It's Fall | Sahil & Suhaas

Hey everyone! This is another two-week issue. We stayed in New York this time, mostly heads-down on Cerebellum, with a lot of fall stuff packed in between.

Our friend Aaryan came to stay with us for a weekend, and while he was here he sat us down to talk about Cerebellum and how the last month has gone.

General Updates on Cerebellum

We got our first check. A small $15k check from an investor.
We’ve been talking to investors. While we’re not actively fundraising, we had about a dozen intro calls and coffees with investors over the two weeks.
We applied to accelerators, including a16z Speedrun and YC.
We launched Paradee 1.2. It now speaks four voices in the same 8.5 MB model, with no loss in quality.
We got our first results from a design partner pilot. We fine-tuned a 9B-parameter model on receipt extraction, and it was 33% more accurate than GPT-5.2 at 80% lower cost.

Paradee 1.2: Expanding to additional voices Paradee now speaks four voices without growing in size or losing quality. sahilmahendrakar.com Reading Wholesale Receipts with a 9B Model Post-Training a 9B Open Model to Read Wholesale Receipts Our pilot case study: better than GPT-5.2 at a fraction of the cost. cerebellumlabs.ai

Around New York

On Friday we played Blood on the Clocktower and then went to a friend’s 24th birthday, and on Saturday we went to a Diwali party and housewarming in Brooklyn. We also celebrated our roommate Danny’s birthday over dinner, and went to a Jev event at the Corgi Cafe, which had a real corgi.

Eight friends posing together in an apartment strung with fairy lights — Diwali and housewarming at Anushka's place

Two friends at a dinner table covered in small Korean dishes — Danny's birthday dinner

A corgi climbing onto someone's lap on a green couch in a cafe — A real corgi at the Corgi Cafe

The next week we went to Papers We Love NYC in Williamsburg for a talk on what math can tell us about language, Arca’s office warming, and on Friday the NYC Frontier Hackathon. For Halloween, the roommates were going to dress up as cats, but we ended up staying in and playing board games instead.

A giant skeleton towering over a stoop decorated for Halloween, with a purple witch hat below — Our neighborhood is ready for Halloween

— Sahil

from Suhaas

Sahil covered most of it. I’ll add just a little bit. On Friday I got Pocha 32 with Leon and Gabe. I was talking to Leon about the problems I’ve been having with outbound. He showed me his unconventional outbound strategy. I was inspired! I think in today’s world everyone is saying the same AI slop shit. There’s a lot of value in being a little unhinged ;)

Suhaas, Leon and Gabe squeezed around a small table at Pocha 32, lit entirely blue, with a bowl of soju punch in front of them — Pocha 32 with Leon and Gabe

Leon Tan said it best.

In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.

Al Davis also said it best.

— Suhaas