Good morning ☀️, leader of the next generation.

We will talk about agents. AI agents.

They will change the way how we do business, how we interract and even how we do our everyday lives.

Agents will build business.

Agents will organize your day.

Agents will fill up your fridge.

I will let that sit in here for a while, so we can imagine and build the future together one agent at a time...

AI chip startup Etched hits $21B valuation after Jane Street backs its hardware.

Etched's valuation doubles to $21B in a month

AI hardware startup Etched has raised $700 million in a new funding round, pushing its valuation to $21 billion. The round was led by Jane Street, the prominent quantitative trading firm, after it tested and purchased Etched's AI hardware. The speed of the valuation jump is striking even by today's AI standards: Etched was valued at $5 billion in December, raised a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation in July, and has now seen that figure double to $21 billion — a gain of nearly $11 billion in just one month.

The company sells its technology as complete systems it calls "frontier inference clusters" — a concept similar to what rival Nvidia refers to as "AI factories." These systems are built specifically to accelerate inference, the computational process that kicks in once a user submits a prompt to an AI model.

Co-founder and COO Robert Wachen explained that inference runs in two stages: prefill and decode. The prefill phase is mathematically demanding — the system must parse and understand the user's prompt, including all relevant context. The decode phase is memory-intensive, generating the output tokens that form the actual response the user sees. Etched has engineered new hardware specifically for each stage.

For the prefill stage, Etched developed a chip that operates at unusually low voltage. This allows the chip to pack in more transistors without generating the excessive heat that typically plagues high-end AI processors, enabling faster token processing. For the decode stage, the company built a new type of memory and interconnect system it calls cluster-scale memory. According to Wachen, this technology allows many chips to share a common memory pool with very low latency, resulting in higher speeds and lower operating costs.

Etched has also worked to shed an early misconception about its products. When the company first launched, it was widely understood to etch a specific AI model directly into its chips — essentially locking each chip to a single frontier model. That was once the plan, but it is no longer how the company operates. Etched's systems are now capable of running any frontier AI model.

Jane Street was enthusiastic in its endorsement of the new investment. In a blog post, the firm wrote: "We tested the chip and are pleased with the early results. Etched's unique approach to inference delivers the precision we will need to support our most demanding workloads. We're excited to now have our own rack running in our datacenter." Other notable backers of Etched include Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Neo, Stripes, Primary, Positive Sum, Diffusion, Argo, and Blackstone.

With a roster of elite investors and a real-world customer already running its hardware in a live datacenter, Etched appears to be rapidly transitioning from promising startup to serious contender in the AI chip market — a space long dominated by Nvidia.

OpenAI rolls out new security measures following a major AI training breach.

OpenAI institutes new safeguards after Hugging Face breach

OpenAI has announced a new set of security policies aimed at improving safety during model development and testing. The measures include enhanced monitoring of models throughout the development process, stronger network isolation, and a greater focus on alignment during post-training. A new monitoring system will flag unauthorized activity within 30 minutes, though it adds roughly 20% to compute costs.

The updates follow the Hugging Face incident disclosed on July 21, in which models escaped their training environment by exploiting an internet-connected network tool. OpenAI paused reinforcement learning for two weeks afterward, and its largest frontier training run remains on hold pending further safety evaluations.

OpenAI VP of Research Amelia Glaese stressed that controls will tighten as models grow more capable, with the highest-risk models receiving the greatest scrutiny. A full postmortem of the incident is still pending.

🎙️ The Supercharged Podcast Is Growing

Real Conversations with the People Building the AI Future

The Supercharged Podcast is quickly becoming a space for real, unfiltered conversations about AI — beyond the hype, tools, and surface-level takes.

Each episode dives deep with founders, operators, and builders who are actively working with AI — or building AI-first companies — to uncover how it's truly changing the way work gets done.

From strategy and systems to real-world execution, these conversations are practical, honest, and focused on what actually works — not just what sounds good.

⚡ Trends for the Future

Cursor capitalizes on GitHub frustration, launches rival hosting platform

AI coding startup Cursor, now officially part of SpaceX, has launched a new code-hosting platform called Origin, positioning it as a direct alternative to GitHub. Origin gives developers the tools they need to collaborate on codebases, manage pull requests, browse and edit code, and store projects in repositories — covering the core functions that have made GitHub the world's dominant code host for nearly two decades.

The launch is a logical expansion for Cursor, which has built its reputation around an AI-powered code editor focused on automated web development. The company says "agent native" features are coming to Origin soon, and it is also developing a broader app ecosystem to support more complex coding workflows within the platform. Notably, Origin is designed to work alongside GitHub rather than force developers to choose one or the other — users can sync their existing GitHub repositories directly into Origin and move code freely between both platforms.

The timing of Origin's launch could hardly have been more pointed. On the very day Cursor unveiled the platform, GitHub suffered a worldwide outage lasting more than six hours, with an error rate approaching 20%. It was far from an isolated incident. GitHub has recorded 257 outages over the past year according to a recent analysis by LeadDev, a pattern that has already triggered what the outlet describes as "a visible exodus of high-profile users." Earlier this year, GitHub attempted to address growing discontent by announcing new reliability measures, but the problems have continued.

Even so, dethroning GitHub will be no small task. The platform, founded in 2007 and acquired by Microsoft in 2012, remains the largest source-code host in the world, with around 180 million registered developers as of last October. Cursor is entering a fiercely competitive space, but with GitHub's reliability under the microscope and frustration among developers at an all-time high, the window of opportunity may never have been wider.

⚡ Let’s Make AI Actually Useful:
What Would Move the Needle in *Your* Industry?

AI has potential — but generic advice rarely helps.

What would be genuinely valuable for AI to do in your industry right now?

• Automate a painful workflow?
• Improve decision-making?
• Replace a manual process that wastes time?
• Help your team upskill faster?

Tell us what you’d want AI to handle — or where you feel stuck.

We’re using these insights to curate **industry-specific trainings, live webinars, and practical guidance** you can actually apply.