Comment by Riaz Haq on June 16, 2025 at 11:45am

Meet Cursor: How Anysphere’s MIT-born AI startup hit a $9.9B valuation in 3 years — TFN. Founded by Sualeh Asif, Pakistani-American cofounder

https://techfundingnews.com/meet-cursor-how-anyspheres-mit-born-ai-...

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From Karachi to Silicon Valley: The Remarkable Journey of Saleh Asif

From Karachi to Silicon Valley, Saleh Asif’s journey is a shining example of Pakistani talent on the global stage. A former International Math Olympiad participant and MIT graduate, Saleh is now the co-founder of Cursor AI — a $10 billion platform revolutionizing software development. Backed by global giants like OpenAI and Stripe, his success reflects the untapped potential of Pakistan’s youth in STEM and serves as an inspiring blueprint for the nation’s future.


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https://www.sualehasif.me/

Sualeh Asif
tweets :)
I’m building Cursor to discover a new way to write code. I owe much of my fun to my friends and MIT. I am extremely excited about the new capabilties of LLMs and applications to code tools.

Previously:

Studied machine learning, number theory, performance engineering, and theater at MIT.
Made early contributions to metaphor, an end-to-end LLM powered search engine (before it was cool).
Represented Pakistan at the IMO 2016-2018. Studied and taught competitive math at the Pakistani math camps.
Worked on translation at IBM Watson ML.
Selected Publications:
"Computing L-Polynomials of Picard Curves from Cartier-Manin Matrices", Mathematics of Computation, 2021.
"Arithmetic Expression Construction", presented at 2020 International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation.
"Tetris is NP-Hard Even with O(1) Columns", presented at 2019 Japan Conference on Discrete and Computational Geometry, Graphs & Games (JCDCG^3).
-- Sualeh

Comment by Riaz Haq 4 hours ago

China Has Matched Anthropic in Cybersecurity, Resetting AI Race - The Wall Street Journal.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chinese-ai-anthropic-mythos-cybersecuri...

Chinese artificial-intelligence systems have matched the performance of Anthropic’s powerful model Mythos in some cybersecurity scenarios, a development poised to reset the global tech race and pressure the White House in its overhaul of U.S. AI policy.

Security researchers said that a new AI model, released this month by China’s Zhipu AI, also known as Z.ai, can match the latest U.S. models when it comes to finding security bugs, although it still lags behind Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s products in other tasks.

Overall, the capability gap between top U.S. models and those built by Chinese companies has narrowed significantly, and use of Chinese AI systems has surged as businesses seek to rein in runaway costs. A host of companies, including Microsoft , are weighing how they can offer Chinese models on their platforms, a development that is set to alter the balance of power among tech companies.

“China is making sure that the gap becomes smaller and smaller over time,” said Lior Div, chief executive officer of the cybersecurity company 7AI.

The ability of AI systems to find bugs in software has added urgency to efforts to use models to close quickly vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers. Otherwise, the world will face what some researchers have called a bugmageddon.

Unlike models from Anthropic or OpenAI, Zhipu’s GLM-5.2 is open-weight. That means it can be downloaded and run on hardware operated by anybody and can be modified and used without supervision. Open-weight models are ideal for users who want unfettered access to systems they control, but they are also ideal for hackers, who can run them in the shadows.

GLM-5.2 has ranked as one of the 10 most-used AI models, according to data from OpenRouter, a company that provides access to more than 400 AI models. In some benchmarking tests, according to the cybersecurity company Semgrep, GLM-5.2 bested Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 model, which was released in May. When given further instructions, Opus 4.8 and GLM-5.2 can match Mythos in bug-finding ability, according to researchers.

On Wednesday, the Chinese cybersecurity company 360 Security Technology released a new bug-finding tool called Tulongfeng. The company said it was comparable to Mythos in finding bugs. Those capabilities have alarmed many national-security officials and CEOs.

“This kind of powerful weapon that can alter the landscape of cyberwarfare can’t remain solely in American hands,” 360 Security Chief Executive Zhou Hongyi said at a cybersecurity conference in Beijing. Zhou, an outspoken internet veteran and member of China’s top political advisory body, said China would face unacceptable risks if American entities could use advanced AI models to scan critical Chinese network systems while denying Chinese companies comparable capabilities.

China’s advances coincide with unprecedented U.S. government roadblocks to developers releasing models. On Friday, OpenAI said it was limiting access to its latest model, known as GPT-5.6, because of security concerns among administration officials. The company warned that the current case-by-case model-evaluation process wasn’t a long-term solution but said it is being used while a recent executive order focused on security and model oversight is implemented.

One of Anthropic’s latest general-use models has been shut down for more than two weeks after the Trump administration said no foreign entity or individual could use it because of security risks. The company closed all access to comply with the rule. The administration on Friday restored some access to a related Anthropic model called Mythos 5, which had previously been restricted.

Many have called the administration’s attack on a leading U.S. AI company counterproductive and criticized its decision to allow exports of AI chips to China in light of the nation’s recent advances.

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