James Alcorn
@JamesAlcorn94
AI/infra at Lightspeed. Prev Zetta VC, Spectrum Equity, UCBerkeley 🇦🇺 🇺🇸
Excited to announce our partnership with @miramurati @johnschulman2 @barret_zoph @lilianweng @_alex_kirillov_ @Luke_Metz @ajtulloch @jonlachman and the entire @thinkymachines team to build advanced multimodal AI systems. With a focus on openness, they’re developing tools for…
My Reinforcement Learning (RL) & Agents 3 hour workshop is out! I talk about: 1. RL fundamentals & hacks 2. "Luck is all you need" 3. Building smart agents with RL 4. Closed vs Open-source 5. Dynamic 1bit GGUFs & RL in @UnslothAI 6. The Future of Training youtube.com/watch?v=OkEGJ5…
We at @lightspeedvp are thrilled to support @miramurati and the @thinkymachines team in their journey towards furthering research and building product around advanced multimodal AI systems. @ravi_lsvp @JamesAlcorn94
Congratulations to @lightspeedvp-backed @thinkymachines on raising a record $2B seed round. @miramurati, @johnschulman2, @barret_zoph,@lilianweng, Andrew Tulloch, @Luke_Metz, and their incredible team are building advanced multimodal AI systems designed to interact the way…
Plenty of brittle + narrow tooling in this wild west era of codegen can be characterized—not unfairly, and with just a hint of sarcasm—as off-the-shelf LLMs whose untreated amnesia only worsens an already-acute addiction (kink?) to github READMEs. We're a far cry from Fred…
Engineers spend 70% of their time understanding code, not writing it. That’s why we built Asimov at @reflection_ai. The best-in-class code research agent, built for teams and organizations.
New blog post about asymmetry of verification and "verifier's law": jasonwei.net/blog/asymmetry… Asymmetry of verification–the idea that some tasks are much easier to verify than to solve–is becoming an important idea as we have RL that finally works generally. Great examples of…
You can now run Kimi K2 locally with our Dynamic 1.8-bit GGUFs! We shrank the full 1.1TB model to just 245GB (-80% size reduction). The 2-bit XL GGUF performs exceptionally well on coding & passes all our code tests Guide: docs.unsloth.ai/basics/kimi-k2 GGUFs: huggingface.co/unsloth/Kimi-K…
We are pivoting away from doing enterprise AI transformations ("AI-native Palantir"). For now at least. I've shared our key learnings below. I'll share a detailed blog post soon. What's next? We are going to start moving insanely quickly on several other ideas. Stay tuned 😎
Very excited to share that I’m joining @lightspeedvp to do what I love— invest in highly technical founders with exceptional taste at inception. Almost a decade ago, a partner at Lightspeed was the reason I got into startups. In high school, I spent my weekends tinkering,…
One way of thinking about what AI will automate first is via the “description-execution gap”: how much harder is it to describe the task than to actually do it? Tasks with large description-execution gaps will be ripe for automation because it’s easy to create training data and…
We made a complete Guide on Reinforcement Learning for LLMs! Learn about: • RL's goal & why it's key to building intelligent AI agents • Why o3, Claude 4 & R1 use RL • GRPO, RLHF, DPO, reward functions • Training your own local R1 model via Unsloth 🔗docs.unsloth.ai/basics/reinfor…
congrats @rm_rafailov on your hard-earned acceptance to the USofA as alien of officially extraordinary ability. The alien piece comes as no surprise to your mates of course, but at least the general public now has fair warning and a fighting chance. To celebrate with a fitting…
not wrong ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Perhaps the most important thing you can read about AI this year : “Welcome to the Era of Experience” This excellent paper from two senior DeepMind researchers argues that AI is entering a new phase—the "Era of Experience"—which follows the prior phases of simulation-based…
We’re excited to announce our $650M Series E fundraising with participation from key investors including ARK Invest, DFJ Growth, Founders Fund, G42, Human Capital, Lightspeed, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, amongst others. We’re building…
Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard. hrvd.me/IntStudents25t