Ciaran Lee retweeted
We’re pleased to announce the launch of our 2.0 series of Fin Apex models!
We think these are the best models for customer service.
They are incredibly fast and efficient to run, but even beyond that, we’re seeing an increasing, not shrinking, performance gap between our specialised models, and the general frontier.
We recently did a backtest against Astra, an amazing general model, and you’d expect overkill for customer service - but it still underperforms Apex on our particular tasks.
So, at least in our experience, there’s still a lot of room for domain specific customisation.
We try to give some flavour of the sort of tradeoffs necessary to achieve this performance in the launch post:
fin.ai/blog/announcing-apex-…
Ciaran Lee retweeted
We launched a lot today:
* @fin_ai now does Customer Success
* It has skills letting it dynamically work out how to solve unseen problems
* Operator has massive new features
* Intercom Helpdesk has a new Copilot & Human In the Loop features
* 3 new CX models released
* + more – at San Francisco, CA
Ciaran Lee retweeted
Looking forward to giving a live demo of @fin_ai Voice at Pioneer in SF next Wednesday in SF (Oct 7th)
It'll be live-streamed, register here:
go.fin.ai/pioneer-26
Nice piece here by @Keyes
progressireland.substack.com…
"Of the 492 cities from which satnav maker TomTom collects data, road speeds in central Dublin are the seventh-slowest"
Ciaran Lee retweeted
This viral Stripe chart shouldn't surprise anyone.
It's EU policy coming to its conclusion.
This is what we get when we celebrate publishing regulatory pdfs and closing critical energy sources.
We should get used to charts like this.
So when I speak Europeans campaigning (aka glueing-their-hand-to-something) for all this degrowth wankery, I'm always puzzled as to why exactly. The degrowth is already here—it's just not evenly distributed
Here's 9 facts
1. Productivity growth numbers in the US vastly outpaces EU equivalents. (e.g. 2022→2025 shows a 7x difference)
2. The tech sector alone explains accounts for ⅔ of the EU–US productivity gap since 2000, according to ECB.
3. In 2024 + 2025, 5 AI heavy companies—Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon—accounted for 40% of the S&P 500’s total return.
4. Competing in AI requires 3 essential ingredients: capable models, advanced chips, and affordable electricity. So naturally the EU is working against this.
5. Electricity: EU prices for energy-intensive industries are ~2x US levels and 50% above China’s, according to the IEA. Why is this?
6. European governments left themselves dangerously dependent imported gas, while also pulling batshit moves like closing nuclear plants. EU carbon pricing added insult to injury.
7. Models: The EU AI Act adds compliance requirements, training-data + copyright policies, and plenty of risk-management obligations. As with all things EU they'll never explain fully how to be compliant until you're in court. The result: is minimal model development in EU and very delayed AI product+feature roll out from big (easy-to-fine) companies.
8. Chips: Europe’s semiconductor ambitions are undermined by insufficient investment, fragmented funding, slow delivery, and of course high operating costs. Net effect is they're on course to miss their 2030 goals by >40%
9. Putting it all together, we’re making it harder and more expensive to resource, build and deploy AI in Europe, and risking another decade of falling behind.
The result will be even slower growth relative to the rest of the world. – at Dublin City, Ireland
Ciaran Lee retweeted
This was great fun, very well received, and @gavinjoyce did a stellar demo.
It’s only been 1 week but @salesforce customers are clearly absolutely loving what they see in @fin_ai.
I also managed to be the one guest speaker who didn’t get frame-mogged by @Benioff (granted only because he wasn’t on the stage)
Watch Des Traynor (@destraynor), our Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer introduce Fin at the SMB keynote at @Dreamforce. Showing exactly what Fin can do, with a Fin Voice demo, live and in front of thousands.
Full video below 👇
Ciaran Lee retweeted
Second Breakfast banned in the Shire per further sustainability initiatives declared by the Isengard-affiliated administration.
But to "keep the tradition alive", now Hobbits will become the second breakfast for the new arrivals, adding a charming modern quirk to the custom.
I've noticed a curious pattern in media coverage recently.
Here's a headline from a rather grim article today:
My 4 year old has discovered emoji and now loves long text conversations.
So fun but renders my frequently used emoji useless 😂
The eventual rise of Europe feels inevitable.
I’d love if it happened in my lifetime, for my kids. Not sure it will.
"The decline of Europe is not inevitable, despite how much Americans love to joke that the continent is doomed to be an open-air museum. Sure, it's things may have to get worse before they get better, but believing that 'it's over' is just loser talk." world.hey.com/dhh/three-sacr…
Ciaran Lee retweeted
Sure didn't the Irish go everywhere complaining about lack of benefits and stabbing children.
What a piece of work. – at San Joaquin Hills, CA
Jennifer O'Connell: There was nothing ‘unIrish’ about the violence on Parnell Square. Or the heroism irishtimes.com/opinion/2026/…
Ciaran Lee retweeted
We’re excited to share that we just signed an agreement for @salesforce to acquire @fin_ai for ~$3.6B. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2027.
Fin started as Intercom 15 years ago. We changed our name to cap our transformation just weeks ago. We were a darling of the SaaS era and invented so many of the patterns you see in software today. Nearly four years ago, in need of a reboot, we jumped on weeks-old modern LLMs to create and define the category we know as Customer Agents today.
Salesforce invented modern software and SaaS. And @benioff is like the final boss of tech founder CEOs. In seat for 27 years, he’s one of the last of his era. Still pushing, pivoting, placing big bets. It’s a privilege for @destraynor and I to get to partner with him and join forces with Salesforce upon close at this most fascinating time. And will be very fun to get their help bringing Fin to magnitudes more consumers.
To our customers: Over the past few years we’ve been shipping intensely. Including recently our groundbreaking model, Apex, and our paradigm-defining internal agent, Operator. With the resources of Salesforce this will only accelerate. And yet little will practically change. I’ll still be CEO, Des will still be running R&D, we’ll both still be committed to continuing to lead this category. Thank you very sincerely and deeply for your belief in us.
To all of our friends, our families, and our employees, past and present: While this is not the end, it is a major, pivotal, special, and emotional moment for us. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you. For everything.
To my cofounders, my exec team: Look what we built. Four young lads with a dream and nothing to lose. And a home grown exec team who pulled off the greatest and arguably only late stage software company pivot to AI, and invented one of the most important categories in AI. Thank you for sticking through all of this with me.
And now, time to get back to work. See you at our next product launch in a couple weeks. (:
Ciaran Lee retweeted
Two months ago, we announced Apex 1.0, the world's first proprietary CX model that beat all foundation models on resolution rate, latency, and cost for customer experience use cases. No other company, whether new startup, or incumbent has since released anything comparable.
Today, we release a further brand new model called Apex Flash. A smaller model with high performance, but specifically designed to be even faster. There are instances where you're happy for a model to take its time, but in many cases, time will always be of the essence. That's where our new model comes in. And tomorrow, we're announcing our first major new product that runs on Apex Flash…






































