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.
OpenInfer is a San Mateo-based AI infrastructure startup building an 'Inference OS for the agentic era' - software that runs large AI models and agents directly on the CPUs, GPUs and NPUs enterprises already own, from edge devices to private data centers, without cloud lock-in. Founded by ex-Meta and Roblox systems engineers Behnam Bastani and Reza Nourai, its OpenInfer Engine claims 2-3x faster inference than Llama.cpp and Ollama on distilled DeepSeek models and works as a drop-in replacement for existing endpoints. The company raised an $8M seed round in February 2025 and has since shipped Jean, a private email-native agentic AI system, and orchestration layers for heterogeneous compute.

Tim Dettmers is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), best known for making large language models accessible on consumer hardware. He created the bitsandbytes library (2.2M monthly installs), co-authored QLoRA - a technique enabling fine-tuning of 65B-parameter models on a single GPU - and pioneered LLM.int8() quantization. With over 18,000 citations across his work, Dettmers has become one of the most influential voices in efficient deep learning, consistently arguing that computational democratization - not AGI hype - is where the real progress lives.