Mathpocalypse, Cryptopocalpyse, ARRpocalypse, Housingpocalypse
John Coogan and Jordi Hays discuss how frontier AI mathematical discoveries are sparking fears of a 'cryptopocalypse' for public key cryptography, alongside coverage of AI compute trends and market reporting dynamics. They are joined by partners from Union Square Ventures to discuss their new $900M fund, Nathan from Air Street Capital on the State of AI report, Boom Pop on their acquisition by Navan, Hone on autonomous outcome engines, Arena on raising $200M for agent alignment, and founder Zach on building screenless consumer AI assistants.
- Matthew Green of Johns Hopkins warned that software systems could lose public key cryptography after OpenAI released hundreds of AI-generated mathematical proofs. Read →
- Arena raised $200M at a $3.1B valuation led by Lightspeed and Kleiner Perkins to evaluate multi-step autonomous AI workflows across production tools like GitHub and Google Drive. Read →
- Zach raised $10M at a $100M valuation for a consumer AI companion after the rapid acquisition of his previous startup, Cali. Read →
- Pre-training compute collapsed from roughly 50% of frontier GPU workloads down to 10%, shifting capital toward reinforcement learning and post-training data curation. Read →
- Union Square Ventures announced a $900 million fund cycle, the largest in the firm's history, built to back capital-intensive bets across robotics, energy, and autonomous software. Read →