{"id":904209,"date":"2026-11-03T08:44:13","date_gmt":"2026-11-03T08:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/904209\/"},"modified":"2026-11-03T08:44:13","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T08:44:13","slug":"y-combinators-garry-tan-uses-ai-agents-so-much-he-spends-up-to-200k-a-year-on-tokens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/904209\/","title":{"rendered":"Y Combinator’s Garry Tan uses AI agents so much, he spends up to $200K a year on tokens"},"content":{"rendered":"

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan has, in the past, jokingly admitted<\/a> that he\u2019s suffered from \u201ccyber psychosis\u201d and sometimes barely sleeps because he\u2019s so excited to be working with his AI agents. On a new episode of Walter Isaacson\u2019s podcast\u00a0The Builders<\/a>, set to publish on Tuesday, Tan put a price tag on his passion.<\/p>\n

\u201cI spend about maybe $100[,000] to $200,000 a year on tokens,\u201d he told Isaacson. He uses agents for countless work projects and coding tasks and has freely shared his set of 23 Claude Code skills, called gstack<\/a>, on GitHub \u2014 an effort to help teach others what agents can do, he said.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, he uses his agent the way many people use AI: to help him research Isaacson\u2019s podcast and prep for the kinds of questions he might be asked. On the other, his agent also helps him run his life. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s read all of my email and all of my Dropbox. It\u2019s read, like, all of my Apple Notes, even my therapy notes going back 20 years,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He describes using AI agents as getting help with \u201calmost anything that you do in your day-to-day life, and for it to do it somewhat more autonomously. Think of it as a Jiminy Cricket on your shoulder at all times. Like, almost anything you want to do, it knows you, and it\u2019s there to help. And it will actually sort of run ahead and say, \u2018What about this?\u2019 Or it\u2019ll help you see around corners.\u201d<\/p>\n

As an early OpenClaw adopter who is now a power user, Tan says one thing he\u2019s learned is not to treat AI agents like traditional software. Some people are so worried about \u201crepeatability and safety that they actually trade off all of the beautiful parts of working with an AI agent, which basically can be so similar to a human,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

For instance, Y Combinator is also using an agent that is \u201crebuilding the way we operate at YC,\u201d he said. \u201cWe now have an internal AI agent, for instance, named Stray Light that kind of has a personality, and then it has a company brain. Like it actually has the total context of every founder we\u2019ve ever backed, anyone who\u2019s ever emailed us, like all the applications.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tan, who is, naturally, an avid lover of technology (as anyone running Silicon Valley\u2019s famed startup accelerator would be), believes personal AI agents will eventually become mainstream, if one major problem is solved: Costs have got to come down.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s too expensive right now,\u201d he said, adding that he knows the amount of money he spends on AI agents is \u201ca crazy privilege that not everyone can do.\u201d<\/p>\n

But freebie agents controlled by Big Tech maybe aren\u2019t the answer, either. When discussing the future he\u2019d like tech to build, and how Meta as a social media company has impacted us, he said, \u201cThis is a huge company that controls the algorithm, and we all wish that they didn\u2019t at some level,\u201d he said. \u201cSo you could imagine a personal AI that you control, that you program.\u201d<\/p>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan has, in the past, jokingly admitted that he\u2019s suffered from \u201ccyber psychosis\u201d and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":904210,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,11360,74,529],"class_list":["post-904209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-garry-tan","tag-technology","tag-y-combinator"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=904209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/904210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=904209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=904209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=904209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}