1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness. New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)

Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy: • Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies. • How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be. • In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good! • It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.) • A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to). • Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big. • Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions. Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

Everyone is sick of generic AI, including us. Gamma was the first AI presentation platform to reach real scale. But now that AI tools are everywhere, everything looks the same. Earlier this summer, we came to an uncomfortable conclusion: without a step change in visual variety, Gamma’s output would look and feel too similar to all the other AI tools. The entire point of a presentation is to help someone "get" your idea, to see it as unique and do something with it. We started over. Today we're shipping Gamma 5, the biggest product overhaul in our company's history. We rebuilt Gamma to create presentations that actually look like you and your brand. Your teams can design anything they dream up, following your brand's aesthetic or something entirely new, with every frontier and image model under the hood. And the same goes for your docs, social assets, and graphics. We revamped our agent, design tools, editing, import, export, connectors, and more. Get your ideas out there.

Your AI is vaporware without deep integrations with your customers’ systems of record. Introducing @WithAmpersand: integration infrastructure for enterprise agents. We power 11x, Orb, and Square's ability to take agentic action in systems of record like Salesforce, SAP, NetSuite, and Workday. Ask anyone serious about building AI and they’ll tell you: - The SaaSpocalypse didn’t happen. The world depends on CRMs, ERPs, HRISs, and ITSMs. - Your customers customized their deployments beyond recognition. - Systems of record companies are basically monopolies. They never had to make their APIs and MCPs user-friendly. - Docs don't explain half the weird edge cases you'll hit. - One bad write can blow up your pilot or renewal. - Once you finally get it working, someone changes a field and it breaks again. The world's data lives in structured databases. AI needs a translation layer to work with it. So, for your AI to truly transform the way enterprises work, you'll need deep integrations built for: - scoped permissions - bi-directional actions - real-time speed for agents - custom objects, fields, and workflows for each of your customers We built Ampersand to power the future of software. AI didn't trivialize writing integrations. It made them the critical path. I believe that deeply, so I didn't make a launch video about Ampersand. Instead, it's the best builders I know explaining just how big of a challenge this is.

Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas in new @SpaceX note: "We think that over the next few weeks (ahead of Starship Flight 15), investors can take advantage of a unique opportunity to buy shares that look unusually cheap. We expect developments over the next few months will help investors better appreciate the role of SPCX in addressing the critical bottlenecks of power and chip making, potentially unlocking earnings growth and multiple expansion for the stock." Price target the same at $300.

Starting Monday, I'll be full-time on Ballast.Org, a new company grounded in a simple idea: economic value creation and humanitarian impact can compound together. Ballast is a for-profit engine built to grow capital and fund nonprofits in perpetuity. We will build in the world beyond core tech, with an initial portfolio of businesses ranging from real estate to hospitality to industrials.

What should the future of personal computing look like? We built it 😈 Introducing Imbue Studio:

We’ve raised $85M for this moment. Introducing Warp 2.0: The first AI Head of HR. Every company is building AI to replace jobs. Warp is building AI to do the jobs no human should have to: If you work in HR, I want you to spend time with the manager who needs help or building company culture people actually want to work at. If you’re a founder, I want you to focus on signing clients or spending time with your family. You shouldn’t have to figure out how to register state tax in California. You shouldn’t have to pay outrageous penalties because you don't know what a DE 9C is. I want to make HR human again. Today, this is finally possible with the Warp Agent. I’d love for you to see it in action: warp.co/agent

We sat down with Rich Jaycobs, the former president of Cantor Futures Exchange & legendary creator of 7 exchanges & 6 clearing houses, and 1/5 of all approved DCMs since 2000. Here's what it really takes to build a compute market. sfcompute.com/news/commodity…

Inference providers hate this man... Your LLM deployment can deliver 30 to 50% better performance after initial deployment. If your current inference provider isn't learning your workload and tuning the stack continuously after deployment, you need another provider. Wafer's continual inference agents do that work. Wafer's continual inference agents profile your production workload to identify where scheduling, decoding, or GPU memory pressure limits performance. The agents benchmark changes to batching, serving engines, and GPU kernels against your workload. Each candidate must preserve correctness and meet your reliability targets before it ships. The agents keep profiling as traffic changes, identifying new bottlenecks and further opportunities to improve performance per dollar. Watch @gpuemi explain how that work continues after deployment in his conversation with theCUBE.

San Francisco Compute has closed a few more deals. sfcompute.com/news/tcv-q3-20…

We gave our AI system a spec, and in under 2 weeks, it designed, verified, and deployed a chip that beats NVIDIA. It’s built for low-power physical AI workloads. We’re running live inference on >B+ parameter models like Llama, Qwen, and Kimi, serving at 3.4x better perf/watt than NVIDIA Jetson. From just a specification, our AI system autonomously generated all of the RTL Design, UVM verification, formal proofs, firmware, drivers, and kernels, co-designing the model, software and silicon as one optimization loop. Better AI can now design better chips to run AI, leading to a loop of recursive-self improvement towards our path to abundant intelligence.

Origin, our code hosting platform, is now live. It's fast, easy to use, and deeply integrated with Cursor. Get started by syncing your repos from GitHub.

Cursor has officially joined SpaceX. We’re grateful to become part of such a special company, and it has been a privilege working with the SpaceXAI team. Lots ahead.

Today we’re announcing Not Diamond Code, the world’s most powerful intelligent model router for long-horizon coding agents. Not Diamond works with any gateway or harness, including Claude Code, to select the best model and reasoning effort for each step, reducing costs by 20-65% without impacting quality.

Novig is officially live nationwide 🇺🇸 Welcome to the next generation of sports trading on the prediction market built for fans.

Cursor for iOS!

Today, we're announcing a $60M Series B led by @BatteryVentures, bringing our total funding to $85M in just under a year. Also joining the round are founders and operators who’ve built generational companies of the last two decades – @tobi (CEO, Shopify), @arashf (Dropbox), @chughesjohnson (Stripe), and more. The round came together in 6 days. Here's why. Every major category in enterprise software is seeing multiple AI-native challengers. CRM, ERP, ITSM – all being rebuilt from scratch by a new generation of companies applying AI to solve persistent problems we couldn’t before. Employee Management (also known as HCM) is the exception. It’s the last frontier, and we believe the most important one. The operating layer to manage people, run payroll, benefits, compliance, and IT, for every company in the world, is still built on architecture that predates AI by decades. This fundraise is the story of how Warp is changing that. The average Warp customer is growing 5x faster than their peers, with 1/10th of the HR and admin overhead. We’re seeing a massive shift happening in how the best companies run their people operations. From the fastest-growing AI-startups to massive public companies, the winning teams are running lean: HR, finance, and ops generalists who automate as much as possible, and use their time instead for strategic work that AI can’t automate. Warp is the platform of choice for ambitious companies operating at this new pace. Legacy HCMs help humans track the work. Warp uses AI to proactively complete the work. Workday was built for the last era. We're building for the next one. And it’s working. We've – - Doubled ARR in Q1 - On track to $2B+ payroll volume this year - Signed enterprise customers with thousands of employees - Launched entire product lines back-to-back: Warp benefits brokerage and Warp Fabric (our AI-native IT automation suite built in-house). A few thank-yous: 1. Our customers, the fastest-growing companies in the world, who trust us with their most critical systems. We wouldn't be here without you. 2. Our team - 50+ people in NYC who've built this platform, taken on the hardest problems in business-critical software. We're just getting started. 3. Our investors doubling down in this round, and some of our earliest believers – @sound_ventures_ (@aplusk, @epsteineffie), @PeakXV, (@arnavsahu341), @harjtaggar at @ycombinator, @balajis, @kevinhartz, @kvogt, @amasad, @HOFCapital (@myfady), @colinevans (@OpenAI) We're here to arm ambitious American companies with Workday-grade power, but with the usability and delight of an Apple product. With this new funding, we plan to fund deeper AI agents, tax and compliance infrastructure, expand our product suite, and support even closely our fast-growing customers. Come join us.

Three announcements from our keynote at Compile, including how we're training a new model with SpaceX.