general-instinct
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Bill Jiao Is Teaching Big AI to Live in Small Machines
A teenage biology inventor met his future co-founder beside a Beijing dumbbell rack. Now Bill Jiao is trying to move frontier models out of the cloud and into the stubborn, latency-bound world of robots, drones and pocket-size hardware.
General Instinct
General Instinct is a Y Combinator (Spring 2026) startup building inference infrastructure for physical AI. Its software distills, quantizes, and deploys large frontier models onto resource-constrained edge hardware - drones, robots, IoT devices, and old PCs - fully offline. The flagship product, Instinct Edge, takes a model, a target device, and a latency budget and returns an optimized offline runtime that hits that budget on hardware like Jetson, mobile NPUs, ARM CPUs, and Apple Neural Engine. The company also ships an open-source compression toolkit, InstinctRazor.