y combinator

20 Sep

Want to Get Into Founder Mode? You Should Be So Lucky

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsEntrepreneurs, founders, plaintext, silicon valley, startups, y combinator

It’s also true that when one of those groundbreaking companies matures and faces challenges, a founder has a unique ability to make bold moves and stick to the original vision when others urge a less risky course. There are certainly cases where companies struggled when founders were replaced by managers. Remember Yahoo? And of course there’s Apple, where the founder returned and restored the company to its former glory and beyond.But there are abundant counterexamples as well. Apple isn’t exactly struggling under Tim Cook. And consider Microsoft. Its CEO since 2014, Satya Nadella, had been a company lifer, slogging away…

26 Jul

Open Source AI Has Founders—and the FTC—Buzzing

stp2y0 CommentsAIartificial intelligence, founders, FTC, open source, startups, y combinator

Many of yesterday’s talks were littered with the acronyms you’d expect from this assemblage of high-minded panelists: YC, FTC, AI, LLMs. But threaded throughout the conversations—foundational to them, you might say—was boosterism for open source AI.It was a stark left turn (or return, if you’re a Linux head) from the app-obsessed 2010s, when developers seemed happy to containerize their technologies and hand them over to bigger platforms for distribution.The event also happened just two days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared that “open source AI is the path forward” and released Llama 3.1, the latest version of Meta’s own open…