life update: i moved to sf to work for the 🐐 @eladgil on early stage investments onwards!!

Houston has bad weather, no natural beauty, and little history. But that’s a feature, not a bug. It means government has to be responsive to the people to create a place people and businesses want to locate. It must be efficient with taxpayer money and consider tradeoffs. It must create an ecosystem that leads to a high quality of life for its residents. Lose this focus and the city fails. There is no presumption that residents must acquiesce to the city; the city must work for the residents. Turns out there’s great demand for this concept: the city has gone from the from the 45th largest in the US to the 4th largest in 100 years. It's a simple concept but one I find wanting in many legacy cities with more natural advantages.

When you ask @eladgil for a photo to promote his appearance at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit, you have to be ready for what he sends ... We'll take you in any design or form, Elad! Elad Gil is the founder of Gil & Co., where he is an advisor or investor in companies including: @Airbnb @anduriltech @coinbase @figma @Square @stripe and many more. He has an invaluable perspective on what separates successful companies from the pack, and we're excited to hear more from him on Nov. 12 in San Francisco. See you then, Elad 🔥

Generalists are useful, but it’s not enough to be smart. Advances come from specialists, whether human or machine. To have an edge, agents need specific expertise, within specific companies, built on models trained on specific data. We call this Specific Intelligence. It's what we're building at Applied Compute. We unlock the latent knowledge inside a company, use it to train custom models, and deploy an in-house agent workforce that reports to your team. We work with sophisticated companies that have already captured early gains from general models, like @cognition, @DoorDash, and @mercor_ai. They’re pulling even further ahead with proprietary in-house agents that don’t need to wait for the next public model release. Together, we are building and validating models and agents in days instead of months, achieving state-of-the-art performance on customer evals. Our team has high density and low latency. Our founders all worked on different parts of this problem while they were researchers at OpenAI — @ypatil125 as a key member on the agentic software engineer effort (Codex), @rhythmrg as a core contributor to the first RL-trained reasoning model (o1), and @lindensli as a core contributor on ML systems and infrastructure for RL training. Two-thirds of the team are former founders, and everyone brings a deep technical background, from top AI researchers to Math Olympiad winners. We are backed by $80M in funding from Benchmark, Sequoia, Lux, Elad Gil, Victor Lazarte, Omri Casspi, and others. With their support, we are growing the team, scaling deployments, and bringing to market the first generation of agent workforces built on specific models. In short: 1. We are building Specific Intelligence for specific work at specific companies. 2. That will power in-house agent workforces to support their human bosses. 3. That in turn will unlock AI’s full potential through humanity’s greatest engine of progress: thriving corporations in a free market.