ASI: The AI Agent That Beats OpenAI - Built by 5 People in a Few Weeks

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Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup.

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead. 

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email: 

• 📈 This startup is reimagining the way we build with personalized AI

• 🚀 They’ve already partnered with the UAE government - over 250,000 students have used their tools

• 💰 They’ve raised $3 million from GSV, Mark Cuban and others.

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of ASI and Quddus Pativada 📈

ASI (formerly DigestAI) is an AI research lab with a mission to reimagine the way we build. Founded by Quddus Pativada at just 17, ASI builds personalized AI agents designed to operate like a human but smarter, scalable, and available 24/7. 🤖

At its core, ASI is powered by Personal Language Models (PLMs) - AI systems that are trained like ChatGPT, but fine-tuned for individualized users. These models adapt to each person’s context, goals, and personal workflows, and can act accordingly. 📋

Whether you need an agent to run internal ops, analyze financial statements, or build a website, ASI builds systems that just get it.

There are 2 sides to ASI:

• Consumer platform: AI agents for broad use cases like tutoring, building landing pages or making pitch decks. 💻
  

• Government and enterprise arm (ASI Atelier): National-scale deployments like its partnership with the UAE Ministry of Education, to provide tutoring to entire populations. 🇦🇪

MyASI: The Agentic AI Framework That Quietly Beat the Giants 🔧

ASI is stepping into the AI agent race with myASI: an agentic framework that’s already outperforming some of the biggest names in AI.

In internal benchmarks, myASI topped the GAIA (General AI Agent) Benchmark, beating out OpenAI, Genspark, and Manus - companies that have collectively raised hundreds of millions of dollars. 📈

ASI? They built myASI in a few weeks, with a team of five and a near-zero budget. 😯

What makes myASI special? It’s not just a single tool - it’s an agentic framework that allows you to generate hyper-personalized agents tailored to your exact role, workflow, or need.

Think of it as a meta-agent that builds the exact tool you need, when you need it. 😉

And unlike many hyped-up launches, myASI is already running - fast, efficient, and built with the same scrappy energy that’s powered the rest of ASI’s breakout journey.

The goal? Not just to match the best — but to build something more useful, more personal, and more human. 🚀

Here’s a quick demo of MyASI creating a “2D Call of Duty”:

https://vimeo.com/1092303608/5437f88c1d?ts=0&share=copy

Backstory 👀

Before ASI, Quddus grew up in Dubai and was obsessed with tech & building things from scratch. 🧱

He taught himself to code at age 10 by building a Flappy Bird clone, and by the time the pandemic hit, he’d built a COVID-19 contact tracing tool for his classmates (recognized by the UAE government). 😷

The idea for ASI came when Quddus was 14 years old, frustrated by the lack of tools that could simplify learning. He wanted an app that could summarize textbooks. 📚

By 17, he turned that idea into DigestAI, working out of his bedroom in Dubai while still in high school.

His motivation for continuing to build ASI? 

He transferred to a top private school and saw the difference in education - there was a big gap in the quality of classwork and teachers. 🏫

College could wait. He took a gap year and never looked back…

Early beginnings 🌱

The earliest versions of ASI were raw but efficient. They first focused solely on education.

Students could snap a photo of their homework and receive personalized flashcards over WhatsApp - no app installs, no friction. This was before GPT-3 even came out… 🐣

This simple approach helped the platform spread in areas with low connectivity like Ghana. 

But ASI quickly outgrew its initial use case. Quddus and his team began evolving it into a true tutor - one that could:

• Recall past interactions 🤝

• Adjust difficulty in real-time ⌚

• Explain topics using analogies tailored to the student’s passions (think: learning chemistry with NBA examples) 🏀

The interface is now chat-first, but Quddus believes the future lies in generative interfaces where the AI adapts not just the content, but the format, from quizzes to games to lessons, depending on the student’s needs.

💸 Fundraising journey

Raising money as a teen who skipped college wasn’t easy. 

Over 60 investors rejected him, a lot of it because of his age or lack of experience. ❌ 

 20 people called him crazy for not going to university. 😮

One day, after watching a GQ interview where Mark Cuban said he reads emails at 9 AM, Quddus emailed him. Cuban replied and invested $500K. 💸

He went on to raise over $3 million from:

• GSV Ventures (one of the world’s top edtech funds)

• Character.vc

• Shaan Patel (founder of Prep Expert)

• Several angels, including a Stanford alum who rejected him from Stanford — but invested in his startup

All of this was done through cold emails and Zoom calls. "Sort of helped," Quddus says, "because no one could see how young I look."

📊 Statistics

📈 Fast forward to today, ASI has been used by over 250,000 students, who have prompted over 4,000,000 queries to date.

🛜 In three weeks, ASI gained over 10,000 users in Ghana on 2G networks, showing its accessibility even with limited connectivity.

The company has rejected acquisition offers from "pretty big companies" because it is "mission-driven" and believes its mission is not possible within legacy institutions

🇦🇪 In November 2023, ASI signed a multi-year partnership with the UAE Ministry of Education to build and develop the world's first national AI tutor.

🏆 This partnership made Quddus the youngest CEO IN HISTORY to win a government contract.

🏅 The scale of ASI even caught the eye of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who called it one of his “favourite examples” of AI innovation.

And now with MyASI, ASI is stepping beyond education - into the frontier of agentic AI.

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