Y Combinator AI School Takeaways
Takeaways
| Speaker | Key Insights | Key Metrics | Relevance for Experts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Garry Tan (President, YC) | YC has 0.8% acceptance rate, up to 12% unicorn rate; looks for pragmatic builders, "Agency scales," tools change but mindset doesn’t | 0.8% acceptance, 12% unicorn rate | AI experts and business leaders: Focus on resilience, user-centricity for startup success |
| Sam Altman (CEO, OpenAI) | Product overhang, memory as favorite feature, building agent store; choose $0 billion ideas, hire scrappy people, AI agents next wave; energy per capita correlates with living standards | Task length doubles every 7 months | ML engineers: Agentic AI, workflow automation; business: high-potential niches |
| Jared Kaplan (Co-Founder, Anthropic) | Scaling laws foundation, task length doubles every 7 months, RL scaling, direct replacements in finance/law; human data crucial | 7-month doubling for task length | ML engineers: Scaling laws, human data integration; business: error-tolerant domains |
| François Chollet (CEO, Ndea) | Scaling doesn’t unlock fluid intelligence, AGI needs adaptability, Type 1/2 abstractions (value-level/pattern, program-level/composable) | N/A | AI experts: Combine pattern recognition with programmable adaptability for AGI |
| John Jumper (DeepMind) | Architecture > scale, design decisions 100x impact, AlphaFold 35K+ citations, results first, narrow targets | 100x impact, 35K+ citations | ML engineers: Targeted, high-impact projects over broad scaling |
| Aravind Srinivas (CEO, Perplexity) | Browser with integrated agents, focus on search, Google’s poor incentives, retention key, AI startups take 2-3 years | 2-3 year traction timeline | HCI leaders: Agent-integrated browsers; business: retention metrics, long-term planning |
| Fei-Fei Li (Stanford/World Labs) | Intelligence grounded in perception, not prediction, technology should make us more human, best students have fearlessness | N/A | AI experts, HCI leaders: Perception-grounded AI for human-centric tech |
| Elon Musk (Tesla/SpaceX) | First principles, ego stalls innovation, superintelligence this year/next, Grok-3.5 in training, Neuralink implants in 6-12 months, Mars colony in 30 years, ~10 major AIs (4 in U.S.) | 6-12 months, 30 years, ~10 AIs, 4 U.S. | Business experts: Long-term, groundbreaking projects; AI leaders: Diverse AI landscape |
Key Citations
Full ML Guide July 2025
Coming July 2025
Study of LLM Reinforcement
Coming September 2025