Michael Zhu

Honored to have been invited to fal and Henry Shi’s Lean AI Leaderboard Celebration Dinner, celebrating some of the leanest and fastest-growing startups in SF. Here are some of the most overwhelming trends that were discussed among high-growth companies working with small, high-output teams: 1/ Headcount is no longer used as a success metric. As Henry Ward said, “Hiring means we failed to execute and need help.” Headcount is not a flex measure anymore. People aren’t asking “How big is your team?” anymore. They’re asking “How many customers do you have?” 2/ They're finding ways to leverage AI across every function. Every engineer uses Cursor or Windsurf. Every GTM leader is in Clay. The most efficient teams are built AI-first across the board. Thank you to Henry Shi, Burkay Gur, and Gorkem Yurtseven for putting this all together!

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A new study from Carnegie Mellon, “Does AI-Assisted Coding Deliver? A Difference-in-Differences Study of Cursor’s Impact on Software Projects” that looks at a more recent period, tracking code quality in projects using GenAI tools up to mid-2025, finds that AI briefly accelerates code generation, but the underlying code quality trends continue to move in the wrong direction. https://lnkd.in/gm6dxb8W

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Excited to see real-world proof of ARM’s impact on streaming. This collaboration between Amazon Web Services (AWS), Playtech, and the Wowza team makes this a must-watch for anyone focused on streaming performance and cost.

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I believe AI infra has put up the slides. Wanna use any hardware supported by Linux to create a memory pool scattered across your data center or Oracle Cloud and achieve a 5x1 memory improvement only using software? Or how about improve your KV Cache capacity 5x1 compared to local memory… and still be faster than local memory? The AI Infra slides show specifics. Or checkout the Forbes writeup: https://lnkd.in/g_aeyGma

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Excited to share our team's work on developing a Ranking Engineer Agent (REA), an autonomous AI agent, to fundamentally transform the end-to-end ML lifecycle for ads ranking, one of the most sophisticated and complex machine learning systems. Improving ads ranking has been a deeply complex, manual, and multi-week-long process, heavily reliant on manual effort across hypothesis formation, configuration, execution, and failure recovery. REA is changing that paradigm. It now autonomously manages the entire workflow from generating high-impact hypotheses and designing experiments to executing training jobs, diagnosing system failures, and optimizing iteratively. This critical shift allows our engineers to pivot from operating the experiment loop to directing it: setting the strategic vision, evaluating macro-level results, and making crucial architectural decisions that propel our business forward. Congratulations to the entire team for pushing the boundaries of what autonomous ML engineering means at Meta scale. Please see the full technical deep dive on the Meta Engineering Blog here. https://lnkd.in/gtjGyrBv

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A new chip — SN50. A new partnership with Intel Corporation. $350M+ in new funding. What an incredible start to the Year of the Horse 🐎 We’re not just scaling AI — we’re reshaping the infrastructure behind it. From silicon to systems to large-scale inference, everything is accelerating. This is one of those rare moments when vision, technology, and capital align. If you want to build where it truly matters — now’s the time. Join us. https://lnkd.in/dGYF5eM8 #AIInfrastructure #HighPerformanceComputing #DistributedSystems #AgenticAI #Inference #Hiring

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With AI adoption and deeper integration into enterprise products, the world moves toward being collectively intelligent. First movers will have a distinct advantage. Fully backward-integrated AI companies are best positioned to win on economics.

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Thrilled to see this groundbreaking partnership between two visionary leaders— Lip-Bu Tan and Jensen Huang—uniting the strengths of Intel and NVIDIA. By combining Intel’s x86 CPU leadership with NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing expertise, this collaboration marks a powerful step forward in shaping the future of AI infrastructure and personal computing. Wishing both teams tremendous success as they co-develop next-generation data center and PC products that will drive innovation for years to come. #AI #Innovation #Partnership #Intel #NVIDIA #Leadership

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