HIGGS-D8HVK
Joined January 2025
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Paid my tuition thanks to AI baby videos.
Took minutes to create—and they’re going viral.
Just look at the views these shorts are getting.
Want to start earning easy money too?
Like, retweet, and comment
“BABY”(make sure you're following),
and I’ll send you the full guide.
Usra Chowdhury retweeted
she left @harvard surgery to build AI. she was told silicon valley would never accept her, that she would die under a bridge.
so she cold-messaged @KiteVC on linkedin because he backed canva early. he replied the next day and sent her to @SanghaCapital. one 90-minute call later, they were her first investors.
@larsras, co-founder of google maps, came in next. @amandaterry of @ACTAIVentures backed her at pre-seed. then @M13Company and @latifperacha led a $5M seed, with xAI co-founder @ChrSzegedy.
@heyrobynai just launched and ran out of invites on day one.
now her dad thinks they'll IPO in three years.
@iamjennyshao on nontechnical, episode 5.
00:00 she left her harvard surgical residency for a startup
00:46 "leave what? leave surgery? leave harvard?"
01:14 "you're gonna die under a bridge"
03:18 how do you walk away from yourself
05:03 now her dad thinks they'll IPO in three years
06:10 why melanie perkins and canva
07:02 the cold linkedin message to bill tai
07:49 one 90-minute call, then the round
08:32 why people are scared of AI
13:13 "decide who owns the complexity"
16:19 everyone gets their own jarvis
17:37 what if AI takes every job?
19:06 robyn, as in robin to your batman
19:52 "help my dog live longer"
28:45 "as a founder, no one's dying"
30:37 530 builds in one year
32:37 three kinds of surgeons
36:52 why AI forgets everything about you
37:30 three years with nobel laureate eric kandel
40:45 "it's like 50 first dates"
44:11 can AI just order my pizza?
45:19 would you give AI your credit card?
47:59 "jenny, I just need more tokens"
49:50 brian chesky lived with his users. she texts hers.
This test kills most AI startups.
she left @harvard surgery to build AI. she was told silicon valley would never accept her, that she would die under a bridge.
so she cold-messaged @KiteVC on linkedin because he backed canva early. he replied the next day and sent her to @SanghaCapital. one 90-minute call later, they were her first investors.
@larsras, co-founder of google maps, came in next. @amandaterry of @ACTAIVentures backed her at pre-seed. then @M13Company and @latifperacha led a $5M seed, with xAI co-founder @ChrSzegedy.
@heyrobynai just launched and ran out of invites on day one.
now her dad thinks they'll IPO in three years.
@iamjennyshao on nontechnical, episode 5.
00:00 she left her harvard surgical residency for a startup
00:46 "leave what? leave surgery? leave harvard?"
01:14 "you're gonna die under a bridge"
03:18 how do you walk away from yourself
05:03 now her dad thinks they'll IPO in three years
06:10 why melanie perkins and canva
07:02 the cold linkedin message to bill tai
07:49 one 90-minute call, then the round
08:32 why people are scared of AI
13:13 "decide who owns the complexity"
16:19 everyone gets their own jarvis
17:37 what if AI takes every job?
19:06 robyn, as in robin to your batman
19:52 "help my dog live longer"
28:45 "as a founder, no one's dying"
30:37 530 builds in one year
32:37 three kinds of surgeons
36:52 why AI forgets everything about you
37:30 three years with nobel laureate eric kandel
40:45 "it's like 50 first dates"
44:11 can AI just order my pizza?
45:19 would you give AI your credit card?
47:59 "jenny, I just need more tokens"
49:50 brian chesky lived with his users. she texts hers.
Usra Chowdhury retweeted
We’ve raised $1.3M from YC & Afore Capital so you never have to type or speak again.
Typing is slow. Talking into your computer is awkward. Subvocal fixes both
Our glasses give you the speed of speech without you making a sound or touching a keyboard.
It tracks your internal speech muscles with non-contact sensing and decodes silent, almost invisible mouthing into text at more than 200 words/min.
Pre-orders are now live at:
subvocal.co/preorder?utm_sou…
Usra Chowdhury retweeted
All that said, I'm generally excited about this new paradigm.
It gives us a whole new axis to scale AI models - towards personalized responses.
Which is more impactful to large scale adoption than just intelligence.
If AI can understand you, it can make things more beautiful for you. We are hoping to help make a more beautiful world for everyone.
Usra Chowdhury retweeted
BCI is moving away from clinical applications to consumer uses, and applications like these will become more abundant w time.
Robust and dependable regulation on user safety and standards of use on neural data can do great work in setting such standards for safety that allow users to trust such systems.
If brain signals can be used to understand private thoughts and personal preferences, users will want the service providers to be more trustable, and sufficient regulation to enforce the same.
Usra Chowdhury retweeted
We wanted to talk about this publicly and share how we're thinking about responsibility that comes with such capabilities.
We are focused on how to have higher standards on user consent and are investing in edge inference, and training on encrypted neural data.
We have some interesting work here that I can’t wait to talk more about.
Usra Chowdhury retweeted
We wanted to be careful about this release given the societal impact of AI that can change faces.
It can cause negative impacts like amplifying body dysmorphia, and narrowing beauty standards, can allow a bad actor to actively influence audience feedback.
Usra Chowdhury retweeted
Here’s how that works on altering faces based on personal preferences learnt using neural feedback.
Usra Chowdhury retweeted
Unlike DPO which is generally used to tune text-to-image models, our paradigm is on-policy and doesnt require a preference dataset.
We show that even a simple embedding + k-NN based reward model works well so no explicit reward model has to be trained.
The models move personal preference more strongly than population level preference showing individual preference is captured from EEG.
We also see seed stability across runs where the model converges to similar levels across seeds.
Randomizing the rewards shows that the rewards don’t move, indicating that the reward signal does come from EEG and is not an artifact of training.
Usra Chowdhury retweeted
In most aesthetic areas, personal preferences deviate quite a lot from population level preferences that internet scale AI models converge to.
This leaves people with poor satisfaction when trying to use these models for tasks that require taste.
So far, there was no way to solve this since getting reliable preference measures from every user is not possible at scale.
Usra Chowdhury retweeted
How do you get an AI model to make something beautiful for you?
Today non-verifiable capabilities are tuned with either rubric rewards or reward models trained from human feedback, both of them are lossy.
We have finally been able to use arousal signals from the brain to create implicit rewards for personal preferences.
This means personal feedback from each user can be gathered passively with a BCI wearable without explicit user input.
More on the work here
sabi.com/blog/measuring-tast…
Usra Chowdhury retweeted
Introducing RL with Neural Feedback (RLNF). We have found reliable ways to train AI models to respond to human preferences purely from brain signals.
The example below is a picture of a face that self-transforms into a more attractive version for the subject as they are looking at it.
Usra Chowdhury retweeted
Oxide just raised $445M at a $6B valuation.
@bcantrill and @sdtuck started @oxidecomputer to build the computers the hyperscalers keep for themselves. @EclipseVentures led the seed when nobody else would. now they're profitable, and he says they didn't even need to raise.
i also asked him if AI is a bubble, why america hates data centers, and why every oxide employee makes the same salary.
nontechnical, episode 4.
00:00 $445M at $6B, and they didn't need it
03:06 one wire transfer bigger than their whole seed
07:14 "they don't have the guts. they're too chicken."
09:09 100% banked at SVB
13:04 a 92-year-old kicking their asses in board meetings
14:48 "would you like me to name names?"
16:58 a16z loved it, then sent the first rejection
20:19 leaving a first round partner meeting for the A's
22:52 "Marc Andreessen was offended"
23:05 NEA: "we will only invest in software"
25:55 "legends are dead"
28:32 "when a VC says 'I've got a technical question'"
42:39 the firm that walked away from a signed term sheet
46:48 "if I could get sequoia, do you think you'd be here?"
49:41 "they were cowards"
52:36 the nuke email he wrote and never sent
58:33 four years later, they asked for a reference
1:02:01 "politics and business don't mix"
1:10:51 is AI a bubble?
1:14:56 how he ruined a dinner party in 1997
1:20:44 "people hate data centers"
1:22:08 how sun got thrown through the windshield in 2000
1:26:26 why everyone at oxide makes the same salary
1:30:58 the worst hire of all time
1:40:42 when oxide goes public
Usra Chowdhury retweeted
Your OCR says it’s done—but did it get everything right? 🤔 In high-stakes workflows, even a small error can be costly.
🚀 Meet the MiniCPM-OCR suite: an open-source solution to parse fast and guard the results.
Two new models:
🔹 MiniCPM-OCR 1.0 — SOTA OCR performance and speed at 1B scale. Compact, accurate, and fast.
🔹 MiniCPM-OCR Jev — A 2B decision model that helps assess parsing accuracy, with performance approaching that of Qwen3.5-397B-A17B on JevOCRBench.
⚡ What’s new?
Small model, SOTA results: MiniCPM-OCR 1.0 scores 93.68 on Real5-OmniDocBench and 54.7 on OCRBench v2.
A sharp goalkeeper 🛡️: MiniCPM-OCR Jev is model-agnostic, checking text, formulas, and tables from different OCR parsers. It achieves 93.6 on JevOCRBench, outperforming JEV-35B-A3B (90.1) and approaching Qwen3.5-397B-A17B (93.8).
Up to 128 pages per minute 🤯: With DSpark, MiniCPM-OCR runs at 1.49× the speed of PaddleOCR-VL-1.6 and 3.62× that of MinerU2.5 Pro. The SDK’s concurrency optimizations further boost throughput to as much as 128 pages per minute.
Deploy where you work: Day-0 support for Arm, Houmo AI, Intel, and NVIDIA, plus 10 more chip vendors through FlagOS.
Ready for your stack: vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp, and Ollama, with quantized models, fine-tuning support, and Agent Skills.
🔗 GitHub: github.com/OpenBMB/MiniCPM-O…
🤗 Hugging Face:
MiniCPM-OCR 1.0：huggingface.co/openbmb/MiniC…
MiniCPM-OCR Jev：huggingface.co/openbmb/MiniC…
👉 Try the Demo：platform.modelbest.ai/consol…
Use the API：platform.modelbest.ai/consol…
Usra Chowdhury retweeted
Text-to-speech gets you close. But close isn’t how you’d say it.
So say it yourself, once. HeyGen Voice STS carries the whole performance over to your avatar, down to every pause, emphasis, and whisper.
Test it here: platform.heygen.com/speech-t…
Usra Chowdhury retweeted
Cold calling isn’t dead. And that’s why today, we’re launching Unify Dialer.
Sellers have already placed 112K+ calls with it.
→ Prospect, sequence, and dial in one place.
→ Move faster through your call list with Power Dialer, with the research done before you dial.
→ Reach more buyers with 34% more reachable numbers than Apollo and 66% more than ZoomInfo in our benchmark.
60% of reps book a meeting within their first hour of dialing on Unify.
Who better to pick up the phone than the wolf of insurance himself, Juliano Massarelli? 👇🏻
Try it here:
unifygtm.com/dialer?utm_sour…
Usra Chowdhury retweeted
We’ve raised a $2.5M pre-seed to fix hardware hiring.
The most reliable way to know if an engineer can do the job is to watch them work.
In hardware, that’s been almost impossible to do at scale.
Colare runs simulation-based assessments that show how candidates actually work, in the tools they’d use on the job, before anyone books an interview.
We assess across:
- Mechanical (CAD, DFM, FEA)
- Electrical (PCB, schematics)
- Systems
- Manufacturing, & more.
Candidates solve problems from first principles.
Hiring teams see that across their whole pool, so engineers only interview people who’ve already cleared the bar.
We're already working with everyone from seed-stage startups to multi-billion-dollar aerospace manufacturers.
If you’re hiring hardware engineers, let’s talk:
colare.com/
You don’t need another complicated AI workflow. Dreamina lets you use Seedance directly, and registering through my official partner link unlocks the $0.29 promotional price👉:
dreamina.capcut.com/pricing/…
#DreaminaOnly29Cents #Dreamina #DreaminaPartner #Seedance
Usra Chowdhury retweeted
a two-year-old mining company has raised $400M. @a16z, @khoslaventures and the CIA's venture fund are all on the cap table.
@jclozano9897 co-founded @MarianaMinerals with @tbc415 and @baker_tilney, two friends from stanford. it's now worth $1.6B. they buy mines after the market gives up on them, then run them with software and AI.
i asked him how you actually buy a mine, why AI's real bottleneck is metal, and whether he'd hire me for being good at claude code.
nontechnical, episode 3.
00:00 $400M and the CIA's venture fund
02:19 you can just buy a mine
04:41 2 years, $400M, $1.6B
08:58 cold emailing VCs vs. their first check
13:46 when to buy a mine (right after the market gives up)
19:54 every mining truck is a robot without a brain
25:08 everything human-made is grown or mined
26:15 the cheapest AI company wins
28:31 AI's real bottleneck is metal
30:55 america doesn't have enough miners
33:27 space mining and asteroids
43:13 how a $1.6B founder hires
46:17 would he hire me for claude code?
48:43 "slop cannon"