Silkroad Innovation Hub

It was amazing to organize an @sv_icons dinner with @ScottWu46, co-founder and CEO of @cognition_labs, and learn from a leader pushing forward the development of AI agents. Thanks so much Scott! Thanks also to @silkroadih for hosting and @EffectiveSoft for sponsoring. Key takeaways from Scott below:  Advice for Founders:  · Work with people you know well, like, and respect: Scott’s co-founders and early hires included many childhood friends from math/coding competitions and camps. · Build a team of entrepreneurs: 13 out of 19 of Cognition’s team members previously started their own companies. · The conventional advice of move fast, stay close to your customers, and hire an A+ team is correct and should be applied to the extremes. Don’t look for secret truths. Strongly follow what works well.  · Always go the extra mile when pursuing high priorities: Scott flew to North Carolina to have dinner with the parents of a potential, talented young hire to assuage their concerns about him joining a new startup.  The Future of Agents:  · The demand for work, such as code, is limitless as companies and individuals always have new ideas and ambitions.  · Cognition will enable anyone, using natural language, to become a software engineer.  · Nevertheless, studying computer science remains incredibly valuable as it teaches you how to think and solve hard problems.

It was amazing to organize an @sv_icons dinner with @AravSrinivas, the founder and CEO of @perplexity_ai, and hear your vision for reinventing search with LLMs. Thanks so much Aravind! Thanks @silkroadih for hosting and @EffectiveSoft for sponsoring. Key takeaways and advice for founders below: Perplexity’s Product Vision: Imagine Perplexity as the expert network of the future. In response to a user’s question, a team of AI agents could email, conduct voice calls with, and compensate several human experts, and then analyze the calls to deliver a response to a user for a fixed price. Perplexity has a great opportunity to leverage its leading LLM-powered search engine to build the best general-purpose, personalized assistant for consumers by expanding its data sources. Aravind imagines layering in voice-enabled AI agents for shopping, appointment booking, and much more. The future of AI is multi-model: Perplexity leverages a combination of small and large models to answer user questions depending on complexity, maximizing the tradeoffs behind accuracy, latency, and cost.