Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan 重度使用 AI 智能体，年 token 开销最高达 20 万美元
Y Combinator’s Garry Tan uses AI agents so much, he spends up to $200K a year on tokens
- 1YC CEO Garry Tan 自述每年为 AI 智能体花费约 10 万至 20 万美元的 token 费用
- 2YC 内部智能体 Stray Light 配备公司大脑，掌握历届被投创始人、全部往来邮件和申请数据
- 3他将自用的 23 个 Claude Code 技能包 gstack 开源至 GitHub，用于示范智能体能做什么
- 4Tan 认为个人智能体要成为主流须先降成本，并警惕大厂控制的免费智能体重演算法被少数公司掌控
重度智能体使用已有明码标价的样本，Tan 的核心经验是不拿传统软件的可重复性标准去管智能体。
- 影响：年 10 万至 20 万美元的开销说明重度使用目前仍是少数人的特权，成本被 Tan 视为普及前必须解决的问题；YC 把全量创始人、邮件和申请数据喂给内部智能体以重构运营，数据授权边界需要同步设计。
- 参考：可考虑先算清自身可承受的 token 年化成本再决定使用深度；值得参考其开源的 gstack 技能包试点编码类任务；若要建公司大脑，先盘点邮件、网盘、笔记等数据源并划定可读取范围。
- 依据：花费数字、Stray Light 案例与相关观点均为 Tan 在 Isaacson 播客访谈中的自述，暂无独立验证；gstack 技能包已公开在 GitHub。
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. 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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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Julie Bort is the Startups/Venture Desk editor for TechCrunch.
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来源：TechCrunch · AI · techcrunch.com