Lightcone Podcast

Suhail Doshi, a YC alumni who previously founded Mixpanel and Mighty, has created a state-of-the-art (SOTA) AI image diffusion model with Playground. The app allows you to talk to it like a graphic designer and helps you create imagery and text for a wide variety of use cases. In this episode of Lightcone, Suhail sits down with the hosts to talk about his experience building Playground with his team and what it takes to make a SOTA model.

Try Playground: https://playground.com/design

Read Playground V3 Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10695

Familiar with the lore of Y Combinator? Then you'll know Jessica Livingston — one of the original co-founders who started YC back in 2005. On a recent visit to our SF headquarters, she shared with the Lightcone hosts the stories and decisions of the early days that would form the foundations of YC as we know it today.

Is the latest excitement around AI just another round of dot-com or crypto-style hype? The Lightcone hosts discuss where AI might be if the hype cycle is real, and what may remain once the buzz wears off.

Apply to YC's first-ever Fall batch at ycombinator.com/apply.

It’s the first guest episode of Lightcone! The hosts sit down with Paul Buchheit, one of Google’s earliest employees, the creator of Gmail and current YC Group Partner. (He also came up with Google’s famous tagline “Don’t be evil.”)

This discussion covers a wide range of topics including the future of AGI, the early days of OpenAI and the crucial importance of open source models.

As AI continues to evolve and advance, a line of thinking has emerged that humans will no longer need to learn how to write code in the future. If so, could this mean that a staff of ten or less could create a unicorn? The hosts of Lightcone analyze this prediction and discuss whether it has merit.

There's been a lot of news lately about the updates to some of the largest foundational AI models. But what does this mean for startups? How will future product releases from the AI giants effect the companies built on top of them? The hosts of Lightcone discuss how founders can take advantage of these developments and avoid being steamrolled by the competition.

Last month, YC hosted Startup School East, a one-day event in Boston for university students. As part of the event, the Lightcone Podcast did their first live stage recording specifically tailored for the students.

What's happening in startups right now and how can you get ahead of the curve? In this episode of the Lightcone podcast, we dive deep into the major trends we're seeing from the most recent batch of YC using data we've never shared publicly before. This is a glimpse into what might be the most exciting moment to be a startup founder ever. It's time to build.

YC has become a surprising force in the hard tech world, funding startups building physical products from satellites to rockets to electric planes. In this episode of Lightcone, we go behind the scenes to explore how YC advises founders on their ambitious startups. We also take a look at a number of YC's hard tech companies and how they got started with little time or money.

If you read articles about companies like OpenAI and Anthropic training foundation models, it would be natural to assume that if you don’t have a billion dollars or the resources of a large company, you can’t train your own foundational models. But the opposite is true.