Visions of AI: Personal Intelligence

Good Morning, Visions of AI is a new feature format I’m experimenting with that will amount to a short profile on an AI or emerging tech startup. The cadence of this style of article is unknown as of yet, but there are a lot of fascinating startups I want to share about. This is designed to be light evening reading to go out at a time-slot of 8 pm EST. Not that many AI researchers have worked at Google DeepMind, OpenAI, xAI and started their own companies. Igor Babuschkin in 2026 is the founder of River AI. River is building a stack for personal AI that is both open-source and adapts to you. This is a bit like the holy grail of personalization combined with all the recent advances in AI. I actually find myself attracted to the philosophy and goal of the startup: We imagine a future where your AI works entirely for you and deeply aligns with your values. Compared to the corporate chatbots of today, it will feel completely different: responsible, curious, and truly yours. Most importantly, you'll own everything: the hardware it runs on, the data it learns from, and the intelligence itself. This has legit open-source vibes to me and the interview with the lead investor General Catalyst felt authentic: The interview is with Hemant Taneja, the CEO of General Catalyst, one of the lead investors of the Seed/Series A. Chapters 02:22 — Co-Founding xAI 04:36 — An AI Experience You Own 05:59 — Betting Early on Open Weights 07:47 — How Do You Make Money on Free Models? 09:25 — Why the US Needs Its Own Open Models 11:27 — Enterprises Want to Control Their AI 13:36 — What Is Continual Learning? 16:56 — An API That Updates the Weights 19:17 — A Personal AI for Everyone 20:46 — The 20-Minute Training Run A 2-Month old Startup River AI is among a group of AI labs that are taking on hard problems with quick capital not seen previously in the history of Venture Capital. It’s also very clearly a bet on Open-Source American AI.