#23: Lovable AI Showdown, YC Sprint 2025 demo day and more

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Welcome back, AI Agent Enthusiast!

In today’s Agent Pulse:

• 📢 Top AI Agents News

• ⚔️ Agent Arena

• Featured AI Agents

• Free courses

• Papers

📢 TOP AI Agents News

YC Demo Day – The Agent Stack Gets Funded

Spring 2025’s YC Demo Day confirmed it: agents are no longer niche, they’re the foundation. Nearly every startup was either building AI agents or infrastructure to support them. Think “Cursor for X” across every vertical:

• Den - AI agents for enterprise knowledge work

• Cactus - Solopreneur AI ops: calls, payments, tasks

• Eloquent - Customer operations agents, built for finance

• Sim Studios - Open-source agent builder already used by U.S. DoD

• Anvil - SEO for LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini

• Sygaldry - Quantum-accelerated AI servers

• Atum Works - 3D chip stacks for AI compute

• Vybe - “Vibe-coded” apps, built by feel, not spec sheets

Thoughts

What stood out was how horizontal agents have gone vertical: startups are solving deep, niche problems with focused agentic solutions and investors are backing that hard.

Sim Studios and Vybe represent two poles of the trend: one aims to make agent-building effortless for everyone, the other delivers radical accessibility via interface and UX. Both point to a future where agents are as common and as expected as mobile apps.

Lovable AI Showdown Weekend

Lovable’s AI Showdown Weekend was a bold move: no secret benchmarks, just wide-open access and side-by-side comparison of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models in a real coding playground.

Over one weekend, users created 230,000+ projects and fired off 5M+ prompts, testing how each model handled live code-gen inside Lovable’s unique “vibe coding” interface.

- $25K Content Challenge – which model explains & solves best
- $40K Build Challenge – which model builds the best tools
- Real-time model switching + feedback from devs, not labs

Thoughts

Lovable flipped the script: instead of rigid benchmarks or cherry-picked demos, they let the crowd stress-test top models in real workflows. That openness paid off, not just in engagement, but in surfacing how real developers feel about using agents for practical builds.

The takeaway? We’re entering an era where “developer experience” becomes the benchmark, and where public, messy, human feedback may be the most honest judge of AI agent quality. Agent Arena is already moving in that direction too.

What Top Execs Read Before the Market Opens

The Daily Upside was founded by investment professionals to arm decision-makers with market intelligence that goes deeper than headlines. No filler. Just concise, trusted insights on business trends, deal flow, and economic shifts—read by leaders at top firms across finance, tech, and beyond.

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Other News headlines

• Databricks Enters the Agent Arena with "Agent Bricks": Databricks launched "Agent Bricks," a new platform designed to help businesses create their own AI agents on top of their existing data, signaling a major move by the data and AI giant into the burgeoning agentic AI space. More

• Viseven Unveils "eVa" for Pharma Marketing: Viseven, a marketing tech company for the life sciences industry, introduced "eVa," an AI agent integrated into its content experience platform to streamline and automate the creation of marketing materials for pharmaceutical and life sciences companies. More

• Pipefy Integrates AI Agents for HR and Finance: Process automation platform Pipefy announced the integration of AI agents into its solutions for HR and finance departments, aiming to automate tasks like employee onboarding and invoice processing. More

• Walmart Ramps Up AI Assistant Capabilities: Retail giant Walmart is expanding its use of a generative AI assistant for shoppers, which can now summarize product reviews and provide personalized recommendations, showcasing the growing use of agent-like features in e-commerce. More

• Chipotle Expands Use of AI Hiring Assistant: Chipotle is broadening its use of an AI-powered hiring assistant to streamline its recruitment process as the company continues to open new locations, highlighting the practical application of AI agents in human resources. More

• OpenAI releases o3-pro: OpenAI has released a souped-up version of its o3 AI reasoning model.

• Meta acquires Scale AI: Mark Zuckerberg acquired almost half of Scale AI for more than $14 billion and stole its CEO Alexandr Wang to head a “superintelligence lab.” Google reportedly plans to cut ties with Scale AI.

✨ Featured Agents

• TeammatesAI: Autonomous AI Teammates

• OraczenAI: Custom AI agents that simplify complex workflows

• Twig: Automate Tier 1 support with AI Agents

• TensorStax: Autonomous AI Agents for Data Engineering

• TheLibrarian.io: WhatsApp AI Personal Assistant

• Agentverse: Search and Discover AI Agents

🎓 FREE Courses

• Anthropic: AI Fluence Course, designed for everyday users of AI.

• HuggingFace: Model Context Protocol (MCP)

• Microsoft: Generative AI for Beginners

• OpenAI: Advanced Prompt Engineering

🎓 Papers

• Academic (arXiv): A taxonomy distinguishing narrow LLM-driven “AI Agents” from broader “Agentic AI” systems, mapping their applications and challenge. (Source)

• Academic (arXiv): Paper argues that “AI Agentic” is often a buzzword for traditional autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, urging the field to leverage decades of existing multi-agent research rather than “reinvent the wheel”. (Source)

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