My great-great uncle Meyer Jacobstein en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meye… was a 3-term Congressman from Rochester & opposed the Immigration Act of 1924

For 15 years, Thinking, Fast and Slow (TFAS) was my standard gift for new hires.  I was a product-oriented leader, and great products orchestrate system-one decision frameworks for their users. Along with books like Nudge, it shaped how I wanted products to work. TFAS is back on my mind, my System 2 mind, since @typesafeai dropped JEV. For those who haven’t seen it, JEV is a “System 1” model that ingests unstructured context against a typed schema and returns an evaluation and confidence score.  Much like our system one brain, it is very, very fast (and cheap), and usually right.  The implications are huge. Much of intelligence is high-speed “deciding,” not “generating,” and LLMs are an elephant gun for the mouse hunt of most agentic work.  If you’re exploring here, or want to, find me at @SPC, where we’re building the future of compute and intelligence.

Dropping some truth with @finn_meeks and our latest cohort of frontier builders at @spc What an amazing time to build. We're looking at engineered biology, model alignment and interpretability, the future of work, agentic factories, space materials, next-gen compute, and so much more.

Sign up here:: southparkcommons.com/bio-dat…

Watch on YouTube: piped.video/watch?v=cidAk58f…

Over the last two days, we’ve had Qasar from Applied Intuition and Brendan from Mercor at @spc. Both were invited and hosted by SPC members—Abe Ankumah and @nickmecklenburg. This is SPC at its best. The magic of SPC is—and always has been—its members.

Some will find this demo startling. That's reasonable. What @nuance_ai built is startling. But it's also a step toward insuring AI is both safe and helpful. For AI to follow our intent, it needs to understand what we really intend. And what we really mean is in the nuances.

We’re excited to share that @nuance_ai has raised a $50M Series A led by @lightspeedvp, joined by @Accel, @spc, @nvidia, and @definevc! Much of human communication happens beyond words. Before we can speak, we learn to read faces, return smiles, follow gestures, and sense when someone is listening. That visual and emotional vocabulary stays with us for life. At Nuance Labs, we’re building a foundation model that understands and responds to the full spectrum of human emotion. A single full-duplex audio-visual model that sees, listens, and responds in real time, with the natural give-and-take of a conversation with a friend or colleague. We believe the best interface with a machine is the one we’ve practiced since birth. Join us!

I love my job.

A stitch in time saves nine. Or, with semiconductors, perhaps 99. When you miss a bug in software, you patch it and catch the next release. Miss one in a chip, and you have to respin the whole thing. That can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Or more. SukHwan Lim from TenX Semi stopped by @spc to explain why silicon has to be right the first time, and how they're remaking chip verification.

I’ll believe in AGI when it makes AV equipment and printers work every time. 🤣

The entire modern economy runs on semiconductors, whose designs are one of the great marvels of engineering and FUs to entropy in human history.  Most of us don’t think a lot about how these chips work; we just enjoy the fruits of their (blazing, miraculous) labors—the software that sits on top and powers nearly everything we do. And for those of us naive CS types whose last experience with EE was learning to build an adder, we assume that the semiconductors beneath our software are “always correct”. Silicon is deterministic, and the bits aren’t ever wrong, right? Turns out it’s not that simple. Chip-design organizations face growing pressure to do more with the same resources. As designs grow more complex, teams must move faster without lowering design quality. In the age of agentic chip design, verification is becoming the bottleneck, and AI cannot transform chip design when design and autonomous verification do not progress hand in hand. Solving this bottleneck before the chips are taped out (let alone shipped) is the work of TENX SEMI.  I’m proud to announce today that @SPC and @KhoslaVentures led TenX’s early funding. We’ve believed in their mission from the start.  The team of CEO SukHwan Lim (former EVP at Samsung, where he ran all US R&D for System LSI semiconductors), Subhasish Mitra (Stanford Professor and EE legend in robust and dependable computing and 3D nanotechnologies), and Shwetabh Verma (Broadcom, Apple, Cadence) is extraordinarily well-positioned for this business. Subhasish’s foundational work transformed formal verification into a scalable, high-throughput reality. By shifting the paradigm toward automated consistency analysis, TenX Semi's autonomous verification platform uncovers bugs (including deep, hard-to-find long-tail bugs) without requiring additional test writing. The result is unprecedented speed and design quality, enabling teams to do far more with the same resources. At a top-ten semiconductor company, TenX Semi's platform uncovered critical bugs in a production design in less than two weeks, which would take many months to accomplish using business-as-usual practices. Today, TenX Semi is advancing chip design by combining autonomous verification with AI-powered bug localization and fixing. In TenX Semi's vision, design and autonomous verification progress hand in hand, and bugs uncovered in the process are fixed autonomously. Special thanks to Tathagata Srimani (T), co-founder and CTO of SPC portfolio company Flucta, for introducing me to the TenX team. Before T was a rising-star Professor at Carnegie Mellon, he studied under Subhasish. The move from simulation to formal verification, and then to optimization and AI-assisted development, heralds an exciting new era for the semiconductor industry, the most critical infrastructure underpinning the entire AI era.

The quality of people reaching out about the @spc fellowship this year is absurd. Very bullish

Register here: luma.com/aiandthewetlab_spc

AI for science is the most exciting area of exploration at @SPC right now. Next week, we're bringing together leading life sciences leaders for a deep dive on AI and the wet lab. The first of many deep dives into AI x science. Spots are limited.

Very nice of you to say @doppenhe -- and good luck with the new fund!