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What Surprised Us Most In 2025

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What Surprised Us Most In 2025

Y Combinator Startup Podcast

2025/12/22
Y Combinator Startup Podcast

Y Combinator Startup Podcast

2025/12/22
OverviewShownoteHighlightsTranscriptChaptersPins

Shownote

2025 was the year AI stopped feeling chaotic and started feeling buildable. In this Lightcone episode, the YC partners break down the surprises of the year, from shifting model dominance to why the real opportunity is moving back to the application layer, ...

Highlights

2025 marked a turning point in the AI landscape, where the frenzy gave way to focus and founders began building with greater clarity. The market matured beyond hype, revealing clear patterns in model performance, infrastructure availability, and application potential. As the chaos settled, a more strategic era of AI innovation emerged—one defined by precision, agility, and real business outcomes.
00:00
Anthropic's Claude leads YC winter 2026 cycle due to coding tool performance
05:32
Startups are arbitraging AI models using proprietary evals to stay competitive.
10:25
Competition in AI hardware means more compute availability for startups.
21:23
Vibe coding is not fully reliable for production code as of 2025.
29:28
Gamma reached $100 million in ARR with only 50 employees

Chapters

Did Claude Outshine GPT in the Developer Race?
00:00
Why Most Consumer AI Apps Are Still Missing the Mark
05:32
Is the Real AI Gold Rush Happening Beneath the Surface?
10:25
What’s Holding Back AI’s Next Leap—And Who’s Fixing It?
15:26
Can Tiny Teams Really Build the Future of AI?
27:03

Transcript

Jared Heyman: I think perhaps the thing that most surprised me is the extent to which I feel like the AI economy stabilized. We have, like the model layer companies and the application layer companies, and the infrastructure layer companies. It seems like ...