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Video Generation as a Primitive
Y Combinator· 2025-07-31 02:38
Video generation models are getting really good. Google's V3 already produces 8-second photorealistic soundon clips for just a few dollars per video, and they're often indistinguishable from reality. Soon, you'll be able to create nearperfect footage of anything on the fly for a marginal cost approaching zero, and video will become a new basic building block for software.When this happens, a lot of new ideas become possible. It's definitely going to change media and entertainment. Imagine being able to crea ...
Retraining Workers for the AI Economy
Y Combinator· 2025-07-30 19:03
So, we talk a lot about the AI revolution in terms of models, chips, and software. But to make it a reality, there has to be a huge buildout of physical infrastructure like data centers and semiconductor fabs. And that's where we have a problem.While we're all focused on the race for AI talent, we also have a shortage of skilled trades people. Think the electricians, the HVAC technicians, the welders, who are all essential to building out this physical infrastructure. The government's new AI action plan cre ...
How Small Teams Will Build the Future
Y Combinator· 2025-07-16 20:10
I think one of the things that will feel most different about these next 10 years versus these last 10 years is how much a single person or a small group of people with a lot of agency can get done and that is a bigger deal than it sounds like because coordination costs are huge and when we can empower people with more knowledge more tools more resources whatever I think we won't just see like a little bit more stuff get built but because of these kind of coordination costs across people we'll see like a re ...
John Jumper: AlphaFold and the Future of Science
Y Combinator· 2025-07-15 14:00
AI for Science & AlphaFold Overview - AI systems can accelerate scientific discovery and enable new breakthroughs, particularly in healthcare [1] - AlphaFold, a system developed for protein structure prediction, has been cited approximately 35,000 times, demonstrating its impact on scientific research [1] - The speaker's guiding principle is to build tools that enable scientists to make discoveries [1] Protein Structure Prediction & Biological Significance - Proteins, numbering around 20,000 different types in humans, perform nearly every function in a cell [1] - Determining protein structure is exceptionally difficult, often requiring years of effort and significant resources, costing around $100,000 [2] - There are approximately 200,000 known protein structures, with roughly 12,000 new structures being added annually [2] - Protein sequence discovery is happening approximately 3,000 times faster than protein structure determination [2] AlphaFold Development & Key Factors - AlphaFold's success was driven by data (200,000 protein structures), compute (128 TPU V3 cores for two weeks), and, most importantly, research and innovative ideas [2] - Research and novel ideas were approximately 100 times more valuable than the data used in training AlphaFold [3] - Mid-scale ideas, rather than just scaling transformers, are crucial for building transformative AI systems [2][3] Impact & Applications of AlphaFold - AlphaFold has enabled scientists to make discoveries in areas like vaccine and drug development, and understanding how the body works [1] - The release of the AlphaFold database, containing approximately 200 million protein structure predictions, significantly increased its adoption and impact [3] - Researchers are using AlphaFold in unexpected ways, such as predicting protein interactions and engineering proteins for targeted drug delivery [5][6] - AlphaFold is estimated to have accelerated the field of structural biology by approximately 5-10% [9]
The Real Moat in the Age of AI
Y Combinator· 2025-07-06 17:27
Startup Characteristics - The key to startup success lies in deeply understanding a specific user base and providing effective software solutions [1] - A significant competitive advantage (moat) is built by understanding users better than anyone else and having software that works for them [1] - Successful founders typically possess strong engineering/technology skills combined with unique insights into a specific area [1] - The founders of multi-billion dollar startups possess a rare combination of technical expertise and unique understanding [1]
AI for Scientific Discovery
Y Combinator· 2025-06-30 21:16
Looking ahead 10 to 20 years, what are you sort of most personally excited about. There's a lot, you know, in 10 to 20 years, unless something goes hugely wrong, we'll have like unimaginable super intelligence. And I'm very excited to see how that goes.I think AI for science is what I'm personally most excited about. I am a believer that to a first order approximation all long-term sustainable economic growth in the world like everything that leads to people's lives getting better is basically discovering n ...
Satya Nadella: Microsoft's AI Bets, Hyperscaling, Quantum Computing Breakthroughs
Y Combinator· 2025-06-25 21:00
A fireside with Satya Nadella on June 17, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Satya Nadella started at Microsoft in 1992 as an engineer. Three decades later, he’s now Chairman & CEO, navigating the company through one of the most profound technological shifts yet: the rise of AI. In this conversation, he shares how Microsoft is thinking about this moment— from the infrastructure needed to train frontier models, to the social permission required to use that compute. He draws parallels to the early PC ...
Andrej Karpathy on why we still need humans in the loop
Y Combinator· 2025-06-24 21:46
I think guies are very useful for auditing systems and visual representations in general. And I think guies for example are extremely important to this because a guey utilizes your computer vision GPU in all of our head. Reading text is effortful and it's not fun.But looking at stuff is fun and it's it's just a kind of like a highway to your brain. We have to keep the AI on the leash. I think a lot of people are getting way over excited with AI agents and uh it's not useful to me to get a diff of 1,000 line ...
Powering the Future with Fusion
Y Combinator· 2025-06-09 21:26
These massive data centers are the beating heart of the AI boom that's reshaping our world and they're hungry for more electricity. That's one of the reasons that for the first time in a decade, demand for energy in America is spiking. To keep up, we're burning more and more fossil fuel and fast.But there's another path, a clean, safe, virtually limitless source of power. Fusion energy. Fusion is the way the sun works.Only here on Earth, we've actually struggled to be able to do it in a commercializable, co ...
Fusion Energy Will Power the AI Boom
Y Combinator· 2025-06-06 14:00
These massive data centers are the beating heart of the AI boom that's reshaping our world and they're hungry for more electricity. That's one of the reasons that for the first time in a decade, demand for energy in America is spiking. To keep up, we're burning more and more fossil fuel and fast.But there's another path, a clean, safe, virtually limitless source of power. Fusion energy. Fusion is the way the sun works.Only here on Earth, we've actually struggled to be able to do it in a commercializable, co ...