No restrictions: The gap Pakistani founders saw in AI

On August 14, SpaceX completed its acquisition of Anysphere, the developer of popular AI coding tool Cursor, in an all-stock $60 billion historic deal said to be the largest startup purchase on record. The integration fast-tracks the newly formed SpaceXAI—which combines xAI and Grok—into a key player in enterprise AI and a direct competitor of OpenAI and Anthropic.

One of Cursor’s four cofounders is Sualeh Asif from Karachi. After completing his A-Levels from Nixor College, the 26-year-old, who also represented Pakistan at the International Mathematical Olympiad, bagged a scholarship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2022, Asif and his classmates founded Cursor.

Understandably, the media coverage is mostly about the money. But I am interested in a quieter question. What did these four students understand, or act on, earlier than most of the industry?

Their story suggests an answer, and it may be more useful to us than the valuation.

Some context first. In June, the National Foundation for American Policy published its latest count of American private companies worth a billion dollars or more. Immigrants founded or co-founded 455 of the 775, 59 per cent, rising to two-thirds if you include American-born children of immigrants. The founders came from 76 countries. India leads with 96 such companies, followed by Israel with 60, the United Kingdom with 47, China with 41 and Canada with 30. Pakistan sits on the same table with 10, and the report names all of them: alongside Asif, there is Qasar Younis at Applied Intuition, Samar Abbas at Temporal, Obaid Khan at Motive, Saad Godil at Hippocratic AI, S. Zayd Enam at Cresta, Mo Shaikh at Aptos Labs, Amir Husain at Avathon, Omair Tariq at Cart.com and Talha Sattar at Nimble RX.

One more figure stayed with me. Nearly one-in-four companies in the report have a founder who first arrived in the country as an international student. Not as an investor, not on a company transfer, but as a student. Four of the Pakistani founders came that way: Sualeh Asif at MIT, Saad Godil and Amir Husain at the University of Texas at Austin, and Omair Tariq at the University of Houston.

These numbers are normally read as an argument about immigration policy. I read them as a question about what converts technical training into something valuable, because the answer to that question has changed recently and I do not think we have absorbed it.

The gap nobody is looking at

Building software has become relatively cheaper, easier and considerably faster. In some kinds of work, a small team (and occasionally one person) can now produce what until recently required a department. But easier construction does not tell you what to construct. If anything it makes that judgement more valuable, because the part that used to be hard has stopped being the bottleneck.

Which is why one interview has stayed on my mind. Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code at Anthropic, spoke recently with Diana Hu at Y Combinator’s Startup School. Claude Code is Cursor’s direct competitor, so this is a rival’s account of the same race. One idea in it seems to me particularly useful for Pakistani entrepreneurs and academics, and it costs relatively little to begin exploring.

Cherny’s claim is that we routinely hold these models back without noticing. Today’s model, not next year’s, can already do things that no product permits anyone to do. He calls that unused remainder ‘product overhang’: the distance between what the model is capable of and what the software wrapped around it allows.

He tells the story against his own industry. In his account, when Claude Sonnet 3.5 appeared, the coding tools of the day mostly finished your sentence. They suggested the next line, sometimes the next few lines, or let you ask questions about your code without touching it. Yet the model underneath could already write entire files. Nothing was broken. Users were satisfied. The opening was simply far smaller than what stood behind........

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