Exploring the future of work, learning, startup ecosystems & film. Principal @join_ef Alum @ycombinator (S15) @trygigster @rossintel
Bangalore/San Francisco
Joined March 2010
- Tweets3.4K
- Following930
- Followers990
- Likes65.4K
Let's go @HariAyapps and @naveen_venk!
@archgen_ is building skyscrapers for semiconductor chips
Shrinking transistors is getting harder. Stacking them makes heat harder to manage. We’re building the tools to design chips in three dimensions.
We stack transistors vertically, shorten connections, and optimize timing and heat together.
Our foundational model for thermal simulation, predicts temperature roughly 5,000× faster than conventional EDA tools.
Our placement engine ranked #1 in HRT’s macro-placement challenge
We’re working with some of the largest fabs in the world to tape out our first chip in April 2027
archgenlabs.com
Akash Venkat retweeted
Two things I’ve been thinking about regarding AI:
• People often highlight the risks involved in AI, which are surely very real. I’m struck, however, by how hard it is to understand the contours of the positive scenario. There are easy-to-perceive and frequently invoked elements of a positive vision — more diseases cured, more material abundance, etc. — which sound great, but these are by themselves just ingredients. I’m curious what the larger equilibrium is supposed to look like. Do people work? If so, why? What is their marginal contribution? If not, how are resources allocated? What is scarce? What is the ratio between humans and AIs? Are humans in control, whatever that means? One sometimes hears the Culture novels invoked as one scenario, but I’m not sure they depict a desirable outcome. (AI runs everything and humans compete in games? Iain Banks himself said that the humans in the Culture are “somewhere between passengers, pets and parasites.”) There is Richard Brautigan’s famous poem, but do we want to be “returned to our mammal brothers and sisters”? (Isn’t that rewinding Genesis?) We could say that it was hard to imagine the world of 1900 from the vantage point of 1700, and that’s assuredly true. But nobody in 1700 was trying to recast humanity itself within a couple of years — things necessarily unfolded slowly and by increments, and therefore with the possibility for error correction. Given how rapid the rate of progress in AI may be, it feels strange for the upside case to be so opaque.
• There is increasing discussion of whether AIs are conscious or how we would know whether they are, with conclusions there often assumed to be relevant to matters of moral worth. At first blush, this seems a rather arcane, benign, or even absurd issue. (Remember the response to Blake Lemoine’s fears.) Setting aside the terms of the debate itself, or the relevant demarcation criteria, it seems to me a quite high-stakes question, for an affirmative answer — that is, granting moral worth to AIs — would presumably mean that the aggregate worth of AIs would soon outweigh that of humans in any utilitarian calculus. The AIs will be exceptionally wise and intelligent, and vastly more numerous (especially once one considers the imminent future and the AIs not yet born). As such, even epsilon of moral worth will multiply to a lot once one considers the quadrillions that could soon exist. (This is effectively a distributed version of the Nozick’s utility monster.) If this conclusion is unpalatable, I think one of three propositions needs to be rejected: the premise AIs can have moral worth; utilitarianism itself; or the belief that there is even a possibility that they will be far more numerous than humans.
With both of these matters (contours of future society; AI moral worth), there is the possibility of dramatic change. Today, people argue about datacenters. I’m curious how popular support for AI will evolve as more people come to understand these medium-term questions and the relevant stakes. What is the vision for AI that most people would be excited about?
Akash Venkat retweeted
More founders, more seed funds, more VCs, more investment in private markets, more startups.
Akash Venkat retweeted
Physics-accurate video generation is a crucial problem to solve if we want to arrive at world models that are actually useful. The key issue is that typical diffusion-based video models don't replicate real-world physics accurately because they simply don't have the right inductive biases to "fit" the exact underlying dynamics of the scene.
We at @DiracRobotics took this challenge head on, and here's our v0 of WorldMatter, a physics-accurate gaussian simulator!
Given a few training samples of a particular type of physical interaction (eg: bowling ball hitting some pins), it's able to learn, and generalize the dynamics to give us accurate rollouts of the scene.
Check out our results in this video. There are definitely still some imperfections, but our approach is getting iteratively better with each experiment we execute.
Stay tuned for our upcoming releases!
The first step towards building a world where robots can learn.
Meet WorldMatter v0 from Dirac.
Our 3D Gaussian world model rolls out world interactions after seeing a few initial frames.
The same rollout can be observed from novel viewpoints, letting us see the interaction from different angles while preserving 3D geometry and plausible physics.
It can generalise across different motions of the world, including complex multi-collision environments.
This is just the beginning.
Akash Venkat retweeted
The first step towards building a world where robots can learn.
Meet WorldMatter v0 from Dirac.
Our 3D Gaussian world model rolls out world interactions after seeing a few initial frames.
The same rollout can be observed from novel viewpoints, letting us see the interaction from different angles while preserving 3D geometry and plausible physics.
It can generalise across different motions of the world, including complex multi-collision environments.
This is just the beginning.
Akash Venkat retweeted
The entire AI compute stack depends on one small town in Western North Carolina.
The companies building superintelligence have the business model of an oil refinery.
GPUs turn energy into compute, labs turn compute into tokens. As these commodities scale, new financial markets get built around them.
My latest Slow Hunch is w/@CrucibleCap founder @Melt_Dem.
Meltem started in oil and gas, was early to Bitcoin, and has spent years thinking about the relationship between energy, compute, materials, and markets.
We get into the AI infrastructure boom, the coming neo-cloud shakeout, compute as a new asset class, and what happens when agents become economic actors.
Its markets all the way down, and maybe all the way forward.
Chapters
00:00 AI is a commodities business
01:50 Meltem’s slow hunch: energy, compute, and markets
06:25 From Bitcoin mining to the energy-to-compute thesis
10:03 The founding thesis behind Crucible
15:03 Why commodities and capital markets matter
20:18 The economics of the AI infrastructure boom
26:06 Debt, neo-clouds, and the coming compute shakeout
30:58 Compute and energy as the commodities of the AI era
34:43 Agents as traders and economic actors
37:47 What an agent-native economy might look like
40:34 Why markets may be the best way to distribute AI’s gains
Akash Venkat retweeted
Self improving AI is the most powerful tool in developing the next generation of EDA algorithms for layout
These algorithms run faster and more efficiently by orders of magnitude and ever before.
Check out our work here: archgen.tech/blog/posts/how-…
The more I am looking at AI for semiconductor design, the more it seems to me that:
1. RTL generation is just coding
2. 100% of RTL will be generated by agents
3. This means frontier models will dominate
And to be clear, we still need specialized tools for those agents that do verification, physical simulation, layout etc.
Akash Venkat retweeted
As a teenager, Naman Pushp taught himself how to build carbon fiber aircraft by watching YouTube videos. He turned his bedroom into a toxic R&D lab along the way.
Now, at 21, his company Airbound is on a quest to make the lightest, most efficient aircraft ever produced.
Naman is more or less the posterchild for a new wave of young Indian startup founders trying to do more ambitious things in the country.
We get into the aircraft, carbon fiber, India's pros and cons and much more on the pod. Full episode right here - corememory.com/p/the-boy-won…
How do we not have a 'Culture' series TV/film adaptation yet?
In Iain M. Banks's books, the Culture solves envy—a crux of humanity—by letting every citizen experience what they have not yet via tremendous compute (a world where citizens have no token limit).
Citizens quickly realize envy is pointless, as different life experiences mix good and bad; the grass of others is not any greener.
3
323
Akash Venkat retweeted
Was a full circle moment to introduce @alanchanguk to the team and show all the fast progress we’ve made all Caldera.
I joined @fuseenergy when it was 40 people and worked closely with Alan, Charles as the company went vertical, from 20M to 600M ARR in 2 years.
Early growth like that is intoxicating and visceral - you put in 80 hour weeks not because someone asks you to, but because you feel a strong sense of belonging to the business - you think if not you, then who?
We’re bringing that ruthless pace to Caldera. At Fuse a lot of priors were set from Revolut from which it derived its culture. Now I catch myself saying, far too often, ‘This is how we did it at Fuse’.
If you’re a killer engineer and want to rethink manufacturing, this is where you start.
Akash Venkat retweeted
OH: 'The "I'm moving to Canada" of the right is "I'm moving my data center to space"'
Akash Venkat retweeted
Amaan's company, Pathfinder, was the first investment I made against Families Fund's thesis.
I believe in a future where parents educate their kids how they please and spend 10x more quality time with them.
Today that's true for about 1 in 12 kids. I see a world where that becomes 1 in 4.
If this happens, Pathfinder will see hundreds of billions of dollars flowing through their platform for homeschooling alone (and that's not even including private school, etc.).
Want to be part of the revolution? Start by reading Amaan's article.
I have never been more bullish on the future of families in America.
Akash Venkat retweeted
India is 17% of the world, including a huge number of talented developers working on ethereum and ZK not to mention other kinds of secure, private and open technology, and it has so far had 0 of 11 devcon(nect)s.
I'm excited to engage with the community here.
Akash Venkat retweeted
feels pretty obvious that the lack of funding for zany early ideas because of the structure of venture and the crowding into winners that people are bemoaning will be solved by the new zillions of centimillionaire angels.
Akash Venkat retweeted
Week #4 of building @NeuralMiles in public: Just one month of building, and we are ready to deploy on testing sites!!!
To get a sense of what is needed for real sites, we successfully tested digging a specific area via tele-ops.
Updates:
a. Completed digging an area via camera feed to understand operational issues
b. Benchmarked latency from different locations
c. Simplified hardware designs
d. Signed 2 NDAs for site deployments and business outreach
Failures:
a. Tried tele-operating from the US but faced problems, so we need to iterate!
Tele-operating machines from labour-abundant geographies will provide an immediate remedy to constrained operations in many western countries without high capex needs, while building a solid platform to build autonomous algorithms with the data collected.
Would really appreciate intros to companies involved in mining and construction excavator operations! If you are following our journey and can help, our DMs are always open.
Except the fact that @deepboliya fell with his laptop while testing 🙃, it has been a great week of learning!
NeuralMiles(EF S26)
#robotics #startup #physicalAI #autonomy #construction #mining
Casual 7M in revenue run rate added during the fundraise by the formidable @vaibhav514g :)
