Apply to AI Startup School in SF: https://events.ycombinator.com/ai-sus

There’s never been a better time to launch an AI startup, but many prospective founders find themselves stuck when it comes to thinking of a good idea. In this episode, the Lightcone hosts look at different ways breakthroughs can be discovered.

Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply

In this special episode of Lightcone, we’re joined by YC partner and creator of Gmail, Paul Buchheit, to dig into some of the latest trends in the world of AI and startups.

We recorded our conversation at a recent retreat where 300 of the top AI founders in the world gathered to share expertise and make predictions about how this technology will shape our future.

In the discussion, we cover a wide range of topics, including the future of work, the power of agency and taste in an AI world, and why this is the absolute best time to be building a startup.

Happy New Year! In this mini-episode, the Lightcone hosts ring in 2025 with their predictions for startups, AI, crypto, and more.

2024 has been quite a year for AI and startups.

As AI models continue to rapidly improve and compete with one another, a new business model is coming into view: vertical AI agents.

In this episode of the Lightcone, the hosts consider what effect vertical AI agents will have on incumbent SaaS companies, what use cases make the most sense, and how there could be 300 billion-dollar companies in this category alone.

There's an ongoing debate about whether AI scaling laws will hold or hit a wall in the near future. However, what's clear now is today's models already have the power to increase productivity in ways that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago.

In this episode of the Lightcone, we dig into the results of a recent o1 hackathon hosted by YC to find out what can be unlocked when founders leverage a SOTA reasoning model.

Earlier this month, OpenAI raised the largest venture round ever at $6.6 billion. The company’s CFO says AI is now at the point where orders of magnitude matter and the next generation of models will be capital intensive.

In this episode of the Lightcone, the hosts consider what a world with ultra-intelligent models would look like, and what potential unlocks could be made possible.

With rapid advancements in LLMs, AI can now follow prompts to generate code and build functional custom software. So, how does the tech landscape change when coding becomes accessible to everyone?

In this episode of Lightcone, we sat down with Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit—an AI-powered platform for software development and deployment—to explore how anyone can now tap into the power of coding.

As LLMs continue to improve, it's clear that vertical AI agents are key to the next generation of billion-dollar SaaS opportunities.

In this episode of the Lightcone, we sat down with Jake Heller, the co-founder and CEO of Castext— which sold to Thomson Reuters for $650 million in 2023— to discuss what it takes to build a successful vertical AI company.

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