Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Write some software, give it away for free
If you think of software development as a hobby like painting or playing an instrument or getting exercise in the woods, then it starts to make a lot more sense why someone would wish to take a loss on it. The real gain isn’t always money; it’s experience, discovery, new perspectives, and sometimes personal goals.
Supercomputer networking to accelerate large scale AI training | OpenAI
When training large AI models, a single step can involve many millions of data transfers. One transfer arriving late can ripple through the entire job, potentially causing GPUs to sit idle. Network congestion, link, and device failures are the most common sources of delay and jitter in transfers. These problems get more frequent, and harder to solve, as the size of the cluster increases.
Removing Sandbagging in LLMs by Training with Weak Supervision
We find that training with weak supervision can reliably elicit sandbagging models when supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) are combined: SFT on weak demonstrations breaks the sandbagging behavior, enabling RL to then fully elicit performance. Neither method succeeds reliably alone-RL without SFT almost always leads to reward hacking rather than genuine improvement, and SFT without RL fails to elicit full performance when the supervisor is much weaker than the untrusted model.
The bottleneck was never the code
For fifty years the residue was expensive enough to keep our attention on it. Typing speed, language design, framework choice, IDE plugins, code review tooling were all about reducing the cost of the residue. With coding agents the cost has fallen far enough that we can see what’s underneath: people trying to agree.
So your new ‘co-worker’ is an AI agent – here’s how to make the best of your human-machine relationship
My research on AI and agent capabilities, value and risk, as well as emerging studies of the cognitive implications of AI, the future of work and the role of AI in workplace inequality, suggest two key lessons for anyone navigating this new AI agent reality…
The context window has been shattered: Subquadratic debuts a 12-million-token window – The New Stack
Subquadratic, a Miami-based startup, launched its first model on Tuesday and claims it can get around all of this, now offering a model that can handle a token window of 12 million tokens. What’s more, the company says it plans to offer a model with a 50-million-context window soon.
Hallucinations Undermine Trust; Metacognition is a Way Forward
If we understand hallucinations as confident errors — incorrect information delivered without appropriate qualification — a third path emerges beyond the answer-or-abstain dichotomy: expressing uncertainty. We propose faithful uncertainty: aligning linguistic uncertainty with intrinsic uncertainty. This is one facet of metacognition — the ability to be aware of one’s own uncertainty and to act on it. For direct interaction, acting on uncertainty means communicating it honestly; for agentic systems, it becomes the control layer governing when to search and what to trust. Metacognition is thus essential for LLMs to be both trustworthy and capable; we conclude by highlighting open problems for progress towards this objective.
What’s Going On With Accelerators? — Chris Neumann
I’ll take it a step further: not only are ambitious individuals increasingly looking at top accelerators as a credible path to advance their careers, accelerators are increasingly selecting founders in ways that look a lot like how elite MBAs choose students.
Your Team Isn’t Using AI. Here’s Why That’s Your Fault.
When you mandate a tool, you get compliance. When you create the conditions for experimentation, you get curiosity. Compliance produces people who can follow your automation playbook. Curiosity produces people who see their own workflows differently — people who start asking “why am I still doing this manually?” without being prompted.
Inside Japan’s Startup Boom: Elite Engineers, Exploding Revenue, and Almost No Funding – Tremendous
Japan is a massive pool of great startups. But these startups are largely ignored.
AddyOsmani.com – Cognitive Surrender
Across three experiments and 1,372 participants, Shaw and Nave found that simply having an AI available was enough for people to surrender. On trials where the AI was wrong, 73% of the time participants accepted the wrong answer. Worse: their confidence went up when AI was available, even though half the answers were deliberately incorrect. They were borrowing the model’s confidence (which is always quite high) and treating it as their own.
Building Better Businesses #005 – by Dr. Astrid J. Scholz
Governance has to breathe — and it has to evolve with the organization. An autocracy of one founder is a perfectly legitimate form of governance when it’s just you. The mistake is treating it as permanent.
“Is this making my life better?” – by Maja Viklands Harris
While the new government is best known for its long meetings and fiery debates, Kitchin and Ye think City Hall is making progress on the goals set forth by the Charter Commission. They cite district representation, a more diverse city council, and professional city administration as major wins for Portlanders.
Thinking Local: Buckman Coffee Factory w/ Mayor Keith Wilson — Better Portland
We’re honored to welcome Mayor Keith Wilson. This will be an intimate and engaging conversation where members can hear directly from Mayor Wilson and share perspectives on the issues impacting our local business community.
Firsthand: How I Bet On Clay (And It Bet On Me)
I joined Clay as one of its earliest employees and a reluctant marketing hire. This is how, over the last three years, we built a role around my strengths as a storyteller, scaled past $100M ARR, and created a brand that startups study.
PSL’s T.A. McCann is running a startup again, as the CEO of Lev — an ‘AI co-founder’ for startups – GeekWire
After eight years as managing director of Seattle startup studio Pioneer Square Labs, McCann is shifting focus to become CEO of Lev, a startup that bills itself as an “AI co-founder” for early-stage entrepreneurs — offering an automated version of the guidance and validation that McCann and his PSL colleagues have provided to founders for many years.
Top counties for migration gains – The Business Journals
The South became a “domestic migration powerhouse” in the aftermath of the pandemic. Counties in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas topped census migration rankings, with larger cities often attracting 30,000 or more new residents annually.
