Sebastian Muehl

Looking forward to sharing how we at basys.ai are leveraging Generative AI to tackle healthcare’s biggest challenges. PS: Also looking forward to sporting my basys vest in the #BayArea PPS: What I’m not looking forward to is the second cross-country flight in less than a week. #GenAI #BasysAI #GenerativeAI

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🪄✨🤖 Magical AI Experiences 🪄✨🤖 In yesterday’s Stratechery Daily Update, Ben Thompson describes his magical first ride with Waymo: “The ride itself was, on any objective basis, pretty uneventful…What was really surprising to me, though, was how I felt about the entire thing. After Waymo greeted me by name, explained the process (which only happens on your first ride), and dropped me off with a cheery “Happy Friday”, I felt a twinge of — what is this?! — sadness as it drove away. I felt like I had just made a new friend, and now my friend was driving away after too short a time together.” Later in the update, he comments, “What was the most striking was how this experience made me think about Google: I felt a genuine surge of affection for the Internet giant.” ^^This is what we strive for at OfOne (YC W23). With voice AI, restaurant brands have a unique opportunity to rethink and deliver a differentiated brand experiences. When done correctly, AI can be delightful and immersive. We’re working really hard every day to enable our partners to provide this to their customers. The technology is there, and it's getting better every day. The brands that lean in and execute on this well will win customers hearts. Link to article below. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, you should be!

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Little can be added to those statements. Hardware can be one of your best competitive advantages, if done right.

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Who's got a Waymo experience to share? I just had my first truly bad one. First, I should say I love Waymo. It's not in many places yet, but it's poised to be everywhere soon. The app tells me I've done 26 rides covering 97 miles in SF and mostly it's been an exceptional experience. Apart from some quibbles like getting dropped off a block away up a big hill, it's a zen-like experience and a smooth better-than-human-driver experience on the way to wherever I'm going. But I think we're all bound to experience some hiccups as we journey to the future. In my case, I was taking a trip into the Financial District for an event and I had 6 minutes to spare given the ETA. Then all of the sudden it decides it wants to pull into the left lane, which is filled with parked cars. I sit at first amused at this decision. It pulls up right behind the parked car and waits. Then it goes through a dance of deciding it wants to get back in the original lane (everybody loves to snub a driverless car in traffic!) and pulling ever closer to the parked car ahead. Miraculously the driver of the parked car shows up, loads his trunk and departs with ease. The Waymo decides the next course of action is to pull directly behind the next parked car in the lane. My amusement fades. I call support via the touchscreen. My 6 minute buffer that had evaporated to 1 minute suddenly tells me I'll be 13 minutes late, a driver assistance team is dispatched and on their way. Yikes! Then magically (I think they manually took control), the Waymo behaves like a normal driver and inches back into the normal lane and I'm on my way, arriving 1 minute late to the meeting. So in the end, a bit of time stress for someone who really likes to be on time (I started a time company after all) and not really world-ending. In fact, despite this unfortunate experience, I'll be loyally riding again. And so I guess this ends as a parable about what Product Market Fit looks like. If you can mostly deliver superior experiences, there's room for rough edges. (pictured below, mom's first trip in a Waymo)

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I spent over half a decade working with driverless cars. I see massive potential for these vehicles to reshape NYC real estate. Waymo recently raised $5.6 billion in a Series C round led by Alphabet and supported by many other leading companies. Meaning the future of this technology feels closer than ever. These are the biggest Opportunities & Challenges Driverless cars present in the NYC market: 1. Reduced need for parking could free up valuable urban space, converting parking lots into housing, retail, or green areas. 2. Easier commutes may drive up outer borough property values, balancing Manhattan and other more densely populated areas of the City 3. NYC’s notorious traffic, pushback from unions on automation, unpredictable weather, and high foot traffic require advanced tech and regulatory adaptation. The next steps will be crucial as real estate, tech, and policy leaders navigate how driverless cars might reimagine our cities. How do you think driverless tech will impact real estate in NYC? P.S This is me in a driverless car back in 2017

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Today's a very special day as we announce the launch of Resolve AI and share that we at Greylock led their $35M Seed round. Reimagining software development may be the biggest opportunity in the AI era. Resolve is unveiling the world's first AI Production Engineer -- an AI engineer that understands source code, handles alerts, performs root cause analysis, and resolves incidents. In less than six months since starting, Resolve is already in production across enterprises, dramatically reducing Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), increasing uptime and improving reliability. Most importantly, companies that use Resolve free up their teams to focus on what they love and not the operational toil of keeping systems running in production. We are tremendously proud to be backing Spiros Xanthos, Mayank Agarwal and team. Spiros and Mayank are proven entrepreneurs who have built multiple successful companies, most recently leading observability at Splunk following the acquisition of Omnition. They also are the co-creators of OpenTelemetry, one of the most widely adopted OSS projects. Running production with AI is a tall order and the Resolve team has the rare intersection of deep observability, developer and AI expertise to make it happen. For the first time, machines are on-call for humans, and not the other way around!

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One of the biggest challenges for improving performance on Meta is teams beeing held accountable for daily (and sometimes hourly) results. This isn't enough time to try new strategies or products. So by optimizing towards a daily ROAS goal in the short term, might hurt performance in the long run as you could be missing out on new solutions.

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Interested in how to kickstart and scale design engineering in your organization? Check out the latest episode with Steve Saul!

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I just got a demo of https://www.usegalileo.ai/ from the head of our design department. It looks awesome and can save so much time in design prototytping. Just furthers my belief that the most valuable members of any technical team (designers, developers, etc) in the future are going to be those that have the deepest context of the business problem they are solving and can communicate about it in simple language. In other words, an ability to see their business at a high level of abstraction than is often required today. This is highly valuable already today...but as AI tools make the execution of technical tasks faster...contextual knowledge and communication will be 100x more important than even now. TIA Ventures ScrumLaunch

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A team of ex-Apple folks with $250M in funding may have over-promised and under-delivered in the wearable market. (Humane) However, this market is still advancing and Get Rewind AI has announced its pivot with a new brand, Limitless. Do we really need pins and clips with always on LLMS? Maybe It's just another "boring" week in AI. #news, #ai, and #productivity.

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Human in the loop with AI: Best-in-class LLMs are now at ~80th percentile in output quality. That is excellent for first drafts and being better than average, but still not great for delivering a final product of specialized, expert level work. #LLMs #AI #GenAI #futureofwork https://lnkd.in/gpe6BJjx

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We’re in the transition phase from value creation through human labour to value creation through machine labour — labour being the key word. The jobs that’ll be replaced first are the most laborious. Three areas stand out: 1. Movement of People & Goods Autonomous vehicles. Wayve, Tesla, Waymo. 2. Movement of Parts Warehousing and robotics. Figure, Tesla. 3. Movement of Information AI agents. OpenAI, Anthropic. My back-of-the-napkin calculation suggests that over 250 billion human hours are spent each year in these areas. From delivering packages to component fabrication or intra-company accounting, we’re headed toward a future where over a billion people will need to rethink how they spend their working time. What’s interesting is that training for these laborious roles is incredibly skill-specific, making them particularly vulnerable to automation. In a way, they’re very non-human tasks, requiring situational awareness within the capabilities of today’s machines. This suggests a stark truth: each year, 250 billion hours of human life are spent enduring non-human behaviours to make a living. The issue? Many adjacent roles face a similar risk, pushing unprepared workers into potentially major career shifts. I think we’re dropping the ball when it comes to preparing today’s workforce for this shift. And we’re certainly failing the workforce of the future through outdated education. The shift to machine labour is happening. It’s glacial — slow, unstoppable, and world-changing. On balance, I think it’s a net positive. Fewer laborious, non-human jobs being done by people. But we need much greater emphasis on preparing people for that change.

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My emotions during my first Waymo trip are very telling about how humans react and adapt to new technologies: - First 5 minutes: "Watch out for that bike!" or "Is it going to stop at the red light?" - Next 5 minutes: "We are truly living in the future and I can't believe how safe I feel." - Last 5 minutes: Texting and reading emails. Not even looking out the window We've seen a similar reaction to people's reactions to ChatGPT 3.5. It's launch was a seminal moment and mind-blowing. Twelve months later, it's viewed as an unsophisticated model. The takeaways: - Technology is innovating so quickly that it's more fleeting than ever. Consumers will get jaded unreasonably quickly which puts more pressure on the ability to consistently ship great and enduring product. - This fleeting consumer nature allows for rapid product iteration to cast aside any initial poor user experiences. It's okay if v1 isn't an absolute star. Just keep shipping.

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Here's an out-of-band $408k offer for a new RIV-5 AI engineer hire at Rivian. Notably, their new hire stock grants are structured in spans of 2 year instead of the traditional 4 year grant. This follows the trend of many companies either front loading their stock grants or even going as narrow as initially granting one year grants to employees. I’ve posted about front-loaded vesting schedules here: https://lnkd.in/gP7-Pj55 And single year equity grants here: https://lnkd.in/gNyZZAay Super neat to see all these details including the bonus breakdown as you browse through offers on Levels.fyi (download our app!) and if you’re a company we even notify you of these market intelligence updates for companies that fall within your peer group. Competitive intelligence dossiers: https://lnkd.in/dByYUHWq Any other companies with interesting vesting schedules? Planning to write more about some of the unique ones.

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What's going to happen to NVIDIA now that they've reached 3tn market cap? For the current employees and long timers... I've read stories of mid-level engineers who reportedly earned more than $60M via stock appreciation. Imagine the numbers for the more senior folks. How will NVIDIA keep folks around who are post-economic? And for all the new folks... The value proposition is complex. The company is the most valuable (by market cap) in the world. If they are heavily compensated via RSUs, the assumption is that there is significant remaining upside to be gained. It's incredibly difficult to continue orders of magnitude stock appreciation after reaching the absolute zenith... NVIDIA is an obvious tech darling - it looks and feels like a version of Google in the mid to late 2000's - but I'm really interested to see if the immense financial success of the stock will end up driving out the core talent group (eg, the long timers who are now mega rich) while also limiting access to new upstart talent who don't see a path to outsize financial success. Curious what others think!!

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Product announcements keep coming around GenAI. On the tooling side, here's my attempt at bringing some order to apparent chaos. What is the goal of "Canvas" in ChatGPT, "Artifacts" in Claude and "Spaces" in Perplexity? How will incumbents respond? Who will prevail? I think competition is brewing on three levels: TASK - productivity for the individual (most adoption is here currently) TEAM - making teams work better together (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude are all investing here) TRANSACTION - targeting enterprise processes, where we'll see attempts to displace enterprise applications and eventually systems of record. Thoughts? I've surely missed something.

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💭 𝗥𝗲𝗳𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗔𝗜'𝘀 𝗣𝗮𝘁𝗵 𝗙𝗼𝗿𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱: 𝗕𝗮𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗗𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻 In 2019, 𝗥𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗦𝘂𝘁𝘁𝗼𝗻 made a statement that still echoes in the AI world: let computation, not human intuition, take the lead. This idea laid the groundwork for models like GPT-3 and GPT-4, yet Rodney Brooks’ perspective also resonates – sometimes, practical AI needs a bit of human-designed insight to keep things efficient. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how AI is evolving beyond just scaling up models. We’re moving towards 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗳𝗹𝗼𝘄𝘀 that iterate and refine, making our outputs closer to the thoughtful processes humans use. At Creao AI, we’re exploring what it means to truly balance these visions. Can we create agents that design, adapt, and operate on their own, yet still draw on the best of human insight? This blog captures some of my thoughts on how AI might get there. 🔗 Check out my latest blog post for more on these reflections as CREAO takes steps toward a more 𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗼𝘂𝘀, 𝗮𝗱𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗔𝗜 future. 👉 https://lnkd.in/gxqWC7Wh #AGI #CREAO #AgentWorkflows #ArtificialIntelligence #AutonomousAI

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Unique role in a unique company! *Board Chair position* for one of the leading teams in generative machine learning committed to designing proteins - https://www.dreamfold.ai/ If that's you or someone you know - please reach out! About the Company: * DreamFold’s mission is to find treatments for severe, life-threatening diseases.  * DreamFold originated from the labs of renowned AI experts Yoshua Bengio (Turing Award winner) and Michael Bronstein (co-founder & DeepMind professor at Oxford).  * DreamFold has established a strong publication record: FoldFlow and  FoldFlow-2 are state-of-the-art models for protein structure design.  * With initial funding from top-tier deep tech investors, DreamFold is now preparing for a funding round it aims to close in Q3 2025. Objective: Work closely with the founding team and investors to help position DreamFold as a leading company in generative protein design. Bring expertise, insight, and capabilities to build a biotech company with an innovative modality and platform. Year 1: Prepare DreamFold for fundraising by supporting the CEO and team in fine-tuning the value proposition.  Year 2: Complete the Series A funding round to help scale DreamFold and establish two or more significant partnerships. In addition to the usual responsibilities of a Chair of the Board, the candidate will:  * Work with the founding team and investors to establish and articulate a clear, investable vision, strategic roadmap, and plan for sustainable growth.  * Take a leading role in promoting DreamFold’s assets, people, and technologies to the stakeholder community (e.g., biopharma, investors).  * Help develop the skills and competency base by mentoring and recruiting the initial advisory board. Attributes: The founding DreamFold team and investors are ambitious and strongly believe they can contribute to developing new treatments. Chair candidates should possess the following attributes:  * Ideally, the candidate has been a founder of a biotech company that scaled through multiple rounds of funding and deployed innovative technologies in biologics or novel advanced modalities to the clinic.  * Has personally led a company through value-enhancing milestones and returned value to shareholders through a meaningful liquidity event.  * Enthusiastic about the potential of generative algorithms in protein/drug design and willing to collaborate closely with the technical team.  * Able to commit to one day a week initially. #ai #genai #board #recruiting #biotech #pharma

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The Rabbit R1, the Humane, all these AI wearables seem like great products, for the wrong initial market. Market is full of 28 year-old boomers too attached to their existing tech. I truly believe when we look at the next generation of device we carry -- we shouldn't be appealing to techies and hackers. We should be looking towards the generation that is growing up with these devices. In reality, something like the R1 is literally perfect for a the curious 4-9 year olds of today who want to ask things like "what flower is this" or "how far is the sun". No grown ass adult is gonna point a camera towards a Cybertruck and ask “Yo what car is this”. One day that will be the case. But today, these products will need to be 100X better to ever trump over a smartphone. This will take time a lot of money and iteration. But, it will happen. Though, these products coming out today that are being dumped on...they're literally already perfect right now -- for kids. Children are naturally curious as hell. Parents want to manage screen time. A product that lets kids 24/7 ask the questions they're curious about seems... perfect. I started an online elementary school that had over 100,000 kids aged 4-9. Parents were always on the lookout for products that lets explore/learn without being attached to a screen. Market is there. Product is there. And, I think building for the new-gen (kids) will lead to more innovative products that can appeal to the masses in the long-run vs trying to appeal in the short run to the guy too attached to his Apple iPhone.

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