Y Combinator Startup Podcast

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Transformers: The Discovery That Sparked the AI Revolution

Nearly every modern AI model, from ChatGPT and Claude to Gemini and Grok, is built on the same foundation: the Transformer.In this video, YC's Ankit Gupta traces how AI learned to understand language — from early RNNs and LSTMs to attention mechanisms and the breakthrough 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need — the discovery that unlocked the modern AI era.

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  The End of the Designer–Engineer Divide

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  From Pivot Hell To $1.4 Billion Unicorn

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  The Best Consumer Startup Ideas Were "Impossible" Until Now

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  Cursor Head of Design Reviews Startup Websites

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  Inside The Startup Launching AI Into Space

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  How To Recruit The Best Engineers And Sales Reps

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  From Idea to $650M Exit: Lessons in Building AI Startups

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  YC Partners Answer Your Questions | Office Hours

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  What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About AI And Jobs

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  How To Design Products That Truly Stand Out

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  The World's First Commercial Mobile Carbon Capture Device

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  Every AI Founder Should Be Asking These Questions

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  Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of …

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  Fintech 3.0: Now Is The Best Time To Build In Crypto

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  Aaron Levie: Why Startups Win In The AI Era