Solo founders' week: 164MB speech model beats Whisper Large, $117M raised for AI datacenter turbines
julianweisser · x · 2026-10-03
This week's solo-founder roundup: Manan Gupta's Phonon-2 is a 164MB speech recognition model that beats OpenAI's 10x-larger Whisper on accuracy, transcribing an hour of audio in 20s on a MacBook Air (with free Mac dictation app Detta). Carl Schoeller raised $117M from Founders Fund, Greylock and General Catalyst for Parallax, building gas turbines for AI datacenters. Also: Wabi 2.0 personal AI agents launch, and the Vibecheck formal-methods hackathon with Anthropic, OpenAI and Anduril folks.
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