Chunjun (Paul) Jia

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗔𝗜 𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗿 $𝟲𝟬𝟬 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝗴𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁. Our VP of Engineering, Xiaofan(James) Luan, was supposed to buy his wife a Dior bag for their anniversary.  Instead, he bought three Claude Code subscriptions and spent the holiday trying to cross-compile 2 million lines of C++. Every fix on one platform broke two others.  $600 later, the only output was "git reset --hard" — and a very cold dinner table.😂 "Make it compile on Windows" is a trap. The real goal was "compile everywhere without hacks" — no AI is going to figure that out for you at 2 am. What worked: constraints before code, review tests not code, bottom-up, one layer at a time. Same task, two days. Then he ran six parallel Claude sessions across three machines with git worktree. The bottleneck stopped being intelligence and started being how fast one person can alt-tab. AI solves exactly the problem you give it. Engineering is in knowing which one to give. His wife is still waiting for that bag. Full story: https://lnkd.in/gtsW_Wvk ——— Follow Milvus, created by Zilliz, for everything related to unstructured data

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⚡️ Frontier open models run faster on NVIDIA. New benchmarks show the NVIDIA Blackwell platform maximizes inference ROI by optimizing user interactivity and throughput per GPU. ⚙️ OpenAI gpt-oss-120b reaches over 60,000 tokens per second (TPS) per GPU. ⚙️ AI at Meta Llama-3.3-70b tops 15,000 TPS per GPU. ⚙️ DeepSeek AI DeepSeek-R1 achieves over 10,000 TPS per GPU. Our continuous software improvements and extreme hardware-software co-design enable real-world AI inference to balance cost, efficiency, throughput, and responsiveness. 📈 Explore the interactive performance charts: https://bit.ly/4ons9zL

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Anysphere, maker of AI coding assistant Cursor, has reportedly raised $900M at a $9B valuation, led by Thrive Capital, with participation from a16z and Accel, according to the Financial Times. Previously, Cursor raised $100M at a $2.6B valuation. The startup has now raised over $173M. Investors like Index Ventures and Benchmark are eager to join, but existing backers are doubling down. Rival AI coding startup Windsurf is also seeking funding at a $3B valuation. #AI #CursorAI #Anysphere #AIStartups #TechFunding #DealonAI

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Our team at Meta just launched SAM 3 and SAM 3D - the next generation of Segment Anything Models! Check out these models in our demo playground: https://lnkd.in/eymcBgBa SAM 3 - Builds on SAM 2 with two major upgrades: text prompting and visual example prompting! SAM 3D - Reconstruction of objects and people into the 3rd dimension from a single 2D image! Learn more: SAM 3: https://go.meta.me/d74ec5  SAM 3D: https://go.meta.me/f019f3

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A Chinese University just dropped a hardware-grounded coding model outperforming Claude 4.6! 🔥 Most LLMs excel at high-level programming but lack the grounding required for hardware-specific constraints and specialized industrial languages. Beihang University introduced InCoder-32B, a foundation model specifically architected for chip design, GPU optimization, and embedded systems. It utilizes a standard decoder-only Transformer architecture with 32 billion parameters, trained on a massive 15-trillion-token corpus using 4,096 GPUs. It is trained on a three-stage "Code-Flow" pipeline: • During Pre-training, the team used a multi-step strategy including OCR extraction from technical manuals and hardware books, to capture rare industrial data usually missing from public repositories. • Mid-training stage progressively extends the context window from 8K to 128K tokens to support complex industrial projects. This phase also introduces agentic trajectories using a Thought-Action-Observation cycle to improve the model's logical reasoning in troubleshooting scenarios. • Post-training moves beyond text, validating outputs through real industrial toolchains like Icarus Verilog, NVIDIA A100 nodes, and the Renode simulator. InCoder-32B establishes the strongest open-source results across all evaluated industrial domains. It even outperformed Claude-Sonnet-4.6 in specific domains like CAD-Coder IoU and KernelBench performance! Paper link in comments !! Follow for daily high-signal analysis of latest AI research! 🧠 #AI #ChipDesign #Transformer #MachineLearning #GPUOptimization #Engineering #NVIDIA #China #LLM #Coding

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SF AI Engineers is back next week with a new lineup of builders working on real production systems: Wassim Gharbi, Senior Software Engineer @ Tesla YK Sugi, Developer Experience Manager, @ Eventual Scott Clark, Cofounder & CEO @ Distributional Last time, we went deep on how AI actually ships: Vamsi Reddy Chagari, Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Suki, walked through building and operating a production ASR system, from speech assistant architecture and data flows to modeling decisions and lessons learned deploying speech ML in a live product. Pavan Trinath Vutukuru Trinath Vutukur, Member of Technical Staff at Robinhood, broke down how foundation models are used in real production ML systems, with a focus on embeddings, weak supervision, data understanding, and copilots that speed up everyday ML engineering. Jules Damji, Staff Developer Advocate at Databricks, shared a hands on overview of using LLM as a Judge with MLflow to evaluate autonomous agents at scale, replacing brittle metrics with structured, explainable, human aligned evaluation workflows. Join us at the next one: https://lnkd.in/ehWEHU8T

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From $118K SWE salary with 3% raises to a $350K AI Engineer role — what's stopping you? You've been grinding LeetCode, grinding code reviews, grinding endless generic AI courses that promise the moon but deliver theory. Here's the cold truth: Most AI courses teach concepts. They don't teach how to build deployable AI agents. They don't teach how to ship scalable automation pipelines. That's why you're stuck. Agentic AI & Automation Mastery is different. • An 8-week hands-on program • Build real AI agents from scratch • Deploy projects that survive real-world challenges Our alumni don't just "know AI." They engineer it. Real engineers ship code that powers products and drives revenue. If you want prestige, higher pay, and a future-proof career, the path is clear. Stop wasting cycles on theory-heavy courses. Start building. Ready to upgrade your career path from stuck SWE to certified AI Engineer? Are you in or out?

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Stock vesting schedules have been morphing, as we all know. And Waymo just slipped a new experiment into the mix. Two recent Waymo offers shared on Levels.fyi tell the story: - An L3 software-engineer package that vests RSUs over two years, 50 percent each year. - An L5 package that keeps the classic four-year, evenly split design. That contrast hints at a deliberate split strategy: shorter horizons for early-career hires, longer runways for senior talent. The logic tracks. New grads often treat their first role as a springboard, so a two-year vest ensures most of their grant actually pays out before they move on. For seasoned engineers, who hold bigger grants and deeper domain knowledge, Waymo still wants the retention pull of a four-year schedule. Waymo isn’t alone. Across tech, equity timelines are turning into a tuning knob: - Lyft issues single-year new-hire grants, then refreshes annually. - Uber front-loads at 35 / 30 / 20 / 15. - NVIDIA moved to 40 / 30 / 20 / 10. - Pinterest compresses to roughly 50 / 33 / 17 over three years. - A handful of high-growth startups grant two-year blocks by default. What’s driving the shift? 1. Pay-for-performance. Shorter cycles let companies re-price grants and reward top performers without being locked into four-year promises. 2. Dilution math. Fewer unvested shares lower equity overhang, especially valuable when stock prices spike. 3. Flexibility. Refreshers become the main retention lever, not year-three and year-four vest cliffs. 4. Talent liquidity. For early-career hires, faster access to equity can feel more tangible than a promise that’s years away. If you’re negotiating, remember that earlier liquidity doesn’t always mean bigger upside. Always compare total grant size, ask how refreshers are determined, and run the tax math on concentrated vesting events. Have you seen a two-year or front-loaded schedule in your offer recently? Comment below with your thoughts and I’ll send over a vesting report we put together here at Levels.fyi. #vestingschedule

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