Strongly agree with this K-shaped divergence happening on software teams. It's existentially urgent to move faster here than what many consider reasonable, because a decent-sized gap today will compound into an insurmountable chasm in output and execution speed and quality by the fall. This means your team must simultaneously buy into the vision of what is possible and will be possible soon, while also being in the trenches on a daily basis wrestling with and steering agentic systems that still often make mistakes, overcomplicate things, and don't always do what the user is envisioning. Navigating this takes strong, continuous leadership that's also in the trenches. We're doing a lot at Speak to stay on the cutting edge here as a team - a few examples: - Continually thinking about what we're still doing manually and following that signal to agentify our repos and processes - Retooling our engineering hiring process to explicitly test for agentic engineering skill and mindset - Explicitly trying to build production features while keeping manual code as close to 0% as possible If you're working at a company that isn't all-in, you should leave before it's too late. Accelerate!

As we all know on X, agentic AI coding crossed a capability threshold at the end of 2025 such that the era of software engineers writing code by hand was over. @speak, we're urgently embracing this fundamental change to the way we develop software. I wrote up a snapshot of what we’re observing and learning, and where we think things are going: speak.com/blog/agentic-engin…

Can voice AI actually get you to fluency?💡 Join us LIVE Wednesday at 4PM CST with Andrew Hsu, Co-founder & CTO, @speak — the voice-first AI language tutor that’s hit $100M ARR and 15M downloads. We'll see you here on X soon!📷 #AI #LanguageLearning

Thanks @RashiShrivast18 for telling the @speak story! We’re pushing hard to make the world’s best AI language tutor available to everyone. Super excited for the slate of new feature launches coming later this year! Stay tuned. forbes.com/sites/rashishriva…

House of Hsu

Congrats @OpenAI! Some thoughts from testing the new GPT-5 models @speak over the past several weeks: - Significant leap in the reasoning frontier - your strong assumption now should be that it can crush most real-world complex tasks across a giant context window/dump, and if it doesn’t, it’s more than likely that your prompt isn’t good enough or you need to provide more clarity. Your ability to think in a structured manner and write with clarity is the big bottleneck now. - We were the most impressed by GPT-5's pattern recognition and reverse engineering capabilities across giant context dumps. It’s super good at systematically understanding and generalizing from examples to create structured workflows or playbooks. - Example - over the years, we’ve developed a highly opinionated and structured pedagogical methodology for functional language fluency that we call the Speak Method, but have struggled for years to distill and document it into a playbook clearly enough. Gemini 2.5 Pro and o3-pro couldn’t do this, but GPT-5 did an amazing job analyzing a large dump of our curriculum/content and breaking down/generalizing the principles necessary to scale our content. This was really surprising and felt superhuman. - We've found previous reasoning models both slow and inconsistent in their logical leaps. GPT-5 feels far more consistent and accurate on reasoning tasks, which is transformative for our curriculum scaling process and language tutoring capabilities. - Zooming out and speaking as an extremely heavy user of both ChatGPT and the API, I’m super excited (and relieved!) that the constellation of models is going away and everything is getting unified. It’s absurd that the full model is priced ~same as o3/4.1 and 5-mini is 5x cheaper! This day has been coming for a long time, and we expect to switch all of our realtime usecases over with reasoning=minimal. Huge congrats to the OpenAI team and we can’t wait to bring all this to our users this quarter!

A special bit of silicon valley is that everyone is willing to help each other. Back in 2015, we pinged @karpathy for AI help and (within 2 min!) he offered to meet up w/ us the next day. One of a few formative convos that led to us doing AI research and starting @speak.

Thanks for having me on @latentspacepod @swyx!

Thanks for having me on @ashleevance - was a very fun convo!

The day has finally come! @speak is no longer an English language learning app. You can now learn 🇪🇸 Spanish, 🇫🇷French, 🇯🇵 Japanese, 🇰🇷Korean, and 🇮🇹Italian as well! And I'm not talking about memorizing vocab in a dopamine machine, I'm talking about good old fashioned spoken fluency.

Spotted @pdhsu at our parents’ house.

Fun fact: @speak has 65% brand recognition in South Korea and close to 10% of the population has used us to improve their English fluency. Was great talking to @bquazz on how we got our start there!

📈 @speak

“We’re really an AI native company." Speak CEO @connorzwick explains how his app uses #AI to get language learners talking! Plus, their growing presence in East Asia, and partnership with @OpenAI's startup fund.

These guys were among the earliest of all the startups we've funded to understand what AI was going to make possible, and they have executed perfectly on that early insight.

We've raised a Series C from @Accel valuing Speak at $1b to keep driving toward our mission of reinventing the way people learn, starting with language. This year was great, but we have even bigger plans for 2025 and are hiring exceptional technical talent to work on one of the fastest-growing consumer AI applications. Join us! speak.com/careers

OpenAI-Backed Language Tutor Startup Doubles Value to $1 Billion trib.al/7M2JsOQ

OpenAI-backed Speak raises $78M at $1B valuation to help users learn languages by talking out loud tcrn.ch/3D9gZw4

When I was on a menswear forum, I remember discussing the question of why there are so many bespoke shoemakers in Tokyo. Some said "it's because the Japanese value craftsmanship. They are noble, not like wasteful Westerners." This sort of handwaving feels unsatisfying to me.