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Thais Castello Branco

Verified account Taste Labs

@thaiscbranco_

ceo @tastelabs | on a mission to end AI slop | prev founding team @ExaAILabs
San Francisco, CA tastelabs.com Joined October 2022
976 Following 14K Followers 1.1K Posts

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Thais Castello Branco Verified account @thaiscbranco_
We’re excited to introduce Taste Labs.

Our mission is to end AI slop. We’re building the data and infrastructure layer to give AI models and agents taste.

And today we’re coming out of stealth, announcing our $18.5M seed funding, co-led by @CRV and @AmplifyPartners

AI has nailed objective domains and made it easy to generate anything. But it still feels off. Now, the challenge is judgement. What fits, what feels like you, what’s GREAT. This requires turning a fuzzy, subjective domain into something we can measure and codify. We’re starting with design.

There are two sides to cracking this, the foundation model layer and the agent layer:

- We’ve already been working with the top frontier labs to evaluate and improve their models, crafting the right post-training data and RL environments.
- We’ve also been working with app-layer companies to build the context and verification tools for their agents to produce better, more on-brand, more creative outputs.

We want a future where AI feels right.

If you’re passionate about this mission, join us!
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Thais Castello Branco Verified account @thaiscbranco_
engineering a beautiful mind.

there's all this talk about "taste" but, practically, technically, what is needed to make models better at subjective domains?

amplifypartners.com/blog-posts/eng…
www.amplifypartners.com Engineering a beautiful mind — Amplify Partners The story of Taste Labs, their mission to fight the slop, and the technical anatomy of improving model outputs in subjective domains.
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Thais Castello Branco Verified account @thaiscbranco_
if you want to join a tasteful rocketship ;) tastelabs.com/careers

thanks for the shoutout @lennysan !
Lenny Rachitsky Verified account @lennysan 4d
The best time to join a rocketship is before everyone knows about it.

I’m excited to launch The Next 50: the 50 hottest early-stage startups to keep an eye on (and try to join).

Using @harmonic_ai’s data, the juiciest startup dataset out there, we looked at every early-stage startup and ranked them on headcount growth, recent funding, and investor interest.

We then picked the top 50.

Here's the full list: lennysjobs.com/next50

We’ll update it quarterly, and I’d love your feedback on what other factors we should consider.

P.S. This is in addition to the Lenny 100, the top 100 well-known companies with the highest talent density, tackling the most ambitious problems: lennysjobs.com/lenny100
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Thais Castello Branco Verified account @thaiscbranco_
If frontier models can edit Qwen 3.5 0.8B weights to be better at math, can it give the same model taste?

Probably not, but it can make it a better design critic.

Here's what we found:
Rikiya Takehi @rikiyatakehi Nov 2
We asked GPT-6 Astra to edit Qwen3.5-0.8B weights to improve math.
It directly changed only 0.016% of weights, fixing 0.8B's reasoning loops & improving math up to 6x and even instruction following 3x, without gradients or training.

We call this Weight-Space Programming: frontier LLMs can now natively read/write neural network weights! 🧵
Blog: rikiyat.github.io/blog/weight-sp…
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