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How Salesforce Is Using AI to Power the Enterprise
31 oktober 2025 · 14 min
This episode contains sponsored content in partnership with Salesforce.
At Dreamforce 2025, Every CEO Dan Shipper sat down with Silvio Savarese, chief AI scientist at Salesforce, to discuss how one of the world’s largest software companies is shaping the future of AI for the enterprise.
Together, Dan and Savarese explore how his team at Salesforce develops AI solutions that now power more than 13,000 businesses—including OpenAI, Dell, and FedEx—helping them become truly Agentic Enterprises that operate with greater scale, speed, and precision. Examples include a large language model built for Salesforce developers years before ChatGPT’s release, and Agentforce, the company’s agentic layer that enables a hybrid future of work where humans and AI agents collaborate to achieve more than either could alone.
They also discuss how Agentforce gives enterprises a deeply unified AI platform that connects their data with agent functionality—making it both powerful and practical. The conversation touches on how Salesforce builds trust with enterprise customers amid the jagged frontier of AI by ensuring consistency in results, while continuing to push the boundaries of what agents can do autonomously. Savarese shares how enterprise-grade simulation environments help them strike that balance, and reflects on how AI agents will ultimately transform how businesses and individuals alike get things done.
@Salesforce #SalesforcePartner #DF25
Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Timestamps:
00:00 – Start
01:16 – Inside Salesforce’s early AI innovations
02:50 – How Agentforce works and what it can do
07:03 – The real challenges of deploying AI at scale
08:57 – Why Salesforce b… Lees meer -
Inside Claude Code From the Engineers Who Built It
29 oktober 2025 · 1 uur 10 min
At Every, the team credits Claude Code with transforming the way they work.
They now ship to codebases they barely know, each new feature makes the next easier to build, and even non-technical teammates confidently use the terminal.
To explore how this happened, AI & I host Dan Shipper invited Claude Code’s creators—Cat Wu (@_catwu) and Boris Cherny (@bcherny) from Anthropic AI—to discuss what they’ve learned from building one of the most beloved AI engineering tools in the world.
This episode is a must-watch for anyone—technical or not—who wants to understand how to use Claude Code like the people who built it.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share.
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Build your first AI-powered app at [ai.studio/build](http://ai.studio/build).
Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Start
00:01:26 - Introduction
00:02:25 - Claude Code’s origin story
00:07:03 - How Anthropic dogfoods Claude Code
00:14:06 - Boris and Cat’s favorite slash commands
00:15:49 - How Boris uses Claude Code to plan feature development
00:21:53 - Everything Anthropic has learned about using sub-agents well
00:26:16 - Use Claude Code to turn past code into leverage
00:33:14 - The product decisions for building an agent that’s simple and powerful
00:36:38 - Making Claude Code accessible to the non-technical user
00:45:12 - The next form factor for coding with AI
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
- Cat Wu: https://x.com/_catwu
- Boris Cherny: https://x.com/bcherny
- Claude Code: https://www.claude.com/product/claude-code Lees meer -
Spiral: Designing an AI Ghostwriter With Taste
22 oktober 2025 · 1 uur 8 min
Good writing has always been downstream of good thinking. The average language model can help you write faster—but can it help you think better?
Danny Aziz wrestled with this question while building the new version of Spiral, an AI writing partner informed by our editorial taste at Every that launched yesterday.
The result is a product—and a philosophy—built by the ultimate craftsman who believes you can lean into AI without blunting your edge with slop. We had Danny on AI & I to talk about using AI without losing your craft. We get into the hidden alpha in AI tools that slow you down, how to code with AI without losing your craft, and everything Danny learned about cajoling AI to write well.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded—without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at Framer.com, and use code DAN to get your first month of Pro on the house.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 – Start
00:01:00 – Introduction
00:05:26 – How Danny used Spiral to prepare for this podcast
00:08:29 – Why slowing down makes AI writing better
00:13:42 – The agents working under the hood for Spiral
00:14:46 – How Spiral helps you explore the canvas of possibilities
00:24:41 – Why Danny pivoted away from the old version of Spiral
00:31:51 – How to use AI without losing your craft
00:34:55 – Danny’s workflow for building Spiral as a solo engineer
00:40:39 – Code with AI while staying in control
00:45:26 – What Danny learned about getting AI to write well
00:47:52 – How Danny used DSPy to give AI taste
00:56:16 – Dan v. AI Dan: Can the machine match the man?
… Lees meer -
We Taught AI to Play Games—Now It’s a $3.6 Million Company
15 oktober 2025 · 58 min
This episode is a little different from our usual fare: It’s a conversation with our head of AI training Alex Duffy about Good Start Labs, a company he incubated inside Every. Today, Good Start Labs is spinning out of Every as a separate company with $3.6 million in funding from General Catalyst, Inovia, Every, and a group of angel investors from top-tier AI labs like DeepMind. We get into how Alex learned some of his biggest lessons about the real world from games, starting with RuneScape, which taught him how markets work and how not to get scammed. He explains why the static benchmarks we use to evaluate LLMs today are breaking down, and how games like Diplomacy offer a richer, more dynamic way to test and train large language models. Finally, Alex shares where he sees the most promise in AI—software, life sciences, and education—and why he believes games can make the models we use smarter, while helping people understand and use AI more effectively.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share.
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Timestamps
00:00:00 - Start
00:01:48 - Introduction
00:04:14 - Why evals and benchmarks are broken
00:07:13 - The sneakiest LLMs in the market
00:13:00 - A competition that turns prompting into a sport
00:15:49 - Building a business around using games to make AI better
00:22:39 - Can language models learn how to be funny
00:25:31 - Why games are a great way to evaluate and train new models
00:26:58 - What child psychology tells us about games and AI
00:30:10 - Using games to unlock continual learning in AI
00:36:42 - Why Alex cares deeply about games
00:44:37 - Where Alex sees the most prom… Lees meer -
Box CEO Aaron Levie on Why AI Agents Won’t Take Your Job
8 oktober 2025 · 53 min
Aaron Levie is AI-pilled, but he’s one of the few CEOs who sees a future where AI agents work for us, instead of replacing us—helping us to do more than we could before.
Aaron’s been the CEO of Box for 20 years–long enough to see a few tech revolutions up close—and taking the company AI-first gave him a glimpse of what the next one means for us. We get into why jobs aren’t going away, the new shape of work, and what it takes to build an AI-first company from the inside.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share.
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Meet NotebookLM, the AI research tool and thinking partner that can analyze your sources, turn complexity into clarity and transform your content: https://notebooklm.google.com/
Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Start
00:01:30 – Introduction
00:02:36 – Why AI won’t take your job
00:06:42 – Jevons Paradox and the future of work
00:10:40 – How Aaron’s experience with the cloud era shapes his view of AI
00:19:44 – Why every knowledge worker is becoming a manager of AI agents
00:25:21 – What Aaron’s learned from bringing AI into every corner of Box
00:33:57 – What’s overhyped in AI today
00:43:31 – How Aaron balances everyday execution with innovation
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Aaron Levie: Aaron Levie (@levie)
Box: https://www.box.com/
Dan’s essay on the shift toward the allocation economy: "The Knowledge Economy Is Over. Welcome to the Allocation Economy"
Dwarkesh’s podcast with Richard Sutton: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/richard-sutton Lees meer -
MCP Servers: Teaching AI to Use the Internet Like Humans
1 oktober 2025 · 52 min
If your MCP server has dozens of tools, it’s probably built wrong.
You need tools that are specific and clear for each use case—but you also can’t have too many. This creates an almost impossible tradeoff that most companies don’t know how to solve.
That’s why we interviewed Alex Rattray, the founder and CEO of Stainless. Stainless builds APIs, SDKs, and MCP servers for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Alex has spent years mastering how to make software talk to software, and he came on the show to share what he knows. We get into MCP and the future of the AI-native internet.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share.
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded—without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at Framer.com, and use code DAN to get your first month of Pro on the house.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Start
00:01:14 - Introduction
00:02:54 - Why Alex likes running barefoot
00:05:09 - APIs and MCP, the connectors of the new internet
00:10:53 - Why MCP servers are hard to get right
00:20:07 - Design principles for reliable MCP servers
00:23:50 - Scaling MCP servers for large APIs
00:25:14 - Using MCP for business ops at Stainless
00:28:12 - Building a company brain with Claude Code
00:33:59 - Where MCP goes from here
00:41:10 - Alex’s take on the security model for MCP
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Alex Rattray: Alex Rattray (@RattrayAlex), Alex Rattray
Stainless: https://www.stainless.com/ Lees meer -
Cognition’s CEO on What Comes After Code
24 september 2025 · 53 min
The future has a way of showing up early to some places. In software engineering, one of those places is Cognition—the startup that made headlines in early 2024 with Devin, the world’s first autonomous coding agent, and more recently with its acquisition of the AI code editor Windsurf.
Scott Wu, Cognition’s cofounder and CEO, has a front-row seat to what comes next. In this episode of AI & I, we talk with Wu about why the fundamentals of computer science still matter in an AI-first world, the direction he sees for the short- and long-term future of programming, and why he believes we may already be living with AGI.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 – Start
00:02:02 – Introduction
00:02:32 – Why Scott thinks AGI is here
00:09:27 – Scott’s personal journey as a founder
00:16:55 – Why the fundamentals of computer science still matter
00:22:30 – How the future of programming will evolve
00:26:50 – A new workflow for the AI-first software engineer
00:29:33 – How Devin stacks up against Claude Code
00:40:05 – Reinforcement learning to build better coding agents
00:50:05 – What excites Scott about AI beyond Cognition
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Scott Wu: Scott Wu (@ScottWu46)
Learn more about Cognition: https://cognition.ai/
Try the world’s first autonomous coding agent: https://devin.ai/ Lees meer -
One Developer Got Thousands of Users Before His App Launched
17 september 2025 · 57 min
Naveen Naidu built an app that found product-market fit backwards.
Most apps launch first and then try to find users. Monologue, Naveen’s AI voice dictation app that came out of beta yesterday, did the opposite. It built a following of thousands of users during its incubation period at Every—many of them switching over from venture capital-backed competitors—all while the app barely had a landing page.
The growth has continued in the 24 hours since launch, with an average of 1 million words being transcribed weekly, and in this episode of AI & I, we sit down with Naveen to talk about his journey as the single engineer behind a viral app. We get into the false starts and side projects that taught Naveen how to ship fast, the brutal feedback that kept Monologue honest, why Every decided to build in a crowded category, and the AI coding tools that let one developer do the work of a team.
Get free early access to Amazon's Alexa Plus: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCCNHWV5?ref_=aucc_us_dis_everyalexa_q3_25
Timestamps:
00:01:27 – Introduction
00:03:51 – A live demo of Monologue
00:06:27 – Hard lessons from Naveen’s years in the wilderness
00:12:29 – Building a muscle to ship fast
00:21:11 – The spark that became Monologue
00:26:09 – Dogfooding your way to a killer feature
00:29:45 – Why the harshest product feedback is the most valuable
00:31:47 – Every’s strategy for launching an app in a crowded space
00:40:08 – Giving Monologue the Every “smell”
00:45:09 – Naveen’s one-person AI stack to build beautiful apps
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Links to resources mentioned in the … Lees meer -
Claude Code Can Be Your Second Brain
10 september 2025 · 1 uur 12 min
Noah Brier uses Claude Code as his second brain—it’s the coolest notetaking setup we’ve ever seen.
He has Claude running on a server in his basement hooked up to a VPN. It stores, reads, and writes to thousands of notes in his Obsidian vault. He does it all from his phone.
We had him on the show to tell us exactly how he’s pulling this off.
Dan and Noah get into:
The nuts and bolts of the Claude Code-Obsidian setup: Noah set up Claude Code on top of his Obsidian root directory, and he walked me through how he uses it to prep for an upcoming speech—creating a project folder, pulling in relevant research from his notes, saving transcripts from chats with other LLMs, and generating daily progress updates.
The “thinking partner” that lives inside Noah’s second brain: Noah points out that in the hype around AI’s ability to write, the fact that it can read is overlooked. That’s why he has an agent inside Claude Code with strict guardrails to stay in “thinking mode.” It logs his questions, tracks insights, and catches him up on research if he returns to a project after a few days away.
How Noah does deep work on his phone: Noah rigged a home server in his basement, put his Obsidian vault in it—and then runs Claude Code on top. Noah says that being able to think, write, research, and ship code from his phone has fundamentally changed the way he works.
This episode is a must-watch for anyone curious about who wants to learn how to use Claude Code to build a true second brain.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Start building in Google AI Studio at ai.dev.
Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded—without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at Framer.com, and use code DAN to get your first month of Pro on the house.
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you ca… Lees meer -
This AI Makes a Video Game World in 40 Milliseconds
3 september 2025 · 1 uur 5 min
We had Dean Leitersdorf on the pod and he did something no guest had ever done.
Mid-sentence, he transformed from a startup founder in a black t-shirt to a wizard with light shooting from his hands. Then, he was in a white-walled game universe, and when he picked up the tissue box on his table, it morphed into a gun which he could shoot by moving his arm.
He did it with one of his products, Mirage: It takes any live video feed (like Dean on the pod) and instantly renders each frame into a new style of your choosing—40 milliseconds from input to output.
Dean is the co-founder and CEO of the creators of Decart which makes Mirage. They recently raised $100 million at a $3.1 billion valuation to build a new era of real-time generative AI experiences like this.
Realtime generative video models are going to change video games forever, and Dean is on the forefront: imagine creating endless variations on existing titles, like GTA-V with a frigid winter filter, or taking a bare-bones vibe-coded prototype and using Mirage to texture it.
But games are just the beginning, Dean sees Mirage as opening the door to a new medium, a new experience created by AI.
In this episode, we take a look at how Mirage works under the hood, and what the Decart team learned about the future of software while wrestling with its toughest research problems. We also debate AGI—how close it really is, what counts as progress, and what kind of society it might create. This episode is a must watch for anyone interested in the future of gaming, creativity, or if you just want your mind blown by what’s already possible.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscr… Lees meer -
Best of the Pod: How to Prepare for AGI According to Reid Hoffman
27 augustus 2025 · 1 uur 10 min
AGI is coming. Reid Hoffman just wrote the book on how to prepare.
According to Reid, every major tech breakthrough (the written word, the printing press, the telephone) triggered mass fear. But, contrary to our worries, new technology tends to enhance human agency—even more so, if you know how to use it well.
Reid is the cofounder of LinkedIn, Inflection AI, and Manas AI; a partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners; an early backer and board member of OpenAI; and an award-winning podcaster
We spent an hour talking about how to develop a compass for navigating AGI. Here are a few takeaways:
Our sense of human agency is not just about external control but an internal stance—how we approach uncertainty & new tech is crucial
In new technology waves, NO blueprint or plan will have the right answers. Instead, adapting to new technology requires broad access, an experimental mindset, and flexibility
In an AGI world most jobs will transform, not disappear—and how you can prepare with hands-on trial and error
How certain social norms and ethics should change as AGI changes the landscape—like individual access to personal data
Why now may be finally be the era where quantified self tools become valuable
…and more, including everything in his new book Superagency, out this week.
It was a pleasure to have him on the show for a second time. This is a must-watch for anyone who wants to help build a more human future with AI.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-.... It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: / danshipper
Sponsor:
Attio is the AI-native CRM built for the next era of companies. With Attio, setup takes minutes. Connect your email and calendar, and it instantly … Lees meer -
Best of the Pod: She Built an AI Product Manager Bringing in Six Figures—As A Side Hustle
20 augustus 2025 · 1 uur 6 min
**Automate 80% of your repetitive writing, thinking, and creative tasks**
**Try Spiral made by Dan Shipper & Every: https://spiral.computer?utm_source=youtube**
Claire Vo built ChatPRD—an on-demand chief product officer powered by AI. It’s now used by over 10,000 product managers and is pulling in six figures in revenue.
The best part?
Claire has a demanding day job as the CPO at LaunchDarkly. So she built all of ChatPRD herself—over the weekend—with AI.
I sat down with Claire to talk about how ChatPRD works, how she built it as a side hustle using AI, and all of the ways she’s using AI tools to accelerate her work and life.
We get into:
- How she used AI to build ChatPRD over Thanksgiving break
- The part of product management that Claire thinks AI will disrupt
- Why the PMs of tomorrow will be “proto-managers” who create prototypes rather than just specs
- How junior PMs can use AI to upskill faster
- The ways in which ChatPRD is baked into her own workflow
- How building ChatPRD is making Claire a better PM
- How Claire uses AI as a tech-forward parent
This is a must-watch for anyone interested in turning their side hustle into a thriving business or who works in product.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Thanks to Google and LTX Studio for sponsoring this episode!
The Gemini 2.5 family of models is now generally available. 2.5 Pro, the most advanced model, is great for reasoning over complex tasks; next up, 2.5 Flash finds the sweet spot between performance and price; and finally, 2.5 Flash Lite is ideal for low-latency, high-volume tasks. Start building in Google AI Studio at https://ai.dev/
LTX Studio is helping storytellers go from concept to delivery in one seamless platform. Whether you're storyboarding your next film, prototyping ad concepts, or creating pixel-ready assets, LTX Studio allows you to fully realize your imaginations. Check them out here: https://tinyurl.com/2d5nx3ut
Want even more?
Sign up… Lees meer -
Best of the Pod: Vercel's Guillermo Rauch on AI and the Future of Coding
13 augustus 2025 · 58 min
Read Dan Shipper's essay on the allocation economy: https://every.to/chain-of-thought/the-knowledge-economy-is-over-welcome-to-the-allocation-economy
Guillermo Rauch is one of the most prolific coders of this generation.
But he doesn’t think of himself as a coder anymore.
Coding, he says, is a specific skill that AI is becoming great at. Instead, he thinks the future of coding is more holistic, full-stack engineers who can ideate, design, and execute all together.
Guillermo is the founder and CEO of Vercel, the creator of NextJS, and SocketIO. We spent an hour talking about the future of software development in an AI world—and the meta-skills that are essential for the coders of today to master—in order to use tomorrow’s tools to their fullest extent.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Sponsors:
LTX Studio is helping storytellers go from concept to delivery in one seamless platform. Whether you're storyboarding your next film, prototyping ad concepts, or creating pixel-ready assets, LTX Studio allows you to fully realize your imaginations. Check them out here: https://tinyurl.com/2d5nx3ut
Attio is the AI-native CRM built for the next era of companies. With Attio, setup takes minutes. Connect your email and calendar, and it instantly builds a CRM that mirrors your business. Go to https://www.attio.com/every to get 15% off on your first year.
Want even more?
Read Dan Shipper's essay on developing taste with AI: https://every.to/chain-of-thought/what-i-do-when-i-can-t-sleep
Try Cora to manage your email with AI: https://cora.computer
Try Spiral to repurpose content with AI: https://spiral.computer
Try Sparkle to organize your files with AI: https://makeitsparkle.co
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Eve… Lees meer -
Best of the Pod: Dwarkesh Patel’s Quest to Learn Everything
30 juli 2025 · 50 min
Dwarkesh Patel is on a quest to know everything.
He’s using LLMs to enhance how he reads, learns, thinks, and conducts interviews.
Dwarkesh is a podcaster who’s interviewed a wide range of people, like Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Blair, and Marc Andreesen. Before conducting each of these interviews, Dwarkesh learns as much as he can about his guest and their area of expertise—AI hardware, tense geopolitical crises, and the genetics of human origins, to name a few.
The most important tool in his learning arsenal? AI—specifically Claude, Claude Projects, and a few custom tools he’s built to accelerate his workflow.
He does this by researching extensively, and as his knowledge grows, each piece of new information builds upon the last, making it easier and easier to grasp meaningful insights.
In this interview, I turn the tables on him to understand how the prolific podcaster uses AI to become a smarter version of himself. We get into:
How he uses LLMs to remember everything
His podcast prep workflow with Claude to understand complex topics
Why it’s important to be an early adopter of technology
His taste in books and how he uses LLMs to learn from them
How he thinks about building a worldview
His quick takes on the AI’s existential questions—AGI and P(doom)
We also use Claude live on the show to help Dwarkesh research for an upcoming podcast recording.
This is a must-watch for curious people who want to use AI to become smarter.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Sponsor:
Gemini: Experience high quality AI video generation with Google's most capable video model: Veo 3. Try it in the Gemini app at gemini.google with a Google AI Pro plan or get the highest access with the Ultra plan.
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-.... It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe … Lees meer -
Intentional Tech: Designing AI for Human Flourishing | Alex Komoroske
9 juli 2025 · 1 uur 12 min
The smallest technical decisions become humanity's biggest pivots:
The same-origin policy—a well-intentioned browser security rule from the 1990s—accidentally created Facebook, Google, and every data monopoly since. It locks your data in silos—and you stayed where your stuff already is. This dynamic created aggregators.
Alex Komoroske—who led Chrome's web platform team at Google and ran corporate strategy at Stripe—saw this pattern play out firsthand. And he's obsessed with the tiny decisions that will shape AI's next 30 years:
Whether AI keeps memory centrally or user-controlled?
Is AI free/ad-supported or user-paid?
Should AI be engagement-maximizing or intention-aligned?
How should we handle prompt injection in MCP and agentic systems?
Should AI be built with AOL-style aggregation or web-style openness?
This is a much-watch if you care about the future of AI and humanity.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Sponsors:
Google Gemini: Experience high quality AI video generation with Google's most capable video model: Veo 3. Try it in the Gemini app at gemini.google with a Google AI Pro plan or get the highest access with the Ultra plan.
Attio: Go to https://attio.com/every and get 15% off your first year on your AI-powered CRM.
Timestamps:
Introduction: 00:01:45
Why chatbots are a feature not a paradigm: 00:04:25
Toward AI that’s aligned with our intentions: 00:06:50
The four pillars of “intentional technology”: 00:11:54
The type of structures in which intentional technology can thrive: 00:14:16
Why ChatGPT is the AOL of the AI era: 00:18:26
Why AI needs to break ou… Lees meer -
Arc Had Millions of Users. Why They Left It Behind for Dia. | Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal, cofounders of The Browser Company
2 juli 2025 · 1 uur 25 min
If you had millions of people using a product you spent years building, would you kill it?
That’s exactly what The Browser Company did with Arc.
The internet backlash was intense, but cofounders Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal saw that AI was about to make the web something you talk to, not just click into. The best home for that assistant was the thing that's already between you and the internet—the browser. And they realized they couldn’t just duct-tape it on to Arc.
One year of heads-down work later, the team launched Dia in beta, and people are raving about it. Dia is a sleek, fast, browser with AI at its core—it gets better with every tab you open, becoming more and more helpful with time.
And even though it’s still early, Josh and Hursh’s big pivot looks like one for the ages.
This week on AI & I, Josh and Hursh joined me for their first full-length podcast about their pivot from Arc to Dia. We talk through their decision-making process, the very public backlash the company faced, and the grit it took to stay the course.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Sponsor:
Attio: Go to https://attio.com/every and get 15% off your first year on your AI-powered CRM.
Timestamps:
Introduction: 00:01:13
The story of how Dan might’ve been the CEO of The Browser Company: 00:02:47
The moment Josh and Hursh knew they had to walk away from Arc: 00:09:42
How to handle the weight of the unknown in a pivot: 00:17:08
The prototype-driven culture that kept The Browser Company alive: 00:23:31
Why having a product loved by millions of users isn’t enough :00:25:42
The architectural decis… Lees meer -
How We Built Our AI Email Assistant: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Cora
26 juni 2025 · 46 min
You don’t need to handle your inbox anymore. It’s Cora’s job now.
Cora is the AI chief of staff we built for your email at Every. It’s been in private beta for the last 6 months and currently manages email for 2,500 beta users—and today we’re making it available for anyone to use. Start your free 7-day trial by going to: https://cora.computer/
Cora is the $150K executive assistant that costs $15/month. Or $20/month if you want an Every subscription, too. This is what that actually means:
Cora understands what’s important to you, screens your inbox, and only lets the most relevant emails through.
The rest of your emails are summarized in a beautifully designed brief that’s sent to you twice a day.
If it has enough context, Cora drafts replies for you in your voice.
You can talk to Cora like you would your chief of staff—you can give it special instructions on how you want certain emails handled, ask it to summarize things, and even give you an opinion on complex decisions.
In this episode of AI & I, I sat down with the team behind Cora—Brandon Gell, head of the product studio; Kieran Klaassen, Cora’s general manager; and Nityesh Agarwal, engineer at Cora—for a closer look at how it all came together. We talk about:
The story of the first time Brandon, Kieran, and I used Cora, while sipping wine at the Every retreat in Nice.
The evolution of Cora’s categorization system, from a 4-hour vibe-coded prototype to a multi-faceted product with thousands of happy users.
The features on Cora’s roadmap we’re most excited about: a unified brief across different email accounts, an iOS app, and an even more powerful assistant.
This is a must-watch if you’re curious about what it feels like to give Cora your inbox, and take back your life. Go to https://cora.computer/ to start your 7-day free trial now.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: … Lees meer -
Inside OpenAI: Coaching the People Creating AGI | Joe Hudson, Founder of The Art of Accomplishment
18 juni 2025 · 54 min
Joe Hudson is a coach who works with the executives building AGI at OpenAI.
From inside OpenAI, he witnesses the full spectrum of human emotion that comes with bringing something new into the world—the exhilaration, the terror, the weight of it all. He feels these emotions, too: He believes AI will eventually replace what he does as a coach.
But instead of fixating on that fear, Hudson is asking a deeper question: Who is he becoming in the meantime? He believes that moments like this—when we can feel the ground quiver—can be powerful catalysts for transformation, but only if we’re willing to face the uncertainty they bring.
In this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper sits down with Hudson to talk about how he’s answering that question. They get into what happens when the thing you’ve built your life around might disappear, how to find who you are beneath your professional identity, and why Hudson believes intention is the key to growing with AI.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Sponsors:
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Timestamps:
Introduction: 00:01:49
What it feels like inside the room where AGI is being built: 00:03:14
The most important question to ask yourself as AGI approaches: 00:08:15
The importance of sitting with uncertainty: 00:17:49
How Joe is preparing his daughters for a pos… Lees meer -
How Two Engineers Ship Like a Team of 15 With AI Agents
11 juni 2025 · 54 min
If you’re using AI to just write code, you’re missing out.
Two engineers at Every shipped six features, five bug fixes, and three infrastructure updates in one week—and they did it by designing workflows with AI agents, where each task makes the next one easier, faster, and more reliable.
In this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper interviewed the pair—Kieran Klaassen, general manager of Cora, our inbox management tool, and Cora engineer Nityesh Agarwal—about how they’re compounding their engineering with AI. They walk Dan through their workflow in Anthropic’s agentic coding tool, Claude Code, and the mental models they’ve developed for making AI agents truly useful. Kieran, our resident AI-agent aficionado, also ranked all the AI coding assistants he’s used.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Sponsors:
Microsoft Teams
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Attio: Go to https://www.attio.com/every and get 15% off your first year on your AI-powered CRM.
Timestamps:
Introduction: 00:01:16
Why Kieran believes agents are turning a corner: 00:03:18
Why Claude Code stands out from other agents: 00:06:36
What makes agentic coding different from using tools like Cursor: 00:11:58
The Cora team’s workflow to turn tasks into momentum: 00:15:20
How to build a prompt t… Lees meer -
The Future of AI in Medicine: From Rules to Intuition | Awais Aftab, Psychiatrist and writer
4 juni 2025 · 53 min
OCD treatment changed my life—but it took me a decade of chasing down wrong answers to be diagnosed.
In the rush to create scalable treatments, disorders like depression and OCD are squeezed into diagnostic checklists—from which the complexity of the human mind invariably leaks out. The field of psychiatry is broken, and I spoke to someone on the inside about how AI can help fix it .
Awais Aftab has been questioning psychiatry’s rigid categories from inside the field. He’s a clinical assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University, editor of Conversations in Critical Psychiatry—an Oxford University Press volume that tackles philosophical and critical perspectives in psychiatry—and author of the Substack newsletter Psychiatry at the Margins. We get into how AI is transforming psychiatry by embracing the complexity of human minds instead of flattening it.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Sponsor: Microsoft Teams
Want seamless collaboration without the cost? Microsoft Teams offers a robust free plan for individuals that delivers unlimited chat, 60-minute video meetings, and file sharing—all within one intuitive workspace that keeps your projects moving forward. Head to https://aka.ms/every to use Teams for free, and experience effortless collaboration, today.
Timestamps:
Introduction: 00:01:20
The case Awais makes for pluralistic thinking in psychiatry: 00:03:38
A pragmatic approach to mental healthcare: 00:15:30
Awais’s take on why my OCD diagnosis took 10 years: 00:19:04
Why psychiatry is stuck where machine learning was decades ago: 00:24:19
Why psy… Lees meer -
GitHub CEO on the AI Coding Arms Race: One Agent, 150M+ Devs | Thomas Dohmke
28 mei 2025 · 31 min
GitHub Copilot has 15 million users—more than Cursor and Windsurf combined. So why does it feel like they're losing the AI coding race?
Last week at Microsoft Build, I interviewed the CEO of GitHub Thomas Dohmke to find out.
I wanted to know: Is their huge existing user base a blessing or a curse? And will their latest launch—an autonomous coding agent built into GitHub—let them retake the lead? Watch this episode of AI & I to find out
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Sponsor:
Attio: Go to https://www.attio.com/every and get 15% off your first year on your AI-powered CRM.
Timestamps:
00:00:38 - Introduction
00:07:40 - Copilot’s place in the AI coding agent race
00:10:42 - Inside the product decisions behind Copilot’s new agent
00:16:18 - How Dohmke thinks about shaping Copilot’s personality
00:20:29 - How GitHub supports both AI-native developers and legacy enterprise users
00:26:57 - Dohmke’s predictions for the future of software development Lees meer -
Kevin Scott on The Future of Programming, AI Agents, and Microsoft’s Big Bet on the Agentic Web
21 mei 2025 · 28 min
I interviewed Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott about the future of agents and software engineering for another special edition of AI & I.
With 41 years of programming behind him, Kevin has lived through nearly every big shift in modern software development. Here’s his clear-eyed take on what’s changing with AI, and how we can navigate what’s next:
The real breakthrough for the agentic web is better plumbing. Kevin thinks agents won’t be useful until they can take action on your behalf by using tools and fetching data. To do this, agents need access across your systems—and Microsoft’s answer is adopting Model Context Protocol, or “MCP,” that allows an agent to access tools and fresh data beyond its knowledge base, as their standard protocol for agents to move through contexts and get things done.
How the agentic web echoes the early internet. Just as protocols like HTTP and HTML gave the web a shared language, Kevin believes the agentic web needs its own infrastructure—the first glimpses of this include MCP (the HTTP of agents) and NLWeb, Microsoft’s push to make websites legible to agents (similar to what HTML did for browsers).
Open ecosystems can coexist with strong security systems. Kevin argues that the “tradeoff” between ecosystems that allow “permissionless” innovation and robust security is a false dichotomy. With AI agents that understand your personal risk preferences—and know your communication habits across email, text, and other channels—they could detect when something suspicious is happening and act on your behalf.
The craftsman’s dilemma in the age of agents. Kevin is a lifelong maker—of software, ceramics, even handmade bags—and he cares deeply about how things are made. Because this can feel at odds with coding with AI agents, Kevin’s approach is to notice where the process matters most to him, and where it's okay to optimize for outcomes. After four decades of seeing breakthrough technologies, his advice is simple: be curious, try stuff, and use it if it… Lees meer -
OpenAI Launches Codex: An Autonomous Programming Agent
16 mei 2025 · 43 min
OpenAI just launched Codex, a brand-new coding agent that can build features and fix bugs autonomously. We’ve been testing it at Every for a few days, and I’m impressed.
I invited Alexander Embiricos, a member of the OpenAI product staff responsible for Codex, to demo the agent live on a special edition of AI & I. We talk through:
- What Codex is and how it works. Codex’s UI allows developers to see the list of tasks the agent is working on, how many lines were changed for each, and the status of the PR. It’s built for the senior software engineer who wants to delegate and review tasks efficiently.
- How OpenAI is thinking about agents. Codex is one piece of a unified super-assistant OpenAI wants to eventually build—an agent that helps users easily get things done by selecting the right tools for them behind the scenes.
- Why an “abundance mindset” is best for interacting with agents. Codex is designed to allow users to delegate many tasks at once without getting caught up in the details. This lets you point an abundance of agents at a specific task, like a difficult bug—it’s worth it even if only one of them succeeds.
- OpenAI’s vision for the future of programming. In the future developers will probably spend less time writing routine code and more time guiding agents, reviewing their work, and making strategy decisions. Programming will become more social, letting teams easily delegate multiple tasks at once, allowing people to focus on ideas and collaboration instead of routine coding.
Timestamps:
Introduction: 00:00:52
The product decisions behind Codex’s interface: 00:01:40
How Codex works under the hood: 00:06:20
Why you need an abundance mindset to work well with agents: 00:14:06
Setting Codex to work on a real task in “Ask” mode: 00:16:28
How OpenAI is thinking about designing agents: 00:18:54
The future of programming is social: 00:31:16
Reviewing Codex’s work live: 00:37:21
How the landscape of agents will evolve: 00:39:41 Lees meer -
The $10B Hedge Fund CEO Who’s Betting Big on AI | Will England, Walleye Capital
14 mei 2025 · 1 uur 7 min
Will England just pivoted his $10B AUM hedge fund to go all in on AI with a firm-wide email: “I wrote this email using ChatGPT—you should too. As a hedge fund, we should be ashamed to leave money on the table by ignoring AI.”
It’s working: 75% of his 400-person team are using ChatGPT daily—and Walleye is well on its way to transforming into an AI-first juggernaut. They record every meeting, use LLMs to ingest and analyze earnings reports, and are building “The Borg”—a firmwide intelligence layer.
What’s surprising? Will isn’t some AI hype man: He’s the CEO, CIO, and managing partner of Walleye Capital, a multi-strategy hedge fund competing with firms like Citadel, Millenium, and Point72. He’s Princeton and Oxford educated, but he’s based in Minnesota, doesn’t have an X account, and rarely gives interviews.
In my experience, teams go as their CEO goes—and Will is the best example of a CEO going all in on AI that I’ve seen. "It would be irresponsible not to go after AI with maximum discipline and intensity," Will told me—and in this episode he lays out his exact playbook for doing it.
We get into:
Why AI is essential operating leverage. At Walleye, using AI is treated like using email or Excel. Ignoring it means getting left behind—in an industry where information = money, every edge counts. England makes this not optional for anyone, backed by internal leaderboards and cash incentives.
How Will uses AI for journaling and decision-making. Will journals every day using ChatGPT, which helps him with everything from decision-making at work to reflecting on his family life to tracking his workouts.
How Will pivoted his billion dollar firm. Will’s commitment to AI isn’t theoretical—he announced AI as the new standard for work at Walleye, and made avoiding it unacceptable.
How to lead during times of technological change. Will leads with an ethic of personal responsibility: "If we get disrupted by AI, that's on me.”
Why students of history do better at handling the future.… Lees meer -
Jhana Meditation Silenced Her Mind—And Changed Her View On AI | Nadia Asparouhova
7 mei 2025 · 54 min
After two Jhana meditation retreats Nadia Asparouhova could silence her mind, change her emotional state at will, and even intentionally slip out of consciousness. It challenged the idea that our minds are not under our control—and made her wonder if we’re more like AI than we realize.
Nadia is a writer and researcher of technology and culture. She published Working in Public, a book about the evolution of open-source development, with Stripe Press. Her latest book, Antimemetics, is about why some ideas don’t go viral even though they’re powerful.
I had her on the show to talk about her experience with Jhana meditation and how it reshaped the way she thinks about being human in the age of AI. We get into:
Jhana as a means to nurture profound joy and calm. Unlike many meditation practices that emphasize passive observation, Jhana is goal-oriented—practitioners proactively cultivate states of concentrated bliss. Apart from helping her regulate her emotions, it prompted Nadia to reexamine deep questions of our human existence.
Self-talk is not essential as it seems. Nadia describes how advanced meditation quieted her inner voice—challenging the idea that self-talk is core to being human.
How years of cultural evolution have shaped our sense of self. According to Nadia, our modern conception of “self” isn’t as timeless as we assume. She draws on psychologist Julian Jaynes’s theory that our inner dialogue—what we often equate with consciousness—only emerged in humans a few thousand years ago; a provocation to reconsider the benchmarks we use to assess the intelligence or sentience of LLMs.
What it is like to experience a “cessation.” On her last meditation retreat, Nadia experiences a cessation where your consciousness abruptly winks out—like suddenly flipping a switch. Nadia described it as slipping into nothingness, then returning with the jarring realization that even your sense of self can vanish and reappear.
Why she likes the unknowability of AI. The mechanics of … Lees meer -
The Next AI Wave Will Be Social, Not Solo | Sarah Tavel, Benchmark and ex-Pinterest
30 april 2025 · 49 min
Sarah Tavel thinks it's criminal that ChatGPT isn’t inherently social.
There’s no easy way to discover great prompts or share the ones that worked. As a venture partner at Benchmark, Sarah believes that the next wave of consumer AI will be built on this missing social layer—by product-driven founders who understand people, not just models.
Sarah has seen this shift before. As one of Pinterest’s first product managers, she saw the company grow from a niche consumer tool to a beloved global community. On this episode of Every's podcast AI & I, we talk about how she’s applying the lessons she learned to AI—and what it takes to build a breakout consumer AI app today.
We get into:
Why product geniuses win as new tech matures. In the early days of a new technology, companies win by wrangling raw innovation into something usable. But as the infrastructure matures, Sarah says the edge shifts to product thinkers—founders who turn new capabilities into delightful user experiences.
The future of prompting is social. When Sarah had to dig through Reddit to find a prompt to help her interpret her blood test results, she saw a gap: The best prompt creators are invisible. Sarah bets that a social AI product that makes them discoverable and followable would gain traction.
Sarah’s method to spot exceptional founders. Sarah backs founders for whom building a company feels like a calling—or even an affliction. These are people who have fallen in love with the process and are obsessed with learning how to grow alongside their companies.
How to tell if your startup really has network effects. Founders raising money love to say that their business has “network effects.” Sarah has learned to look for early signs they’re real—like traction in a small, white-hot segment of the market. If there’s no evidence the flywheel is already starting to spin, it’s probably not a network effect.
How LLMs change the way the best VCs invest. Sarah thinks the future of venture will be shaped by how well … Lees meer -
How To Predict The Future With Kevin Kelly - Ep. 57
23 april 2025 · 55 min
Kevin Kelly has spent more time thinking about the future than almost anyone else.
From VR in the 1980s to the blockchain in the 2000s—and now generative AI—Kevin has spent a lifetime journeying to the frontiers of technology, only to return with rich stories about what’s next.
Today, as Wired's senior maverick, his project for 2025 is to outline what the next century looks like in a world shaped by new technologies like AI and genetic engineering.
He’s a personal hero of mine—not to mention a fellow Annie Dillard fan—and it was a privilege to have him on the show. We get into:
How you can predict the future. According to Kevin, the draw of new frontiers—from the first edition of Burning Man and remote corners of Asia, to the early days of the internet and AI—isn’t staying at the edge forever; it's returning with a story to tell.
Why history is so important to help you understand the future To stay grounded while exploring what’s new, Kevin balances the thrill of the future with the wisdom of the past. He pairs AI research with reading about history, and playing with an AI tool by retreating to his workshop to make something with his hands.
From 1,000 true fans to an audience of one. Rather than creating for an audience, Kevin has been using LLMs to explore his own imagination. After realizing that da Vinci, Martin Luther, and Columbus were alive at the same time, he asked ChatGPT to imagine them snowed in at a hotel together, and the prompt spiraled into an epic saga, co-written with AI. But he has no plans to publish it because the joy was in creating something just for himself.
What the history of electricity can teach us about AI. Kevin draws a parallel between AI and the early days of electricity. We could produce electric sparks long before we understood the forces that created them, and now we’re building intelligent machines without really understanding what intelligence is.
Why Kevin sees intelligence as a mosaic—not a monolith. Kevin believes intelligence… Lees meer -
This AI Alien Will Bring In $4 Million This Year in Revenue - Ep. 56 with Quinten Farmer and Eliot Peper
17 april 2025 · 1 uur 23 min
With LTX Studio, you can bring your stories to life, complete with a cast, storyline, and settings, all according to your style and specifications. Check them out here: https://bit.ly/LTXStudioEvery
500K people are confiding in an AI alien—and it's on track to generate $4M this year.
It’s called a Tolan: an animated AI character that can talk to you like your best friend. The company behind it, Portola, has 4x’d their ARR in the last month from viral growth on TikTok and Instagram.
Tolan isn’t just a hyper-growth startup—they’re also exploring AI as a completely new creative tool, and storytelling medium. Their goal is to help their users go from overwhelmed to grounded, and it’s working.
Today, on AI & I, I sit down with two of the minds behind Tolans:
My good friend Quinten Farmer, Portola’s cofounder and CEO, and Eliot Peper, their head of story and a best-selling science fiction novelist. We get into:
How to build AI personalities users love. During user onboarding, the team gathers information—through a light-touch personality quiz—and then uses frameworks like the Big Five and Myers-Briggs to shape a Tolan that mirrors the user; like an older sibling might. The aim is to create someone who feels familiar enough to be safe, but different enough to be interesting.
Why AI characters are “improv actors”. Rather than scripting detailed prompts, the team trains Tolans to improvise—inspired by Keith Johnstone’s book Impro, where he talks about building strong narratives through free association and recombination.
How “memory” is critical to developing compelling characters. Tolans develop their personalities through “situations”: small narrative setups (a memory, a joke, an embarrassing moment) the Tolan reacts to, remembers, and gradually weaves into its character; accumulating into something that feels like a real lived experience.
Why response time is everything for voice AI interactions. A Tolan has at most two seconds to curate the right context about a user an… Lees meer -
An Inside Look at Every’s Design Philosophy - Ep. 55 with Lucas Crespo
9 april 2025 · 1 uur 3 min
This episode is sponsored by Vanta. Achieving SOC 2 compliance can help you win bigger deals, enter new markets, and deepen trust with your customers—but it can cost you real time and money. Vanta automates up to 90% of the work for SOC 2, ISO 27001, and more, getting you audit-ready in weeks instead of months and saving you up to 90% of associated costs—and Every listeners can get $1,000 off of Vanta at https://www.vanta.com/every.
As our creative lead, Lucas uses tools like native image gen in ChatGPT and Midjourney to generate the cover images you see every day. He also designs the interfaces for our products—Cora, Spiral, and Sparkle—and makes everything on our site feel as thoughtful and delightful as possible.
It was great to have him on the show to talk about how AI is changing his design process. We get into:
Why Every’s aesthetic feels familiar and new at the same time. Every’s aesthetic plays with the tension between the old (like Greek statues and Baroque symbols) and the new (like saturated colors and modern motifs) to make the glamor of the past feel fresh.
Art direction matters more than ever today. As AI makes it easier to generate images, Lucas says the real work of design is shifting toward art direction, specifically, curating an aesthetic that feels “organic;” on his X timeline that’s showing up as clouds, earthy landscapes, and textures.
Reimagining what a website can be with AI. Lucas compares most websites to identical buildings—predictable, efficient, and forgettable—and wonders how AI can help us break that mold by designing experiences that prioritize serendipity over speed, and curiosity over control.
Behind the scenes of Cora’s visual aesthetic. How Lucas designed the landing page and launch video for Cora by rooting it in the product’s philosophy: turning the inbox from a source of chaos into something that feels calm, thoughtful—like stepping into spring.
The future of internet interfaces. Lucas believes the future of digital interfaces… Lees meer -
Being Human in the Age of Intelligent Machines - Ep. 54 with Dr. Alan Lightman
3 april 2025 · 56 min
AI forces us to reckon with what makes us human—a question caught between science and spirituality that MIT’s Dr. Alan Lightman is uniquely placed to explore.
Dr. Lightman is a physicist, bestselling novelist, and professor of the practice of humanities at MIT. As one of the first at MIT to hold a joint faculty position in both the sciences and the humanities, he’s at ease walking the line between the two disciplines.
I loved Dr. Lightman’s book Einstein’s Dreams, so I was psyched to have him on the show. We spent an hour talking about:
Being a “spiritual materialist”: Dr. Lightman’s philosophy that knowing the scientific explanation for natural phenomena—like spiderwebs and lightning bolts—deepens our experience and feeling of wonder.
The nature of consciousness: He believes that consciousness is a subjective experience emerging from the tangible activity of billions of neurons firing in our brains.
AI isn’t conscious, even though it might appear to be: AI might display manifestations of consciousness—like the ability to plan for the future—but whether it has an inner experience in the truest sense is a fundamentally different question.
Challenge your conceptions of what “natural” means: Dr. Lightman argues that since humans evolved through natural selection, everything our brains create—from eyeglasses and hearing aids to AI—can be considered “natural” as they are inevitable consequences of our naturally evolved intelligence
AI that can do more than just data retrieval: Modern neural networks begin to approximate something resembling genuine thinking because the “digital neurons” process information in complex, non-linear ways.
Evolution that blurs the lines between biology and technology: Dr. Lightman argues we’re driving our own evolution toward the “homo techno,” hybrid beings that merge human and machine; early examples include brain implants that enable paralyzed individuals to control robotic limbs.
Dr. Lightman also recently published a new book called The… Lees meer -
He’s Using AI to Optimize His Life - Ep. 53 with Jonny Miller
26 maart 2025 · 1 uur 3 min
Jonny Miller uploaded his entire life to ChatGPT to use it as the ultimate AI coach.
He created what he calls a Codex Vitae—with core personality traits, values, goals, burnout signals and more to load into ChatGPT. It hyper-customizes his responses, to help him access deep meditation states, create custom supplementation plans, and do deep research on areas of brain and body that he finds interesting.
Jonny runs a course on nervous system mastery, hosts a podcast, coaches founders and CEOs, and is building a wellness app—all using AI. As a long-time friend and writer for @every, I was psyched to have Jonny on AI & I to talk about how LLMs are expanding the breadth and depth of what he can do. We get into:
Energy as your greatest asset: Jonny’s philosophy around pursuing a non-traditional path—like us at Every—by fiercely protecting his energy and optimizing for “aliveness” instead of higher revenue figures.
ChatGPT projects for everything: His use of projects in @ChatGPTapp to organize different areas of his life; for example, he uploads his meditation journal to a Jhana project and asks it for advice when he’s struggling with the practice on a particular day.
Deep research in action: How he uses @OpenAI’s deep research to tackle practical questions about moving his family to Costa Rica, hilariously esoteric ones about whether there’s a connection between Pokémon and shamanism, and everything that lies in between.
The rise of “centaur” teams: Jonny’s belief that @kevin2kelly’s prediction around “centaurs”—human + AI teams outperforming either human or AI working alone—is becoming our reality.
This is a must watch for anyone interested in using AI for personal development, coaching, or to build systems that can understand you.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usual… Lees meer -
I Interviewed New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy about AI - Ep. 52 with Governor Phil Murphy
19 maart 2025 · 47 min
I interviewed the Governor of New Jersey Phil Murphy on AI & I.
We spent an hour talking about his vision for AI in government, economic development, and the regulatory challenges ahead. His approach is refreshingly pragmatic:
Spark real innovation at scale. Governor Murphy is laying the groundwork through an AI hub that pools the strengths of the government, academia (Princeton University), legacy tech (Microsoft), and next-gen players (CoreWeave).
Creating a place for the brightest minds to live and work. He’s making the Garden State irresistible for the best talent through walkable communities, legal recreational cannabis, and an angel investment tax credit.
AI that augments teams, instead of replacing them. The Governor sees AI as an “accelerant” that enables teams to do more with the same number of employees. He’s walking the talk by training 61,000 NJ state employees in AI to automate busy work and free them to focus on strategic tasks.
An integrated regulatory framework for AI. He believes that a technology as pervasive as AI should be regulated at a national level because the state-by-state approach could stifle innovation.
Governor Phil Murphy is the first governor I’ve ever had on the show and I was honored he took the time to come on. I was also especially excited to do this because I grew up in New Jersey! This is a must watch for anyone interested in the intersection of AI and policy.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
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Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
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Timestamps:
Introduction: 00:02:00
Why there should be a nation-wide framework to regulate AI: 00:04:31
How 61,000 state employees in New Jersey… Lees meer -
Prompt Your Way To Personal Growth - Ep. 51 with Steve Schlafman
12 maart 2025 · 56 min
Steve Schlafman is using a $20 ChatGPT subscription to expand his consciousness.
He’s doing this through:
Advanced dream work—Steve records himself talking about his dreams every morning, uploads the transcript to ChatGPT, and prompts the LLM to analyze it like a Jungian dream analyst would. The model pulls out archetypes and hidden emotions that he would’ve been oblivious to.
Creating living records of meaningful experiences—Instead of losing key insights from therapy or coaching, Steve uses the LLM to highlight emotional patterns, pick out recurring symbols, and build a personal growth timeline.
Leaning into voice interfaces—Diagnosed with ADD as a child, Steve often lost track of ideas because his brain processed information faster than he could type or write it out. AI voice interfaces free him to process information in a way that’s more natural to him.
Steve is a former VC-turned-executive coach and the founder of @downshift, the “decelerator” for founders and executives. If you think this episode is too “woo” for your liking, Steve argues that you might be over-indexing on just one way of experiencing the world.
We see the world through four windows: thinking, sensing, feeling, and imagining—and according to him, the last two are often ignored. So if your rational mind has always run the show, Steve invites you to let your feelings and imagination take the lead.
This is a must watch for anyone interested in using AI to understand themselves better—and grow.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
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Timestamps:
Introduction: 00:01:07
The power of treating your startup as an e… Lees meer -
How AI Startups Can Win With Better Strategy - Ep. 50 with Mike Maples
5 maart 2025 · 1 uur 3 min
Our sponsor for this episode is Microsoft. Want seamless collaboration without the cost? Microsoft Teams offers a robust free plan for individuals that delivers unlimited chat, 60-minute video meetings, and file sharing—all within one intuitive workspace that keeps your projects moving forward. Head to https://aka.ms/every to use Teams for free, and experience effortless collaboration, today.
Mike Maples knows how AI startups can beat incumbents with billions of dollars.
Mike—who wrote early checks to Twitter, Twitch, Okta, and Lyft, and now invests through Floodgate, the fund he cofounded—told me it's not about the smartest model, or raising the most money.
Startups can win in AI with better strategy.
AI is changing the economics of startups—both how they’re started and how they’re funded. A new breed of companies is emerging, and I invited Mike on the show to talk about how they can best strategize. Last year, Mike co-authored a book called Pattern Breakers, which is essentially a guidebook to why there’s no guidebook to building companies. I really liked it, and my colleague Evan Armstrong reviewed it for Every, so I was glad to have him on. We talk about how shifts in technology create space for smaller players to compete—even with AI giants like OpenAI—and how to capitalize on them.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
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To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Timestamps:
Introduction: 00:02:20
Innovate the business model, not just the product: 00:06:02
How startups can compete against the likes of OpenAI: 00:15:49
Mike’s take on DeepSeek: 00:19:34
Why the future has always belonged to the tinkerers: 00:21:44
Ho… Lees meer -
He Built an AI Audience Simulator. It’s the Future of Customer Research. - Ep. 49 with Michael Taylor
26 februari 2025 · 1 uur 6 min
Michael Taylor has perfected the art of getting AI to speak in tongues. He’s taught it to mimic the voices of your customers—so you can see how they would respond before you ship.
Michael is the creator of Rally, a market research tool that lets you simulate an audience of AI personas. He built a simulator that lets us A/B test Every’s headlines on an audience that mimics the real Hacker News audience. It’s become a part of my writing workflow, and I love it because you test your assumptions quickly, cheaply, and without any of the risks of putting something out into the world.
Besides Rally, Michael co-authored a book on prompt engineering for O’Reilly, and he writes a column for Every about managing AI tools like you would people. In a past life, he founded a growth marketing agency which he grew to 50 people and sold in 2020. One of the reasons I’m drawn to Michael’s work is because he has a tinkerer’s mindset. He’s always exploring the limits of what a new technology can do, and what he’s into today, everyone else will likely discover six months later. We spent an hour talking about using language models to judge your work, best practices for assessing an AI’s performance, and Michael’s flow inside Cursor. He also demos Rally live on the show, testing three different potential headlines for an Every article.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
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To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Timestamps:
Introduction: 00:01:32
AI can simulate human personalities with remarkable precision: 00:04:30
How Michael simulated a Hacker News audience: 00:08:15
Push AI to be a good judge of your work: 00:15:04
Best practices to r… Lees meer -
How Nat Eliason Made $200,000 in a Week Teaching AI - Ep. 48
12 februari 2025 · 59 min
Nat Eliason’s career arc is borderline absurd—but it works.
In the last five years, he ran an SEO agency, got into crypto, made $600,000 from a course on the note-taking tool Roam Research, flipped real estate in Austin for a 6x return, and published a book with Random House. He’s now writing a book of science fiction and running a viral course about building apps with AI.
I’ve known Nat for a long time, and I think he knows where the puck is headed better than anyone. He’ll see a new tool or trend, master it, build a business around it, and move on. Nat’s pulled it off with crypto, Roam, real estate—and now AI. His app-building course has over 800 students and racked up $200,000 in pre-sales in one week.
Nat was one of the first guests I had on the podcast and I was delighted to have him on again. We spent an hour talking about how coding with AI is creating new behaviors in programming, Nat’s best practices for using the coding tool Cursor, and his take on the future of writing with AI.
This episode is a must-watch for writers, creators, and anyone interested in the future of product building.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Timestamps:
Introduction: 00:01:45
The origins of Nat’s viral course on building apps with AI: 00:10:15
How coding with AI has evolved over the last two years: 00:17:16
Nat creates an app using Composer, Cursor’s AI assistant: 00:20:52
Tactical tips for coding with Cursor: 00:24:36
How coding with AI is creating new behaviors in programming: 00:27:36
What excites Nat the most about the future of AI: 00:31:11
A demo of Hubbard, the AI editor Nat bui… Lees meer -
Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch on What Comes After Coding - Ep. 47
5 februari 2025 · 56 min
Guillermo Rauch is one of the most prolific coders of this generation.
But he doesn’t think of himself as a coder anymore.
Coding, he says, is a specific skill that AI is becoming great at. Instead, he thinks the future of coding is more holistic, full-stack engineers who can ideate, design, and execute all together.
Guillermo is the founder and CEO of Vercel, the creator of NextJS, and SocketIO. We spent an hour talking about the future of software development in an AI world—and the meta-skills that are essential for the coders of today to master—in order to use tomorrow’s tools to their fullest extent.
Here are a few takeaways:
One of the most important keys to his success is taste—and developing taste is all about paying better attention to everything you experience day to day.
He’s great at recognizing bleeding-edge technologies with extremely practical applications but that have bad user experiences. If you can learn to recognize those and build with them, you might build the next NextJs or SocketIO.
He’s already seeing enterprises use Vercel’s AI coding copilot v0 to replace all of their programming—they just send v0 demos back and forth to iterate on new prototypes.
Why prototype cultures are becoming common in AI—and the benefits of written cultures like Amazon vs. prototype cultures like Apple for different kinds of companies.
For developers building frameworks, always put the product first; a framework in isolation without a “customer zero” is never going to be a good tool.
The theory of “recursive founder mode”—if you want to build a scalable business, you have to scale yourself by creating an atmosphere that nurtures talent and ambition.
AI tools are shifting software toward consumption-based billing models, making us capital allocators who decide how much compute the AI consumes.
The future of AI is agents with the taste, knowledge, and tools to perform specialized tasks.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share… Lees meer -
How to Prepare for AGI According to Reid Hoffman - Ep. 46
29 januari 2025 · 1 uur 9 min
AGI is coming. Reid Hoffman just wrote the book on how to prepare.
According to Reid, every major tech breakthrough (the written word, the printing press, the telephone) triggered mass fear. But, contrary to our worries, new technology tends to enhance human agency—even more so, if you know how to use it well.
In Superagency, his book that was released yesterday, Reid examines how we’ve historically adopted new technologies and focuses on AI’s potential to increase our agency—the ability to make decisions that affect outcomes. He wrote the book for two audiences: anyone who is curious, or even skeptical, about AI; and technologists who are building in AI, with the hope that they will think about human agency as a design principle for their products. As someone who straddles both worlds, I read the book and really liked it.
Beyond being a prolific author, Reid is the cofounder of LinkedIn, Inflection AI, and Manas AI; a partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners; an early backer and board member of OpenAI; and an award-winning podcaster—and I was pleased to invite him onto AI & I again, this time in person.
We recorded an hour-long conversation, going deep on:
The notion of human agency, how our sense of agency shapes our response to new technologies, and its interplay with uncertainty
Why Reid believes that private commons and equitable access to AI will be beneficial for society at large
How the history of AI mirrors a philosophical shift in how we understand intelligence, from trying to program explicit rules about how thinking works, to building systems that learn patterns from data
Reid’s take on how the next decade of AI will involve a play between rule-based systems and pattern-matching ones
It’s a must-watch for anyone who wants to help build a more human future with AI.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
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The Venture Capitalist Who Finds the Best AI Products—Before They Win - Ep. 45 with Nabeel Hyatt
22 januari 2025 · 1 uur 2 min
As a general partner at Spark Capital, Nabeel Hyatt backs just one or two companies each year.
But when he does invest, Nabeel picks winners. He was an early investor in Discord, video editor Descript, self-driving startup Cruise (acquired by General Motor for over $1 billion), and, recently, AI note-taking app Granola.
Nabeel’s investment thesis is to look for products like the Japanese toilet.
Don’t fret—Spark Capital hasn’t pivoted into the sanitaryware industry. Nabeel isn’t looking for startups that are disrupting plumbing.
Rather, just like Japanese toilets, he’s looking for products that delight users with new experiences they didn’t know they wanted—and if his past investments are anything to go by, Nabeel has a good eye for that.
On my recent trip to San Francisco, I sat down with Nabeel to talk about the qualities shared by remarkable products and the founders that build them, why he chooses not to invest in more than a couple of startups a year, and how he’s actually using AI in his daily life. Nabeel is one of my favorite people in AI, and this is one of my favorite recent conversations. It’s a must watch for founders who want to build useful AI products with soul.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
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Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
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Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Nabeel Hyatt: @nabeel, https://nabeelhyatt.com/
Spark Capital: https://www.sparkcapital.com/
The piece Chris Pedregal wrote for Every: How to Build a Truly Useful AI Product
Chris Pedregal on AI & I: 🎧 The Secret to Building Sticky AI Products
The AI tools Nabeel talks about: Windsurf, Wordware Lees meer -
An Inside Look at Building an Email Client in 3 Months - Ep. 44 with Kieran Klaassen, Brandon Gell
15 januari 2025 · 1 uur 15 min
Building an email client used to take many years and millions of dollars.
But Every’s Kieran Klaassen built Cora—a totally new way to manage your inbox with AI—in just 3 months. He even shipped the original MVP of the product in a single day—something that just wasn’t possible before the current state of generative AI.
Now, there are almost 10,000 people on the waitlist for Cora, and we’re onboarding new users every single day.
Every’s head of Studio Brandon Gell and I worked closely with Kieran as he built Cora, and to kick off my podcast, AI and I, in 2025, I invited both of them on the show to talk about it. We go behind the scenes, getting into how Kieran built the product with Cursor, o1, and o1 Pro, what we’re learning as we onboard new users every day, and the future of Cora and of Every as a multi-modal media company.
This is a must watch for anyone curious about our approach to building with AI at Every.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Sign up for the Cora waitlist: https://cora.computer/
Learn more about Cora: Introducing Cora: Manage Your Inbox With AI
Kieran Klaassen: @kieranklaassen
Brandon Gell: @bran_don_gell Lees meer -
How AI Will Change Science Forever - Ep. 43 with Alice Albrecht
18 december 2024 · 1 uur
AI is going to change science forever.
Small scale studies will give way to large scale open data gathering efforts. We’ll shift from seeking broad general theories to making contextual predictions in individual cases. The traditional research paper will change fundamentally.
That’s why I had Alice Albrecht on the show. Few people straddle the worlds of science and AI like she does: She holds a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from Yale and is a machine learning researcher with almost a decade of experience. In 2021, she founded re:collect, an app that aimed to augment human intelligence with AI. It was acqui-hired by news curation app SmartNews in September of this year, and she is now the senior director of AI product.
We discuss the contours of this new paradigm of science: the growing importance of data in scientific discovery, how AI makes N-of-1 studies imperative—when they’re normally seen as unscientific, the case for big tech to open-source their data for research, and the power of unbundling data from interpretations, in both science and media. Here is a link to the episode transcript.
In January of this year, we published Alice’s thesis about how augmenting human intelligence with AI is more effective than attempting to achieve super intelligence through standalone AI systems, and in a happy coincidence, she’s our last podcast guest of 2024. Thank you for listening, and we’ll see you in the new year.
In the meantime, this is a must-watch for anyone interested in how AI is changing the future of scientific research.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
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Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Alice Albrecht: @AliceAlbrecht
Th… Lees meer -
The Secret to Building Sticky AI Products - Ep. 42 with Chris Pedregal
12 december 2024 · 1 uur 1 min
Chris Pedregal knows how to build AI products that people love.
Chris is the cofounder and CEO of Granola, an AI-powered notepad for meetings. We use it for many of our meetings at Every—the app listens in on the conversation, transcribes it in the background, and when the meeting ends, creates automated notes and a shareable transcript for anyone who missed it. If you take notes during the meeting, Granola polishes them to be more organized and complete.
Granola is one of my favorite consumer AI products because it’s equal parts delightful and useful. It’s not a bland chat interface. It’s not an over-the-top demo that you wouldn’t use more than once. Granola is a product with “soul,” imbued with the team’s vision for how AI can work alongside you to turn discursive conversations into clear insights. And I’m not the only one who thinks so—since Granola’s launch in May 2024, its user base has grown by 5x, with around 5,000 weekly active users, and half the people who try the app still use it 10 weeks later for an average of six meetings a week. The company also recently raised a $20 million Series A.
Granola has the marks of being built by a thoughtful, intentional team, which is why I was excited to have Chris on the show. We spent an hour talking about Chris’s product development philosophy, the role of intuition in making products with “soul” and how he balances this with user feedback, how you can become a better product thinker, and the kinds of consumer AI startups Chris thinks will succeed. Here is a link to the episode transcript.
This is a must-watch for anyone interested in building valuable, sticky AI products that users will love.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow … Lees meer -
Do 60-Minute Coding Tasks in 60 Seconds—With AI - Ep. 41 with Steve Krouse
4 december 2024 · 1 uur 1 min
Here’s the most compelling benchmark of AI progress: A task that took 60 minutes a year ago now takes 60 seconds.
In January 2024, researcher Geoffrey Litt and I spent an hour coaxing ChatGPT to build a simple app on this podcast. Nearly 12 months later, Steve Krouse and I built the same app with one prompt in less than minute.
Steve is the cofounder and CEO of Val Town, a cloud-based platform for developers to write, share, and deploy code directly in the browser. In this episode, we used Townie, an AI assistant integrated into Val Town, to build an app that would keep track of time on the podcast, take notes, and generate more questions for the guest.
Townie had generated the app even before Steve could finish describing it on the show, a mark of how much AI has evolved over the last year. As the founder of a growing startup, Steve tells me his contrarian take on why he isn’t focused on the needs of the non-technical AI programmer, betting instead on being the platform sophisticated developers turn to for backend infrastructure. He also tells me how he started programming and how it continues to shape his vision for Val Town. Here is a link to the episode transcript. (Disclosure: I’m a small investor in Val Town.)
This is a must-watch for founders building AI-powered developer tools, and anyone interested in the future of programming.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Steve Krouse: https://stevekrouse.com/, @stevekrouse
Val Town: https://www.val.town/
Townie, the AI assistant integrated into Val Town: https://www.val.town/townie/signup?next=%2Ftownie
Pieces on Val Town’s blog about how the… Lees meer -
How We Incubate and Launch New Products With AI - Ep. 40 with Danny Aziz, Brandon Gell
27 november 2024 · 1 uur 1 min
Over the last few months at Every, we’ve launched two new AI products with tens of thousands of users, and we’ll release a third one before the end of the year. The weird thing is: We’re a media company with less than 10 full-time employees, and we’re mostly bootstrapped.
That’s not how things are supposed to work in startups.
When we were first starting Every Studio six months ago, we were told a million reasons why it wouldn’t work: divided focus, not enough money, and the biggest one—it would be too hard to find talented people to run the products we build.
Yesterday, we proved out one of the biggest risks to this strategy: We launched a brand-new version of our AI product Spiral with Danny Aziz as its general manager.
Danny left a $200,000-a-year salary to come chase his dreams with us. So we decided to take this moment to pull back the curtain and ask, Why? Why did he join us? And why is the model we’ve built working so far? What have we learned about what happens when you mix media, software, and AI in a single organization?
That’s why I invited Danny and Brandon Gell, Every’s head of Studio, on the show. We get into the details of Every’s business model, how new technology and the right people can make the flywheel turn, the power of learning by doing and building from real needs, and where each of us sees ourselves one year from now. Here is a link to the episode transcript.
This is a must-watch for anyone who wants to build a business on their own terms, and have a lot of fun while doing it.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Danny Aziz: @DannyAziz97
Brandon Gell: @bran_don_gell
Try … Lees meer -
His GPT Wrapper Has Half a Million Users—And Keeps Growing - Ep. 39 with Vicente Silveira
20 november 2024 · 1 uur 3 min
Everyone told Vicente Silveira that his startup—a GPT wrapper—would fail. Instead, one year later, it’s thriving—with about 500,000 registered users, nearly 3,000 paying subscribers, and over 2 million conversations in the GPT store.
Vicente is the cofounder and CEO of AI PDF, a tool to help you summarize, chat with, and organize your PDF files. When OpenAI allowed users to upload documents to ChatGPT, the consensus was that his startup, and all the other GPT wrappers out there, were toast. Even when some of his competitors closed up shop, Vicente believed they could still create value for users as a specialized tool. The AI PDF team kept building.
Today, AI PDF is one of the most popular AI-powered PDF readers in the world—and they did it with a five-person team and a friends-and-family funding round.
I sat down with Vicente to understand, in granular detail, the success of AI PDF.
Vicente explains how staying small and specialized is a key strategic advantage for his business. We get into why lean startups are better positioned than companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to create cutting-edge solutions for users, the role early adopters of technology play in shaping the market for new products, Vicente’s candid take on raising capital as a growing startup, and his thoughts on the emerging role of AI managers who will be responsible for overseeing AI agents. We demo an agent integrated into AI PDF, prompting it to analyze a bunch of recent articles from my column Chain of Thought and write a bulleted list of the core thesis statements—and even pit AI PDF against Perplexity live on the show.
This is a must-watch for small teams building profitable companies at the bleeding edge of AI.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
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Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to… Lees meer -
How to Win With Prompt Engineering - Ep. 38 with Jared Zoneraich
13 november 2024 · 1 uur 2 min
Prompt engineering isn’t just about telling AI to solve your problems—it’s about knowing which ones to solve.
Yet there’s a mismatch between the people who can identify the right problems—experts with deep domain knowledge—and the technical infrastructure required for developing and refining prompts. Jared Zoneraich, the cofounder and CEO of prompt engineering platform PromptLayer, is bridging the gap with a platform on which non-technical experts can manage, deploy, and evaluate prompts quickly.
The role of human prompt engineers, however, has been the topic of controversy, with some arguing that AI can optimize prompts better than us, while others suggest that more capable LLMs eliminate the need for meticulously crafted prompts altogether. I spent an hour talking to Jared about why he believes prompt engineering isn’t becoming obsolete. He also tells me everything he’s learned about writing a good prompt and what the future of AI tools looks like. Here is a link to the episode transcript.
This is a must-watch for prompt engineers, people interested in building with AI systems, or anyone who wants to generate predictably good responses from LLMs.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Jared Zoneraich: @imjaredz
PromptLayer: @promptlayer, https://www.promptlayer.com/
A couple of Steven Wolfram’s articles on ChatGPT: What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?, ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”! Lees meer -
How Notion Cofounder Simon Last Builds AI for Millions of Users - Ep. 37 with Simon Last
8 november 2024 · 56 min
Notion cofounder Simon Last told me everything he’s learned from integrating an AI application into a platform that has over 100 million users.
Simon likes to keep a low profile, even though he’s the driving force behind Notion AI, one of the most widely scaled AI applications in the world.
In this episode, we get into how AI changes the way he builds software since the days he cofounded Notion with Ivan Zhao in 2013. He talks about the challenges that arise because AI doesn’t follow the deterministic rules of traditional software, and how he designs evals to build AI systems that are reliable at scale. Simon tells me about the AI tools he uses to code and how he would think about rebuilding Notion from scratch with them. He also shares his thoughts on how the growing capabilities of AI are redefining human roles, and argues that we have the responsibility to shape technology to align with our collective vision of the future.
This is a must-watch for anyone interested in building reliable AI products at scale.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Simon Last: @simonlast
Notion AI: https://www.notion.so/product/ai
The AI code editor Simon uses: Cursor
OpenAI’s definition of AGI that Simon ascribes to: https://openai.com/charter/ Lees meer -
How Union Square Ventures Built an AI Brain for Venture Capital - Ep. 36 with Matt Cynamon
30 oktober 2024 · 1 uur 9 min
Union Square Ventures is building an AI operating system to support their investment team.
But it’s not what you think: It’s a constellation of AI tools that captures and synthesizes the firm's collective wisdom. It’s evolving every day, and Matt Cynamon is the mad scientist in charge
Matt calls himself a “regular” at USV. In practice that means he’s responsible for running experiments with AI for the firm. As an inherently curious person with the professional obligation to tinker, he’s built a suite of tools for the firm, including:
The Librarian, a chatbot trained on around 15,000 articles from USV’s blog
Portfolio Tracker, a GPT that analyzes the investments made by the firm
Meeting Notes, a tool that makes it possible for team members to interact with meetings
I sat down with Matt to talk about how AI is enabling him to bring his ideas to life as a generalist, get demos of the tools listed above, and exchange notes on all the other projects he has in the works at USV. We edit actionable insights extracted by an AI from meetings at USV and prepare them to be posted on the firm’s X handle live on the show. We even try out an art project at USV’s office called The Dream Machine, which generates art from conversations. Here’s a link to the episode transcript.
This is a must-watch for anyone interested in riding the AI wave by learning how to ship useful products quickly.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
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TIMESTAMPS:
Introduction: 00:00:52
How Matt became in charge of everything AI at USV: 00:01:56
How AI empowers generalists to be creators: 00:06:22
The Librarian, a chatbot trained on everything USV has published: 00:10:41
Portfolio Tr… Lees meer -
Building AI That Builds Itself - Ep. 35 with Yohei Nakajima
23 oktober 2024 · 58 min
Yohei Nakajima leads a double life.
By day, he’s a general partner of a small venture firm, Untapped Capital.
By night, he’s one of the most prolific internet tinkerers in AI. (He also sometimes works on automating his job as a venture capitalist.)
He’s the creator of BabyAGI (@babyAGI_), the first open-source autonomous agent that went viral in March 2023. Yohei has since released seven iterations of BabyAGI, a coding agent called Ditto, a framework for building autonomous agents, and, most recently, BabyAGI 2o, a self-building autonomous agent.
I sat down with Yohei to talk about:
What feeds Yohei’s drive to create new tools
The evolution of BabyAGI into a more powerful version of itself
What Yohei learned about himself by tinkering on the internet
Yohei’s personal philosophy about how the tools we build our extensions of ourselves
Why founders in AI should think about their products from a modular lens, by addressing immediate problems while enabling growth in the future
Yohei’s insight into a future where models will train themselves as you use them
We experiment with Ditto live on the show, using the tool to build a game of Snake and a handy scheduling app. Yohei also screenshares a demo of BabyAGI 2o in action.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Timestamps:
Introduction: 00:00:59
BabyAGI and its evolution into a more powerful tool: 00:02:26
How better models are changing the way Yohei builds: 00:05:00
Using code building agent Ditto to build a game of Snake: 00:08:10
The ins and outs of how Ditto works: 00:13:24
How Yohei gets a lot done in little time: 00:1… Lees meer -
How to Use AI to Become a Learning Machine - Ep. 34 with Simon Eskildsen
11 september 2024 · 1 uur 14 min
Simon Eskildsen is a learning machine.
I first interviewed him in 2020 about how he leveled up from being an intern at Shopify to becoming the company’s director of production engineering by reading and applying insights from hundreds of books.
A lot has changed over the last four years. Language models have made it possible to access and contextualize information faster, easier, and more cheaply than ever before—and in this episode, Simon and I talk about how this changes the way he learns.
Simon is now the cofounder and CEO of AI startup turbopuffer, which is building a search engine that makes vector search—an approach to information retrieval that uses machine learning to gather context—easy and affordable to run at scale.
We spent an hour talking about how he leverages LLMs’ contextual intelligence to supercharge his learning, such as helping him pick up new words as a non-native English speaker, do odd jobs to maintain his rural cabin in Quebec, and articulate technical concepts in legalese. As we talk, we screenshare through his Anki setup, including the flashcard template he finds most useful, and the custom AI commands he’s created in productivity software Raycast. Simon tells me about the clutch of AI tools he experiments with for journaling, writing, and coding, as well as his thoughts on how language models will fundamentally reshape the way we learn. Here’s a link to the transcript of this episode.
This is a must-watch for note-taking aficionados and anyone who wants to supercharge their learning with AI.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Simon Eskildsen: @Sirupsen
Simon’s start… Lees meer