START: Silen Naihin, CTO & Co-Founder, Experiential Labs: "Open source AI gateway that turns your traffic into a model you own"

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Every AI model. One key. Zero markup.

That’s the starting point. The bigger ambition: help companies turn their AI traffic into better models they own

Silen Naihin helped grow AutoGPT to 160,000 GitHub stars. Now, at Experiential Labs, he’s working to bring model access, evaluation and training into one unified experience.

The open-source gateway gives companies control over model access. From there, the team is building simulations around their traffic to understand different workloads and recommend models based on three things: cost, quality and speed.

The goal goes beyond choosing a model. It’s helping companies evaluate performance and train specialized models around their own work when they need them.

Silen expects agents to do most of the work. So the product has to serve both: humans who need to understand what’s happening and agents that need to use it.  

Start with access. Build toward ownership.

"The open source AI gateway. Hosted providers, your own keys, and your own GPUs behind one endpoint, at the provider's price."

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🎙️Silen Naihin, CTO & Co-Founder, Experiential Labs on Fondo START  

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02:51 Going off the beaten path: TKS, Minerva & dropping out
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03:37 Getting into YC & the research behind Experiential Labs
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05:00 From 8 H100s and continual learning to building a company
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05:58 Why every company will become an AI company
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06:42 Cost, quality & speed: the “holy trinity” of AI models
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07:00 When fine-tuning beats prompting
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08:14 What happens when powerful AI gets incredibly cheap
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09:00 Why the future could be a model—or LoRA—per customer
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10:00 Open-source models get the tokens; closed models get the spend

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10:27 Jevons paradox, DeepSeek & exploding AI usage
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11:06 Why OpenAI and Anthropic aren’t the next Yahoo
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13:05 Experiential Labs’ bigger vision beyond the AI gateway

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13:45 Building AI infrastructure for humans and agents
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14:01 Optimizing models across cost, quality & speed

Check out experientiallabs.ai