VC @NEA | Spend my time nerding out about USC/Saints football, Star Wars, RTS games, and obscure facets of the US economy

Joined June 2020
James Kaplan retweeted
We’re sharing new results showing that frontier AI models are able to outperform human experts on financial predictions for the first time. We built an environment for the challenging task of Earnings Predictions, finding that the most recent frontier models (Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, Astra) with Samaya’s harness, meaningfully outperform expert consensus predictions on commonly reported earnings metrics such as company revenue, gross margin and more. We built this environment to have a “point-in-time” gate in the harness to ensure no information leakage, and created financial retrieval and data tools that would respect this gate and give the models access to the same information available to experts. We also adjusted for bias in expert consensus to create a hard, bias-corrected baseline, where outperformance has real signal. Only the most recent frontier AI models are able to beat this hard baseline, pointing to an important inflection point in AI capabilities in finance. Like with FrontierFinance, we see substantial headroom for further RL training in this environment — the models show large variations in error across different rollouts. We’re continuing research on using earnings prediction and other predictive tasks to post-train models to learn from their mistakes. Get in touch if you’d like to collaborate or try out an alpha version. Link to the full research below.
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Excited to announce our partnership with Valarian to lead their $50M Series A, our first defense and dual-use investment in Europe. While so much of the media is focused on physical sovereignty and the supply chain, Valarian is building the infrastructure layer that lets governments, primes and regulated businesses across the free world to achieve digital sovereignty. Shared more on our thesis below.
Almost every organisation on Earth is paying for the privilege to hand over its IP to someone else's AI. We just closed a $50M Series A, led by @NEA, to build the alternative from right here in London: every model, agent and workload sealed in its own enclave, on infrastructure you control, with keys only you hold. You can't be sovereign on someone else's stack. Build your own with Valarian.
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I know many people who remove the F1 key from their keyboard with pliers because Excel Help is so bad but maybe a poetry pharmacy is what we all really needed
Introducing Ode Poetry. Ode is a wonderful poetry pharmacy that reads you a poem for the moment you’re in. Just tell Ode what you're feeling, and it uses Microsoft AI audio models to connect you with the same work that poetry expert William Sieghart would recommend. The best technology doesn't replace human creativity, it helps more people experience it. Super proud of the team for making this truly humanist tool. More in the blog: microsoft.ai/news/ode-poetry…
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Amazon really blew an 18 yr lead on Mercor
AWS says Mechanical Turk will no longer accept new customers and that it is placing the crowdsourcing service in maintenance, signaling its future retirement (@ssharwood / The Register) (Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)
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Excited to be a small supporter of Trajectory! Today, most production agents for serious enterprise use cases require a deterministic harness that encodes edge cases or company-specific business processes. In this paradigm, to make agents better, companies make their deterministic tree / policy graph bigger and bigger since models can’t learn on their own. Trajectory re-writes this paradigm. Their platform helps models learn from a company’s own product usage data, building the rails for specialized AGI. And they hiring fast, DM if interested!
Today, @MichaelElabd, @QuantumArjun, and I are excited to announce Trajectory. We are a research lab and product company building the platform for Continual Learning. Our platform unlocks the signal already sitting in product usage, so companies can continuously post-train large-scale agentic models that outperform the frontier. @trajectorylabs We’ve raised $15M from @Conviction, @BessemerVP, @radicalvcfund, @jeffdean, @drfeifei and more. We’re partnering with some of the best AI-native companies: @ClayRunHQ @Harvey, @DecagonAI, @mercor, @RogoAI to power their agentic systems, some of which we are already in production with. We’ve brought together a world class research team from DeepMind, OpenAI, Apple, Meta Superintelligence, Amazon AGI, Scale AI, and an elite product team from Stripe and Figma. AI will never again start on day one. Every correction, every retry, every edit will make products smarter. This is Continual Learning.
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Excited to partner with Hilmar and the Fenris Games team as they become an independent game studio. And pumped for their new partnership with @GoogleDeepMind, who will be investing with us. As someone who’s played thousands of lifetime hours of strategy games, this has been special!
Great to be partnering again!
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Similar to looking at lines of code written, token spend isn’t necessarily indicative of productivity, but if the number is 0, you’re probably doing something wrong
Ranking engineers by token spend is like me ranking my marketing team by who spent the most money. We may not have hit our KPIs, but Joe spent $200k on a branded blimp that only flies over his own house, so he’s getting promoted to VP! Don't mistake a high burn rate for a high success rate.
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Appreciate the way Neo helps high slope young teams. Excited to meet the new group!
Today we unveiled Neo Residency, a new program for startups and high-agency student teams. 🎉 We’re replacing our best-known program, Neo Accelerator, with something even better and more selective. 🧵
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With the median cop in SF getting paid $289k, that’s a $145M unspent labor budget just in SF. Departments across the country are facing a labor shortage and are looking to technology to supplement.
The San Francisco city government hasn’t gotten enough credit for the improvements in public safety last year — including a 125% clearance rate by the Homicide Unit. Incredible results in any context, but also interesting to note that this was achieved despite ongoing labor shortages in law enforcement. I remember seeing something at the end of last year suggesting SFPD was short around 500 officers.
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FCF continues to elude large model companies because: -The threat of distillation forces Anthropic to keep running on the hamster wheel and disrupting themselves in short cycles (FCF comes the longer they are able to harvest the fruits of their previous model before they have to invest in the next one) -The move to RL democratizes the frontier, which was previously a capital intensive game Companies that own the user (the application layer) are best positioned since their usage data can be used for RL in this new paradigm At the same time, while their LLM API may not be profitable, it may be a low margin loss leader to sell other high margin software products (Claude Code/Codex, enterprise deployments, etc). This is the playbook profitable supposedly “commodity” API businesses like Stripe and ElevenLabs have leveraged
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Fascinating data on the challenges + growth areas of gaming: It's harder than ever for new games to compete, with older/entrenched games holding or growing share of playtime across all platforms Roblox dominates with kids and accounted for 2/3 of the entire industry's net new non-China growth... …but once kids get old enough, spending shifts to social media and gambling (iGaming, sports betting, prediction markets, crypto)
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Congrats to @elevenlabs on their $500M fundraise. @matiii has a rare combination of humility and obsessiveness, and it sets a culture that attracts and retains the best. It’s why they’ve shipped product at lightspeed even as they’ve grown and have consistently beat even our “optimistic case” when we first invested in the Series C in 2024. Congrats team!
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Privates markets love a non-profit with a strong consumer brand like OpenAI and Utah: Some ideas for what’s next: -The College Board (~$1B revenue) -Goodwill ($6B+ revenue) -Habitat for Humanity ($350M+ revenue)
In a groundbreaking endeavor, the University of Utah athletics is entering into what could be a $500M+ equity partnership with Otro Capital featuring the creation and shared ownership of a for-profit entity to operate athletics, sources tell @YahooSports. bit.ly/44hUcZJ
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Complaints against VC king-making miss the whole point. It’s not about VC $ crowning the winner. The market is pricing in the value of market leadership. For a long time, "value investing" (backing the #2 player at a cheaper price) has lost to paying high prices for the winner. This logic taken to the extreme means investing in companies ahead of knowing if they'll be market leaders since the prize is so great if you're right.
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Calling BS here 2 reasons: -Just because a product looks good in a demo doesn’t mean it performs well in a real-world environment with the required integrations -Industry-specific GTM matters a lot. And winning the customer with a useful but not defensible agent can be a wedge to something bigger
Terrifying Reality of 2025 Financial sponsor built a prototype in 2 weeks during diligence on an AI-healthcare company. Prototype outperformed the target’s core product in clinician testing. Deal killed.
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James Kaplan retweeted
We've raised $7M to help companies build AI agents that actually learn and work. @Osmosis_AI is a platform for companies to fine-tune models that outperform foundation models with reinforcement learning. Better, faster, and cheaper.
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Most AI generated videos looks fake, but that’s the wrong question to ask since the world only cares about the top 1% of content anyways
❓ Can AI-generated videos always fool people? 👉 Nope -- we catch them in 94% of cases 😅 🎥 With DeeptraceReward (deeptracereward.github.io), we teach MLLMs to detect human-perceived fake traces in AI-generated videos — and release both training data & model! 🔥 Benchmark: - 4.3K human annotations on 3.3K AI-generated videos + 3.3K real videos - Pinpoints visually & temporally grounded traces that reveal "fakeness" 🤖 A 7B reward model trained on this data outperforms GPT-5 by +34.7% at detecting, grounding & explaining deepfake traces. 🧠 Key insight: saying “this is fake” is easy; locating where & when is far harder. 📄 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.22646 This work is done with amazing collaborators at Penn, Princeton, and Stanford! @liusiyi64198 @yinuoxu @lupantech @guangqiusehu @tianboyang @tarananatasagar @christophershen @yikaimao @yuanzheliu @keyushshah @chungunlee @YejinChoinka @james_y_zou @DanRothNLP @ccb 🙌 A huge shoutout to everyone! #AI #Deepfakes #Multimodal #ComputerVision #MachineLearning #LLM #TrustworthyAI
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