Perplexity Open-Sources Decider v1.3 as SpaceX Builds AI Supercompute Site in Texas

Key Takeaways

1. Perplexity released Decider v1.3 and Decider Flash v1.3 under Apache license, free on OpenRouter for one week, with weights on Hugging Face.
2. SpaceX is building a Texas supercompute site for frontier AI training, with $220M pledged for local water infrastructure.
3. Replit Agent can now make business purchases and buy ads; Squaremates opened to all Square sellers with app-building and MCP access.
4. Vercel detailed UI SDK and Workflow SDK 5 for agent-built interfaces and faster agent loops.
5. A forwarded forensic study claims several Chinese AI models were trained on export-restricted Nvidia Blackwell chips; the claim is disputed/unverified.

1. AI Models and Agent Infrastructure

1. Perplexity open-sourced Decider v1.3 and Decider Flash v1.3 under the Apache license, with weights published on Hugging Face and both models free on OpenRouter for one week until November 19. The release adds a “locate” capability that finds target text by description and returns character offsets, aimed at batch decision-making and evidence or entity extraction. The author claims the models significantly outperform the best general extraction models on 17 out-of-domain NER, PII and extractive QA tasks, and beat the current classifier by 6.54 percentage points on 63 internal production classification tasks; he also frames decision models as a path to agent safety at telemetry scale, citing a case of reading 1 billion tokens across 7,000 agent sessions in one day and producing 14 agent safety rule fixes 1 2. Tobi Lutke called the models “good models” 3.
2. Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch argued that rigid, high-level single-framework abstractions limit agents’ ability to generate UI on demand, while a UI SDK offers composable behavior wrappers covering accessibility, performance and consistency without restricting what UI can be generated. The referenced UI SDK description lists more than 50 behaviors including popovers, selects, typeahead and focus, with React, Vue, Svelte, Solid and Web Components components. Rauch also said Workflow SDK 5 and Vercel Workflows improve agent workflows’ time-to-first-step and step-to-step latency and strengthen encryption and security, with a durable log reusable across agent harnesses; the referenced post claims latency and overhead reduced by up to 25x, encryption by default and regional workload isolation with failover 1 2 3.
3. A forwarded forensic study claims new models from DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax and Ant Group were trained on Nvidia Blackwell chips that are banned from export to China — a claim marked disputed/unverified. The described method matches hidden weight-initialization patterns tied to specific GPUs and seed counts across more than six trillion chip-layout and seed combinations; it says six Chinese models, including DeepSeek-V4-Pro, Kimi K3 and MiniMax-M3, initialized on Blackwell systems, with four matching GB200/GB300. The forwarded account also claims real-hardware reproduction — bit-for-bit reproduction of DeepSeek-V4-Flash initial weights on a B300, a 0.999995 correlation for Kimi K3 on rented GB200, failure on H100 and mismatch after a one-bit seed change — and estimates 2,000 to 3,000 Blackwell GPUs per cluster for Kimi K3 and DeepSeek-V4-Pro at roughly $150M–$200M per cluster 1 2.

2. Compute Buildout and Business Agents

1. SpaceX is building a supercompute site near Brownsville, Texas, planned for training frontier AI for medical research, emergency response, advanced manufacturing and national security, with self-generated power intended to avoid raising nearby residents’ electricity bills. First work involves clearing waste illegally dumped on the site since the 1960s, including scrap metal, old appliances, rusted tanks, fiberglass insulation, construction materials and thousands of illegally discarded tires. SpaceX has pledged $220M to expand Brownsville and Cameron County water and wastewater facilities, adding 20 million gallons per day of treatment capacity, described as the city’s largest private water investment; the project has brought more than 3,000 construction jobs and is to add more than 500 long-term jobs, with investment also spanning the Rio Grande Valley to Cochise County, Arizona 1 2 3 4.
2. Replit Agent can now make purchases for a business, including buying ads to acquire customers, via Link and Visa and Google Ads, according to forwarded posts and Amjad Masad. A forwarded description says the agent uses a Link agent wallet and known business information to source purchases — for example filtering options for coffee pods under $35 for an office — and requests approval before completing a purchase. Masad also recalled that mobile programming was mocked four years ago and said millions of dollars of software is now created directly on phones daily 1 2 3 4 5.
3. Squaremates opened to all Square sellers, positioned as AI that can act rather than only inform, and lets sellers build custom apps in natural language that connect to Square data and are hosted on Square for their teams. Sellers with existing agents can use the Square CLI to run hosted apps, and Square CLI and MCP are in open beta so sellers can run Square business data — orders, catalog, customers, payments and inventory — inside their own AI agents. Forwarded posts describe Squaremates as proactive intelligence deeply connected to a seller’s existing business and familiar with regular customers, and one argues such platform assistants could help turn a startup wave into more durable businesses 1 2 3 4 5 6 7.

3. Product Launches and Startup Signals

1. Interior AI added a hover-style “🎨 Style” menu for quick 3D previews, with a “Render” step producing photorealistic results; the maker wants to try 3D walkthroughs and video models such as Seedance for photorealistic interior-renovation tours. He described walking through a 3D room, uploading wallpaper textures onto any wall or object and setting object materials before rendering, and said switching to WebGPURenderer r187 with SSGI and SSR markedly improved on a slower ThreeJS shader attempt. He called an AI reconstruction of a walkthrough video generated on a VPS in under five minutes promising, and said he may pivot the whole product toward this direction to regrow, calling it far more powerful than basic image-to-image restyling 1 2 3 4 5.
2. Garry Tan highlighted Summer Engine (YC F26), a game-creation platform where users describe a game and the platform builds it for play with friends; he said tens of thousands of creators are already making games on Summer, the community has produced more than 240,000 assets forming one of the world’s largest free asset libraries, and users own their games and can sell them and publish to Steam, Web, iOS, Android and Summer Games. He also cited Retell reaching $100M annualized revenue from $10M in 17 months, profitable on $4.6M raised by focusing on the hardest parts of voice AI deployment, and Aside’s Computer Use reaching SOTA on Scale AI’s Cua Driver Bench while the team focused on daily backend computer-use UX; Aside reportedly passed $2M ARR four months after launch with 150K monthly active users, going from $1M to $2M in 33 days 1 2 3 4 5.
3. A team that saw code-review costs become unreasonable after headcount growth and AI-driven output built its own agent on the particle-1 model, cutting codebase costs by more than 80% with better quality; the solution is open source and self-hostable. Separately, a second-time YC founder said selling his first company to Dropbox only made fundraising and replies easier — the product still had to work and users still did not care who he was — and that persistence beats intensity, citing 200 consecutive weeks of running 1 2.

4. Leadership and Ecosystem Debate

1. Naval argued that Jensen Huang is to Nvidia what Steve Jobs was to Apple: irreplaceable, while Tobi Lutke called a reported CEO transition a “generational mistake,” said founders like Jensen cannot be replaced, and argued Nvidia would end up run by caretakers trying to preserve the status quo; he also asked what the board saw. Amjad Masad, meanwhile,讽刺ed that a congressman leading an inquiry into Huang’s alleged foreign ties had himself appeared in Congress in a foreign military uniform, and forwarded a report that the Megaspeed investigation idea came from a “tech industry contact” rather than the intelligence or policy community 1 2 3 4 5 6.
2. Nikita Bier argued that hiring a domain expert to build a zero-to-one product carries risk, because breakthrough products are exceptions that break rules and first-principles builders lack “scars” that can interfere with decisions — noting Airbnb’s founding team had no hotel-industry people — and said the best setup pairs both types so obvious errors are avoided while “expert” assumptions are questioned. He also denied a quoted statement attributed to him and said his account was hacked 1 2.
3. Paul Graham forwarded a Reuters report alleging that a week before the U.S. captured Venezuela’s leader, JD Vance met oil trader John Addison at a private Montana ski club to ask how quickly Venezuelan oil could be sold under U.S. control; both denied the meeting, but flight records showed their planes parked together that day. Two days after the Venezuela operation, Energy Secretary Chris Wright reportedly called Addison and, without public bidding, gave his company Vitol the job of selling Venezuelan oil; Vitol and a competitor have since profited by hundreds of millions of dollars, and Addison and his wife donated $7M to a Trump campaign while he leads a committee advising Wright. The forwarded post calls for Congress to subpoena Wright, Vitol and Addison and obtain phone records, emails and flight logs to determine whether anyone had advance knowledge of the military action, and to require public bidding before any company profits from U.S. foreign policy 1.
4. Paul Graham also forwarded a founder’s lesson that nobody really knows what they are doing, recalling that his first startup assumed others were confident and later seeing peers pivot and rebuild; he said persistence, such as 200 consecutive weeks of running, wins through daily showing up rather than big days. He quoted Joshua Reynolds on education — that teachings imposed on the mind are lazily and ineffectively received, and the few who truly learn are their own teachers — and forwarded that humans used poisoned weapons in hunting at least 125,000 years ago, commenting on the cultural complexity of learning to extract plant poison safely for hunting 1 2 3.

5. Platform and Tooling Updates

1. Jack Dorsey’s Squaremates rollout was accompanied by forwarded discussion of shared context and model choice from Bradley Axen on BuilderLab Studio’s The CUBE, and a viewer said AI is spawning new company architectures after watching Jack’s BuilderLab talk. A forwarded case described Burgers Never Say Die asking Squaremates after closing why its signature cheese sauce, made from cheese-trim offcuts, was not selling well, but the source did not detail the outcome 1 2 3.
2. Shopify’s Tobi Lutke forwarded that Shopify can now show whether a card has been used for fraud at other brands, to pursue fraud patterns across the ecosystem and protect brands, and forwarded praise that Shopify may be the most AI-minded company with a positive vision for humanity’s future. He also endorsed a summary of Shopify lessons: optimize for churn, set different time scales for different work, optimize totals rather than ratios, measure by value-realization period, re-examine “successful” experiments, personalize onboarding with signup information, put onboarding inside the product, and avoid optimizing the appearance of progress 1 2 3.
3. Alexis Ohanian said Halo robot drew thousands to queue for trials after going viral, and promoted 776 portfolio companies: OnTicketWallet uses AI to price season tickets and distribute them to major marketplaces, while Laurel, which removes six-minute billing work for lawyers, reportedly had its largest quarter with ARR up 4x year over year and expansion up 13x, expanding into consulting and financial services. He also forwarded Riverside Labs’ Tonality voice model, which claims to edit any word in a recording while preserving voice identity, expression and room acoustics via API 1 2 3 4.
4. Garry Tan noted YC Startup School Taipei wrapped, with many talented developers and demos, and separately highlighted Firecrawl’s path from a thousand-star repository to a product used by 1.2 million developers. Greg Isenberg argued one of the best startup directions is building a Grok Bot for a single industry such as dentists, listing a stack of T3 Code with Opus 5.5/Fable 5.2, Paper for design, Orgo for per-agent computers, AgentMail for inboxes, AgentPhone for phone numbers, Composio for connectors and CleanShot for screenshot bug reports 1 2 3.