If we were having coffee and you asked me what I actually think about AI in engineering, here's my take without the slides.
First, get the replacement worry off the table. Your engineers aren't the bottleneck. The workflow is. A great motor designer with a good simulation tool gets maybe hundreds of serious iterations into a design cycle before the schedule says stop. Let’s say 500, out of a design space with millions of viable answers in it. That person isn't underperforming. They're rationing.
Now the part every engineering leader needs to hear:
The clock has been reset. Chinese OEMs take a vehicle from concept to showroom in under two years and refresh it while everyone else is still validating last year’s design. People call it China Speed, and it's the bar now whether you sell into China or not. Your competitors measure themselves against it. So do your customers.
You remember the old rule? Cost, performance, schedule: “pick two.” Physics-grounded AI in the design loop is the first thing I've seen that breaks that rule. Run a million candidate system designs in a day, every one solved against real electromagnetics and thermals, and your engineer gets to pick from a frontier instead of a limited handful. Less magnet and copper in the box, more torque and efficiency out of it, and the answer in days, not months. All three, from your same team.
That's the new mandate. Be faster than your competitors, faster than China Speed, and the product that comes out the other end is the best one your customer can buy. Not the best one your schedule allowed.
Software got swallowed by AI first and gets all the attention. But the durable advantage sits in physical product, because that's where the volume and the real margin live. Cut 15% of the rare-earth magnet out of a electric motor that’s built a million times in a year, and you have your CFO’s attention. And because AI on hard physics is a lot harder than AI on text, fewer companies are doing it. So far.
The teams already embracing the change have put this where design decisions get made. They've given their engineers access to the tech and the mandate to use it, and started measuring product iterations per week instead of per year.
Last week one of the largest automakers in the world (Hyundai) said publicly that this approach gave them more efficient, lower-cost motor designs in a fraction of the time conventional methods take. A world-class team said that. Not a startup.
Fair disclosure: I run commercial teams, so I see this every day. Discount me accordingly. But the direction isn't in question anymore. Only the timing is, and that's yours to decide.
“Pick two” was the rule my whole career. I don't think that holds anymore.
I build on both sides of the Atlantic. This isn't only a European problem. Plenty of Americans have gotten too comfortable. Skepticism is a skill. Cynicism is a habit, and comfort feeds into it.
We need to separate the man from the machines: what Elon's teams keep building is a wake-up call to celebrate brilliant human ingenuity again.
Je vais dire quelque chose qui risque de déplaire à beaucoup de monde, mais tant pis.
Je crois qu’une partie de notre société est en train de perdre quelque chose de bien plus grave que sa compétitivité économique.
Elle est en train de perdre sa capacité à rêver.
Hier, Tesla a présenté une démonstration spectaculaire autour d’une voiture capable de quitter le sol. Un prototype, certes, pas encore la voiture volante de Retour vers le futur.
Mais quand même, bordel. On parle de technologies qui semblaient relever de la science-fiction quand nous étions gamins.
Et ce matin, en regardant certaines réactions françaises, qu’est-ce que je découvre ?
« Ça sert à rien. »
« Musk est un raciste. »
« Ça ne règle pas les problèmes de recharge. »
« Ça n’efface pas ses saluts nazis. »
Mais sérieusement, qu’est-ce qui nous est arrivé ?
À quel moment avons-nous perdu cette âme d’enfant qui nous faisait ouvrir grand les yeux devant une invention ?
Et le plus triste dans tout ça, c’est qu’on semble avoir oublié notre propre histoire.
La France, c’est le pays des frères Lumière, qui ont contribué à faire naître le cinéma.
C’est le pays de Louis Pasteur, dont les travaux ont révolutionné la microbiologie et la vaccination.
C’est le pays de Nicéphore Niépce, pionnier de la photographie.
C’est le pays des frères Montgolfier, qui ont envoyé l’être humain dans les airs à bord d’une montgolfière.
C’est le pays de Blaise Pascal, qui concevait déjà une machine à calculer au XVIIe siècle.
C’est aussi le pays du TGV, et l’un des deux pays qui ont donné naissance au Concorde.
Vous imaginez ce que représentaient ces inventions à leur époque ?
Des humains qui osaient accomplir ce que beaucoup pensaient impossible.
Des gens qui n’acceptaient pas les limites de leur temps.
Des visionnaires, des ingénieurs, des scientifiques, des entrepreneurs qui voulaient repousser les frontières du réel.
Nous avons été ce pays-là.
Alors comment avons-nous pu en arriver à un point où notre premier réflexe devant l’extraordinaire semble parfois être de chercher pourquoi il faudrait le mépriser ?
SpaceX récupère des fusées qui reviennent se poser sur Terre ? On parle immédiatement d’Elon Musk et de ses provocations.
Des robots humanoïdes commencent à réaliser des tâches physiques de plus en plus complexes ? « Ça va détruire des emplois. »
L’IA ouvre des perspectives gigantesques pour la médecine, la science, l’éducation et la création ? « Ça pollue, ça vole le travail des artistes, ça sert à tricher. »
Un entrepreneur annonce vouloir réaliser quelque chose d’incroyable ? « Encore un milliardaire qui veut s’en mettre plein les poches. »
Mais est-ce qu’on réalise seulement ce qui est en train de se passer ?
Nous vivons une époque où des fusées réutilisables se posent après leur mission, où l’IA accélère certaines découvertes scientifiques, où des robots apprennent à évoluer dans notre monde, où des personnes seules commencent à créer des choses qui nécessitaient auparavant des équipes entières.
Et devant tout ça, on serait devenus incapables de dire simplement : « Putain, c’est incroyable. Comment est-ce qu’ils ont réussi ça ? »
Je ne demande pas qu’on admire aveuglément les milliardaires. Ni qu’on ferme les yeux sur les conséquences sociales, environnementales ou politiques de leurs projets.
On peut condamner les propos d’Elon Musk tout en reconnaissant les prouesses des ingénieurs de SpaceX et de Tesla.
On peut défendre les travailleurs tout en trouvant la robotique fascinante.
On peut vouloir encadrer l’IA tout en étant émerveillé par ses possibilités.
L’esprit critique n’a jamais obligé personne à devenir cynique.
Et c’est justement ce cynisme qui me désespère.
J’ai parfois l’impression qu’on a remplacé l’admiration par la jalousie, le goût du risque par la peur de l’échec, l’ambition par la suspicion et le rêve par le sarcasme.
Name the person who could introduce you to your top three venture fund targets tomorrow.
If nobody comes to mind, that's the problem. Not your pitch deck. Here are 12 routes in, ranked by what the intro is worth.
Top 5 panic attacks deep tech founders wake up to at 3 AM:
1.“We’ll run out of money before we close a real deal.”
2.“My board is losing confidence in me.”
3.“I don’t know what I don’t know.”
4.“I’m an engineer, not a salesperson. But right now, that’s the job.”
5.“Our tech is amazing and nobody understands it.”
Every one of these is a systems problem, not a you problem.
The founders who sleep aren’t smarter. They just stopped winging it.
Founders often think a signed enterprise deal is the finish line. It's not. It's the starting line.
Renewals are won or lost in months 2-11. Keep expanding, keep proving outcomes that matter. Durable revenue is a relationship you have to keep earning.
If you stop making customers successful, a non-renewal writes itself.
When building AI for Engineering, let customers play with your product early. The temptation is to hold it back because it's not perfect, but design engineers buy by fiddling. Not by watching demos, and definitely not by watching you do it for them. When they light up, strike.
Michael Horne retweeted
The whole way that startups need to be judged on for funding has changed overnight. It's about creativity, novelty and distribution advantage not product execution.
> Last week I got to look through 80+ applications from a seed-level incubator batch, through a friend
> Every website was a 8/10, all vaguely similar, and the copy and grammar were a solid 8/10. All were "in principle fundable," because even the TAM analyses, the metric projections, and most importantly the MVPs were "equally decent."
> Honestly, in some cases the differentiating element was very hard to find.
This is exactly my experience, almost everyone around me thinks they're being extremely productive but everyone making the same slop tools, sites, apps etc.
I mean I know I am
Everyone has fixed the low hanging fruit, like I fixed all my server set up, I built a situation monitor that tracks everything like my Ubuntu version, PHP version, updates, it checks the freshness of my backups
Everything works really well now, thanks to AI
But did I or anyone I know make anything really groundbreaking? It's all great but kinda average? Like how image gen of AI is always kinda average? I'm pro-AI of course but I'm just telling you what I think, it's all kinda bland?
I also haven't seen anyone make anything that actually increased revenue for them, lots of internal tools and automation that makes everyone's lives easier for sure, like less/no support, automatic fixes of bugs, great great, but where's the groundbreaking stuff?
But maybe that comes next year? I have no clue
Michael Horne retweeted
EVERY SINGLE DATA CENTER IN THE WORLD SHOULD BE BEING BUILT IN EUROPE. People should be banging on the doors of politicians demanding more European data centers to save the planet. But it is the exact opposite.
China is catching up in AI despite significantly lower capital expenditure, while Europe continues to lag far behind.
I looked at the numbers, and the conclusion is clear: despite spending around 90 percent less on capital expenditure, China is managing to catch up with Western frontier labs.
Europe, by contrast, is significantly behind, both in data center investment and in the development of frontier models.
Hey @XMoney, would love to help with testing/feedback. Looks like a fantastic concept, would use it regularly. Can you add me to the list?
Calling it:
US nationalization of @AnthropicAI and/or @OpenAI by end of 2026.
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Access to all other Claude models is not affected.
We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…
And it's now coming for physical engineering. In fact, it's already here. What traditionally takes months of engineering work to do (design an electric motor, layout a complex chip) can now be done in days, even hours. Buckle up.
A big pivot from Ken Griffin on AI:
“Number one is, in the last few months, there has been a step change in the productivity of the AI toolkit. It is profoundly more powerful than it was just nine months ago.
And for us at Citadel, that has allowed us to unleash a much broader array of use cases for AI. And it has been really interesting to watch, to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days.
These are not these are not mid-tier white collar jobs. These are like extraordinarily high skilled jobs being, I'm going to pick a word, automated by agentic AI. And I gotta tell you, I went home one Friday actually fairly depressed by this because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society.
When you witness it in your own four walls, when you see work that used to be man years of work being done in days or weeks, it's like, wow, like that's the first time I've seen real impact in our four walls.”
This echoes my own experience with agents and the conversations I am having with students, friends & clients. The toolkit has dramatically transformed and it feels like in finance, for the first time, AI is real.
When the anxiety hits at 3am, every deep-tech founder is thinking the same 9 things.
None of them go in the board deck.
Here they are. And what actually works.
🧵
9: "Enterprise procurement will eat us alive."
Legal reviews, security questionnaires, 12-month cycles. Nobody gave you the rulebook.
Build the contract pack early. Mutual NDA, MSA template, security responses. Procurement isn't the enemy. Being surprised and unprepared is.
None of these go away on their own.
You can't out-wait them.
The founders who clear them treat commercial readiness as a system, not a guess.
If any of these hit close to home, follow us @launchright. We help deep-tech founders close real deals before the runway closes them.










