Topher Conway (@topherc) header
Topher Conway (@topherc) profile picture

SV Angel

San Francisco
Joined February 2007
Photo by Topher Conway (@topherc)Photo by Topher Conway (@topherc)Photo by Topher Conway (@topherc)Photo by Topher Conway (@topherc)Photo by Topher Conway (@topherc)Photo by Topher Conway (@topherc)Photo by Topher Conway (@topherc)Photo by Topher Conway (@topherc)Photo by Topher Conway (@topherc)Photo by Topher Conway (@topherc)
Topher Conway retweeted
So excited for @JudgmentLabs to open for general access today! We're seeing a massive shift from single/few-turn chatbots to long-horizon agents that execute increasingly complex tasks autonomously. As agents cover more surface area, monitoring and improving their performance becomes critical infrastructure. When I met @alexshander03 and the team when they were still Stanford students, I was blown away by their thoughtfulness and vision for the product that is so clear and different from other players in this space. Excited to continue supporting the team and proud to be a supporter since Day 0
Today, @JudgmentLabs opens for general access. We believe long running agent systems will generate more exhaust data than the world can currently process. Hidden within agent traces are rich records of how to make these systems better: what users ask for, when agents stumble, and how agents interact with the external world. Judgment is the most performant monitoring and improvement layer for long-horizon agents. We’re excited to see what you build!
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Topher Conway retweeted
No one changes the world alone Introducing Ampersand - the first model built for us. Ampersand is a collaborator trained to help people achieve their individual and collective goals. In multi-month simulations, users collaborating with Ampersand accomplished more than with Fable and other frontier models Available to everyone through our API
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America designs the future. We should manufacture it, too. Arda is AI that turns product designs into assembly plans and updates them as designs change. Built to speed up American manufacturing. Today, we're launching publicly. Backed by @Accel, @AltimeterCap, @foundersfund, @khoslaventures, @xyz_vc, @8vc, @svangel & @felicis.
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Topher Conway retweeted
Congrats on the launch!! Excited to be partners since day 0
Introducing Underdog, your Private Personal AI on devices you already own Today we're announcing our backing from @a16z @khoslaventures @HummingbirdVC Anthology (@AnthropicAI @MenloVentures) @patrickc @naval @rauchg @polynoamial @Thom_Wolf @Mascobot @tszzl @OfficialLoganK and other top AI leaders Our mission is to provide free, capable, reliable and private AI to billions of people. Underdog’s Law: today’s frontier intelligence reaches your devices in six months. We’re starting with fast, capable AI that runs on consumer hardware. By co-designing models and inference engines, we’re pushing the frontier of capability, speed, power and data efficiency. Our research also spans agentic commerce, confidential inference, and how AI will reshape the internet economy. Privacy and capability no longer needs to be a tradeoff. If you believe in this future, join us. Time to build.
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Welcome to SV Angel @JayCarney!
We’re excited to welcome @JayCarney to SV Angel to lead Project Blueprint, strengthening the relationship between technology leaders and policymakers while building bipartisan cooperation around America’s AI future.
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Topher Conway retweeted
For AI to work with us, it needs to understand us Today, we're introducing Persimmon, the first large-scale model designed to realistically simulate how people talk and interact
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Topher Conway retweeted
What an incredible outcome for @huggingface! Long before it was obvious, @ClementDelangue and his co-founders saw that AI should be more open and accessible. His passion for open source, remarkable ability to bring people together, and talent for assembling an extraordinary team are at the heart of everything Hugging Face has become. Together, @svangel and A Capital feel incredibly fortunate to have been their partners and, collectively, the company’s largest outside shareholder. Thank you, Clem, and congratulations to the entire Hugging Face team, NVIDIA and @JensenHuang!
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Topher Conway retweeted
Super happy to share our intention to join forces with NVIDIA in a $12,930,300,000 acquisition 💛💚 10 years after starting Hugging Face, open-source AI is at an inflection point. Thanks to the community, we’ve shown that it can be a complement, and even an alternative, to closed-source APIs. But for it to happen at larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility. That’s why we went to talk to Jensen, who offered to do exactly that with us. In addition to doubling down on NVIDIA’s massive contributions to open-source AI (I called them the “King of American open-source AI” earlier this year), they’ve committed to strongly supporting Hugging Face and our mission while keeping the platform open, independent and compute agnostic. The founders and the team are all staying to keep pushing this mission forward. Together, we think we can make open source the default way to build AI, with the goal of empowering 100 million AI builders to own their intelligence rather than rent it. Excited about the next 10 years! 🤗🤗🤗
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Topher Conway retweeted
Introducing Transfyr. Always Learning.
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Topher Conway retweeted
Today we are announcing dfbench, a cybersecurity benchmark we developed to evaluate frontier models and agentic systems. A few weeks ago we posted about how it is time to graduate from CyberGym Level 1 as the primary measure of cyber capability, in favor of newer benchmarks. Eventually every public benchmark saturates: Level 1 is now there, and it’s also not a great representation of what AppSec teams care about. dfbench is a held-out evaluation for frontier models doing open-ended defensive security work. It measures whether an agent can provide broad, actionable security coverage at sustainable cost. That requires enough coverage to get ahead of exploitation, enough precision that security teams can act on what the agent finds, and enough efficiency to keep that coverage current. We received access to all providers’ relevant trusted access programs so we could run these evals without model refusals. Both GPT 5.6 Sol and Luna are strong at detection, and Luna is incredibly cheap for its quality. Grok 4.5 provides a nice middle ground between performance and cost. Validation and differential analysis results suggest plenty of room for improvement among frontier models. Moving forward, we plan on working closely with the security community to safely evaluate the cyber capabilities of frontier models ahead of their release to the general public.
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Topher Conway retweeted
Tomorrow's medicines should be designed with the precision and scale of modern engineering. I'm thrilled that @ChaiDiscovery has raised a $400M Series C at a $3.8B valuation from @IndexVentures @KleinerPerkins @Sequoia @_DimensionCap to accelerate progress towards that goal.
We’ve raised $400M at a $3.8B valuation to further advance AI-driven molecular design. The round was led by @IndexVentures, alongside @KleinerPerkins, @Sequoia, @_DimensionCap, and others.
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Topher Conway retweeted
Introducing “Comeback City: A Love Letter to San Francisco.” Proud to call this place home.
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Topher Conway retweeted
Perpetual futures are finally coming to America. Trade on future asset prices with leverage in a regulated, institutional-grade environment. Only on Kalshi.
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Topher Conway retweeted
Alzheimer’s is one of medicine's hardest unsolved problems, and one of the most devastating. At the OpenAI Foundation, we believe AI is well suited to its complexity. We're directing over $100M to scientists mapping the disease, designing drugs, & more. I wrote about it here: openaifoundation.org/news/ai…
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Topher Conway retweeted
We’re building an LLM chip that delivers much higher throughput than any other chip while also achieving the lowest latency. We call it the MatX One. The MatX One chip is based on a splittable systolic array, which has the energy and area efficiency that large systolic arrays are famous for, while also getting high utilization on smaller matrices with flexible shapes. The chip combines the low latency of SRAM-first designs with the long-context support of HBM. These elements, plus a fresh take on numerics, deliver higher throughput on LLMs than any announced system, while simultaneously matching the latency of SRAM-first designs. Higher throughput and lower latency give you smarter and faster models for your subscription dollar. We’ve raised a $500M Series B to wrap up development and quickly scale manufacturing, with tapeout in under a year. The round was led by Jane Street, one of the most tech-savvy Wall Street firms, and Situational Awareness LP, whose founder @leopoldasch wrote the definitive memo on AGI. Participants include @sparkcapital, @danielgross and @natfriedman’s fund, @patrickc and @collision, @TriatomicCap, @HarpoonVentures, @karpathy, @dwarkesh_sp, and others. We’re also welcoming investors across the supply chain, including Marvell and Alchip. @MikeGunter_ and I started MatX because we felt that the best chip for LLMs should be designed from first principles with a deep understanding of what LLMs need and how they will evolve. We are willing to give up on small-model performance, low-volume workloads, and even ease of programming to deliver on such a chip. We’re now a 100-person team with people who think about everything from learning rate schedules, to Swing Modulo Scheduling, to guard/round/sticky bits, to blind-mated connections—all in the same building. If you’d like to help us architect, design, and deploy many generations of chips in large volume, consider joining us.
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Topher Conway retweeted
We will be co-hosting this in SF with our great friends at SV Angel. We'll keep the event small and cozy and have a few prizes for the teams:🥇$16k🥈$8k🥉$4k. Come by and hang out with the humans& team - it’ll be a lot of fun!
Announcing the humans& hackathon! Hack with us this Saturday - come experiment and build AI apps to help people collaborate and communicate, work with creative folks, learn a bit about what we're building, and win cool prizes Apply here: luma.com/2pbif8t9
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Come join us at SV Angel and help us build AI products!! ai-lead.svangel.com/
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Topher Conway retweeted
We are hiring an AI Lead at @svangel! It's an amazing opportunity for a builder passionate about AI and startups, and you'll have a front row seat to how we invest and will work to improve our investing process end-to-end with AI. We almost never hire so this is a rare opportunity to join our team. Apply here: lnkd.in/gJD3K_jq
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