Follow @kpolley, Perplexity's CISO

@kpolley: Proud to open source Numbat

https://t.co/eJsNNFG79z

The seven most shambolic things that happened in AI today.

Thanks for an engaging conversation at @ChaseCenter last weekend, @sdianahu! My first in a basketball arena!

@ycombinator: In 2001, @JeffDean and Sanjay Ghemawat did the math and realized Google’s entire search index would fit in RAM — then shipped it in a few days, and search got fast.

In 2013, another napkin calculation showed that three minutes of daily speech recognition per user would require doubling Google’s server fleet. That one became the TPU.

At Startup School 2026, Google’s Chief Scientist talks with YC’s @sdianahu through the thought experiments behind both, why inference hardware is the next specialization, and where two or three people in a room can still win.

00:07 — Are AI Models Already Junior Engineers? 01:44 — AI Systems That Improve Themselves 02:40 — The Google Search Breakthrough That Changed Everything 04:38 — AI Agents Will Run for Weeks 05:58 — The Napkin Math That Led to TPUs 09:20 — How to Find Breakthrough Ideas 10:25 — The AI Engineer's New Mental Model 12:33 — Why AI Is Really an Energy Problem 16:11 — Context Engineering Is the Next Frontier 19:46 — The Skill That Made AI Better at Optimization 22:13 — Why Long-Running Agents Fail 25:21 — Where Startups Can Still Beat Google 31:19 — How to Become an AI-Native Founder 36:36 — Question Your Biggest Assumptions 42:08 — AI That Builds Better AI 50:02 — Build Something That Truly Matters

Week 1 · Day 5 — The Heart

Gemini Robotics 2 is here, with our new suite of models, robots can now reason through every movement to manage tasks that weren’t possible before, like tying delicate knots - and even team up to solve complex workflows. Huge congrats to the robotics team on this great milestone!

@GoogleDeepMind: One brain. For any robot. 🤖

We’re launching Gemini Robotics 2: our next-generation physical AI bringing full body intelligence to humanoids, advanced dexterity, multi-robot teamwork and more.

It's time to scale that Simile.

Our ambition is to build a foundation model that can predict what anyone will do in any situation.

Research-wise, Simile in 2026 for simulation is like OpenAI in 2019 for AI assistants - signs of life, a path to scaling, yet still many open research questions.

Commercially, Simile is already a company with many amazing enterprise partners who understand the potential of simulation and will help us grow sustainably.

If simulation and this special combination of research and product is appealing to you, we’re hiring.

@simile_ai: Today we’re announcing our Series B.

We’ve raised $200M at a $2B valuation from Greenoaks with participation from Index Ventures, Hanabi, A*, Bain Capital Ventures, CVS Health Ventures, and Definition.

Our mission is to simulate all eight billion people on earth, accurately. https://t.co/Pkumac7fI2

Read more here: https://t.co/ia67hU6q6L

And with Computer Brain, every project goes through self-improvement loops on its memory, leading to better contextual understanding over time, thanks to offline compute that Brain performs between tasks and sessions of the collaborators on a Project. https://t.co/1cmBuqGQGu

Introducing Projects on Perplexity Computer. With the launch of Projects, we're turning Computer into a multiplayer agentic operating system for work with persistent memory, files, and sessions scoped across hubs and users. Available to all users! https://t.co/5JCBpzslmG

How to Build Production-Ready Apps with AI | Colin Matthews

Think outside the (sand)box…

1 Billion ChatGPT users