If you look inside the major AI labs today, you will see a marvel of engineering but a stagnation of philosophy. The prevailing dogma, a “scale orthodoxy”, suggests that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is strictly an economic equation: more power and compute + more data = more intelligence. While the current approach has created tremendous economic value, it is transforming research into an arms race and startups into licensing vehicles.
We think there’s more.
History tells us that the greatest breakthroughs do not come from optimizing the status quo. They come from high-agency, exceptionally brilliant teams willing to take substantial risk and dare to attack the fundamental assumptions of a field. That’s why we’re thrilled to co-lead the initial funding rounds for Flapping Airplanes alongside the ever-contrarian David Cahn at Sequoia with participation from Index and Menlo.
The Anti-Consensus Bet
The current industrial research complex is hyper-focused on scale. The industry is training models on more data than a human perceives in a lifetime, yet achieving results that still lack the fluidity, efficiency, and robustness of true human intelligence. The next leap won’t come from a bigger cluster; it will come from a different approach altogether.
Flapping Airplanes is flying in a different direction.
Founded by brothers Ben and Asher Spector, the company is betting on a contrarian truth in Silicon Valley: fundamental research still matters. While the incumbents focus on feeding the beast, Flapping Airplanes is returning to the drawing board. They believe that the path to true intelligence requires new approaches, not just larger clusters.
Outsized Talent, Outlier Results
We back founders who view the world differently, and few fit that description better than Ben, Asher, and Aidan.
Ben is a rare polymath with a proven gravitational pull for talent since his early MIT days and through his work as a Stanford PhD studying under Chris Ré. He’s not just a participant in the AI ecosystem; he is an architect of it. As the founder of Prod, the mysterious incubator behind companies like Cursor, Mercor, Etched, and Decart, Ben helped ignite an ecosystem with a combined valuation of more than $50 billion. He also understands that while a spark of intuition can generate new hypotheses, it takes a world-class team years of grinding to develop a new paradigm. Now, he is turning his efforts and network towards his own moonshot.
Ben and Asher are building a new kind of airframe. They have eschewed the standard hiring playbook, recruiting a team of “unflappable” talent: high-school prodigies, math olympians, and gritty researchers willing to build up from first principles, who have not yet been indoctrinated into the dogma of scale.
A Coalition of Conviction
We are proud to partner with David Cahn at Sequoia, Index, Menlo Ventures, and others to back this vision. The fact that the very firms who backed incumbent AI Labs are also backing Flapping Airplanes tells you everything you need to know: there are huge wins left in AI, with plenty of space for new entrants.
We share a collective belief that we are still in the early innings of AI, and that pure research plays, driven by intuition and bold invention, will birth the next generation of category-defining companies.
For researchers tired of incrementalism and merely fine-tuning the giants: Flapping Airplanes is building the alternative. We’re betting on this team building a different airframe and they’re looking for exceptional talent to join the flight.