Assertion Not checkable as stated
Diana Hu: Supabase is the default backend recommendation across all LLMs
“Whenever someone asks how to set up anything that you need, some sort of backend, Firebase type of transaction, the default answer from all the LLMs is actually a Superbase.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hu: Anthropic surpasses OpenAI as top API for YC applicants
“And, shockingly, in this batch, the number one API is actually Anthropic. It came out a bit more than OpenAI, which who would have thought?”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Diana Hu: AI's future Google- and Facebook-scale startups have not started yet
“Startups like the future Facebook or the future Google are yet to be started because those come in in the deployment phase, because right now I think these things, things are still getting built up.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hu: A YC startup's 8B model beat OpenAI on healthcare benchmarks
“There's this particular YCE startup that told me that they collected the best data set for healthcare. And they ended up performing better than OpenAI and a lot of the benchmarks for healthcare with only eight billion parameters.”
Assertion Supported
Hu: Cursor scaled from $1M to $100M revenue in one year
“We've seen crazy growth unlike anything, only possible with, right now with AI, like all these companies that we work with, zero to twelve million in 12 months. The cursor story where they went zero to one in one year, the next one to a hundred. This is, like,…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hu: Software engineers will transition to product engineers
“I think one of them that I can read verbatim is, I think the role of software engineer will transition to product engineer. Human taste is now more important than ever as CogenTools make everyone a Tenex engineer.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hu: YC founders rarely use Devin for serious features
“Notable, Devon does get mentioned, but the drawback of Devon not really being used for serious features is that it doesn't really understand the code base. It's being used mostly for small features and barely, it's like barely mentioned.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hu: Vibe coding works for zero-to-one, but scaling requires systems engineers
“Zero to one will be great for vibe coding where founders can ship features very quickly. But once they hit product market fit, they're still going to have a lot of really hardcore systems engineering where you need to get from the one to N and you need to hire…”
Insight
Hu: Top 1% engineers will still require deliberate practice despite AI
“I think there's gonna be a generation of software engineers that are, like, good enough because it's so easy to retool there with all these cogent tools. Like, the barrier is so low. You're gonna be good enough engineers. There's gonna be tons of those. But to…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hu: 10T parameter models will spark a GPT-3 level innovation leap
“I think the type of level of potential innovation could be the same leap we saw from GPT-II, which was around one billion Parameters that was released with the paper of a scaling loss, which was one of these seminal papers that people figure out, okay, this is…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hu: AI has effectively passed the Turing test for phone calls
“At this point, AI has passed Turing tests and is solving all of these very menial problems over the phone.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hu: Customized open models will beat frontier LLMs in specific domains
“So there's this other world where the open model that's customized, I think, is gonna win and compete versus the big one for specific domains.”
Opinion
Diana Hu: Command-line interfaces are becoming the right UX for AI agents
“CLI seems to be becoming the right UX for agents. This is why I think going back to ClockCode versus Cursor ended up doing so well. It's just so much more freedom being fully on the command line.”
Assertion Supported
Hu: Confluence Labs Saturated the ARC-2 Benchmark at 97% Accuracy
“I actually worked with a company in the winter 26 batch not too long ago called Confluence Lab, which actually ended up saturating the V-two results with 97%, and I think their task cost was a lot more efficient too.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hu: Google Gemini adoption in YC batch rose to around 23%
“I think last year was probably single digit percent, or even like two, three percent, and, ah, now for winter 26 is about 23%.”
Insight
Diana Hu: Series B AI startups are orchestrating and arbitraging models
“Startups are doing as well, they are actually arbitraging a lot of the models. I had some conversations with a number of founders where before they might have been loyalists to, let's say, OpenAI models or Anthropic, and I just had some conversations recently …”
Insight
Hu: Voice AI Startups Meta-Prompt with Frontier Models Before Distillation
“I think that's a common pattern sometimes for companies when they need to get responses from elements, elements in their product a lot quicker. They do the meta-prompting with a bigger, beefier model, any of the, I don't know, hundreds of billions of parameter…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Hu: Happy Robot Closed 7-Figure Deals with Top 3 Logistics Brokers
“Happy Robot, who has sold seven figure contracts to the top three largest logistic brokers in the world. They're built AI voice agents for that.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hu: OpenAI reasoning models are catching up to Claude 3.5 Sonnet
“The thing about CodeGen, the big game in town that we saw, ah, six months ago was Clawed Sonnet. It's still actually a big contender. Most are still using it. But O-one, O-one Pro, and O-three meaning all these resilient models are starting to see it's almost …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hu: GPT-4o sees virtually zero use for code generation among founders
“The other one is four-oh, virtually no use for CodeGen.”
Assertion Supported
Hu: Diode demonstrated that OpenAI's o1 can automate PCB system design
“But the thing that they demonstrated now with O-one was actually able to do the system design and component selection, which is crazy. So it would be able to read all the data sheets and select the right components.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Hu: OpenAI's o1 solves Navier-Stokes equations for airfoil design
“O-one was actually able to write All of these equations, all these partial differential equations, and solve basically Naive Stokes questions to actually solve airfoil.”
Insight
Hiring engineers at the MVP stage slows launches and blocks insights
“It's gonna actually slow you down in terms of launching quickly, because if you're hiring from a pool of people and engineers that you don't know, it takes over a month or more to find someone good, and it's hard to find people at this stage where it's very ne…”
Insight
Early tech stack choices matter less if users adopt the product
“If you build a company and it works and you get users good enough, the tech choices don't matter as much. You can solve your way out of it.”
