Antonio Pinto

One of my frustrations building an AI startup at the application layer was this feeling that I was basically a token reseller. You can have huge revenue, great retention, happy customers, all of it. But if a big chunk of every dollar goes straight to the model provider, you start wondering how much of the business you’re actually building for yourself. And yes, you can use open source models. For some tasks they’re great, for others you still need the frontier. But even if you own the weights, you still need somewhere to run them. Without scale, compute is expensive. Need a lot of it quickly? You pay another premium. Meanwhile the labs are locking in enormous amounts of capacity years ahead, with economics you probably can’t get as a startup. So switching away from an API doesn’t magically solve the margin problem. You go from buying tokens to buying compute, and you’re still buying from someone with more scale and negotiating power than you. That’s fine as long as you’re building something customers value enough to pay a healthy margin on top. It gets uncomfortable when your supplier starts competing with you. They can charge less for the same product and still make more money on each customer than you do. In an ideal world, you want to own the weights without having to spend billions training the model yourself. That’s why open source is so awesome. You want to be able to switch models and providers without getting locked in, and run inference with a cloud provider that has the scale you don’t and actually passes those economies of scale on to you. You don’t need to own everything. But you want the freedom to switch, and the economics to build a business that’s yours.

infinite faq

Incredibly proud of John Ternus for increasing the price of the new iPhone. He’s going to be a great CEO.

This is GPT-6 Astra. Anything you can do on a computer, Astra can do for you. Fast.

Quick update: starting to send beta version to Android and iOS users starting tomorrow. Hope you all stopped watching TV shows in the meantime 🥲

TV Time stops on July 15th 😭. But let's save its soul. Bingers was created by the founder of TV Time (@Toze). Save your TV Time data right NOW so all is retrieved when the app comes out (end of July) bingers.app

Popular TV-tracking app TV Time is shutting down as company focuses on AI techcrunch.com/2026/07/02/po…

TV Time will be shut down on July 15.

The fallacy of this is that more creates more. More hours, more hiring, more something. And it is true in a sense. If you put in more work, more work will happen. But I think for most startups, the leverage is really in how differently you approach the problem, how well you cultivate your team, and the strategy. Any large company can outspend you on hours. They have thousands or tens of thousands more people, spending more hours. If hours worked were the metric, every large company and government organization would always win and do the best work. More hours, better output. This thinking is often representative of younger founders, where the startup becomes their identity and life. They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you. But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work. I’ve never worked this way. As a designer, I always saw the need to take a step back, to take a break. At times, I might work 12 hours or 16 hours, or whatever amount was needed, but it wasn’t the norm. You just can't grind design, you need inspiration. But taking that step away from the work, would give me more perspective, inspiration and I could approach the problem differently or I could just see the solution. Grinding is never good for any creative problem, and startups or creating new products are often mostly about creative problem solving. Grinding works ok for email jobs, or where you just executing on very clear playbook. With Linear, we’ve never worked this way. We work reasonable hours, 5 days a week. All of us founders have families. Many of our employees have families. I personally stop every evening, spend time with the family, cook dinner for the family, eat dinner together, and focus on things outside of work. Sometimes I work in the late evenings or weekends, but to me the pride is that I don’t need to. Company should be succesful without it. My goal is to build a company that is sustainable in the long term, and doesn’t require heroics or personal sacrifices every single day. There are times when our team is heroic. Launches, incidents, some other work that just needs to be done. They will work late into the night because they know it is the right thing. But we don’t require that every day or every week, and the more this happens, the more I think it is a failure of our company and leadership. The team and the leaders should always keep a reserve to use when something is needed. Our thinking was also that quality, which we value, doesn’t emerge from working more or stressing people more. It emerges when you create the conditions for it to emerge. Often it is the appreciation, space, time, and how the person feels. A person who is rested will do better work. I wouldn’t attribute much of our success to working a lot. The success came from having clear thinking, ideas, and focus to do the right things. I sometimes wish we could move the culture more toward a Zen master. Real mastery is not exerting the most effort. It is achieving the outcome with the least necessary effort.

What I would love to see from Deepseek is not a flash model but a multimodal with good vision capabilities like GLM and Kimi! But anyway, the team is cooking 🧑‍🍳

Introducing Code Review, a new feature for Claude Code. When a PR opens, Claude dispatches a team of agents to hunt for bugs.

I tried asking ChatGPT and here's what it said:

christmas toy syndrome. remember being a kid, coming home from christmas dinner, refusing to sleep because you couldn't wait to play with your new toys? that's exactly how i feel since breakthough agentic ai models dropped (opus 4.5+ for example) every hour not working feels like burning opportunity cost. not in a hustle-porn way - in a genuine "holy shit this is so fun" way. tasks that used to drain me now take minutes. the boring stuff evaporated. what's left is pure building. 1 hour watching netflix = potentially 50-100 hours of output i'm leaving on the table. the addictive part? work doesn't feel like work anymore. it's just... playing with the most powerful toys ever built. anyone else feeling this? alien tech