marketplace volume, not net revenue

Every single startup selling AI Training Data (July 2026) >50 cos sell data and RL environments to big AI labs and drive AI progress behind the scenes. They total ~$8.5B in rev and ~$100B in valuation, >75% of which are just 4 players: Scale, Surge, Mercor and Handshake.

Today’s been an absolutely stacked day for AI news. In case you missed it: 1. GPT 5.6 Sol and Sol Ultra dropping tomorrow. Early reviews say it’s not as smart as Fable but very positive. 2. Grok 4.5 launches from Cursor / SpaceX that claims Opus 4.7 quality at 80tps and $2/M in $6/M out price. 3. Bytedance Seedream 5 Pro launches as an image ~#2# and nearly as good as GPT Image 2 at 4x cheaper cost: $0.045-$0.09/image, specializing in edits and infographics. Easily beats Meta’s Muse Image. 4. GPT-Live launches a full duplex non-turn based voice model which allows interactions while you’re talking seamlessly, a huge upgrade in audio AI for consumer Coming soon: 1. Seedance 2.5 Pro expected to launch soon (early July) to further extend Bytedance’s lead in SOTA video gen models. Will use Seedream 5 Pro as the frame generator. 2. Gemini 3.5 Pro launching soon (July 17). Google seems to have fallen quite behind frontier and people eagerly await to see what Google can put out here amidst a string of high profile departures. 3. GPT-6 rumored to launch soon (Polymarket spikes at August 14) with a new larger retrain, taking aim at Fable.

Top 20 Startups by Web Traffic founded since 2020 1. DeepSeek 2. Perplexity 3. Suno 4. Polymarket 5. Gamma 6. ElevenLabs 7. Lovable 8. Arena 9. xAI 10. Supabase 11. Manus 12. Higgsfield 13. Cursor 14. Fanvue 15. OpenRouter 16. GPTZero 17. Genspark 18. ShopMy 19. Venice 20. Whop Some interesting observations: — Only 25% were not AI: Polymarket, Supabase, Fanvue, ShopMy, Whop — 20% were acquired — Startups that didn't surprisingly didn't make the cut: Kalshi (founded 2018), Mistral (10M), OpenEvidence (11.4M), Cognition — All but 2 are unicorns (GPTZero, Fanvue), 7 decacorns, but there's no clear correlation between traffic and valuation

Software engineers who don’t find LLMs for coding useful either 1. Used it a >2mos ago and formed an opinion, before Claude Code 2. Program in an esoteric language or framework, including low level systems / C 3. Work on large preexisting codebases

Venture Capital Compensation in the US Many people kept telling me they don't know how VC comp works, so here it is, split by fund size, based on 2024 survey data, 500+ samples.