James Kaplan
@jamesekaplan
VC @NEA | Spend my time nerding out about USC/Saints football, Star Wars, RTS games, unit economics, GTM strategy, and more
Probably the best AI video ad I’ve seen @Kalshi can’t outspend Draftkings/Fanduel/others so props to @mansourtarek_ for finding GTM Alpha by taking risks on AI-generated video when no one else will And props to @PJaccetturo and team for telling a great story that takes…
History was made by the underdogs.
GlobalFoundries agrees to acquire MIPS, a developer of RISC-V-based solutions and IP, with the deal expected to close in H2 2025 (@antonshilov / Tom's Hardware) tomshardware.com/pc-components/… techmeme.com/250708/p27#a25…
It’s easy to fine-tune small models w/ RL to outperform foundation models on vertical tasks. We’re open sourcing Osmosis-Apply-1.7B: a small model that merges code (similar to Cursor’s instant apply) better than foundation models. Links to download and try out the model below!
I wonder how much of LLM’s inability to run even the most simple business is because most business advice on the internet is bad
All this meant that Claude failed to run a profitable business.
Don't use LoRA if you care about scaling test-time compute (i.e. reasoning use cases)! We tested LoRA RL vs full RL - full post-training was 40% cheaper, 12X faster, AND 50% better than LoRA on out-of-distribution data. Details + link to full blog below! 1/
i do think the future of work is like starcraft or age of empires. you have 200 microagents you’re directing to fix problems, gather information, reach out to people, design new systems, etc.
Can’t bribe an AI customer support agent
Cyber criminals bribed and recruited rogue overseas support agents to pull personal data on <1% of Coinbase MTUs. No passwords, private keys, or funds were exposed. Prime accounts are untouched. We will reimburse impacted customers. More here: coinbase.com/blog/protectin…
This is why many high PMF AI widgets and AI services rollups will get crushed by competition in the long-run. The exception are: 1) High trust/risk industries: when customers find something they know works, they stick with it 2) High switching costs: the more products you…
The False Promise of Labour Replacement Revenue @immad's take: "AI companies are charging 1/3 of labor costs — but margins will get crushed." Right now, AI pricing looks brilliant on paper. But there’s no moat. No network effects. Once competitors show up, margins will…
Big TAM for voice agents in dealerships
Shockingly (or not) — phone calls still win in dealerships. In April, 74% of contacted phone leads turned into dealership appointments—nearly double the rate of internet leads (40%). It confirms what many in the industry have long suspected: The more effort a shopper puts in,…
Clearly AI is dramatically impacting search behavior, yet it hasn’t shown up in Google’s earnings. Hypothetically, it could be that: -These types of queries (likely informational) weren’t very monetizable before AI anyways AND/OR -Google is increasing it’s ad load
Interesting research from Bain: • 80% of consumers now rely on “zero-click” results in at least 40% of their searches • On traditional search engines, ~60% of searches end without the user progressing to another destination Huge implications for discovery & organic traffic…
This is the bull case for model agnostic apps (Perplexity/Cursor/etc) - by routing to the appropriate model given the task they both have both a better cost structure + actually outperform since different models are good at different things
Updated my AI model capabilities table: - Gemini 2.5 is now the best at coding - ChatGPT is by far the best at image gen This stuff changes fast.
Very excited to announce our investment in Ceramic! In a world of rapid model distillation (best highlighted by Deepseek), unsupervised reinforcement learning, and potentially broken pre-training scaling laws, we believe there will be a new wave of model democratization and…
🚀 Congratulations, @ceramic_ai--$12M raised to help enterprises build AI models faster and more efficiently.We're thrilled to partner with @AnnapPatterson & the Ceramic team! 📰 NEA's @lilatretikov, @maddiehfaulkner, and @jamesekaplan detail why we believe Ceramic is poised to…
The biggest question today is whether AI lowering the barrier to content creation helps or hurts incumbents like Roblox On the one hand, Roblox owns game distribution for kids under 16 On the other hand, democratized creation opens the opportunity for a new creator tool to…
The biggest competitor to Roblox is not UEFN or Unity or UGC The biggest competitor is vibe coding + web distribution
[guy who owns a ton of Pokémon cards]: the United States needs a federal Pokémon card reserve