Mercury’s Post

Proxis (YC S24) is the first dedicated platform for LLM distillation and serving, unlocking production-ready models at 1/10th the cost. Fine-tuning frontier models like GPT-4 on proprietary data is expensive and locks customers into one external closed-source model provider. To solve this, enterprise AI teams can use Proxis to distill state-of-the-art Llama 405b into a smaller, more efficient model tuned on their own data, which is 5x faster and 10x cheaper than closed-source alternatives. Jackson Stokes (CTO, on the left) optimized the Gemini model at Google for efficient deployment at massive scale. Liam Collins (CEO, on the right) built zero-to-one systems as a software engineer. Congrats on the launch, Liam and Jackson! 🚀 https://lnkd.in/g3jwr85C

It's not often you get to host an event with your current company and one of your favorite past companies 😏 , but this month, I'm helping to host a deep dive on how founders can get into 500 Global with Mercury Raise. I get the pleasure of interviewing Leonard Lee and Iris Sun from the 500 team on how founders can optimize their application, choose the right program for them, and more. 💡 Fun fact: I first met Leonard when I was working at 500 and he was a founder in the batch! We're opening this event to any founder looking to apply to accelerators right now. https://lu.ma/0dzdarxa

🎉 Big news! The official calendar of events for #SFTechWeek and #LATechWeek is now LIVE! And thrilled to announce that this is officially our BIGGEST Tech Week, ever! - 850+ events 🤯 - San Francisco: Oct 7-13 🌉 - Los Angeles: Oct 14-20 🌴 Link to register below to see all events👇 Sneak peek of a few events you can't miss... - The Future of Entertainment with Andrew Chen (a16z), Carter Reum (M13), Jeffrey Evans (Mantis), David Sabow (HSBC) - Founder Fireside Chat with Chris Best, Substack Founder & CEO - Game Changers: Breakfast with Fenwick and a16z with Jonathan Lai (a16z GP) and Kat Duncan (Partner, Fenwick) - How Design, Story, and AI are Changing Software with Siqi Chen, CEO of Runway - AI Breakthrough: Finding Product-Market Fit with executives from Mistral AI, Pinecone, Anyscale, HSBC and a16z - SPEEDRUN Demo Day by A16Z GAMES 40%+ of the events self-report having an AI theme. We're also seeing a ton of diversity in topics, including: B2B, fundraising/investing, fintech, engineering, deeptech, infra, consumer, games, media/entertainment, SaaS... In just 2 years, the Tech Week community has grown to 100k+ folks and has evolved from primarily VC deal flow to deal flow AND a diverse range of use cases: - B2B Lead Generation - Product Launches - Sourcing Talent - Meeting Investors / Fundraising - Brand Building It's been amazing to see Tech Week serve as a bridge between different cities, connecting the SF, LA, and NY ecosystems. Our back-to-back scheduling for SF and LA is designed to encourage cross-pollination. 🐝Tech Week wouldn’t be possible without incredible partners. Thank you to Andreessen Horowitz Fenwick & West, HSBC Innovation Banking, Dialpad, Stripe, Atlassian, PwC, and Nasdaq for your support and belief in the mission 🙏 And Tech Week would not be possible without the incredible (and growing!) team behind it - huge shoutout to Andrew Chen Rose Johnson Shrikala Kashyap Joung Lee for your dedication to the community 😊 Make sure you're following us at TECH WEEK by a16z for more updates, and register at tech-week.com!