Akshay from Startup Spells 🪄

Today we’re introducing Gemini 4 Argon. It delivers frontier performance in complex workflows across real-world software engineering, knowledge work, and cybersecurity defense with an industry-leading 1M token output limit.

aws made the industry soft. we're used to them handling all the hard problems and everyone can be a pure product company with 85% margins ai infra is not mature enough for this but everyone is pretending like they can offload the actual work to someone else it's why there's 27 model router products. even most inference companies do the bare minimum on compute someone else set up and it all feels successful because there's so much money around it's hard to justify doing the hard thing when the easy thing is profitable but the gap between what openai, anthropic, deepseek, moonshot and everyone else is huge and it's easy to forget that someone actually has to do the work to close it

Once again, build apps for women. You’ll see higher revenue and better conversion rates. Out of the 5 apps I’m running right now, the one built specifically for women is making 2x more revenue than the others.

“Everything seems fake now.” .@lulumeservey on companies paying for retweets on their product launches: “Every launch uses the same slop cinematic video, same template.” “Half of them, you go to the engagement—it's completely fake.” “You can just start to tell that the amount of engagement this thing has is completely disproportionate to how interesting it actually is. And when you look through the people engaging with it, it's all some random account in a developing country that has no other tweets other than shilling products like this.” “When that happens, I write off the entire company as fake.” “I don't think, ‘This was a fake video or fake engagement.’ I think to myself, ‘It's a fake company with a fake founder. I will never buy their product or do business with them. I would never recommend somebody go work with them. The whole thing is fake.’” “It's better to put out something that truly represents the best version of what you’re doing that might get lower engagement, but the people who are engaging are actually real people, and they care. It's better to get 50 people who feel like this is speaking to them than to get 4,700 retweets that seem obviously fake.”

It’s when the project makers could have a “bug” in the entropy generation for later retrieval.

Either @AnthropicAI is terrible at building sandboxes... or excellent at marketing. (or both) But enough with the “we created a hacking monster” games. Do it for real. I put this in an @BitGo wallet for you. Go get it. 100 BTC: bc1qg4jcyumevszta3rs869v9jrf6rz9z360svp03jsl5xcryfd7xqvs4hurnq

Or… what if we gave you $100 in Codex credits if you tell us what you love about GPT-5.6 Sol or why you switched? Tweet it, claim your gift, enjoy more usage. First 10k get the free tokens! switch-to-codex.openai.chatg…

I’m convinced that a large % of programmers don’t actually like computers. As a side effect, are also perfectly happy to throw away their reasoning to a model as soon as they can. I don’t get it, at ALL. Don’t you *LIKE* understanding the magic of the machine? You do realize hand-programming (I hate that I even have to specify hand now) is fun…right?

(1) Today we're releasing Muse Spark 1.1 -- a strong agentic and coding model at a very low price. It's available through our new Meta Model API and in Meta AI.

Introducing GPT-Live, a new generation of voice models for natural human-AI interaction. Rolling out in ChatGPT starting today. You’ll want to turn the sound on for this one.

We are now in a position where a tiny proportion of the population uses Fable or soon GPT-5.6, while everyone else's experience of AI is 8-30b-model level - Google's AI Overviews, Meta AI, ChatGPT free tier, maybe MS Copilot at best. People outside of tech must be completely baffled how this is supposed to take their job, and annoyed that hundreds of billions are being poured into it.

if you're selling your startup - don't I sold my startups for $8m & I'll never sell again quick context: I sold Tweet Hunter and Taplio for $8m in 2024. $2m upfront, the rest as an earnout based on performance - on paper, a dream exit in reality, 3 things broke me first, I gave up my baby. the products I spent years building, the vision I had in my head all of it went to someone else. and now I sit here watching the new owners ship things I'd never ship, kill features I loved, and just make the product shitty looking at Tweet Hunter like this hurts more than I expected it to 😞 -- second, the earnout was kind of a 2-year prison we wanted a high multiple, so we agreed to performance-based milestones that meant 2 years of waking up every single day knowing the only thing that mattered was hitting aggressive revenue targets I was technically still running the company but I had a boss now: the contract 🥲 hitting milestones used to feel like winning but with an earnout it flips. every win is just dodging a loss and missing one doesn't feel like falling short - it feels like being a loser -- third, the money itself breaks you - nobody warns you about it you have no idea what to do with that kind of money you don't get the time to adjust to it and you start taking bad decisions. you stop identifying as the same person you were before and you go a little crazy, faster than you think and then comes the worst part after all this, when I got back to building, I realized everyone around me already saw me as the "successful guy who exited" and that froze me for months I couldn't ship anything new because I was scared of breaking the perception I've talked to a lot of founders who sold their companies. every single one of them feels this but I got back to it anyway - building is what I love and today I'm building a SaaS portfolio that crossed $1m MRR this year so if you're sitting on a term sheet right now, do me a favor don't read what the buyer is offering read what you'd be giving up and then make a decision