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Mike was my colleague at Berkeley, and he's been fairly skeptical of deep learning's trajectory for years. Most scientists are skeptics, and it can take a big shock to get someone to consider a possibility that goes against the anchoring effect coded in our DNA. I too was somewhat of a skeptic until ~6 months ago, and people ask me all the time why I joined Anthropic. It started in April, when a friend I've known for 20 yrs messaged me saying he'd be in the Bay Area in a week, and he suggested we meet up. I invited him to my house for dinner, and he told me he had just joined Anthropic. He said the models were becoming increasingly more capable, and he believed both that they'd soon be smarter than him and also that all intellectual work would be highly devalued in the near future, and lastly that society was not at all ready for what's coming. I'd of course heard claims similar to this before, but not from a friend I'd known for this long, and who I trusted, at my dining room table. It was the initial shock needed to destabilize my own anchoring. Also, I've been fortunate to work with and/or mentor many smart people in my life (e.g. Fields medalists, a 4x Putnam Fellow, IOI first place winners, etc.), so I feel pretty calibrated in recognizing very smart people, and this was someone who is definitely very smart and with impressive such credentials. So, it was hard to ignore this friend saying the models would be smarter than even him in particular. After that dinner, I decided to do an informal survey, calling and meeting up with a lot of my friends who now work on improving model capabilities at these frontier labs. They all agreed with that first friend. These were all people I'd known 10, 15, 20 years, who mentored me, or I mentored them, or we met professionally in academia. These are people I trust, and their beliefs on this topic were consistent. I then spent a whole lot of time understanding the missions of different companies, and talking to current and former employees and people in leadership. I read Dario's (long) essays and watched videos on YouTube of company leaders being interviewed. Anthropic's stated mission "to ensure that the world safely makes the transition through transformative AI" felt like exactly the right guiding principle to handle such a society-disrupting technology, and everyone I spoke to at the company was very aligned with this mission. It's easily the most mission-focused place I've ever been at, and everyone takes the work extremely seriously and with a profound sense of responsibility. And now here I am. And being on the inside, the pace of progress has surprised me more than I first imagined. The moment that pure mathematicians are in, to me, is just a microcosm of what I predict a much larger of society will be grappling with in the not too distant future, and I really hope our leaders and the general public internalize sooner than later just how significant a moment we're in.

I’m stepping back from venture capital for the best possible reason – to get back to operating. Starting today, I’m CEO of General Medicine, leading the company alongside my friends and cofounders Ashwin Muralidharan and Elliot Cohen. Ashwin explains it below, and I’ll just add that these are my two favorite people to work with, and we have lots to do. More soon.

I'll start from the end: I have joined @VineVenturesLP. I'm excited, a little emotional, and mostly grateful to continue living my life. This morning @BusinessInsider published an interview with me. Thank you to @meliarobin and @JamieHeller for listening and for telling my story with sensitivity and nuance. For many people, I'm Noa Argamani, who was rescued by the IDF after 246 days in Hamas’ captivity. That's part of me, and it always will be. But it's not all of me, and I'd like you to get to know me in my new role too. If you're building something, have an idea you can't stop thinking about or you’re in the Valley and looking to help the most ambitious founders in Israel succeed, I hope to be a bridge between the two ecosystems.

Relace is now also the cheapest provider of DeepSeek v4.1 Flash on OpenRouter. Agent traces are 96%+ input tokens, so GPU utilization is dominated by prefill time. However, most of those tokens are not relevant for the next response. The encoder/decoder split allows you to use a lossier, cheap submodel for prefill without affecting the performance of decode (i.e. quality of responses). It also means you need to shuttle KV between GPUs a lot, which is why they redesigned attention (again) and made the KV 4x smaller. Fully taking advantage of the theoretical gains is a deep engineering problem that DeepSeek left as an exercise for the reader.