Contrary Research Rundown #125
How Replit is making the original vision of computing a reality with agentic AI, plus new memos on Chainguard, Personio, and more
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Research Rundown
In the early days of computing, the vision for how humans would interact with computers looked nothing like the paradigm we've known for the past 50 years. One of the founding documents of computing was Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” In it, Turing didn’t describe the point-and-click paradigm we have today.
Instead, the earliest visions of computing machines were framed as reasoning agents, responding dynamically to human input. When John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon coined the term “artificial intelligence” in a 1955 research proposal, they described machines that, rather than relying on step-by-step human prompting, could autonomously perform tasks, learn, and even reason like a human.
That vision never materialized, due to a combination of hardware constraints, especially insufficient processing power, as well as slow progress in AI through the 1980s and 1990s, and the commercial success of the graphical user interface (GUI). People settled for a direct manipulation paradigm, where users manually interact with graphical interfaces via mouse and keyboard.
Even in these simpler forms, Steve Jobs described computers as “a bicycle of the mind… something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.” But the vision for a computer wasn’t meant to be a tool you handle, like a pencil. It was meant to automate away aspects of work that humans don’t need to do.
What’s old is becoming new. Increasingly, computing is returning to the original vision of its founding days — autonomous reasoning machines that can perform tasks independent of direct human manipulation. McKinsey estimates $4.4 trillion of annual economic value creation globally due to AI, largely driven by AI agents. Andrew Ng has described agentic AI as “the most important trend to pay attention to” in November 2024.
The introduction of agents in almost every use case is expected to be the primary driver of value as AI is increasingly deployed, and it is expected to increase in volume by 45% over the next five years. More agents, everywhere. 2025 is expected to be the year of the AI agent. The number of enterprise applications with agentic AI is projected to increase to 33% by 2028, up from 1% today.
That’s where Replit comes in. Replit is pushing forward the usefulness of AI agents in one key category — software creation.
Since the company’s beginning, Replit’s mission has been to democratize access to programming and empowering a billion software creators. Amjad Masad, the CEO of Replit, believes that AI is the unlock to that democratization. As he describes it, “if you can use a computer you should be able to make software.”
The Replit Agent is a code generation agent meant to automatically produce an application from an idea expressed in natural language. By removing the barrier of becoming a professional software engineer, Replit can enable the fruition of the original vision of computing — autonomously generated software applications that can perform specific tasks.
To learn more about Replit and how the company is making the original vision of computing a reality with agentic AI, check out our new memo on the company.
Chainguard plays a critical role in securing the software supply chain by creating secure base container images. The company verifies each line of code in the images used to create deployable containers in order to identify and remove vulnerabilities. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Senior/Staff Security Engineer - Remote (US)
Senior Product Marketing Manager - Remote (US)
Copy.ai uses large language models like GPT-3 and Claude to help businesses generate marketing and advertising copy using generative AI. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Senior Platform Engineer - Remote (San Francisco area)
VP of Product - Remote (San Francisco area)
Personio is an HR technology company focused on serving the needs of SMEs in Europe. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Senior Software Engineer (AI Team) - New York, NY
Frontend Engineer (Growth) - Berlin, Germany
Axonius is an asset management platform. Serving as a central hub, Axonius aggregates and normalizes security data from over 1.1K diverse business, IT, and security sources via APIs as of February 2025. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Senior Security Operations Engineer - Remote (US)
DevOps Production Engineer - Austin, TX
Airwallex is a financial services platform focused on facilitating cross-border transactions, processing more than $100 billion in global transactions annually as of February 2025. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Senior Software Engineer (Mobile) - San Francisco, CA
Senior Solutions Engineer (Americas) - San Francisco, CA
Checkr automates 99% of the background check process after data retrieval, significantly reducing turnaround times and improving accuracy. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Senior DevOps Engineer - Denver, CO
Senior Product Analyst - Denver, CO
Check out some standout roles from this week.
Ramp | New York, NY, San Francisco, CA or Remote (US) - Senior Security Engineer (Detection & Response), Program Manager (GTM Onboarding), Senior Product Designer, Senior Analytics Engineer, Software Engineer (Applied AI), Senior Software Engineer (Backend)
Databricks | Mountain View or San Francisco, CA - Senior Learning Platform Engineer, Engineering Manager (Identity Platform), Senior Applied AI Engineer, Senior Manager (Infrastructure Data Science), Senior Software Engineer (Fullstack)
Rippling | San Francisco, CA - Director of Product Management (Platform), Engineering Manager (Growth Marketing), Fullstack Engineer II, Product GTM Manager (Narrative), Senior Software Engineer (Product Infrastructure & Tools)
Microsoft is shutting down Skype on May 5, 2025 to focus on its Teams platform which has seen a four-fold increase in consumer calling minutes over the past two years.
Brex aims to reach $500 million in annual net revenue by 2025 as it considers an IPO, but is focused on improving its business predictability first.
OpenAI released GPT-4.5, a research preview of their most advanced model, featuring improved pattern recognition, a broader knowledge base, and enhanced user interaction with fewer hallucinations.
AI’s productivity paradox: While small firms eagerly adopt AI for efficiency, the real economic impact is bottlenecked by large corporations’ slower integration, legacy systems, and resistance to overhauling operations.
HashiCorp has officially joined IBM, marking the completion of its acquisition and the next phase in its mission to enable multi-cloud infrastructure.
Early-stage startups rarely have true competitive moats, Pratyush Buddiga writes, with their only advantage being uncertainty, and that long-term competitive advantage comes from factors like supply control, demand entrenchment, and economies of scale.
Social media and Pan-African media outlets are reshaping Africa’s global narrative, moving beyond foreign perspectives to showcase the continent’s influence in media, pop culture, technology, and business.
MrBeast is reportedly seeking to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to create a holding company for his growing empire, which includes media, snacks, and packaged goods, potentially valuing his business at $5 billion.
Stripe is conducting a tender offer at a $91.5 billion valuation to provide liquidity to employees while also repurchasing shares, following a year of strong growth with $1.4 trillion in payment volume.
Varda successfully landed its second reentry capsule, W-2, carrying an AFRL spectrometer that recorded the first-ever in situ optical emission measurements of a spacecraft during atmospheric reentry.
The AI infrastructure cycle remains bullish, with strong demand for compute power driven by AI scaling laws, Microsoft's evolving data center strategy, and geopolitical implications, particularly for Nvidia, which is seen as central to the growth of AI infrastructure.
Y Combinator deleted a demo video from Optifye.ai after it went viral and sparked social media backlash, where the video showcased AI-powered security cameras tracking workers' performance in a factory.
Perplexity is launching a $50 million seed and pre-seed venture fund, using some of its own raised capital alongside limited partners, and managed by its co-founders Kelly Graziadei and Joanna Lee Shevelenko.
Coatue's report highlights that while the defense sector's role in driving technological innovation has diminished, a new wave of innovation is emerging due to government initiatives, groundbreaking technologies, and the need for modernization, presenting significant opportunities.
Meta isn’t content with the $10 billion, city-sized data center it’s building in Louisiana, and is discussing plans to build a $200 billion “data center campus.”
Jeff Bezos emailed The Washington Post about focusing its opinion pages on supporting personal liberties and free markets.
Perplexity is receiving inbound VC offers at a $15 billion valuation, up from its previous $9 billion round.
German startup Proxima Fusion has published open-source plans for a commercial nuclear-fusion power plant, marking a significant milestone in efforts to create sustainable, clean energy through fusion technology.
European startups produce billion-dollar companies at the same rate as US ones when measured per dollar invested despite dramatically less capital deployed.
DeepSeek is reshaping the economics of AI by delivering top-tier performance at a fraction of the cost, with its R1 model achieving 1/40th the cost of previous models and its V3 model cutting training costs by over 90%.
Grok 3's system prompt is unintentionally biasing the model to mention figures like Elon Musk and Trump out of context.
The EU spent more on Russian oil and gas (€22 billion) in 2024 than on financial aid to Ukraine (€19 billion) amid ongoing efforts to reduce reliance on Russian fossil fuels.
After its $5.3 billion Visa acquisition was blocked, Plaid pivoted into a fintech powerhouse, connecting over 8K financial institutions, expanding into enterprise markets, and positioning for an IPO.
Anthropic is increasing its next funding round to $3.5 billion, bringing its valuation to $61.5 billion, as it aims to develop more advanced AI technologies, despite posting losses.
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