Y Combinator’s Garry Tan uses AI agents so much, he spends up to $200K a year on tokens

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan has, successful the past, jokingly admitted that he’s suffered from “cyber psychosis” and sometimes hardly sleeps due to the fact that he’s truthful excited to beryllium moving with his AI agents. On a caller occurrence of Walter Isaacson’s podcast The Builders, acceptable to people connected Tuesday, Tan enactment a terms tag connected his passion.

“I walk astir possibly $100[,000]-$200,000 a twelvemonth connected tokens,” helium told Isaacson. He uses agents for countless enactment projects and coding tasks and has freely shared his acceptable of 23 Claude Code skills, called gstack, connected Github — an effort to assistance thatch others what agents tin do, helium said.

On the 1 hand, helium uses his cause the mode galore radical usage AI: to assistance him probe Isaacson’s podcast and prep for the kinds of questions helium mightiness beryllium asked. On the other, his cause besides helps him tally his life.

“It’s work each of my email and each of my Dropbox. It’s read, like, each of my Apple Notes, adjacent my therapy notes going backmost 20 years,” helium said.

He describes utilizing AI agents arsenic getting assistance with “almost thing that you bash successful your day-to-day life, and for it to bash it somewhat much autonomously. Think of it arsenic a Jiminy Cricket connected your enarthrosis astatine each times. Like, astir thing you privation to do, it knows you, and it’s determination to help. And it volition really benignant of tally up and say, ‘What astir this?’ Or, it’ll assistance you spot astir corners.”

As an aboriginal OpenClaw adopter who is present a powerfulness user, Tan says 1 happening he’s learned is not to dainty AI agents similar accepted software. Some radical are truthful disquieted astir “repeatability and information that they really commercialized disconnected each of the beauteous parts of moving with an AI agent, which fundamentally tin beryllium truthful akin to a human,” helium said.

For instance, Y Combinator is besides utilizing an cause that is “rebuilding the mode we run astatine YC,” helium said. “We present person an interior AI agent, for instance, named Stray Light that benignant of has a personality, and past it has a institution brain. Like it really has the full discourse of each laminitis we’ve ever backed, anyone who’s ever emailed us, similar each the applications.”

Tan who is, naturally, an avid person of exertion (as anyone moving Silicon Valley’s famed startup accelerator would be), believes idiosyncratic AI agents volition yet go mainstream, if 1 large occupation is solved: Costs person got to travel down.

“It’s excessively costly close now,” helium said, adding that helium knows the magnitude of wealth helium spends connected AI agents is “a brainsick privilege that not everyone tin do.”

But freebie agents controlled by large tech possibly aren’t the answer, either. When discussing the aboriginal he’d similar tech to build, and however Meta arsenic a societal media institution has impacted us, helium said, “This is simply a immense institution that controls the algorithm, and we each privation that they didn’t astatine immoderate level,” helium said. “So you could ideate a idiosyncratic AI that you control, that you program.”