Fundamental Research Labs

Join us! hiring@fundamentalresearchlabs.com

Shortcut had early access to Opus 4.1. Don't let the graphic undersell it. This feels like a step function improvement across multiple dimensions, but especially speed. Opus 4.1 is now live in production on Shortcut

We raised $30M+ from Prosus Ventures and more friends 7 months ago, why are we only announcing it now? Here's a short story about the challenges translating research breakthroughs into real-world products: Prosus invested in us about 7 months ago after our research breakthrough on OSWorld, the challenging computer-use benchmark used by Anthropic, OpenAI and more. We worked hard on OSWorld for about a month last November. With some new technologies developed internally, we achieved about 49% performance, when the public SOTA was below 25%. Some of these technologies were inspired by previous academic work such as Voyager (Wang et al. 2023) that also heavily influenced our Minecraft agents work. We chose to delay the fundraising announcement until we can release some products based off our research. We told investors it would take 1 month. The path from research to product was much more difficult than we anticipated, and we had to pivot twice. In retrospect, this headstart on computer-use gave us extra time to make mistakes and self-correct. Sandeep B. and Martin, along with all our major investors (a16z speedrun, Patron, First Spark Ventures), were incredibly supportive during this time, and we are very grateful for that. Eventually, one of our products Shortcut resonated with users. You might have seen the viral videos from my co-founder Nico Christie. Shortcut is a superhuman Excel agent. It stems from both Nico's deep understanding of Excel users and our initial success on the spreadsheet category in OSWorld (where we achieved 68%, compared to human's 62%). But our initial attempt of building an Excel agent that uses Excel through GUI (human interface) didn't work well as a product, and eventually we understood that using machine interface and actually having control over that interface is the way to go. So we built Shortcut where we can control both the agents and the software. Besides Shortcut, we are continuing to push the research frontier and exploring how to turn these progresses into real-world products that people love. If you read all the way here and are excited about joining a team of researchers, engineers, and product folks to build machines with all fundamental human qualities, write me at robertyang@altera.al! https://lnkd.in/ekuvyXqM

We're hiring technical founders, research scientists, and engineers who want to shape the future of digital humans and agentic products. Reach out to Caitlin or check out our offerings here: https://lnkd.in/eGXmKrrK

We release a major update to Shortcut every night. Shortcut is already ~20% better than it was for our Monday launch. There is a clear path to solving anything a human can do on Excel. Some updates below: Here it painted the Mandelbrot set using conditional formatting only.

Had a great time chatting with Isabelle Bousquette at The Wall Street Journal about Shortcut. https://lnkd.in/enppYxY3 Need to get this printed out for the lab.

In my latest for The Wall Street Journal, I'm writing about our undying love for Excel (a 40! year old tool) that still has a chokehold on industries like banking and private equity. In particular, I'm looking at how one AI startup is trying to capitalize on that obsession. In the past, upstarts have tried to challenge Excel with more technically advanced ways of organizing data that go beyond clunky spreadsheets. Fundamental Research Labs on the other hand, is betting on an interface that looks and feels exactly like the real Excel (in fact it has near perfect feature parity), and building in agentic AI from there. Its tool, known as Shortcut, launched on Monday and sent shockwaves through Fintwit (that's the finance bro subsect of Twitter, I've learned). The Shortcut agent can engage with users in natural language and whip up spreadsheets for a leveraged buyout or discounted cash flow model based on data inputs. “It was obvious to me that if you could automate the Excel work, people would care,” Fundamental Labs co-founder and Chief Business Officer Nico Christie told me. “People feel emotionally tied to Excel,” he added, “it’s a cultural thing.” What do you think? I'm especially curious about people's experiences with AI Copilot Microsoft Excel has already embedded. Is it doing a good job or is there room to compete? Let me know in the comments! Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/enppYxY3

The Wall Street Journal is just as obsessed with Shortcut as we are.

Please DM me if you are a Manager, VP, Director, or C-Level executive at a top consulting, banking, PE / VC / Hedge Fund firm. We are conducting a study where you will blindly judge competing excel work between Shortcut and first year analysts at top shops. It will take about an hour.

I am looking for incoming Goldman Sachs and McKinsey analysts to participate in an anonymous research study. It will take a single day and we will pay $1000 to each participant. DM me if you wish to participate.