Co-founder & Partner NextView Ventures, previously LinkedIn co-founder and foot soldier in PayPal Mafia. Obsessed with the big picture.
Boston / SF
Joined March 2008
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Lee Hower retweeted
Very proud to showcase our latest demo of how our Engineering World Model SKY-001 can design a complex Jaguar car with 1000s of complex parts.
In order to get us to Autonomous Manufacturing, we need to design systems that can think like a ‘AI General Engineer’: planning complex physical structures, long term sequences, and feasibility directly in the physical domain rather than approximating it through next-token prediction.
Engineering design operates in the spatial reasoning domain through hierarchical decomposition, constraint satisfaction, and the sequential construction of complex physical objects.
World models are going to be the next frontier in AI after LLMs and SKY-001 is just the beginning.
I mean no disrespect to Canada or Cohere. I also believe we're only going to see increasing focus on sovereign AI (compute, models, etc).
But as the Canadian government announces their direct funding of Cohere, it's hard not to note the disparity of capital firepower between US model companies and the rest of the world.
"Carney said Canada won't wait for the future of artificial intelligence to be decided elsewhere by those Canadians don't know or trust.
Cohere will invest at least $1.7 billion in new computing infrastructure in Canada by 2030, he added."
For comparison, OpenAI + Anthropic will invest >$1 trillion in US based compute by 2030 (and hundreds of billions elsewhere).
cbc.ca/news/business/canada-…
Lee Hower retweeted
Today, Seneca announces that @SBCOUNTYFIRE has become the first agency in California to acquire a @Seneca_Systems Strike Team of five aircraft plus a Mobile Air Operations Base.
This is the second fire department acquisition of an autonomous aerial fire suppression system in the world. It will being a new set of capabilities to our nation's largest county -- and one that regularly sees nearly 2,000 yearly vegetation fires -- early in 2027.
It also will get the world a little closer to the moonshot goal of @SBCFireChief Dan Munsey: instant response to keep fires at 100 square feet. Fire grows exponentially. Detection has improved. Autonomous aerial response is the clear next step. We are extremely to partner with the exceptional men and women of San Bernardino County Fire to push the boundaries of what is possible.
San Bernardino County Fire will also put the aircraft into use for fuels management and prescribed fire, cargo hauling, night operations, mop up, and other mission types that will keep firefighters and communities safer.
California's wildfire threat is existential and well documented. It is a true privilege to work with the heroes and leaders in one of the nation's largest and most active districts to turn the tide.
A special thanks to the exceptional broader team in SB for the hard work to make this possible: Robotics PM Jeff Alexy, BC Chris Bowden, @Chief_Serrano, @billclerico, Captain Shawn Millerick and to Chris Anthony for making the introduction to Chief Munsey back before both Seneca and FireWERX!
**On a personal note, Dan and San Bernardino was my second call when learning about the fire industry before Seneca. The department staff was generous with their time and wisdom expecting nothing in return. I feel extraordinarily grateful to now call those same individuals friends and partners
Space - hopefully not the final frontier, but now the next frontier for us here at NextView
Excited to announce our latest investment in @rdvrobotics. It's a new space for us (pun intended) but backing an entrepreneur we've known for over 20 years. So excited to finally partner with @joe_landon
payloadspace.com/exclusive-r…
If "normal" companies see even a fraction of the productivity lift Anthropic has, we're in for the mother of all productivity waves.
AI skeptics frequently highlight the fact that aggregate productivity stats don't show much lift (yet) from the technology. This is true given these trailing macroeconomic stats are by definition looking in the rearview mirror and diffusion of new tech across people and companies is always lumpy and takes time.
But Anthropic's S-1 revealed that roughly ~6mo ago, the business flipped from "spending" more on Claude than human payroll. Also internal Claude usage has increased 250x in the first 9mo of 2026.
And Anthropic is an outlier in so many ways, in terms of heavy Claude usage to build Claude and the fact they generate >$6M revenue / employee. So I'm not saying every average company will look like this, but again if AI diffusion occurs at even a fraction of Anthropic it's a pretty significant aggregate impact to productivity.
Anthropic doesn't have to "pay" full price for Claude obviously, so one could argue that other businesses would meter or constraint employee usage more. But it's not free for Anthropic either, given they still pay compute costs on employee usage.
Demand for compute remains robust. FWIW I believe training & inference demand will grow for many years, especially if enterprises (and nation states) stand up their own sovereign capacity with models they control.
But the availability + cost of capital is clearly becoming more constrained in this phase of the compute build out. This phase will favor the hyperscalers who have vast balance sheets and other operating cash flows, and the operational + supply chain excellence to stand up compute at scale.
Five years into his run as CEO, Andy Jassy has nearly tripled the size of AWS, grown Amazon's revenue by about 80%, and expects to spend $220 billion this year to win AI. Amazon's AI business hit a $25 billion run rate in three years, growing several hundred times faster than early AWS.
Jassy joins a16z's Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg to discuss the decisions behind that run, from rebuilding Amazon's fulfillment network after the pandemic to the AWS origin story.
They also cover why data centers became a political fight, Amazon's custom chips, its stakes in Anthropic and OpenAI, why inference needs to get 10x cheaper, AI's most underrated risk, and why every company will have to reinvent its products from scratch, plus Jassy's advice for anyone who's 18 today.
0:47 How Amazon has changed since 2021
1:51 How the pandemic reshaped retail
3:30 Why AI supercharged AWS's growth
5:20 When leadership principles clash
9:36 $60M vs. $25B: early AWS vs. early AI
13:20 How the AI CapEx cash cycle works
15:44 Why the US must build data centers
20:55 The labs-to-enterprise AI barbell
23:12 Demand vs. longtime AWS customers
28:11 Annapurna, Graviton, and Trainium
33:55 Backing Anthropic and OpenAI
37:15 Why AI means smaller teams
42:13 AI's underrated risk: security
46:29 Why Amazon rewired Alexa's brain
53:07 What Jassy tells his kids about AI
56:36 Betting on AI, robotics, and space
YouTube: youtu.be/-YMMRQ1qscI
@ajassy @Amazon @bhorowitz @eriktorenberg
The @skyfallai team has been working on world models for a while, and now has released SKY-001 an engineering world model.
Very exciting times for AI design of physical things.
Introducing SKY-001, the first Engineering World Model.
On CAD and BIM tasks, it beats GPT-6 Astra and every frontier model we tested:
-> 51-125x faster
- > 150-210x cheaper
-> Higher IOU than all frontier models
SKY-001 lets you dream a physical object before you build it.
18 months of work. Built by the team out of Maluuba's deep learning lab (acq. by @MSRResearch).
The first ‘AI General Engineer’ will be the backbone for Autonomous Manufacturing.
Congrats to Ultra on announcing their $50M Series A today.
AI & robot foundational models have been a paradigm shift for robotics, a field which has existed for decades. Everyone believes robots will be far more pervasive in the next 5-10 years than they've been for the last 50. But actually deploying in real world settings is both how innovation will accelerate and where value is being created, so we're thrilled that Ultra is one of the companies in this vanguard.
NextView led the initial seed round for @Ultraroboticsco and it's been incredible to see the progress for this company. It's also our 2nd time investing in @JonMSchwartz and his co-founders which has been great.
Robotics has a distribution problem. Today, Ultra is announcing $62M in funding to solve it, including a $50M Series A led by @hiFramework.
We believe that deployment is the bottleneck in robotics.
It’s relatively easy to make a robot look impressive in a controlled environment. It’s much harder to put a robot into the open world, make it useful, keep it running, earn the trust of the people working alongside it, and do that over and over and over again.
So that’s what we’re focusing on.
My partner @robgo has shared views on the state of seed investing over last 6-12mo. He now delves into the differing paths for seed investors now:
1) Fighting over diamonds in plain sight
2) Searching for diamonds in the rough
3) Mining for silver
nextview.vc/blog/the-three-p…
Lee Hower retweeted
For those of you outside silicon valley, Cognition / Factory drama is like if Timothee Chalamet broke up with Kylie Jenner to date Kim Kardashian and then the E! Cable Network execs chose sides
Lee Hower retweeted
OpenRouter users spent more on OpenAI models than on Anthropic models last week.
This hasn't happened for more than 2.5 years
A thoughtful, nuanced perspective.
Last month I wrote about how we can build a positive and safe future for everyone: meta.com/thefutureisforevery…
Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens.
The reality is:
- People won't want to use agents that are misaligned with them and that don't do what they ask, so labs have a strong natural incentive to make their models more aligned.
There is a lot of debate about slowing progress on capabilities until alignment catches up. My view is that trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate agents and models. Any lab that doesn't focus on alignment will fall behind.
- Labs face significant liability if their models cause harm, so they have a strong incentive to prevent this as well.
Meta delayed shipping Muse for several months to focus on safety and security. We didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would. We just did it as part of our day-to-day work because it was clearly the right thing for people and for us. I'm proud of the security foundations we've built.
- Engaging independent evaluators and advisors is industry best practice. MSL already does this today in several areas because it helps produce better work. Other labs can just do this too. In general, it would be helpful for there to be a larger and more diverse ecosystem of evaluators.
- Committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely. Meta has made this commitment and other labs can do this as well.
I believe the key to building a positive future for everyone is maintaining the right balance of power. This is within our power to do.
Lee Hower retweeted
Worth the read every year. #neverforget
Todd: Hello… Operator…listen to me…I can’t speak very loud. – This is an emergency. I’m a passenger on a United flight to San Francisco.. We have a situation here….Our plane has been hijacked…..can you understand me?
Lisa: (exhaling a deep breath to herself) I understand… Can the hijackers see you talking on the phone?
Todd: No
Lisa: Can you tell me how many hijackers are on the plane?
Todd: There are three that we know of.
Lisa: Can you see any weapons? What kind of weapons do they have?
Todd: Yes…. they don’t have guns….they have knives – they took over the plane with knives.
Lisa: Do you mean…like steak knives?
Todd: No, these are razor knives…like box cutters.
Lisa: Can you tell what country these people are from?
Todd: No…..I don’t know. They sound like they’re from the mid-east.
Lisa: Have they said what they want?
Todd: Someone announced from the cockpit that there was a bomb on board. He said he was the captain and to stay in our seats and stay quiet.
He said that they were meeting these men’s demands and returning to the airport… It was very broken English, and… I’m telling you…it sounded fake!
Lisa: Ok sir, please give me your name.
Todd: My name is Todd Beamer.
Lisa: Ok Todd….my name is Lisa…Do you know your flight number? If you can’t remember, it’s on your ticket.
Todd: It’s United Flight 93.
Lisa: Now Todd, can you try to tell me exactly what happened?
Todd: Two of the hijackers were sitting in first class near the cockpit. A third one was sitting near the back of the coach section. The two up. front got into the cockpit somehow; there was shouting. The third hijacker said he had a bomb. It looks like a bomb. He’s got it tied to his waist with a red belt of some kind.
Lisa: So is the door to the cockpit open?
Todd: No, the hijackers shut it behind them.
Lisa: Has anyone been injured?
Todd: Yes, ..they…they killed one passenger sitting in first class. There’s been lots of shouting. We don’t know if the pilots are dead or alive. A flight attendant told me that the pilot and copilot had been forced from the cockpit and may have been wounded.
Lisa: Where is the 3rd hijacker now Todd?
Todd: He’s near the back of the plane. They forced most of the passengers into first class. There are fourteen of us here in the back. Five are flight attendants. He hasn’t noticed that I slipped into this pantry to get the phone. The guy with the bomb ordered us to sit on the floor in the rear of the plane……….oh Jesus.. Help!
Lisa: Todd….are you ok? Tell me what’s happening!
Todd: Hello…..We’re going down….I think we’re going to crash……Wait – wait a minute. No, we’re leveling off….we’re ok. I think we may be turning around…..That’s it – we changed directions. Do you hear me….we’re flying east again.
Lisa: Ok Todd…. What’s going on with the other passengers?
Todd: Everyone is… really scared. A few passengers with cell phones have made calls to relatives. A guy, Jeremy, was talking to his wife just before the hijacking started. She told him that hijackers had crashed two planes into the World Trade Center……Lisa is that true??
Lisa: Todd…..I have to tell you the truth…..it’s very bad. The World Trade Center is gone. Both of the towers have been destroyed.
Todd: Oh God —help us!
Lisa: A third plane was taken over by terrorists. It crashed into the Pentagon in Washington DC. Our country is under attack….and I’m afraid that your plane may be part of their plan.
Todd: Oh dear God. Dear God…….Lisa, will you do something for me?
Lisa: I’ll try….if I can….Yes.
Todd: I want you to call my wife and my kids for me and tell them what’s happened. Promise me you’ll call..
Lisa: I promise – I’ll call.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
No verbatim transcript of Todd Beamer's call with Lisa Jefferson exists, as the conversation was not recorded and the text includes fabricated dialogue.
snopes.com/fact-check/tra…
usatoday.com/story/news/fac…
nps.gov/flni/learn/his…
catalog.archives.gov/id/2610189