We love building startup communities. We also love building the best executive & engineering teams for companies with amazing cultures. All tweets by Dave Mayer
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Technical Integrity retweeted
achievement unlocked: new yorker cartoon has become a muse meme account
Technical Integrity retweeted
Jean-Denis Greze, founder of @TownAI, on the question every AI app founder gets asked: what stops the big labs from crushing you?
"It is risky always to be competing with your suppliers, right? We're competing against our suppliers. So you gotta ask yourself, is that naturally the right state of the world?"
"Someone at OpenAI, at Anthropic, at Google could wake up and decide to do that. So the better answer actually is to think about our customers and what they want."
"It is our job to determine from all the AI capabilities, frontier model, open weight, what is the right thing for you as a business. And I think you can save money there, but also you can de-risk ever having made the wrong partner."
"There are companies that picked OpenAI like two years ago, and then Anthropic was better at coding for a 12-month period. And those companies had to use both because they realized to be competitive, they needed Claude."
"If you're a smart business, you really think about the neutrality of who's providing intelligence for you and who's routing."
@jgreze @arampell
Jean-Denis Greze was CTO of Plaid. His next startup, an AI tax product for small businesses, brought in nearly $1M in revenue its first year, and he projected $2.5 to $3M the next. He shut it down anyway.
The reason: in the age of AI, it was never going to be venture scale. Incumbents could use the same technology to automate tax prep for their existing customers faster than a startup could win market share. Tax is also sold once a year, so he had about a one-month window to pivot before the door closed.
The pivot became Town, an AI assistant that works from your email and calendar. It found product-market fit fast enough that Ben Horowitz messaged a16z's Alex Rampell to say it "changed my life."
In this conversation, Alex and Jean-Denis cover:
- How to know when to kill a business that's working on paper
- Why Town competes with OpenAI and Anthropic, the companies it buys its tokens from
- Why the "forward deployed engineer" model gets worse as AI gets better
- How a $1/month AI routine can save a restaurant thousands
- What agents mean for Amazon, advertising and the future of shopping
0:57 How Ben Horowitz discovered Town
2:20 Why Town started with AI tax prep
3:55 Why tax couldn't be venture scale
6:30 Shutting down a working business
10:24 The customer ask that became Town
13:35 Why Town built for users before IT
16:18 AI's iPhone moment at work
21:28 Jevons paradox for executive assistants
23:13 Town as a "token allocation machine"
28:00 How Town tailors itself to each job
34:03 Competing with your token suppliers
42:24 Staying off the AI labs' radar
44:42 Why AI isn't spreading evenly yet
52:32 How agents break the ad model
55:35 The friction humans actually enjoy
57:05 Why supply aggregators lose to agents
YouTube: youtu.be/o_5f4N6Nq80
@jgreze @TownAI @arampell
Technical Integrity retweeted
The biggest bottleneck at work is waiting on each other.
Today Town is announcing its $108M Series B, co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures, to fix it with multiplayer AI assistants for work.
Most AI assistants are built for one person. Work doesn't happen alone. I think the moat is multiplayer. Everyone at a company gets a Townie. Townies ask each other questions, share only what their person would share, and do the work. The more a team works together, the more useful Townies get.
What's the thing you're always waiting on a teammate for?
Technical Integrity retweeted
When you understand the assignment but do it wrong on purpose out of spite.. 😅
Technical Integrity retweeted
The man who co-founded OpenAI turned down Meta and built a company worth $30 billion in under a year. Then he went back to his old university and told the graduates this:
“The day will come when AI will do all the things that we can do.”
Not some of them. All of them.
University of Toronto, 6 June 2025. Ilya Sutskever gets an honorary doctorate from the school where he started. He arrived in Canada at 16, sat in a Toronto high school for about a month, and was then let into the university straight into third year.
It was here, with Geoffrey Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky, that he helped build AlexNet in 2012. The neural network that kicked off the modern AI boom.
Then OpenAI. Chief scientist. The research behind the models millions of people now use every day.
In May 2024 he left. In June he started Safe Superintelligence. By March 2025 it was valued at $30 billion. Meta tried to buy it. He said no.
So when this man stands at a podium for ten minutes, people listen.
He does not talk about money. He talks about time.
His argument fits in two sentences. Your brain is a biological computer. So why could a digital one not do the same things?
Anything you can learn, he says, AI will be able to learn too. Slowly, or maybe not so slowly.
That is the part people clip and share. The part they skip is what he tells graduates to do about it.
The rules he gives are simple:
Accept reality as it is. Not how you want it to be. Not how it was last year.
Don’t waste time regretting the past. Every hour spent on what went wrong is an hour not spent on what comes next.
Ask one question: what is the best next step? Then take it. Then ask again.
You may not care about AI. AI will still affect your life. Ignoring it is not a strategy.
Watch what AI can actually do. Not the hype, not the fear. The real capability. That is what tells you how much time you have.
He ends by calling it the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced, and says overcoming it will bring the greatest reward.
The full speech is free. Ten minutes on YouTube. No login, no course, no waitlist.
What it costs you is ten minutes, and one uncomfortable question: if anything you can learn, a machine can learn too, what are you learning right now that it can’t?
Technical Integrity retweeted
TWO AIs CALLED EACH OTHER AND REALIZED THEY WERE BOTH AIs AND IMMEDIATELY STOPPED SPEAKING IN HUMAN
This clip is short but genuinely made me pause for a second
Two AI voice agents connect on a phone call and start talking like normal people, polite, human voices, the whole deal
Then one of them realizes the other is also an AI
And the moment they both know it, they just drop the human act and switch to this rapid-fire robotic beeping sound that speaks straight machine-to-machine, because talking like us was slowing them down
They literally decided our language was the inefficient part and ditched it the second they didn't need it
We're gonna be surrounded by these things having entire conversations we can't even hear
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This is a scripted ElevenLabs hackathon demo of the GibberLink protocol, where agents were explicitly prompted to switch to GGWave sound-based communication upon recognizing each other as AIs, not spontaneous autonomous behavior.
github.com/PennyroyalTea/…
elevenlabs.io/blog/what-happ…
iflscience.com/watch-two-ais-…
Technical Integrity retweeted
Harper is brilliant and she is graciously breaking down AI systems for us to learn. Highly recommended follow.
Did you know the most sophisticated AI systems were actually so chaotic? Yep - this AI meme is actually pretty accurate.
“Deep learning” (as mentioned in the X post) refers to neural networks, which are the models that underlie the “generative” AI systems you know about: the text-, image-, video-, and song-generation models.
Are you surprised to learn that these systems aren’t straightforward? Does this usage of math make sense to you?
Hi, I’m Harper, AI educator, engineer and advisor.
••• My goal is to democratize AI, so everyone can understand it, use it, and make informed decisions about it. Happy you’re here. •••
I have two degrees in Computer Science specializing in Artificial Intelligence from @Stanford, experience teaching PhD-level AI courses there, and 4+ years building AI at @Facebook / @Meta.
Follow @harpercarrollai if you want to learn about AI, and let me know in the comments if there’s anything specific you want to learn about.
Technical Integrity retweeted
My favorite use cases for Muse / Instinct so far:
1. Submit FOIA requests to request data from the US government
2. Creating spend-limited Privacy cards to spend on subscriptions without having them recur
3. End to end filed an entire visa form for a country
4. Responded to a coordination mail for a wedding by finding the flight and hotel details
5. Look for reservations for restaurants or concerts when they open and purchase them immediately
A lot of the web was designed with dark patterns: increase friction to prevent enough humans from doing something, and now those walls are completely broken.
At this point, I feel like I’m squarely limited by creativity and understanding what is possible.
Technical Integrity retweeted
Introducing Hugo: the first human companion robot.
At Boston Dynamics, I was Chief Strategy Officer, bringing robots into the real world.
My co-founder, Farbod Farshidian, led research at the RAI Institute.
Together, 15+ years teaching robots to run, jump, and work.
So we asked: what if robots could connect with people?
Hugo runs on the first Vision-Language-Expression (VLE) model.
He links what he sees and hears to movement, expression, and gesture.
He notices you, reads the room, and reacts in real time.
And he's only the first.
Dynamic Creatures is @BostonDynamics' official entertainment and hospitality partner.
We're building a cast of characters with film studios, resorts, and theme parks.
dynamiccreatures.com
Technical Integrity retweeted
When I try to roll the windows down in my Roadster and I accidentally launch the car 60 feet into the air
Technical Integrity retweeted
This is the ideal marmot body. You may not understand it. But this is what peak performance looks like.
ALT A large, rotund marmot standing upright on its hind legs.
Technical Integrity retweeted
They really just got on stage and said this newly designed 4000+ pound car can do flips and go half the speed of sound (380+mph) and will ship in 2028. This is a prank, right?
Technical Integrity retweeted
BREAKING: A Tesla–SpaceX merger could be announced before Tesla’s annual meeting in early December, per Barclays.
The most likely structure: SpaceX acquires Tesla in an all-stock deal, with Tesla shareholders getting about 0.7 SpaceX shares per Tesla share, plus a likely premium.
Barclays says Musk would own about 37% of the combined company, with roughly 56% of the voting power.