Good Morning,
Visions of AI is a new feature format I’m experimenting with that will amount to a short profile on an AI or emerging tech startup. The cadence of this style of article is unknown as of yet, but there are a lot of fascinating startups I want to share about.
This is designed to be light evening reading to go out at a time-slot of 8 pm EST.
Not that many AI researchers have worked at Google DeepMind, OpenAI, xAI and started their own companies. Igor Babuschkin in 2026 is the founder of River AI. River is building a stack for personal AI that is both open-source and adapts to you. This is a bit like the holy grail of personalization combined with all the recent advances in AI.
I actually find myself attracted to the philosophy and goal of the startup:
We imagine a future where your AI works entirely for you and deeply aligns with your values. Compared to the corporate chatbots of today, it will feel completely different: responsible, curious, and truly yours. Most importantly, you'll own everything: the hardware it runs on, the data it learns from, and the intelligence itself.
This has legit open-source vibes to me and the interview with the lead investor General Catalyst felt authentic:
The interview is with Hemant Taneja, the CEO of General Catalyst, one of the lead investors of the Seed/Series A.
Chapters
02:22 — Co-Founding xAI
04:36 — An AI Experience You Own
05:59 — Betting Early on Open Weights
07:47 — How Do You Make Money on Free Models?
09:25 — Why the US Needs Its Own Open Models
11:27 — Enterprises Want to Control Their AI
13:36 — What Is Continual Learning?
16:56 — An API That Updates the Weights
19:17 — A Personal AI for Everyone
20:46 — The 20-Minute Training Run
A 2-Month old Startup
River AI is among a group of AI labs that are taking on hard problems with quick capital not seen previously in the history of Venture Capital. It’s also very clearly a bet on Open-Source American AI.
