Dean: AI startups should target tasks with 1% model success, not 20%
Jeff Dean · Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI · Y Combinator · Jul 30, 2026 · at 28:26
Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean gives advice at Y Combinator Startup School on how early-stage AI founders can find durable product areas defensible against big tech foundation models.
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“If they're completely failing, that's probably a good sign. If they're kind of able to do some of it, but not very well, That's maybe not a great sign because that's probably a sign that the capability is starting to be present in those models and with more training data or larger scale models or whatever, it's likely to get better. So you know, look for something where the model succeeds zero percent or one percent of the time, not, not 20%.”
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