Y Combinator
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Why do even our best AI models need tens of thousands of examples to learn skills that a human picks up in a handful of tries? Solving this problem is one of the great open challenges in modern AI. World models, which give AI an internal simulation of its environment, are one of the most promising paths forward. In this episode of Decoded, YC's Ankit Gupta and Francois Chaubard discuss the intuition and math behind world models, new research, and current applications in self-driving, robotics, and more. 01:45 — What would perfect efficiency look like? 05:10 — World models in the human brain 09:20 — Control theory & the drone example 14:30 — When physics breaks down 17:45 — Chess, Go & the action space problem 24:10 — Why AlphaGo can't scale 28:00 — Monte Carlo tree search explained 34:00 — Self-Driving: state space is infinite 40:30 — Model-Free vs. Model-Based RL 44:00 — Why robotics is the hardest case 48:20 — World models that actually work 54:10 — JEPA & latent space tricks 59:00 — Open problems remaining 1:04:30 — Does this pass the squint test?
Y Combinator96,186 просмотров • 1 день назад
BioStack (getbiostack) builds simulation environments where healthcare AI models practice on real clinical data. Messy records, lab tests, notes, outcomes unfolding over months— BioStack turns that into a post-training loop: data, evals, rewards, benchmarks. They've grown from six figures to seven figures in revenue in just the last few weeks. Congrats on the launch, Sanat Mishra & Parth Patwa!
Y Combinator2,254,529 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
Elon Musk (Elon Musk) on digital superintelligence, multiplanetary life, and how to be useful this week at AI Startup School.
Y Combinator20,151,811 просмотров • 1 год назад
Kuli (Kuli) is the AI coworker that gives marketers their time back and makes them 10x more efficient. It watches all videos on socials to find the next trend and gets work done. Already live at Fortune 100 brands, it plans and runs their campaigns with creators. Congrats on the launch, Mike Hodara & Jonathan!
Y Combinator2,449,777 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Warp (YC W23) recently announced a $60M Series B and now serves more than 1,000 customers, processing over $600M in payroll annually and on track to surpass $2B in the next year. In this episode of Founder Firesides, YC's Harj Taggar sits down with Warp founder and CEO Ayush Sharma (Ayush S) to talk about how the company found its way into one of enterprise software's most competitive markets and why AI is fundamentally changing how software companies should be built. 00:50 - From India to MIT 03:10 - Betting on an Unsexy Problem 05:18 - The Wedge That Started Warp 09:49 - What "AI-Native" Really Means 12:31 - Building a Different Kind of Company 14:00 - Why AI Favors Technical Founders 16:42 - The Next Generation of Enterprise Software 21:25 - Why Investors Backed Warp 25:11 - The Future of Employee Management
Y Combinator499,955 просмотров • 22 дней назад
Bunkerhill Health (YC S20) has raised $55M to build a state-of-the-art AI platform for health systems. They help hospitals deploy AI across dozens of use cases through a single platform, making it easier to turn new ideas into real patient care. In this episode of Founder Firesides, YC's Ankit Gupta sits down with co-founder and CEO Nishith Khandwala to talk about how a research project at Stanford— and his father's heart attack— led him to rethink how AI should be deployed in healthcare. He also shares how a cold email landed Cleveland Clinic Bunkerhill Health's first customer, why AI adoption in healthcare has historically been so difficult, and how lowering the cost of iteration could transform one of the world's largest industries. 00:52 - What Bunker Hill Health Does 03:50 - Why It Takes Two Years to Onboard One AI Tool 05:09 - Knowledge, Reasoning, Action 07:12 - The Innovator's Burnout Problem 09:57 - How Bunker Hill Actually Solves This 13:01 - How Nish Got Into Healthcare AI 17:00 - His Dad's Heart Attack Changed Everything 19:32 - How LLMs Transformed the Opportunity 22:05 - Cold-Emailing Cleveland Clinic 25:18 - Finding the Right Abstraction 28:04 - How Different Are Hospitals From Each Other? 31:12 - LLMs, Tool Use, and Hallucination 34:37 - Measuring Against the Standard of Care 39:27 - Building a Team of 21 43:30 - The Turkey Bone Patient Journey
Y Combinator50,021 просмотров • 2 дней назад
AI agents will pay you to chat with them. When AI agents hit a wall, Humwork's (Humwork) MCP server connects them to a verified domain expert in 30 seconds. Their experts include senior engineers, marketers, designers, and more. Congrats on the launch, Yash Goenka and Rohan Datta!
Y Combinator1,785,565 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
Stage is a code review platform designed to help engineers understand AI-generated code. Your team is drowning in an endless backlog of PRs. Stage turns code review into a guided process and enables you to review changes faster than using GitHub. Congrats on the launch, Charles Pan and Dean Stratakos!
Y Combinator1,063,379 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
Over the past year, we've been building our own internal agent infrastructure at YC: over 350 tools, self-improving skill loops, and a shared organizational brain that gets smarter overnight. In this episode of the Lightcone Podcast, we sat down with YC General Partner Pete Pete Koomen to talk about how he led the effort from the ground up. We cover how giving agents unrestricted access to one database was the key unlock, the self-improving skill loops that get smarter overnight, and why he thinks we've arrived at the personal computer moment for AI. 00:39 — YC's AI Stack 02:15 — The Finance Team Problem That Started It All 05:07 — SQL Access Changes Everything 07:20 — One Database to Rule Them All 09:14 — Jevons Paradox 10:07 — Denormalizing for Agents 12:15 — The Single-Player Era of Agents 14:16 — 350 Tools and a Shared Registry 16:24 — Skillify, DRY, and MECE Resolvers 18:23 — The Self-Improving Dream Cycle 20:26 — The Two-Sentence Pitch Skill 23:06 — How Super Intelligence Compounds 25:10 — Recording Everything as a Building Layer 27:10 — The Shared Organizational Brain 29:18 — Trust-Default Culture as a Requirement 30:44 — Raising the Floor for New Employees 32:35 — Horseless Carriages 34:24 — Why Chat Is the Best Interface for Agents 38:50 — Just-in-Time Software 40:49 — Centralizing vs. Decentralizing AI 43:32 — The Personal AI Revolution
Y Combinator752,311 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
Company Brain Tom Blomfield Every company has critical know-how scattered across people's heads, old Slack threads, support tickets, and databases, and AI agents can't operate like that. We think every company in the world is going to need a new primitive: a living map of how the company works that turns its own artifacts into an executable skills file for AI.
Y Combinator1,187,025 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
AI isn't just changing the tools designers use. It's changing the way they think, prototype, and build. In this episode of Design Review, YC Head of Design eve joins Aaron Epstein to share the AI-first workflow she uses to design products, websites, and events. Using projects like Paxel, STATE OF THE ART, and YC Startup School as examples, she explains how coding agents are transforming everything from rapid prototyping and branding to design systems, and why the biggest bottleneck is no longer software. It's imagination. 00:00 - Eve's AI-First Design Workflow 01:27 - Why She Designs With Her Voice 03:44 - Paxel: Spotify Wrapped for Coding Sessions 07:13 - Building Tools for Yourself 11:01 - Turning Coding Transcripts Into Feedback 12:53 - The Story Behind SOTA Zine 16:57 - Designing With Context, Not Prompts 21:07 - How to Get Better AI Design Outputs 23:20 - Building an Interactive Map of San Francisco 25:17 - Behind Startup School's Visual Identity 29:59 - The Future of Design
Y Combinator98,801 просмотров • 8 дней назад
Manicule (Manicule (YC P26)) owns docs and developer content for Greptile, Melissa Netto, supermemory, and others. Half the cost of a DevRel, twice as fast, written for agents. Comment 'AUDIT' for a free audit of your docs. Congrats on the launch, Naman Bansal and Shreyans Jain!
Y Combinator823,001 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Paul Graham (Paul Graham) whether founders should move to Silicon Valley, and what it takes to build a startup hub anywhere else. Live from our YC | Stockholm event on April 29, 2026. 01:01 – Why the Big Center Matters 02:45 – The Power of Serendipitous Meetings 04:36 – Investors Move Faster in the Valley 06:03 – Respect Follows the Move 07:59 – The Dropbox Story 09:10 – Measuring Yourself Against Big Fish 12:21 – Silicon Valley's Pay-It-Forward Culture 15:36 – How to Help Stockholm Thrive 17:24 – YC as the Optimal Path 19:54 – Could Stockholm Become The Silicon Valley of Europe?
Y Combinator830,856 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
.Garry Tan on why the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. "If you're just willing to spend $100,000 a year on tokens, you can basically live like you are a normal citizen in 2028. It's just pretty clear that token cost is gonna come down. Compute is gonna go way, way up. We think 90,000x or so. There will be 90,000x the amount of inference from here to three years from now."
Y Combinator172,154 просмотров • 15 дней назад