Synthetic Populations, Codex, and AI notes

Startup(s) of The Week

This week we have a category of startups: Synthetic Populations

Imagine your entire life, upbringing, the world around you, was a simulation. The entire universe was generated around you, molding you into the unique person with unique preferences, all just to see whether you respond positively to Disney’s newest ad campaign for Thor 13 - Revenge of Mjölnir. Oh, and you are simulated too.

That’s the future of customer insights, campaign research, and user interviews that a growing number of AI startups want to create. The idea is that AI can generate huge and more realistic synthetic populations (based on a few real data points, user interviews, etc), which could help predict real behavior whether in response to ad campaigns, product launches, or even legal arguments in a courtroom.

Two startups to highlight in this area:

https://getpersona.xyz/ - Pre-seed stealth company.

Viewpoints.ai - Simulate large-scale interactions with text, image, and video content for real-time, accurate insights. - This startup is run by Stanford PhD, Leo Yeykelis, and is coming out of the PearX accelerator (backed by Pear VC)

Signals

Industry leaders came out with a swarm of announcements this past week. OpenAI’s re-release of Codex, Windsurf released SWE-1 models, Airbnb added new services, Notion added AI features including AI meeting notes, and Eleven Labs put out a universal soundboard.

In some ways, it shows how responsive these tech companies can be to new model developments, trends, and competition.

Open AI and Windsurf | Codex and SWE-1

OpenAI released Codex, a cloud-based software engineering agent.

Powered by a new model codex-1. OpenAI continues to push into more agentic task handling with Operator and this, where Codex can “request further revisions, open a GitHub pull request, or directly integrate the changes into your local environment”. The improvements on the current SWE-Benchmarks aren’t paradigm shifting, but OpenAI has put down the base for your eventual true AI engineer coworker.

Meanwhile, Windsurf, recently acquired for ~$3B, launched SWE-1, its software engineering-specific model. Between Windsurf’s IDE, SWE-1, and OpenAI’s Codex, the AI developer tools race (with players like Cursor, Bolt, and Replit) just got tighter.

Notion | AI Meeting Notes

Notion Introduced AI meeting notes. It is another expansion from Notion the wiki page company to Notion, the all in one business platform. It also is a clear response to Granola AI, which just raised a $43 million series B.

Eleven Labs | Universal Soundboard

Eleven Labs launched a bit of fun this week with their Universal Soundboard, expanding their audio offerings with more accessible, creative tools.

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