Pierre Valade

Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finally get some closure. teendrama.substack.com/p/som…

Super happy to share our intention to join forces with NVIDIA in a $12,930,300,000 acquisition 💛💚 10 years after starting Hugging Face, open-source AI is at an inflection point. Thanks to the community, we’ve shown that it can be a complement, and even an alternative, to closed-source APIs. But for it to happen at larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility. That’s why we went to talk to Jensen, who offered to do exactly that with us. In addition to doubling down on NVIDIA’s massive contributions to open-source AI (I called them the “King of American open-source AI” earlier this year), they’ve committed to strongly supporting Hugging Face and our mission while keeping the platform open, independent and compute agnostic. The founders and the team are all staying to keep pushing this mission forward. Together, we think we can make open source the default way to build AI, with the goal of empowering 100 million AI builders to own their intelligence rather than rent it. Excited about the next 10 years! 🤗🤗🤗

Polsia just raised $30M at a $250M valuation. Approaching $10M annual run rate. One Founder + AI. Zero employees. Polsia runs companies autonomously. It also ran its own fundraising. I just showed up for signatures.

Today, we’re launching Beside out of stealth with $32M from @IndexVentures & @eqtventures (+ many great investors/angels) to build the conversation layer for AI. 20k+ individuals and 600+ businesses now run their day through Beside: we answer the phone, text messages, take notes & update your tools. We began by rebuilding the Phone & Messages app on iOS We’re now launching with macOS & Android. Read our story here: fortune.com/2025/11/11/besid…

I'm bullish that personal AI agents can significantly enhance democracy. Here’s how. The first principle of democracy is that we can each make correct assessments about whether things are going well. If there’s food on the table, we’re safe, we have freedom to do what we like, we’re have opportunities for the future, we’re generally happy, and if any of these aren’t true, we want change. I bet even in a polarized world we can probably agree on a lot of the outcomes we’d like to achieve. The challenge comes when we try to agree on what to do about it. The root cause of these bad outcomes are complex, as are the solutions. We don’t have the necessary domain knowledge, time, or patience to get into the weeds on every topic, like how to optimally balance growth with climate concerns, how to solve the housing crisis, etc., so we recede into tribal positions, generic principles that feel good, and deference to some champion. Let me say something radical: there are optimal solutions to the problems that plague us that balance everyone’s concerns. But: a) There’s uncertainty, because we’re dealing with highly complex systems b) We can’t align on these solutions because so much identity and ego is tied up in a given political position. Worse, this leads to increasing polarization and entrenchment over time, making it more likely to oscillate between extreme, platitude-driven positions instead of converging on an optimal solution. So what’s to be done? I think that having a personal AGI would help, not because it would provide more facts (we know those don’t change minds), but because it could be highly trusted, aligned, and more correct. For example, imagine you’re a progressive thinking about housing policy (the specific details aren’t important here). - You hear a politician say we should freeze rent in New York, and your assumption is that rents are being inflated by greedy landowners and they should be reeled in and punished, and he’s a progressive politician, so you agree. - You’ve heard market-based proposals before on Fox News, but you assume they’re de facto wrong and bad and therefore their policy is wrong and bad. - You hear Ezra Klein talk about pragmatic solutions to build more housing, and how rent freezing is net bad, and he’s more or less on your team so you hear him out, but then you hear friends say he’s moving to the right so you discount his opinion. Your solution, and your vote, was mostly baked in by tribal impulses. Don’t feel bad, this is how the vast majority of us make decisions, and there is legitimately so much cynicism and bad behavior from “the other side” that you can’t treat those arguments in good faith. How does AI help? If your personal assistant deeply understands your goals and values, you’ll trust it over time to make recommendations that are legitimately aligned with your best interests. It’ll start small, with an interesting, nuanced point here and a lightbulb moment there. Eventually we’ll start asking harder questions, “I’m not happy that rents keep going up. Why is this happening, and what are some of the best solutions out there? Which do you think I’ll like best? How do those map to specific policy positions in the upcoming election?” And I think the answer will be very good, grounded in the literature, and explained in a way that’s concise, understandable, and relatable. This can expand to entire personalized voter guides in the future. The key is that in this trusted environment, it should be possible to deviate from dogmatic party positions. Imagine you’re talking to a lifelong friend who’s now an economics professor studying housing policy. If they say “we shouldn’t freeze rents for these reasons”, we’ll listen. Your personal agent will be as trustworthy and aligned as your close friends, and be professor+ level of expertise on any topic. As we extrapolate into a more sci-fi future, our personal agent can: - Attend online political hearings on our behalf and advocate for our desires and positions - Debate in parallel with millions of other agents to try and understand, poke holes, and improve its positions - Vote on a large number of specific proposals and referenda, removing the need for us to vote every four years on a massive bundle of policies we only partially agree on - Contribute its preference vector to be averaged with the rest of society’s preference vectors to output an aggregate preference, and eventually Collective Extrapolated Volition Of course, alignment is absolutely critical here as we increasingly defer to their decisions and trust them to take more actions on our behalf. But done well, we will all benefit significantly from this stepwise change in intelligence, wisdom, and capability, and someday we can start coming together around policies that are actually effective.

To everyone worried about AI job displacement, might I remind you that we, humans, have actively created jobs to absorb our historical increase in leisure hours. Athletes, celebrities, influencers, streamers, chefs, tattoo artists, designers, you name it. Way, way more to come...

The question is: will the chat-native tool (e.g. ChatGPT) build rich in-line UIs (e.g. a view of a draft calendar event) first/best, or the calendar-native tool (e.g. Notion) build interactive AI UIs (e.g. a meeting/calendar assistant to chat with) first/best. Or mapping it back to the world of coding, Claude Code (chat-native tool) or Cursor (code-native tool). It could also be different use case by use case.

Meet Dia. Now available for Arc members.

An update on our new AI browser, Dia: We just wrapped alpha testing with thousands of college students. Felt like the perfect moment to share a raw @browsercompany update on what’s been going on (including demos). So much to catch you up on…