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Malika Aubakirova
@MaikaThoughts
Continually learning | ex-VC, engineer
2.1KFollowers
746Following
606Posts
52Media
2KLikes
Pickling with @ZBalapanov 🎾
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I recently left venture to do product at a new AI lab. Early days means no playbook, so I went back to Ben Horowitz's 1997 memo, Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager, to see what still holds.
TLDR: Most of it does. The bottlenecks moved. The job didn't. The failure mode just got faster: solving for the wrong constraint. The competitor’s last launch. The “how” you’re proud of.
Article below.
TLDR: Most of it does. The bottlenecks moved. The job didn't. The failure mode just got faster: solving for the wrong constraint. The competitor’s last launch. The “how” you’re proud of.
Article below.
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So excited for you, Jacob! I know whatever you set out to work on will be something amazing
Jacob Zietek@JacobZietek · Sep 9I left a16z to start Ixian Robotics!
I’m very grateful for the people I got to learn from at a16z, and excited to be building again. The last couple of months have felt like knocking down dominoes I’ve spent years putting up.
Wrote a bit about the last year and what I want to build next: zietek.dev/blogs/starting…
Open quoted post →I’m very grateful for the people I got to learn from at a16z, and excited to be building again. The last couple of months have felt like knocking down dominoes I’ve spent years putting up.
Wrote a bit about the last year and what I want to build next: zietek.dev/blogs/starting…
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Got a concerning amount of wine -
End of summer sponsored by @TheAndiPenguin
End of summer sponsored by @TheAndiPenguin
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@cclark and I will be doing a fireside chat @AIconference on October 1st. Hope to see you there!
The AI Conference@AIconference · Sep 3What can 100 trillion tokens tell us about the real state of AI?
Join Chris Clark, COO & Co-Founder of OpenRouter, and Malika Aubakirova at The AI Conference 2026 for a fireside chat that looks beyond benchmarks and into how LLMs are actually being used in the real world.
They’ll unpack fresh data on the rise of open-weight models, agentic inference, programming, shifting usage patterns, and what these trends mean for model builders, infrastructure operators, and investors.
See you in San Francisco!
Join Chris Clark, COO & Co-Founder of OpenRouter, and Malika Aubakirova at The AI Conference 2026 for a fireside chat that looks beyond benchmarks and into how LLMs are actually being used in the real world.
They’ll unpack fresh data on the rise of open-weight models, agentic inference, programming, shifting usage patterns, and what these trends mean for model builders, infrastructure operators, and investors.
See you in San Francisco!
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@styskin & @KeenableAI are one of a kind team. Super excited what they are doing in agentic search!
Andrey Styskin@styskin · Aug 25Today we are announcing @KeenableAI, an AI-native index of the best human knowledge we have, starting with the open web.
AI seems to know just about everything until you ask it about something you know deeply. The answer isn’t wrong, but it's just very average.
We started Keenable to fix this problem: every model and every agent should be able to query, reason over, and continuously learn from the living web.
Backed by a $26M Seed from @Accel and @conviction. Built by the team that took on Google at Yandex Search, with researchers and engineers from Amazon AGI, X, and Perplexity.
The Web Search API and Web Query Language for AI are live now. Together they make the web queryable at AI scale. Both are free until end of September.
Seven days of benchmarks, stories, and launches ahead.
Let your agents search.
AI seems to know just about everything until you ask it about something you know deeply. The answer isn’t wrong, but it's just very average.
We started Keenable to fix this problem: every model and every agent should be able to query, reason over, and continuously learn from the living web.
Backed by a $26M Seed from @Accel and @conviction. Built by the team that took on Google at Yandex Search, with researchers and engineers from Amazon AGI, X, and Perplexity.
The Web Search API and Web Query Language for AI are live now. Together they make the web queryable at AI scale. Both are free until end of September.
Seven days of benchmarks, stories, and launches ahead.
Let your agents search.
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AI Infra fund 🚀 what a phenomenal return!
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It was amazing to work with the OpenRouter team from the seed. Huge congratulations @alexatallah @cclark & the @OpenRouter team!!!
Anjney Midha@AnjneyMidha · Aug 19today, @OpenRouter is joining @stripe
this is good for frontier alignment and ecosystem security
you can read why, here: amppublic.com/research/openr…
thank you @alexatallah @cclark and team for your stewardship - here's to all the scaling ahead of us
nostalgia in thread below
Open quoted post →this is good for frontier alignment and ecosystem security
you can read why, here: amppublic.com/research/openr…
thank you @alexatallah @cclark and team for your stewardship - here's to all the scaling ahead of us
nostalgia in thread below
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Congrats to my friends at @perceptis_ai, who now hold the top spot for Corporate Slides on @DesignArena. Amazing work!
Design Arena@DesignArena · Aug 4Perceptis by @perceptis_ai is 1st overall in Corporate Design on Slides Arena with an Elo of 1253.
Corporate Design is one of eight design-specific subcategories on Slides Arena. These subcategories provide clearer insight into model strengths across disciplines. From corporate, educational, medical, and more, they offer a more complete view of where models excel beyond overall rankings.
The model leads with a 9 Elo gap over @trymoda, Claude Opus 4.6 (PPTX) by @AnthropicAI, and @snapdeck_.
Congratulations to the @perceptis_ai team on the accomplishment!
Corporate Design is one of eight design-specific subcategories on Slides Arena. These subcategories provide clearer insight into model strengths across disciplines. From corporate, educational, medical, and more, they offer a more complete view of where models excel beyond overall rankings.
The model leads with a 9 Elo gap over @trymoda, Claude Opus 4.6 (PPTX) by @AnthropicAI, and @snapdeck_.
Congratulations to the @perceptis_ai team on the accomplishment!
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When you have the best team in front of you 😂🇪🇸
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I'm starting 𝐆𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐀𝐬𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐭 - a hiking series for AI builders in the SF Bay Area.
A lot of my favorite conversations with founders and operators happen over dinners or happy hours but some of the best ones lately have happened on the move. I wanted to add another format to the mix. Every other month (or so), I'll get a small group together to conquer a hike.
A lot of my favorite conversations with founders and operators happen over dinners or happy hours but some of the best ones lately have happened on the move. I wanted to add another format to the mix. Every other month (or so), I'll get a small group together to conquer a hike.
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So excited for @neilmovva and @sailresearchco team. Inference for long running agents is about to go brrr 🚀
Neil Movva@neilmovva · Jun 25Samir Menon @blintzbase and I are thrilled to announce Sail @sailresearchco ! We build infrastructure for long-horizon agents: inference served at unbeatable prices-per-token for open models, plus sandboxes designed to run for days, weeks, or longer.
We've raised $80M, w/ our seed led by @Sequoia
and series A led by @KleinerPerkins. We're using this capital to build the most efficient infrastructure for long-horizon agents.
What makes agents so different? Unlike a human waiting at a keyboard (top priority: speed), agents need scale, reliability, and sustainable cost. Sail finds this efficiency everywhere in the stack: we carefully choose our chips, write custom inference engines, and run a global controller that fully utilizes every computer in our fleet. Tight integration from silicon to API lets Sail open up the cost / latency frontier to our customers - the most patient agents can now access 10x more intelligence per dollar.
We're excited to be working with great companies like
@parallelweb, @detaildotdev,@Jackandjillai, and @quadrillion_ai to deploy long-horizon agents with trillions of tokens.
Our team is thoughtful in our engineering craft and relentlessly ambitious in our pursuit of peak performance. We previously trained at companies like NVIDIA, OpenAI, Google, and so many trading firms. Now we're ready to do the work that will define our careers, in the most compute intensive market of all time.
Welcome to the era of abundant intelligence. We can't wait to build with you!
We've raised $80M, w/ our seed led by @Sequoia
and series A led by @KleinerPerkins. We're using this capital to build the most efficient infrastructure for long-horizon agents.
What makes agents so different? Unlike a human waiting at a keyboard (top priority: speed), agents need scale, reliability, and sustainable cost. Sail finds this efficiency everywhere in the stack: we carefully choose our chips, write custom inference engines, and run a global controller that fully utilizes every computer in our fleet. Tight integration from silicon to API lets Sail open up the cost / latency frontier to our customers - the most patient agents can now access 10x more intelligence per dollar.
We're excited to be working with great companies like
@parallelweb, @detaildotdev,@Jackandjillai, and @quadrillion_ai to deploy long-horizon agents with trillions of tokens.
Our team is thoughtful in our engineering craft and relentlessly ambitious in our pursuit of peak performance. We previously trained at companies like NVIDIA, OpenAI, Google, and so many trading firms. Now we're ready to do the work that will define our careers, in the most compute intensive market of all time.
Welcome to the era of abundant intelligence. We can't wait to build with you!
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@BornsteinMatt and I have spent the last year arguing the frontier shouldn't stay locked inside the frontier labs. The next wave of progress depends on engineers and researchers being able to do real model work themselves, not just call an API.
@mirendil is the company building the platform that closes that gap. Vibe research, for real. So excited for @bneyshabur @tararezaeikh @harsh @hjmehta @shayan_ and @a16z
@mirendil is the company building the platform that closes that gap. Vibe research, for real. So excited for @bneyshabur @tararezaeikh @harsh @hjmehta @shayan_ and @a16z
a16z@a16z · Jun 24We're thrilled to lead Mirendil's $200M seed round.
Frontier AI work has been locked inside a few big labs.
@mirendil is building a system that can help anyone do AI work: they train frontier models that are expert at AI R&D and build the product around it. The result is a system that loops over research and engineering problems on its own, making progress without human intervention.
It's like a coding agent built for AI research that controls its own GPUs.
Mirendil is one of the few teams with the experience and the priors to make the end-to-end system work. @bneyshabur, @hjmehta, @shayan_, and @tararezaeikh come out of Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI.
Welcome to the a16z family, Mirendil.
By @BornsteinMatt and @MaikaThoughts
Frontier AI work has been locked inside a few big labs.
@mirendil is building a system that can help anyone do AI work: they train frontier models that are expert at AI R&D and build the product around it. The result is a system that loops over research and engineering problems on its own, making progress without human intervention.
It's like a coding agent built for AI research that controls its own GPUs.
Mirendil is one of the few teams with the experience and the priors to make the end-to-end system work. @bneyshabur, @hjmehta, @shayan_, and @tararezaeikh come out of Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI.
Welcome to the a16z family, Mirendil.
By @BornsteinMatt and @MaikaThoughts
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I went live on @MTSlive with @VirtualElena to talk about Continual Learning based on the article @BornsteinMatt and I recently published.
Our take on why this matters, where in-context learning hits a wall, and the startup landscape forming around it 👇
Our take on why this matters, where in-context learning hits a wall, and the startup landscape forming around it 👇
MTS@MTSlive · Apr 23.@MaikaThoughts says modern AI models work a lot like Memento: pre-training gives them the past, and everything after that needs scaffolding.
"In Memento, the main protagonist has a form of this amnesia where he cannot form new memories. He uses sticky notes where he writes some of the notes to himself. He even tattoos some of the memories that he wants to imprint."
"It kind of maps one to one to AI, how AI models work today."
"We have the training phase where we basically encompass all of the world's knowledge, and that part is what we call pre-training. After the training phase, we basically have the cutoff date after which point we deploy the models into the world."
"The model is basically frozen."
"We use retrieval mechanisms like RAGs, we have the system prompt that essentially serves as a tattoo."
"In Memento, the main protagonist has a form of this amnesia where he cannot form new memories. He uses sticky notes where he writes some of the notes to himself. He even tattoos some of the memories that he wants to imprint."
"It kind of maps one to one to AI, how AI models work today."
"We have the training phase where we basically encompass all of the world's knowledge, and that part is what we call pre-training. After the training phase, we basically have the cutoff date after which point we deploy the models into the world."
"The model is basically frozen."
"We use retrieval mechanisms like RAGs, we have the system prompt that essentially serves as a tattoo."
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amazing to be included alongside this group!
Delta@DeltaCommunityX · Apr 2Join us in recognizing Delta's Rising Investors of 2026! 🎉
Congrats to the investors our community nominated as truly exceptional at the early stage. Angels, emerging fund managers, and established names alike, recognized for their track records, the depth of their writing, and their presence in the technical community.
These are the people who cut through the noise, back the right companies early, and show up as real partners to the founders they work with.
deltainstitutes.org/rising-investo…
Congrats to the investors our community nominated as truly exceptional at the early stage. Angels, emerging fund managers, and established names alike, recognized for their track records, the depth of their writing, and their presence in the technical community.
These are the people who cut through the noise, back the right companies early, and show up as real partners to the founders they work with.
deltainstitutes.org/rising-investo…
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