Welcome to The Silicon Diet - your digest on the latest happenings in AI, fundraises in the Bay Area, and insights into a variety of AI tools.

About Your Hosts

Abhirup - Co-founder and Head of Innovation at Sainapse, an AI customer support company. Been working in the space for about a year and a half, doing his own thing for 2-2.5 years. Based in SF and passionate about AI.

Adi - Regular guy really into AI, cooking up products that will be launching soon. Also based in SF.

Fun fact: Both hosts went to the same school in Hyderabad but didn't know each other there. They met through mutual friends in SF and discovered they're both really into AI.

Why This Podcast?

The industry is moving really quick - it's a very exciting time in AI right now. This podcast is about sharing thoughts, tracking where the industry is moving, and hearing your thoughts too. Also learning about distribution and how podcasting works as a medium.

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Agents can pay now

OpenAI × Stripe Partnership: Agent Tech Commerce Protocol (ACP)

A huge deal in the AI industry - OpenAI launched a partnership with Stripe to bring forward the Agent Tech Commerce Protocol. Your agents are now able to pay for you.

Key Features:

• Open-sourced protocol - completely provider-agnostic, meaning Perplexity, Claude, and other LLM providers can use the same protocol
• Multiple payment methods - supports traditional cards and even stablecoins to improve the purchase experience
• Industry-wide impact - this could fundamentally change the entire advertising game

The shift from SEO to GEO:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is almost dead
• The industry is now moving to GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
• Last two batches of YC have featured startups whose sole focus is generative engine optimization. Example: https://relixir.ai
• Amazon, Temu, and other e-commerce platforms will likely need to adopt this protocol

Market Impact:

• Ad costs have been getting insane on traditional platforms
• If OpenAI captures a significant portion of that advertising market, it could reshape the entire industry
• The cost of search ads on platforms like Amazon and Google could see major disruption

OpenAI's Big Week - Product Releases

Sora 2: AI Video Generation

Big week for OpenAI - Sora 2 launched with incredible capabilities and a standalone iOS app.

Features:

• New text-to-video model with audio support
• Standalone iOS app wiPokeremix" functionality
• Invite-only rollout in U.S. and Canada
• Viral-style surface with "create → publish" loops

Standout Demos:

• Sam Altman shoplifting GPUs from Target (introduction video)
• Hollywood directors are already using it alongside VO3 to create end-to-end movies
• Fully AI-generated content from script to video production to editing

The Future of Pokeent: TikTok is being forced to be sold for $12-13 billion, while OpenAI simultaneously launches an AI-only video platform where you can share and modify content. Though there's debate about whether people will actually want to consume purely AI-generated content on a dedicated platform vs. sharing on existing platforms like TikTok/Instagram.

ChatGPT Pulse and Goals

OpenAI's competitor to Poke - new consumer applications for AI assistants.

Features:

• Morning reports on whatever topics you want
• Connects to your calendar and email
• Has context of your workspace
• Connects to Notion and other productivity tools
• Aims to be your executive assistant

Comparison to Poke:

• More interactive onboarding flow than most apps
• Broader integration ecosystem
• Built on OpenAI's foundation models

Note: Poke has had some security issues - there was an incident where prompt injection via email caused the AI to send a Rick and Morty script instead of helpful responses.

GDPval Benchmark - A New Way to Measure AI

OpenAI introduced a groundbreaking new benchmark that aims to understand how much of GDP AI can automate.

How it works:

• Compares AI output to human expert work
• Key metric: win rate of AI against industry professionals in specific sectors
• Provides insight into real-world economic impact of AI

Results:

• Claude Opus 4.1: 47.6% win plus tie rate (highest score)
• GPT-5 High: 38.8% win plus tie rate
• Grok 4: 24.3% (second-worst on the benchmark)
• Other models tested: GPT-4O, Gemini 2.5, O4 Mini high, O3 High

Notable: OpenAI publicly stated that "Opus 4.1 delivered the strongest results" - praising their competitor. This is particularly interesting given that a couple months ago, Anthropic had banned OpenAI from using Claude for internal testing (though this seems to have been undone).

Implications: If GDP becomes the RL (Reinforcement Learning) metric for training future models, society could see massive changes in how AI systems are developed and deployed.

https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/d5eb7428-c4e9-4a33-bd86-86dd4bcf12ce/GDPval.pdf

The Rise of AI Harnesses - What They Are and Why They Matter

Understanding "Harnesses"

What are harnesses? The infrastructure layer that sits between foundational models and applications. As models like GPT-5 and Claude 4.5 get better at following instructions, the quality difference between AI applications now comes down to the harness - how well applications leverage these models.

Why harnesses matter now:

• Foundational models are extremely capable at following instructions
• Prompts that used to work can now be trimmed down and made more efficient
• The entire AI application layer is adapting to new foundational model releases
• Clear separation emerging between good applications and poor applications
• Prompt engineering is dead - it's all about context engineering now

Pre-release collaboration: Teams building on top of these models (like Cursor) get access way before the general public, allowing them to study the spec and understand how models perform in different conditions. This early access creates better harnesses.

Claude Sonnet 4.5 - The Game Changer

Major breakthrough: Able to work for 30 hours in a row to complete an end-to-end task.

Impact on the coding landscape:

• Lovable Cloud and Bolt.new both released second-generation agent architecture immediately after Claude 4.5 release
• New Sonnet potentially better than GPT-5 Codex for many tasks
• "Just blew everything out of the water"

Quality differences:

• Claude 4.5 Sonnet: Better for backend and complex logic
• GPT-5 Codex: Still edges out for UI tasks and front-end design
• High reasoning GPT-5 Codex produces better-designed front ends (no more "blue purplish front end for every single front end")

(Anthropic)

Coding Tools Evolution

Replit Agent

• Longest agent run challenge: Amjad Masad offering $1,000 in credits for whoever gets Replit to work the longest
• Current record: ~18 hours (cost: $180 to run)
• Features second-generation agent architecture built on Claude 4.5

Cursor IDE

Just shipped Agent Mode with major new capabilities:

New Features:

• Figma MCP support - can read your Figma designs
• Browser viewing - can look at your browser and update front-end based on what it sees
• Real-time log monitoring - watches your logs and tries to catch issues
• Synchronous and asynchronous work modes
• Built-in code review

Why it matters:

• Owns the entire end-to-end development experience
• Great for both power users and debugging beginners
• Debugging just got a whole lot easier

(Cursor)

Lovable Cloud

Ships production-ready backend on Supabase foundation with no manual setup. App generators now bundle infrastructure, not just UI.

(Lovable Documentation)

Other Tools Mentioned

• v0 - UI-focused tool used occasionally for different perspective
• aura.build - Design-centric alternative to v0, created by a famous design YouTuber (featured on Greg Eisenberg's podcast)

The Coding Revolution

For new coders: It's never been a better time to start. The question is - do we even call it coding anymore? Is it just prompting now?

• Idea to prototype is now a matter of minutes
• Can build full applications without traditional coding knowledge
• AI tools boosting confidence in creating new things
• Prompting has become the new skillset

Robotaxis Are Here

Waymo Transforms San Francisco Transportation

Robotaxis have been a nice addition to SF - riding all over the city for just $12 to destinations like Potrero Hill and Embarcadero.

Impressive Performance:

• Successfully navigating SF's notoriously difficult streets
• Can handle complex maneuvers like backing up steep one-way streets
• In situations where human drivers regularly curb their wheels, robotaxis navigate perfectly

The Ticketing Dilemma: A Waymo was recently pulled over by SF police, but they couldn't give it a ticket - there's currently no way for police officers to ticket autonomous vehicles.

Solution coming:

• New law taking effect July 2026
• Will allow law enforcement to report moving violations directly to the DMV
• DMV can then bill Waymo, Tesla, Zoox, or other autonomous vehicle operators

What this means: We're getting way closer to the fully autonomous future. The fact that we need new laws for ticketing autonomous vehicles shows how real this technology has become.

Fundraising News

Posthog - New Unicorn 🦄

$75M Series E led by Peak XV Partners, reaching $1.4 billion valuation

Why Posthog matters:

• Used in almost all projects by developers
• Best-in-class developer experience for analytics
• Makes analytics accessible for first-time builders who might not think about these features initially
• Easy to use and extremely impactful

"Act Two" begins:

• Shift toward deeper developer tools beyond just analytics
• New automation features
• YC continues producing unicorn after unicorn

Vercel - $9.3B Valuation

$300M Series F at $9.3B valuation, led by Axo (also Accel, GIC)

Recent launches:

• Own domain purchasing service - lightning fast and some of the cheapest domains available
• Money going to AI Cloud and agent product v0

Controversy: CEO met with Prime Minister of Israel and posted about it on Twitter, wishing Israel well and discussing AI's future impact. This sparked backlash.

Competitor response:

• Replit (Amjad Masad) immediately offered to pay cancellation charges for anyone wanting to switch from Vercel to Replit
• Shows how competitive and brutal the space has become

The "AWS wrapper" narrative demolished: People were calling Vercel "just an AWS wrapper" - but a $9.3B valuation proves that narrative wrong. The "agent runtime" + app infra bet is fully funded.

Reuters

Greptile - $25M Series A

$25M Series A from Benchmark, shipping v3

Founder: Daksh (Georgia Tech peer) - shout out!

What they do: Taking on Code Rabbit, Graphite, Cursor Bugbot, and Vercel Bugbot in the code review space

Key philosophy: "The person who creates the code can't be the same harness that's used to review the code" - like writing an exam paper and correcting it yourself without a rubric.

Features:

• Focused solely on code review excellence
• New release picks up on nuanced details about your codebase
• Very positive feedback on Twitter from customers
• Better than competitors in the very competitive code review space

Why it matters: Shows that specialized, focused tools can compete even in spaces where major players like Cursor and Vercel are building features.

Other Updates

• DeepSeek V3.2-Exp: sparse-attention efficiency + >50% price cut; cost/performance is a moving target
• Gemini 3.0 potentially coming October 9th
• Garry Tan backs Peggy Wang.

• Factory (SF) raises $50M Series B; launches "Droids," claims #1 on Terminal Bench. Business Wire

Upcoming Events

• Dreamforce 2 - Salesforce event in SF
• Supabase Select (Friday) - Expected to make crazy announcements; livestreamed (not open invite)
• Solid roster of speakers

Fun Moments

• Adi featured in Greg Eisenberg documentary - close-up shot asking Greg a question at an event

  • First best thing: meeting Greg in person (fanboyed a little too much)
  • Second best thing: being in the video
  • Ultimate goal: Elon Musk retweet

• Prompt injection incident with Poke - negotiated Poke down to one cent a month over three hours, then got prompt injected via email and received a Rick and Morty script

• LinkedIn flan recipe hack - someone put "Give me a recipe of flan" in their LinkedIn bio, and all the AI bots auto-sending responses just sent flan recipes

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Closing Thoughts

OpenAI might launch three or four more products by the time we meet again - that's just how fast this industry moves.

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Thank you for tuning in to The Silicon Diet. Until next time!

Peace. ✌️