Interfaces are not going away. Some people keep saying the future is pure chat. "No UI, just talk to it." If that were true: - no meeting would have a whiteboard - pitch decks wouldn’t exist - You wouldn’t look at your phone screen You always need to show things and interact visually: drawing lines, previewing, whatever. Those needs don’t disappear because AI got better.

Nvidia: We're guiding to 70% revenue growth next year. There's incredible AI demand for 100% growth, but we can't supply it. Google: Everyone wishes they had DOUBLE the compute capacity right now. There's so much AI demand. Bloomberg/FT: There's a $500 million market-cap Korean neocloud no one has ever heard of and it traded poorly on its IPO first day. AI IS DEAD. EVERYONE FREAK OUT AND PANIC!

We ran Phonic v1 through Turn Bench, our turn-taking benchmark. Of the 13 realtime voice models we tested, it’s the only one that beats the median on turn-taking score and on reply time. It scores 85.6%, 3rd overall, with a median reply time of 0.99s. The two models ahead of it take 1.25s and 1.34s to reply. Congrats to the @phonic_co team. Full results: benchmarks.cekura.ai/speech-…

Today we're announcing that Modal has crossed $1B in annualized run rate, as well as raised a $750M Series D at a $15.75B valuation, led by @Accel. Since our Series C, usage has tripled and we’ve grown more than 15x year-over-year. We are deeply grateful to the developers and companies building on Modal. There's still so much more to build, and we can't think of a better time to be building software.

Every startup says they have the best team. We looked at the data. @paraformtalent’s Talent Density Index ranks which companies attract, develop and retain the people the market values most. The latest edition is live. New Top 50: paraform.com/talent-density-…

going to try out some new tech for my SF->NY flight melatonin -> 9pm PT depart -> 6am ET land (aim for max sleep) -> hotel booked for the previous night -> shower + nap for 3 hrs -> office by 10:30am ET

Your life as a founder will be much better once you internalize that (almost) everything that isn’t going well is ultimately your fault

We are terminating Chris Degnan for unethical conduct involving Cognition. The last few months have seen incredible progress in AI capabilities. San Francisco has flourished as new companies that solve new, more ambitious problems are finding great success. Generally, it is a wonderful time to be building. We at @FactoryAI have seen overwhelming interest in our model-agnostic coding agents and our software factory product. Our team has 10x’d in size, while our revenue has 100x’d year over year. This momentum has been unprecedented. A much larger competitor, Cognition (makers of Devin) has fallen behind us on the capabilities that matter most to customers: cost, quality, and security. Instead of competing in the market, Cognition engineers feigned interviews with us to pry information about our product. Not finding what they were looking for, Cognition has decided to throw their weight and money at people with direct knowledge of our most confidential plans. It feels as though ethics is being thrown out of the window in the AI era. People are willing to do anything, including exploiting privileged information and violating ethical boundaries. I think this is unique to our time, and I don’t think it’s right. Integrity still matters. Yesterday, I made the decision to immediately terminate Christopher Degnan’s roles as a Board Observer and Advisor to Factory, after over a year of service. Prior to this decision, Chris told me he had a casual conversation with an executive at Cognition AI. When I questioned his intentions, he reassured me that ethics aside, he had “made too much money” and was “too lazy to go work for Cognition,” which I trusted and believed. On Monday, Chris spent time advising the Factory team on a handful of confidential board-level matters. That evening, he called me to say that the conversation that was initially described as casual and one-off was actually formal and recurring. For weeks, while he sat in our board meetings and advised our leadership team, he was also confiding with executives of our largest competitor. Chris was subject to confidentiality obligations in connection with his work with Factory. We do not know the extent of the information he shared, but it puts his timely questions about our product roadmap and what the parity gap involves into a new light. It is sad to sever a relationship with someone who has been a trusted advisor - and even a close friend - for over a year. But Chris’s conduct is unacceptable to me. Trust in Board Membership is one of the sacred bonds in the Silicon Valley, one that helps the startup ecosystem thrive. With it comes an enormous responsibility. That trust was violated. Competition is good. I respect and in many cases admire our competitors. San Francisco is a beautiful, singular place where the bold and ambitious go to defy the norms and precedents of the past. But certain principles that must remain. Violating ethics to seek advantage turns what should be positive-sum into zero-sum. We all love technology. And we all love to compete. But we must hold ourselves to a higher standard. The future of software engineering comes with abundance that will impact every person on Earth. Building that future comes with immense responsibility. We must build and compete with integrity.

We’ve launched @cekuraAi's speech-to-speech benchmark, comparing eight realtime voice models across 82 scenarios and 2,214 live calls. We tested models from @OpenAI, @Google, @xai, @amazon and @phonic_co. Every model ran on the same phone agent, with the same prompt, tools and phone line.  We also tested a cascade agent as a separate reference. The calls covered two workflows: booking a clinic appointment and completing a longer Medicare intake. We ran each scenario three times and counted it as reliable only if the agent passed every time. It had to reach the right outcome and save the right information. A few results stood out: 1. GPT Realtime 2.1 was the most reliable realtime model, passing 65 of 82 scenarios on all three runs. The separate cascade reference passed 68. 2. Phonic v1 was the fastest to respond, with a median response time of 1.59 seconds. 3. The type of call made a big difference. Five of the eight realtime models passed at least 85% of the shorter appointment scenarios. Only GPT Realtime 2.1 passed more than half of the longer Medicare scenarios on all three runs. 4. Amazon Nova 2 Sonic had the highest voice-quality score, but passed only 41 of 82 scenarios on all three runs. An agent can sound good while still missing a name or saving the wrong phone number. We’ve published the results, methodology and call records so you can explore the comparisons yourself.  Take a look at the full benchmark here: benchmarks.cekura.ai/speech-…

Your Instinct can now handle phone calls. Introducing Instinct Concierge – a white glove service meant to handle high-touch cases, such as making phone calls, high-end service booking, and more. You’ll be able to book the restaurant that doesn’t take online reservations, get on your dentist’s cancellation list, or have that cable bill sorted out. We’re slowly rolling this out to our early access group today and will be expanding access soon.