Viral Y Combinator AI demo gets pulled

Top News

• Y Combinator startup demo raises eyebrows: YC has deleted a video demo from optimization and efficiency startup Optifye.ai after it sparked controversy on social media. Optifye designs software that helps factory and assembly line managers monitor their employees. The video features Optifye staffers role-playing an interaction between a manager and a worker who has not hit their daily efficiency quota. TechCrunch suggests the video unintentionally highlighted “growing anxieties over the rise of AI, especially in the workplace.” YC pulled the clip from across its social accounts.

• Nvidia sales explode in Q4: Nvidia released their latest earnings report on Wednesday, besting Wall Street’s estimates for revenue with $39.33 billion. Sales are up 78% and still rising as the company remains at the center of the AI accelerator race. Nvidia anticipates $43B in Q1 revenue, plus or minus 2%. That’s around 65% year-over-year growth. All eyes are now on the company’s next-gen AI processors, known as Blackwell.

• Inception launches diffusion-based language model: Palo Alto startup Inception introduced a new kind of AI model they call a DLM, or Diffusion-Based Large Language Model. While LLMs are most often designed for text generation, diffusion models power text-to-image/video tools, like Midjourney and OpenAI’s Sora. Inception’s DLM can apparently do the work of an LLM, but much faster and at a lower cost, by breaking the output into chunks and working on multiple segments of text simultaneously.

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It’s been a little while since we’ve heard from Bluesky, the platform that once seemed like a real and viable successor to X/Twitter’s throne. The politically-motivated exodus from Twitter was real and measurable: post-election last November, Bluesky added over 14 million new users. It’s at 31 million as of last week.

But speaking as someone who’s active on BOTH platforms, just anecdotally, it seems like they’re going to awkwardly co-exist, at least for a while. Despite its owners’ sometimes divisive extra-curricular activities, and research suggesting engagement has dropped, X users don’t appear to be in any rush to flee en masse. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that advertisers are returning to the platform, and even legendary author Stephen King — who notably took his leave following Donald Trump’s re-election — rejoined X this week (though, granted, with a new round of dismissive comments about Musk and Trump).

Nonetheless, Twitter ex-pats have indeed found a comfortable and welcoming new home, and Bluesky continues to grow and expand its footprint. A new photo and video-sharing app just for Bluesky users — called Flashes — hit the App Store this week, recalling the early days of Twitter, when fresh, innovative third-party apps were constantly launching to enhance the core experience. —Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2089: We open with Jason’s heartfelt tribute to late Apple founder Steve Jobs on his 70th birthday, with a trip down memory lane to their infamous meeting at the D3 Conference in 2005. Plus Outlier’s new take on AI training data, the dangers of memecoins, Apple’s mega-investment in AI, and much more.

E2088: It’s an interview double-header guaranteed to make you smarter about AI and defense. First up, Jason chats with Bryan Hagris of Castelion about giving America a competitive edge on hypersonic missile technology. Then, Alex chats with Crunchbase CEO Jager McConnell about their big pivot from data to AI-powered predictions.

E2087: It’s an all-news episode! Jason and Lon survey the collapse of EV truck startup Nikola, and suggest advice for founders looking to avoid the same pitfalls. Plus they take a look at Superhuman’s new AI email upgrade AND discuss ways Sam Altman could have avoided all of his top people jumping ship and launching their own OpenAI competitors.

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