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, in the past, jokingly admitted that he’s suffered from “cyber psychosis” and sometimes barely sleeps because he’s so excited to be working with his AI agents. On a new episode of Walter Isaacson’s podcast The Builders, set to publish on Tuesday, Tan put a price tag on his passion. “I spend about maybe $100[,000] to $200,000 a year on tokens,” he told Isaacson.

Y Combinator 首席执行官 Garry Tan 过去曾开玩笑地承认，他患有“网络精神错乱”，有时因为对与人工智能代理合作感到过于兴奋而几乎无法入睡。在周二即将发布的 Walter Isaacson 播客《The Builders》的新一期节目中，Tan 为他的热情标出了价格。他告诉 Isaacson：“我每年在代币上花费大约 10 万到 20 万美元。”

He uses agents for countless work projects and coding tasks and has freely shared his set of 23 Claude Code skills, called gstack, on GitHub — an effort to help teach others what agents can do, he said. On the one hand, he uses his agent the way many people use AI: to help him research Isaacson’s podcast and prep for the kinds of questions he might be asked. On the other, his agent also helps him run his life. “It’s read all of my email and all of my Dropbox. It’s read, like, all of my Apple Notes, even my therapy notes going back 20 years,” he said.

他将代理用于无数的工作项目和编码任务，并已在 GitHub 上免费分享了他那套名为 gstack 的 23 种 Claude Code 技能，他说这是为了帮助教导他人了解代理的功能。一方面，他像许多人使用人工智能一样使用他的代理：帮助他研究 Isaacson 的播客并为他可能被问到的问题做准备。另一方面，他的代理也帮助他打理生活。他说：“它阅读了我所有的电子邮件和 Dropbox 文件。它阅读了我所有的 Apple Notes，甚至包括我过去 20 年的心理治疗笔记。”

He describes using AI agents as getting help with “almost 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’s there to help. And it will actually sort of run ahead and say, ‘What about this?’ Or it’ll help you see around corners.”

他将使用人工智能代理描述为在“你日常生活中所做的几乎任何事情”上获得帮助，并让它以更自主的方式完成这些事情。“把它想象成一直停在你肩膀上的吉米尼蟋蟀（Jiminy Cricket）。就像你想要做的几乎任何事情，它都了解你，并且随时准备提供帮助。它实际上会走在前面说，‘这个怎么样？’或者它会帮助你预见潜在的问题。”

As an early OpenClaw adopter who is now a power user, Tan says one thing he’s learned is not to treat AI agents like traditional software. Some people are so worried about “repeatability 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,” he said.

作为 OpenClaw 的早期采用者，现在已成为高级用户的 Tan 表示，他学到的一点是不要把人工智能代理当作传统软件来对待。他说，有些人太担心“可重复性和安全性，以至于他们实际上牺牲了与人工智能代理合作的所有美好之处，而这种合作基本上可以与人类非常相似。”

For instance, Y Combinator is also using an agent that is “rebuilding the way we operate at YC,” he said. “We 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’ve ever backed, anyone who’s ever emailed us, like all the applications.”

例如，Y Combinator 也在使用一个正在“重塑我们在 YC 运营方式”的代理，他说。“例如，我们现在有一个名为 Stray Light 的内部人工智能代理，它有一种个性，并且拥有一个公司大脑。它实际上拥有我们曾经支持过的每一位创始人的全部背景信息，以及任何曾经给我们发过电子邮件的人的信息，比如所有的申请资料。”

Tan, who is, naturally, an avid lover of technology (as anyone running Silicon Valley’s 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. “It’s too expensive right now,” he said, adding that he knows the amount of money he spends on AI agents is “a crazy privilege that not everyone can do.”

Tan 自然是一位狂热的技术爱好者（任何经营硅谷著名创业加速器的人都会如此），他认为如果能解决一个主要问题，个人人工智能代理最终将成为主流：成本必须降低。“现在太贵了，”他说，并补充道他知道自己在人工智能代理上花费的金额是“一种并非每个人都能享有的疯狂特权。”

But freebie agents controlled by Big Tech maybe aren’t the answer, either. When discussing the future he’d like tech to build, and how Meta as a social media company has impacted us, he said, “This is a huge company that controls the algorithm, and we all wish that they didn’t at some level,” he said. “So you could imagine a personal AI that you control, that you program.”

但由大型科技公司控制的免费代理可能也不是答案。在讨论他希望科技构建的未来，以及 Meta 作为一家社交媒体公司如何影响我们时，他说：“这是一家控制算法的巨头公司，我们在某种程度上都希望他们不要这样做。所以你可以想象一个由你控制、由你编程的个人人工智能。”