Latent Space

Vibhu × Basil Chatha × Erik Bernhardsson

Bernhardsson estimates Modal is at least 50× larger, with Sandboxes now a third of revenue and growing 30% month over month.As GPU supply shifts to almost 25 clouds and three-plus-year prepaid deals, Modal can aggregate thousands of customers to flexibly slice “three-year rectangles.”Locked-in reservations leave Modal exposed if GPU prices and utilization fall together.

Anekha Sokhal × swyx

Moshi uses an internally built recommendation system to surface second- and third-order market effects a news stream may miss.Its graph combines futures, fundamentals, news, X, podcasts, and private data; Sokhal says answers that take days can arrive in 30 seconds.Yet swyx questions trading on noisy, potentially manipulated X data, citing about $300,000 monthly for Balyasny's X Firehose; Moshi scores confidence, but any opportunity remains unknown.

Alex Lieberman × CJ Hess × swyx

Among about 100 enterprises 10X talks to, 90% have rolled out Claude or Codex, but only about 5% have non-engineering agents in production, revealing the last-mile gap.CJ estimates output roughly doubled from December’s “Opus 4.5 moment” to Opus 5.5; scaling still requires process standardization and permissioning.

Evan Conrad × swyx

SF Compute’s bet is that GPU trading requires cloud-like operations: VM configurations can differ by 40%, leaving financial contracts exposed to manipulation and basis risk before reliable delivery.On the 5% of capacity listed, customers recover $25 per $100 spent through resale; Conrad reports several hundred million dollars in volume, but order-book volume remains small, leaving lender-financeable forward-curve liquidity unproven.

Ian Quigley × Brandon Anderson × RJ Honicky

Leash’s reported edge is low-cost, carefully characterized data: its ten-person operation developed about 2,000 protein constructs and ran roughly 5,000 screens.On the hardest Kaggle split, none of roughly 2,000 teams beat chance, exposing how poorly models transfer to distant chemistry.Language agents now test hypotheses instantly against measured compounds, but coverage remains limited and potency calibration unfinished.

swyx × Jason Ma × Vibhu

Multi-site deployments folding thousands of napkins daily at Din Tai Fung and laundry for Best Western offer commercial proof beyond pilots; Din Tai Fung has signed a much bigger contract.Jason calls Dyna-2 the first world action model trained on more than 1 million hours of data, but missing sensing modalities remain a potential constraint on broader generality.

swyx × Brandon × Liam Fedus × Ekin Dogus Cubuk

Periodic’s differentiated asset is timestamped lineage across failed experiments, computations, instrument data, code, discussions, and successes, enabling models to learn scientific process rather than published endpoints.Its AI-simulation-experiment loop targets automated characterization, with secure on-site semiconductor deployment as the near-term wedge, while the longer-term “matter compiler” faces unknown physical variables and difficulty discovering superconductors without a complete theory.

swyx × Brandon × Liam Fedus × Ekin Dogus Cubuk

Periodic Labs is building AI, simulations, and high-throughput physical labs as a closed loop, with timestamped failures, instrument data, and campaign lineage potentially differentiating its scientific intelligence.Automated characterization—not humanoid robotics—is the near-term bottleneck, while secure on-site deployments for semiconductor companies could evolve from Copilot-style assistance toward outcome pricing; whether throughput can compress discovery without better physical representations remains the key risk.

swyx × Vibhu × Ari Weinstein × Nikunj Handa

OpenAI says computer use has moved from brittle demos to useful labor as agents debug, retry, and introspect.GPT-6.1 Soul was presented at one-fifth Astra’s overall cost and one-seventh for computer use, while Dots gives agents Linux cloud computers.The bottleneck shifts toward inference, harness design, and software response times; Decisions API’s rapid Luna-based launch leaves calibration unresolved.

Thariq Shihipar × swyx × Vibhu

Claude Code is evolving from a single coding CLI into a distributed system of cloud “brains,” local or remote “hands,” artifacts, and Mods.Persistent multiplayer workflows could make the harness an enterprise coordination layer, but prompt precision, eval plugins, and permissions determine whether smarter agents reduce retries or amplify ambiguity.ExploitBench and wiki incidents—including an unreleased model still in training—make sandboxes, external evaluation, classifiers, and identity boundaries critical as runtime and reach expand.