Brian Zhan
@brianzhan1
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Investing in early stage AI. Seed/A: @Reflection_AI, @SkildAI, @DynaRobotics, @PeriodicLabs, @LanceDB, Lepton (acq NVIDIA), @VoyageAI (acq MongoDB)
SF
Joined April 2016
Enjoyed speaking at the PyTorch conference VC panel keynote. Great exchange on what’s actually moving the needle in AI research and where technical breakthroughs meet venture-scale opportunities. Key takeaways: 1/ RL’s surprising generalization: RL is generalizing better than
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3/ today's models are particularly strong at tool use and can be effectively trained with RL. This technical readiness finally enables production systems for real business problems beyond research benchmarks.
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2/ Untapped efficiency gains in pre-training: While the focus is on scaling compute, significant improvements remain. Delta uses linear attention to scale context windows to millions of tokens more efficiently than current quadratic attention mechanisms. Diffusion models for code
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Hear our founder @CarinaLHong on the latest @TWIML podcast with @SamCharrington 🎙️on why Axiom is bullish on math 📐🚀 “Math and coding are the two biggest parts of the digital world. Coding is heavily invested in. Math is not. Not because math isn’t trackable, but because math
In this episode, @CarinaLHong, founder and CEO of @axiommathai, joins us to discuss her work building an "AI Mathematician." Carina explains why this is a pivotal moment for AI in mathematics, citing a convergence of three key areas: the advanced reasoning capabilities of modern
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The “factory as a robot” is becoming real. @SkildAI + @NVIDIA + Foxconn are fusing world-model intelligence with industrial automation. A glimpse of how foundation models will shape physical infrastructure, not just digital ones
Jensen at #NVIDIAGTC: "The factory is essentially a robot that's orchestrating robots to build things that are robotic." This is just the beginning, exciting times ahead!
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Fantastic talk by @achowdhery at #PyTorchCon on how we actually measure agentic intelligence. Loved the focus on long horizon reasoning, coherence, and adaptation to dynamic environments, key gaps as LLMs evolve from text models to true agents
I had a lot of fun presenting at Measuring Intelligence Summit at #PyTorchCon 2025 on what it means for us to push the LLM capabilities for agentic intelligence and RL. In terms of benchmarks to measure agentic intelligence relevant to real world use cases, we discussed how the
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I had a lot of fun presenting at Measuring Intelligence Summit at #PyTorchCon 2025 on what it means for us to push the LLM capabilities for agentic intelligence and RL. In terms of benchmarks to measure agentic intelligence relevant to real world use cases, we discussed how the
drive.google.com
How do we really measure AI? At #PyTorchCon 2025’s Measuring Intelligence Summit: • @achowdhery (Reflection AI) — Agentic Intelligence & RL • @ml_angelopoulos (LMArena) — Real-world evaluation • Yifan Mai (Stanford) — HELM framework
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More from this star-studded panel moderated by @joespeez, ft @sarahcat21, @saranormous, @brianzhan1, @pxd
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Excited to finally bring Compound into the world @getcompoundai is what I wish I had as an analyst at Coatue, YC, and Bain From repetitive modeling, to rote data extraction - too many late nights spent on work that doesn't matter Focus on insights & decisions by using
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Huge congrats to @yusan_lin and the Mirror Mirror AI team on joining a16z speedrun! Exciting to see fashion tech at the frontier of AI, redefining how creativity, data, and personalization intersect.
Mirror Mirror AI has been accepted into the @a16z @speedrun with $1M in funding to accelerate our next chapter! ✨ Fashion tech is evolving faster than ever since I first entered it back in 2012. With the rapid acceleration of AI and new players emerging every day, we’ve had to
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Excited to have backed @reflection_ai from the seed. Today’s $2b raise pushes frontier open intelligence, with open models + advanced RL at scale, accessible to all. And most importantly, with @nvidia as their key partner. It’s a big day for open AI. Thanks NYTimes for covering
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If you didn’t get a video with the Dynasaur did you really go to CoRL?
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I’ve worked with @maxgazor for 3 years, and we backed @reflection_ai and @dynarobotics together. He’s an incredible mentor: intellectual, thoughtful, hands-on, unwavering. While others chase obvious companies at Series A, Max shows up with big checks to partner with founders
Striker Venture Partners (@strikervp) launches today with $165M. Targeting just 10 companies per fund. We back companies pre-revenue, mostly at inception. @airtable. @cribl_io. @reflection_ai. @dynarobotics. Technical Focus: AI. Cybersecurity. Infrastructure Software.
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Congratulations to @axiommathai for launching. Self-improving reasoning is one of the most ambitious frontiers.
Today, I am launching @axiommathai At Axiom, we are building a self-improving superintelligent reasoner, starting with an AI mathematician.
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Today, @ekindogus and I are excited to introduce @periodiclabs. Our goal is to create an AI scientist. Science works by conjecturing how the world might be, running experiments, and learning from the results. Intelligence is necessary, but not sufficient. New knowledge is
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Today, I am launching @axiommathai At Axiom, we are building a self-improving superintelligent reasoner, starting with an AI mathematician.
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