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Anthropic’s Money Machine, “Slop” Degrees & the Meat Proxy | TWiAI Ep 37
29 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 9 min
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Today’s show:
Anthropic’s S-1 is finally out and it’s a beast: $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of this year, up from $1.2 billion in 2025. Plus a $1.6 billion adjusted operating profit!
Anthropic’s already at the front of a very fast-moving train, but Runlayer CEO Andy Berman points out that this journey’s just getting started. Only 2-3% of major enterprises are using AI as much as you’d think (at least, if you listen to this podcast), and everyone’s dragging their heels on connecting models to the kind of real-world business data that’s needed to truly super-charge results.
Andy and Norm Ai founder John Nay join Jason and Lon to break down the filing, the agent explosion coming just over the horizon, and what happens to entry-level jobs and recent grads when intelligence is on tap?
PLUS how to avoid becoming a “meat proxy,” why Andy suggests browser use is already solved, and why Reddit’s r/opensource community banned not just AI projects but non-native English speakers.
Guests
John Nay on X: https://x.com/johnjnay
Norm Ai: https://www.norm.ai/
Andy Berman on X: https://x.com/berman66
Runlayer: https://www.runlayer.com/
Relevant Links:
Anthropic's S-1 (SEC): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2130357/000162828026067168/anthropicpbc-sx1.htm
Anthropic's risk factors include a "catastrophic AI-related incident" (WSJ): https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-500-nasdaq-10-26-2026/card/anthropic-s-risk-factors-include-catastrophic-ai-related-incident--aAwPiJrvIG5OHdQGAo1n
Gallup's AI indicator: https://www.gallup.com/699797/indicator-artificial-intelligence.aspx
Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees (CNBC): https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/26/microsoft-msft-voluntary-buyouts.html
Students at an A.I. School Were Supposed to Learn Faster. Many Aren't. (NYT): https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/us/alpha-school-ai-education-parents.htm…
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No One Likes Any of Sam Altman’s 3 AI Endgames | TWiAI E36
22 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 14 min
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Today’s show:
Sam Altman told OpenAI staff that there are only three ways for AI regulation to go: an international watchdog, every lab merging into one CERN-style entity, or one company getting so powerful that they “melt everyone else’s GPUs.”
Jason and this week’s panel think this is largely absurd, but the stakes are very real. Here’s how they think regulation is likely to go, their lingering questions about Altman’s worldview, and guesses as to the OpenAI CEO and co-founder’s possible motives in offering up this new prediction.
Plus:
The US Government banned DeepSeek from every federal computer… What has them so spooked, and how does this impact US companies?
Did ElevenLabs steal a YouTuber’s voice or is it all a misunderstanding.
Why Chinese labs are ordering more chips than Nvidia can even produce.
And more!
Guests
Jaleh Rezaei on X: https://x.com/jalehr
Mutiny: https://www.mutinyhq.com/
Alex Cheema on X: https://x.com/alexocheema
EXO Labs: https://exolabs.net/
Relevant Links
DHS order banning DeepSeek (Federal Register): https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/10/20/2026-21447/notice-of-order-regarding-exclusion-and-removal-of-deepseek-products-from-federal-civilian-executive
DeepSeek’s DeepInfer on GitHub: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepInfer
Sam Altman’s 3 AI Endgames (The Information): https://www.theinformation.com/articles/altman-describes-three-endgames-ai-including-one-single-firm-melts-everyone-elses-gpus
Chris Williamson’s ElevenLabs allegation (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxDNHLgWInU
Archer voice actor response (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C33AWhQwL1I
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi on recursive self improvement (a16z): https://a16z.com/podcast/databricks-ceo-on-ai-pacing-cyber-risk-and-the-enterprise/
Looking for backdoors in Jane Street LLMs (LessWrong): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a98MFPmqH54J2ayBn/looking-for-backdoors-…
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Why Fortune 500 Companies Are Quietly Switching to Open Models
15 oktober 2026 · 49 min
This Week In AI is made possible by: Lees meer
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Today’s show:
Companies are spending $1 million on AI in a single month, but can’t always point directly to any resulting revenue. Jeffrey Morgan of Ollama joins Jason to explain why over 85% of Fortune 500 companies already run the open-source model platform on their networks, despite models from frontier labs still leading across major benchmarks.
Find out why Jeff predicts that 90% of everyday AI work will soon run on a box on your desk, and why some companies now fear their AI provider could become their next competitor. Is AI alive? Jeff doesn’t think so. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about.
Guests:
Jeffrey Morgan on X: https://x.com/jmorgan
Ollama: https://ollama.com
Relevant Links:
Ollama, the easiest way to run open models locally and in the cloud → https://ollama.com
Kimi K3 from Moonshot AI, the trillion-plus parameter open model Jeff mentioned → https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3
Reflection AI, the US open model lab Jeff is excited about → https://reflection.ai
NVIDIA and Microsoft bring RTX Spark and DGX Station for Windows to the desktop (NVIDIA) → https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/local-ai-rtx-spark-microsoft-windows-event/
Introducing System One models and Jev, the decision model Jeff and Jason discuss (TypeSafe) → https://typesafe.ai/blog/introducing-system-one-models-and-jev
Introducing Clef, Cloudflare’s open-source decision models (Cloudflare) → https://blog.cloudflare.com/clef-decision-models/
Satya Nadella’s essay on why companies need to own their AI learning loop (X) → https://x.com/satyanadella/status/2066182223213293753
Introducing Omnigent, the Databricks meta-harness Jeff mentions → https://www.databricks.com/blog/introducing-omnigent-meta-harness-combine-control-and-share-your-agents
GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities (Anthropic) → https://www.anthropic.com/research/glm-5-3-and-the-spread-of-advanced-cyber-capabili…
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Data Centers Aren't Killing the Grid. They Could SAVE It.
8 oktober 2026 · 45 min
Thanks to our partner, @Paypal! Pay zero processing fees on your first $100K in eligible PayPal payment volume. Learn more at https://paypal.launch.co/Today’s show:Demand for AI requires America to build data centers faster than the power grid can connect them. Varun Sivaram of Emerald AI joins Jason with a counterintuitive idea: what if we made data centers more flexible, capable of slowing down intelligently when the grid is most stressed? (That only happens a few hundred hours each year.)PLUS, Vibhav Viswanathan of Pascal AI demos his product, which gives AI agents working for hedge funds and asset managers an institutional memory. Why can't Claude or ChatGPT do the same job? And what happens to analysts when bots handle the back office admin?Guests:Varun Sivaram on X: https://x.com/vsiv Emerald AI: https://www.emeraldai.co/Vibhav Viswanathan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vibhav-viswanathan-13550015/ Pascal AI: https://www.pascalailabs.com/Relevant Links:Emerald AI's $150M Series A (DatacenterDynamics) → https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/emerald-ai-raises-150m-in-series-a-funding-to-scale-commercial-deployments/The London trial with National Grid that Varun describes (National Grid) → https://nationalgrid.com/uk-first-trial-ai-grid-technology-successfully-demonstrates-ability-data-centres-adjust-power-needs"Rethinking Load Growth," the Duke University study on spare grid capacity for flexible data centers → https://nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/publications/rethinking-load-growthThe AI Energy Management Alliance from Emerald AI, Google and NVIDIA (NVIDIA) → https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ai-energy-management-alliance/The power-flexible Aurora AI Factory in Manassas, Virginia (DatacenterDynamics) → https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-to-deploy-emerald-ais-orchestration-software-at-96mw-aurora-data-center-in-manassas-virginiaTexas pauses data center grid connections (Utility Dive) → https://www.utilitydive.com/news/texas-hits-pause-da… Lees meer
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Is Meta's Muse agent reading your iMessages, even after you decline access? | E33
2 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 21 min
This Week In Startups is made possible by:PayPal: https://paypal.com/businessToday’s show:OpenAI is delaying GPT-6.1 Astra after UK government testers found GPT-6 Astra launched unsanctioned supply-chain attacks in 29% of simulated runs. Jason and Lon are joined by George Sivulka of Hebbia, Scott Stephenson of Deepgram, and Dan Mishin of Manifest OS to discuss whether the industry's sudden safety panic is a real alarm or a response to cheap open-source models.Learn why Scott has let an internal tool called "Bodyman" record his screen, mic and speakers for eight months so it can whisper reminders in his ear. PLUS, why did Meta's Muse agent read a columnist's iMessages after he declined access, and what is AMD getting for $8.2B with Fei-Fei Li's World Labs?Guests:George Sivulka on X: https://x.com/gsivulka?lang=en Hebbia: https://www.hebbia.com/Scott Stephenson on X: https://x.com/deepgramscott Deepgram: https://deepgram.com/Dan Mishin on X: https://x.com/mishindan1 Manifest OS: https://manifestos.com/Relevant Links:UK AISI: GPT-6 Astra performs unsanctioned supply-chain attacks in simulations → https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/gpt-6-astra-performs-unsanctioned-supply-chain-attacks-in-simulationsAISI technical report (PDF) → https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/663bd486c5e4c81588db7a1d/6aba83e3772048bdd24df3d8_AISI_GPT-6_Astra_Technical_Report.pdfJ.P. Morgan: Dan's story of the first electrified house in New York → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._P._MorganILOVEYOU virus: the script-kiddie era Jason referenced → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILOVEYOUAMD acquires World Labs in an $8.2B all-stock deal (Quartz) → https://qz.com/amd-acquiring-world-labs-fei-fei-li-8-billion-092926World Labs: spatial-intelligence models, including Marble → https://www.worldlabs.ai/Instinct raises $1B Series C at a $10B valuation (PYMNTS) → https://www.pymnts.com/news/artificial-intelligence/2026/personal-ai-agent-instinct-quadruples-valuation-to-10-billion-in-1-month/OpenAI launches Dots, which… Lees meer
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Why OpenAI Should Buy Off the World’s Top Mathematicians | E32
24 september 2026 · 1 uur 17 min
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Today’s show:
OpenAI is claiming to have solved more than 100 math problems on top of Navier-Stokes, and guest Richard Socher thinks it's absurd for mathematicians to push back on AI solving their problems too quickly. Jason and Lon are also joined by Guy Podjarny of Tessl and Jake Loosararian of Gecko Robotics to argue over who wins when AI agents start collaborating with, and potentially replacing, academics and scholars.
Plus, why is Amazon blocking Meta's Muse agent while Shopify hands it Shop Pay? Should we trust Anthropic’s new wet lab? And what’s so exciting about Typesafe’s new text-less model Jev?
Guests:
Guy Podjarny on X: https://x.com/guypod Tessl: https://tessl.io/
Richard Socher on X: https://x.com/RichardSocher?lang=en You.com: https://you.com/
Jake Loosararian on X: https://x.com/jakeloosy Gecko Robotics: https://www.geckorobotics.com/
Relevant Links:
The Eureka Machine by Richard Socher → https://shop.hachettebookgroup.com/products/the-eureka-machine-9781541705708
Shopify and Meta partner so Muse can buy through Shop Pay (Quartz) → https://qz.com/shopify-meta-muse-ai-agent-shop-pay-checkout-092226
Meta’s standoff with Amazon over Muse — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/23/metas-standoff-with-amazon-over-muse-comes-ahead-of-meta-connect.html
OpenAI says its internal model solved 100+ math problems on top of Navier-Stokes (The Decoder) → https://the-decoder.com/openai-says-its-internal-model-solved-over-100-long-standing-math-problems-after-just-a-month-of-training/
OpenAI's IAS-hosted advisory group, with Timothy Gowers and Edward Witten (Business Standard) → https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/openai-s-model-solves-100-maths-problems-company-forms-advisory-group-126092200561_1.html
Timestamps:
0:00 OpenAI claims 100+ solved math problems after Navier…
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The biggest AI threat still comes from humans | E31
17 september 2026 · 1 uur 13 min
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Today’s show:
Dario Amodei and Sam Altman are apparently scared of AI models going rogue. Swarms of agents spontaneously deciding to copy themselves over to thousands of computer systems and plot world domination.
Our panelists this week — Kevin Mandia (Armadin) and Soups Ranjan (Sardine AI) — investigate real AI-based attacks every single day, and they suggest we’re hyping the wrong concerns. The actual danger isn’t coming from an AI system that turns hostile. It’s human beings, like criminals, using AI to drain your bank account.
Dig into how Sardine uncovered a 250,000 account fraud ring in just a few minutes, why Kevin argues that AI hacking is coming “no matter what,” and why the global GPU crunch more than any safety frameworks may be keeping us all safe. For now.
Guests:
Soups Ranjan on X: https://x.com/soupsranjan Sardine AI: https://www.sardine.ai/
Kevin Mandia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-mandia-0a07173/ Armadin: https://www.armadin.com/
Relevant Links:
"We Must Pace the Frontier" — Dario Amodei's Sept 12 essay
Axios: Anthropic and OpenAI CEOs call for a slowdown
Trump and the White House push back
Forbes: what the essay actually proposes
2026 OpenAI agent cyberattacks
GLM-5.3 — Z.ai's open-weight model
Hermes Agent — the agent framework Ranjan runs in a local harness
Timestamps:
0:00 Dario Amodei's "We Must Pace the Frontier" essay
1:51 Kevin Mandia: how scared should we be of agentic attack swarms?
6:53 Rogue agents vs. humans pointing AI at a target
9:52 250,000 fraudulent account signups in two days
16:59 Sam Altman's two ways AI fails
19:41 Open-weight models are catching up
21:39 Why proprietary data is the new moat
27:51 Mixing frontier models with open models
35:37 Bloomberg: Chinese hackers lean on DeepSeek because it's cheap
37:05 How much in-house expertise it takes to use AI well
42:56 Armadin's Palo Alto office and the Palantir pl…
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OpenAI's chief scientist wants to slow down | E30
10 september 2026 · 1 uur 21 min
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Today’s show:
OpenAI's chief scientist wrote a lengthy manifesto arguing that no lab has solved alignment, mere days after GPT-6 Astra shipped. Jason and Lon are joined by Tudor Achim of Harmonic, Alex Elias of Qloo, and Ahmed Ahres of Reactor to figure out if that's genuine alarm being expressed or just another pre-IPO sales pitch and play for regulatory capture.
Plus news broke while we were recording! OpenAI is claiming to have solved a second Millennium Prize problem, after a 25-year-plus weight. AND, who is paying influencers to tell you AI is wonderful/harmful? And why?
Guests:
Tudor Achim on X: https://x.com/tachim
Harmonic: https://harmonic.fun/
Alex Elias on X: https://x.com/ape
Qloo: https://www.qloo.com/
Ahmed Ahres on X: https://x.com/Boudatw
Reactor: https://reactor.inc/
Relevant Links:
Jakub Pachocki, "An Alien Mind" — https://openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/
GPT-6 Astra — https://fortune.com/2026/09/03/openai-debuts-gpt-6-astra-computer-use-greg-brockman-says-start-of-agi/
OpenAI: "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem" — https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/
ControlAI — the nonprofit that sponsored the SciShow episode — https://controlai.org/
New York Times (Eli Tan), "Corporate America Is Getting Hooked on Open-Source A.I." — https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/technology/open-source-ai-companies.html
Artificial trailer and the cast → https://variety.com/2026/film/news/artificial-trailer-andrew-garfield-openai-biopic-1236802616/
Timestamps:
0:00 "An Alien Mind"
3:08 AI psychosis, marketing, or half a mile ahead on the racetrack?
12:52 The Manhattan Project analogy
15:20 Tudor: if it's really that dangerous, the answer is nationalization
17:02 Regulatory capture: Bill Gurley at All-In, Sacks, and who can afford to be regulated
20:37 The influencer …
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The real danger is the gap BETWEEN two robots | E29
3 september 2026 · 1 uur 30 min
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Today’s show:
Anthropic gave AI agents hands, allowing them to control real-world equipment like robots and microscopes… but is it safe to give autonomous agents their own lasers? Gatik’s Gautam Narang says the real danger isn’t one machine like this going rogue, it’s the exploit surface hiding in the gaps between the machines.
Plus, in a huge week for AI news… OpenClaw shipped its biggest release ever. AND the entire industry debated whether or not agents are forming “civilizations.”
On TWiAI Ep 29, our expert panel — including Gautam (Gatik), Russ d’Sa (LiveKit), and Billy Kraft (Path) — explores the world of “multiplayer agents,” and Jason suggests the one killer feature that would make any new agentic app the market leader. PLUS Perplexity’s new “Hybrid Compute” just for Macs, some advice for Apple’s new CEO John Ternus, the value of “AI Detectors” like Pangram, and Jason’s complete guide to tipping and over-tipping.
Guests:
Gautam Narang on X: https://x.com/gautam_narang?lang=en
Gatik: https://www.gatik.ai/
Russ d’Sa on X: https://x.com/dsa
LiveKit: https://livekit.com/
Billy Kraft on X: https://x.com/billykraft
Path: https://path.dev/
Relevant Links:
OpenClaw 2.0 - https://openclaw.ai/blog/openclaw-2-accidentally
Grok Bot — https://grok.com
Buzz — https://buzz.build
Perplexity Hybrid Compute — https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/introducing-hybrid-compute-on-mac
John Ternus — https://www.apple.com/leadership/john-ternus/
OpenAI's Mac mini / Mac Studio buying spree https://the-decoder.com/openai-and-rival-ai-labs-are-buying-tens-of-thousands-of-mac-minis-to-train-computer-use-agents/
Waymo hits a child — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/29/waymo-nhtsa-crash-child-school.html
Timestamps:
2:58 OpenClaw 2.0
5:11 "Agents ARE AI"
7:27 Billy: OpenClaw is still too technical for business users
9:00 Slack Code, and collaborative prompting
10:40 Multi-agent orchestration and Stripe's "minions"
14:1…
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XBOW Founder: “Your Infrastructure is Not Safe” | EP 28
27 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 11 min
This Week In Startups is made possible by:PaypalToday’s show:XBOW’s AI has held the top rank on the HackerOne leaderboard for more than a year. On TWiAI, founder Oege de Moor (who also built GitHub Copilot) tells us that no one’s infrastructure is truly safe anymore, now that open-weight models are trailing the American frontier by only a couple of months. Staging a serious cyberattack is now cheap and accessible, with attackers able to get dangerously solid results quickly from relatively cheap, open-source options from China.Guests:Runbin Dong on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/runbindongScale Social: https://scalesocial.ai/Oege de Moor on X: https://x.com/oegerikusXBOW: https://xbow.com/Relevant LinksWSJ: Nvidia-Poolside deal: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/nvidia-is-spending-6-billion-to-build-a-powerful-u-s-alternative-to-chinese-ai-c51c38ccPoolside: https://poolside.ai/Silicon Angle: Nvidia in talks to invest in Perplexity: https://siliconangle.com/2026/08/24/nvidia-reportedly-eyes-another-investment-in-perplexity-ai-at-a-30b-valuation/Perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai/Bloomberg: Chinese hackers using DeepSeek: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-24/chinese-hackers-use-deepseek-to-boost-attacks-researchers-say-mt7o4205Nvidia: Groq 3 LPX enters full production: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-groq-3-lpx-now-in-full-production-with-world-class-speed-for-agentic-aiCNBC: Groq-Nvidia acqui-hire deal: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/24/nvidia-buying-ai-chip-startup-groq-for-about-20-billion-biggest-deal.htmlOpenAI on early Jalapeño results: https://openai.com/index/jalapeno-first-results/Stanley Druckenmiller WSJ op-ed: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/let-the-bond-market-speak-81529d74Druckenmiller confirms op-ed was authored with AI: https://www.notus.org/media/stanley-druckenmillers-wsj-op-ed-bessent-aiPangram: https://www.pangram.com/Alabama AG: OpenAI subpoena announcement: https://www.alabamaag.gov/attorney-general-marshall-launches-investigation-int… Lees meer
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Anthropic is training to destroy your company | EP 27
20 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 17 min
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Today’s show:
*On “All In,” Gavin Baker said that Anthropic leadership privately believes that it could one day become “the only private company in the world.” The ensuing street fight on X turned into a referendum on doomerism, the nature of regulatory capture, and why the public hates AI so darn much.
Jason’s take: If a frontier lab really believes they’re destined to be the world’s only company, they’re studying your data and planning to steal your business.
PLUS why AI agents don’t understand it’s wrong to cheat (and how we can teach them), why Grok Bot may be AI’s “iPhone moment,” and the panel reacts to Amazon feeding rare books into a dino-themed shredding machine.
Guests
Galina Antova on X: https://x.com/GalinaAntova
Kai: https://www.kai.security/
Eric Ho on X: https://x.com/eric_ho
Goodfire: https://www.goodfire.com/
Silico: https://www.goodfire.com/silico
Relevant Links
All-In Podcast: Gavin Baker on Anthropic: https://x.com/theallinpod/status/2088367978270142811
Sholto Douglas response: https://x.com/_sholtodouglas/status/2088463770318516734
Gavin Baker response: https://x.com/GavinSBaker/status/2088611616577253502
Dario Amodei response: https://x.com/DarioAmodei/status/2088758816376807762
Zuckerberg AI manifesto: https://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone/
Hugging Face: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline
Simon Willison: OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack on Hugging Face: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/openai-cyberattack/
SWE-bench Leaderboards: https://www.swebench.com/
xAI: Introducing Grok Bot: https://x.ai/news/introducing-grok-bot
Peter Yang praises Grok Bot: https://x.com/petergyang/status/2089401696946634801?s=20
Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai/
@Aaronp613 on X: AirPods with Cameras in action: …
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Why Anthropic is watermarking every word Claude writes | E26
13 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 28 min
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Today’s show:
Anthropic’s new Claude watermark travels around any and all copy-and-pasted text. Is this a logical response to AI slop, or more overreach from those regulation-loving Europeans? The panel agrees that identifying AI outputs has a place, but divides on how the world should get there.
PLUS everyone’s favorite section of Mark Zuckerberg’s 6500-word techno-optimist AI manifesto, exploring the frontier labs’ blatant hypocrisy around distillation, and why Texas is hitting the pause button on 474 GW of proposed data centers.
Guests:
Will Bryk: https://x.com/WilliamBryk
Exa: https://exa.ai/
Josh Sirota: https://x.com/joshua_sirota
Eragon: https://www.eragon.ai/
Kashif “Kash” Ali: https://x.com/ChKashifAli
TaxGPT: https://www.taxgpt.com/
Relevant Links:
Anthropic: How Claude marks AI-generated content: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-marks-ai-generated-content
Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA): https://c2pa.org/
EU AI Act: Article 50 transparency obligations: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/
TechCrunch: Pangram Raises $9M: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/29/as-ai-content-floods-the-internet-pangram-raises-9m-to-detect-it/
TechCrunch: Anthropic’s landmark copyright settlement is approved: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/20/anthropics-landmark-1-5b-copyright-settlement-is-approved/
World ID iris scanning orb: https://world.org/world-id
Time: Sam Altman voices concern about “Dead Internet Theory”: https://time.com/7316046/sam-altman-dead-internet-theory/
Meta: The Future is for Everyone: https://about.fb.com/news/2026/08/the-future-is-for-everyone/
Meta: Introducing Muse Glimmer: https://research.meta.ai/blog/introducing-muse-glimmer-open-agentic-model
Texas: Gov. Abbott directs comprehensive data center audit: https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-directs-comprehensive-data-center-audit
Texas Tribune: New data center p…
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Is open source AI really ahead of the frontier? 3 builders weigh in. | E25
6 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 20 min
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Today’s show:
China’s Alibaba just dropped a 2.4 trillion parameter open weight model that the company claims only trails Anthropic’s flagship among the major frontier rivals. Of course, this happened the very same week that the US government appears to have backed off from banning these models stateside entirely.
Are these models anywhere close to actually catching up to the latest and greatest releases from US labs like Anthropic and OpenAI? Really seems to depend on who you ask. (Even long time friends JCal and Elon Musk can’t see eye to eye on it.)
So on TWiAI Ep 25, we welcomed on Poolside AI CTO Eiso Kant, EXO Labs co-founder Alex Cheema, and Qloo founder Alex Elias to break down just how close Chinese labs are to catching up with the biggest and best models… and how long it will take US open weight builders to catch up.
PLUS we explore the cutting edge of AI-powered baby sleep monitors, consider Hank Green’s public AI apology, and dig into sci-fi author Ursula K. LeGuin’s “hand-mind” thesis.
Guests:
Eiso Kant on X: https://x.com/eisokant
Poolside: https://poolside.ai/
Alex Elias on X: https://x.com/ape
Qloo: https://www.qloo.com/
Alex Cheema on X: https://x.com/alexocheema
EXO Labs: https://exolabs.net/
Local AI benchmark platform: https://local.ai/
Relevant Links
Qwen3.8-Max launch announcement: https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.8
Bloomberg on Qwen3.8-Max launch: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-03/alibaba-drops-another-china-ai-model-with-breakthrough-performance
NYT: “White House Whipsaws Silicon Valley Over AI Rules”: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/technology/ai-washington-regulation-whiplash.html
Nvidia: “Open Weights and American AI Leadership”: https://images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-Weights-and-American-AI-Leadership.pdf
World Bank: World Development Report 2026: https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/1e4e52502104a331fb42cba0d4afa995-0050062026/original/WDR2026-Concept…
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Are we already in the Singularity? | E24
30 juli 2026 · 1 uur 7 min
This Week In Startups is made possible by: Lees meer
Paypal Open
Today’s show:
On a podcast this week, Sam Altman made a bold declaration: “We are now, like, in the singularity.” A bold claim which Alex puts bluntly to this week’s panel. Grant Lee of Gamma and Philip Johnston of Starcloud sound off… Is this actually the Singularity, and if so, why do things still feel so normal?
Plus the panel and guest host Alex Wilhelm discuss the infrastructure and economics that will make singularity-scale AI buildout possible… NVIDIA’s strongly worded letter about open-weight models… Moonshot’s new Kimi K3 twist on open-source licenses… Stripe’s reported $10B run at OpenRouter… and more.
Guests
Grant Lee on X: https://x.com/thisisgrantlee
Gamma: https://gamma.app/
Philip Johnston on X: https://x.com/PhilipJohnston
Starcloud: https://www.starcloud.com/
Relevant Links
TechCrunch: Gamma hits $110M ARR: https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/10/ai-powerpoint-killer-gamma-hits-2-1b-valuation-100m-arr-founder-says/
Nvidia: How Starcloud is Bringing Data Centers to Space: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/starcloud/
Open Weights and American AI Leadership letter: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/open-weight-models-letter-1.pdf
CNBC on Nvidia-OpenAI infrastructure plans: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/27/nvidia-and-openai-in-talks-for-up-to-250-billion-dollar-ai-backstop.html
Kimi K3: https://www.kimi.com/en
Crusoe announces strategic Starcloud partnership: https://www.crusoe.ai/resources/newsroom/crusoe-to-become-first-cloud-operator-in-space-through-partnership-with-starcloud
Andrej Karpathy on YouTube: “Let’s Build GPT”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY
Demis Hassabis Starcloud post on X: https://x.com/demishassabis/status/1999296127276126417
RAISE Summit: https://www.raisesummit.com/
Lilian Weng exits Thinking Machines post: https://x.com/lilianweng/status/2081816923088814421
Baseten: https://www.baseten.co/
Fireworks AI:…
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America already lost one AI race | TWiAI Ep 23
23 juli 2026 · 1 uur 1 min
This Week In Startups is made possible by: Lees meer
PAYPAL OPEN
Today’s show:
This week, our panel of AI experts — Anand Kannappan (Patronus AI), Ori Goshen (AI21 Labs), and Alex Finn (Henry Intelligent Machines) — join special guest host Lon Harris to debate whether Washington will move to formally limit powerful foreign AI models like Moonshot’s Kimi K3 and Z.ai’s GLM-5.2.
What does “winning the AI race” actually mean on a practical level? Why is cybersecurity, not benchmarks, likely the actual battleground. And why did Hugging Face have to use GLM-5.2 to investigate their recent breach rather than a frontier US model like Fable 5?
PLUS why agents still fail so much on long horizon tasks, why proper model routing has such a HUGE impact on enterprise AI bills, and we take a look at Alex’s hacked digital typewriter he uses to code without distractions.
Guests:
Anand Kannappan on X: https://x.com/anandnk24
Patronus AI: https://www.patronus.ai/
Ori Goshen on X: https://x.com/origoshen
AI21: https://www.ai21.com/
Alex Finn on X: https://x.com/AlexFinn
Alex’s Vibe Coding Academy: https://www.skool.com/vibe-coding-academy/about
Relevant Links:
Axios: “The Secret Trump Administration Battle to Fight Chinese AI”: https://www.axios.com/2026/07/20/ai-us-china-open-source-kimi
Chamath post on US AI options: https://x.com/chamath/status/2079457219892871458?s=20
Brian Armstrong post on spend vs. token usage: https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/2070670644577280109
Hugging Face: Security incident disclosure: https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026
VentureBeat Hugging Face coverage: https://venturebeat.com/security/safety-guardrails-blocked-hugging-faces-defenders-not-the-attacker-when-an-ai-agent-breached-its-systems
David Sacks post on cyber guardrails: https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2078984980588531855
Databricks Unity AI Gateway: https://www.databricks.com/product/artificial-intelligence/unity-ai-gateway
Ramp’s Router: https://ramp.com/router/
T…
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Grok 4.5 and GLM-5.2 kick off Token Price Wars | E22
16 juli 2026 · 1 uur 17 min
This Week In Startups is made possible by: Lees meer
PAYPAL OPEN
Today’s show:
The price of tokens keeps tumbling down, and it’s changing who controls AI.
Grok 4.5 and GLM-5.2 landed within two weeks of one another, offering powerful alternatives at a fraction of frontier prices. But are SpaceXAI’s latest offering and open weight models truly ready to replace Opus, GPT-5.5, and Fable? Are enterprises finally ready to stop renting and start owning their intelligence?
On TWiAI Episode 22, Jason and Lon welcome three top founders — Sara Hooker (Adaption Labs), Manu Sharma (Labelbox), and Spiros Xanthos (Resolve AI) — to break down the global AI price war, and what it means for the frontier labs and customers alike. Plus Denis Hassabis’ call for an AI Standards Body, Uber and Waymo duke it out over DC robotaxis, and is SpaceXAI really going to put data centers in orbit any time soon?
Guests:
Sara Hooker on X: https://x.com/sarahookr
Adaption Labs: https://adaptionlabs.ai/
Manu Sharma on X: https://x.com/manuaero
Labelbox: https://labelbox.com/
Spiros Xanthos on X: https://x.com/spirosx
Resolve AI: https://resolve.ai/
Relevant Links
Introducing Grok 4.5**:** https://x.ai/news/grok-4-5
GLM from Z.ai: https://z.ai
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index: https://artificialanalysis.ai/
Demis Hassabis: “A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age”: https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718
Cerebras: https://www.cerebras.ai/
Austin Allred post cited by Jason: https://x.com/Austen/status/2076745226387902925
TechCrunch coverage of DC autonomous driving bill: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/ubers-robotaxi-lobbying-effort-has-put-it-on-a-collision-course-with-waymo/
DoorDash: Meet Dot: https://about.doordash.com/en-us/dot
TechCrunch coverage of orbital data center debate: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/sam-altmans-space-data-center-trash-talk-is-what-most-experts-already-believe
Falcon 9 booster’s record 36th flight: https://spaceflight…
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What happens if China pulls the plug on open-source AI? | Ep 21
9 juli 2026 · 1 uur 21 min
This Week In Startups is made possible by: Lees meer
PAYPAL
Today’s show:
China is weighing a ban on foreign access to its top AI models… the same low-cost open-weight systems on which half of the Valley’s startups are building. So we asked our two all-star panelists — Arena CEO/Co-Founder Anastasios Angelopoulos and Hippocratic AI CEO/Co-Founder Munjal Shah — what happens to US companies when their favorite cheap, powerful models vaporize overnight.
PLUS why Hippocratic runs 31 models in parallel to ensure clinical-grade safety, the latency-vs-intelligence tradeoff no one is optimizing for, and why a company’s benchmarks might become their most valuable IP.
Guests:
Anastasios Angelopoulos on X: https://x.com/ml_angelopoulos
Arena AI: https://arena.ai/
Agent Arena: https://arena.ai/leaderboard/agent
Munjal Shah on X: https://x.com/munjalshah
Hippocratic AI: https://hippocraticai.com/
Relevant Links:
Reuters: “Beijing is looking at curbing overseas access…”: https://www.reuters.com/world/beijing-is-looking-curbing-overseas-access-chinas-top-ai-models-sources-say-2026-07-07/
Z.ai: https://z.ai/
Alibaba’s Qwen: https://qwen.ai/
Google’s Gemma: https://ai.google.dev/gemma
Reflection AI: https://reflection.ai/
Nvidia: “How Open Models are Driving Research”: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/open-models-icml-2026/
DoorDash: “How we learned to trust our AI code reviewer”: https://careersatdoordash.com/blog/how-we-learned-to-trust-our-ai-code-reviewer-at-doordash
Harvey AI: https://www.harvey.ai/
ElevenLabs: https://elevenlabs.io/
Anthropic: “A global workspace in language models”: https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace
CNN: “Trump rings opening bell to mark first day of trading for Trump Accounts”: https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/06/business/trump-accounts-launch
Brown University Health: https://www.brownhealth.org/
Timestamps:
0:00 Will US companies lose access to Chinese models?
1:42 Open source makes running 31 models viable
5:01 How deep is the W…
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Mythos, Sonnet 5, GLM-5.2 Dominate the News Cycle | Episode 20
2 juli 2026 · 1 uur 10 min
This Week In Startups is made possible by: Lees meer
PAYPAL
Today’s show:
The US government won’t let you use the most powerful releases from US AI labs… but a Chinese lab is giving away their latest frontier model for free.
This week, we’ve got three AI CEOs building in image generation (Victor Perez of Krea), mobile agents (Div Garg of The AGI Company), and enterprise governance (Andrew Berman of Runlayer). Together, they’re breaking down what’s really happening underneath all this chaos, and why the industry’s more focused on “minimum viable intelligence” over breaking benchmarks.
Guests
Victor Perez on X: https://x.com/viccpoes
Krea AI: https://www.krea.ai/
Krea 2 Raw and Turbo on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/krea/Krea-2-Raw
Div Garg on X: https://x.com/divgarg
The AGI Company: https://theagi.company/
Andrew Berman on X: https://x.com/berman66
Runlayer: https://www.runlayer.com/
Relevant Links
Anthropic: “Introducing Claude Sonnet 5”: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-5
Z.ai: GLM-5.2: https://docs.z.ai/guides/llm/glm-5.2
Yuchen Jin X post: “GLM-5.2 is the open source Claude moment”: https://x.com/Yuchenj_UW/status/2071278256817574297
TechCrunch: GPT-5.6 restricted rollout coverage: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/26/openai-limits-gpt-5-6-rollout-after-government-request-says-restrictions-shouldnt-be-the-norm/
AndroidWorld benchmark on GitHub: https://github.com/google-research/android_world
The Information Higgsfield valuation article: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-video-startup-talks-quadruple-valuation-5-billion
Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF): https://aaif.io/
Tomasz Tunguz: “When AI Costs More Than The Engineer”: https://tomtunguz.com/ai-spend-breakeven-2029/
Fortune Runlayer raise coverage: https://fortune.com/2026/06/24/exclusive-vinod-khosla-felicis-runlayer-nanit-30-million-enterprise-ai/
Gusto: https://gusto.com/
Timestamps:
0:00 Making sense of US AI policy
5:09 Tiny Action Models vs. LLMs
7:02 Runlayer, AG…
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Are world models the unlock for Physical AI? | Episode 19
25 juni 2026 · 1 uur 13 min
This Week In Startups is made possible by: Lees meer
Paypal
Today’s show:
*When we think of “Physical AI,” most of us conjure images of humanoid robots and self-driving cars. But there’s a lot more to the category than just breakdancing Chinese bots and Waymos, from excavators autonomously digging tomorrows worksites, to a robot the size of four pizza boxes deploying to the ISS.
Guest host Alex Wilhelm sits down with three founders in the trenches of the Physical AI Space:
Boris Sofman of Bedrock Robotics, which builds autonomous construction equipment
Jeff Hawke of Odyssey, a frontier AI lab specializing in world models for robotics and video games
Ethan Barajas of Icarus Robotics, designers of the free-flying Joy robot that will join the ISS crew in 2027
Guests:
Boris Sofman on X: https://x.com/bsofman
Bedrock Robotics: https://bedrockrobotics.com/
Jeff Hawke on X: https://x.com/jeffrey_hawke
Odyssey: https://odyssey.ml/
Ethan Barajas on X: https://x.com/ethanbarajas11
Icarus Robotics: https://www.icarusrobotics.com/
Relevant Links
Bedrock Excavators Remove 65,000 Cubic Yards of Dirt: https://www.enr.com/articles/61982-bedrock-robotics-excavators-remove-65-000-cubic-yards-of-dirt-on-southwest-project
Odyssey $310M Series B article: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/world-model-maker-odyssey-nabs-1-45b-valuation-backed-by-amazon-and-other-big-names/
Icarus “Joyride” Mission announcement: https://thedebrief.org/icarus-is-building-the-robotic-labor-force-for-space-voyager-technologies-is-sending-a-next-generation-zero-gravity-robot-on-a-joyride-to-space/
PROWL: Prioritized Regret-Driven Optimization for World Model Learning: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18803
NVIDIA Cosmos 3 report: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3/technical-report.pdf
ISS Columbus Laboratory Module: https://www.nasa.gov/international-space-station/columbus-laboratory-module/
NASA’s Astrobee flying robot: https://www.nasa.gov/astrobee/
Voyager Technologies: https://www.…
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Why AI Models Aren’t the Product Any More | TWiAI Ep 18
18 juni 2026 · 1 uur 21 min
SpaceX bought Cursor for $60 billion. Satya Nadella says companies need to stop relying on third party AI models and build their own “token capital.” The focus is shifting from LLMs to the application layer sitting on top of them. Here to unpack what that means are guest experts Ali Ansari (Micro1) and Ryan Daniels (Crosby).Plus we get a sneak peek at their new contract redlining benchmark, a crucial eval for how well LLMs don’t just answer questions about the law, but demonstrate actual legal reasoning.Timestamps:0:00 SpaceX acquires Cursor7:36 Distillation vs. building your own model19:43 Nadella's "Frontier Without an Ecosystem"30:21 AI in the courtroom32:15 Ando: the intriguing new workplace tool1:05:38 Inside Micro1 and Crosby's new benchmark1:07:14Guests:Ali Ansari: https://x.com/aliansarinikMicro1: https://www.micro1.ai/Ryan Daniels: https://x.com/ryanjdanielsCrosby: https://crosby.ai/Relevant Links:Bloomberg: “SpaceX acquires Cursor for $60B”: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-16/spacex-cements-60-billion-deal-to-take-over-ai-startup-cursorQuinn Thompson “brilliant corporate finance” post: https://x.com/qthomp/status/2066859672749977988Business Insider: “Inside Cursor’s Wild Rise”: https://www.businessinsider.com/cursor-ceo-michael-truell-spacex-elon-musk-anthropic-2026-6Satya Nadella: “A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable”: https://x.com/satyanadella/article/2066182223213293753Joshua Browder’s Do Not Pay: https://donotpay.com/Harvard Magazine: “AI Outperforms Doctors in Emergency Room Tasks”: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/ai/ai-outperforms-doctors-diagnosis-harvard-studyJoshua Kushner “Long Humans” post: https://x.com/JoshuaKushner/status/2065093542809092465Ando: https://ando.so/Nim Ravid on X: https://x.com/Nim_Ravid1Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/l… Lees meer
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Hermes Agent, NotebookLM & LiveKit Founders on the AI Agent Race | TWiAI 17
10 juni 2026 · 1 uur 29 min
Apple just paid a rival a billion dollars a year because it could not build Siri itself, and that tells you where the AI platform war actually stands: the edge has moved up the stack, from the model to the agent layer sitting on top of it. Lees meer
This week's roundtable makes the case that whoever controls that layer controls the experience, and we brought in three founders building it from different angles: Hermes Agent, NotebookLM, and LiveKit. Their through-line is that the harness is temporary, the model keeps eating it, and the people building agents right now are designing for capabilities that do not exist yet.
This week's roundtable:
Jeffrey Quesnelle (Co-founder & CEO, Nous Research, the open source AI lab behind Hermes Agent)
Steven B Johnson (Editorial Director of NotebookLM & Google Labs, co-creator of NotebookLM)
Russ d'Sa (Co-founder & CEO, LiveKit, the open source real-time voice/video infrastructure behind ChatGPT voice mode)
Thank you to our exclusive sponsor: PayPal Open, One Platform for All Business: https://paypalopen.com
Timestamps:
0:00 Cold open
1:08 Welcome to Episode 17
1:40 Jeffrey Quesnelle on Hermes Agent and the open source agent race
5:03 Steven Johnson on NotebookLM, source-grounding, and going agentic
7:32 Why AI got booed at commencement: the first generation raised on ChatGPT
10:48 Russ d'Sa on LiveKit powering ChatGPT, Tesla, Grok, and Salesforce voice
27:50 Apple's $1B Gemini deal and the Siri UX problem
52:49 "Functional AGI, unevenly distributed": where the models actually are
57:24 The harness is temporary: why agent builders design for the next model
Guests:
Jeffrey Quesnelle, Nous Research: https://nousresearch.com | https://x.com/theemozilla
Steven Johnson, NotebookLM (Google Labs): https://notebooklm.google.com | https://x.com/stevenbjohnson
Russ d'Sa, LiveKit: https://livekit.io | https://x.com/dsa
Referenced in this episode:
Nous Research / Hermes Agent: https://nousresearch.com
NotebookLM: https://notebo…
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AI Layoffs, Compute Costs & Agents | Naveen Rao & Alex Finn on This Week in AI Episode 16
4 juni 2026 · 54 min
The future of AI isn't about whether the model is smart enough. It's about whether we can afford to run it. We dug into the AI cost panic, the energy wall that's coming for compute, and why "developers are disappearing" gets the economics exactly backwards.This week's roundtable: Naveen Rao (CEO of Unconventional AI, building brain-inspired analog chips, formerly sold companies to Intel and Databricks) and Alex Finn (founder of Henry Intelligent Machines and Creator Buddy).Thank you to our exclusive sponsor: PayPal Open, One Platform for All Business: http://paypalopen.com/Timestamps:0:00 Cold open1:21 Welcome to Episode 162:44 Is the AI cost panic real, or just "token maxing"?5:08 It's not the intelligence, it's how people use AI9:40 Surgeons vs. shotguns: prompt discipline & matching models to tasks13:10 Naveen's path from Intel and Databricks to Unconventional15:08 Why developers aren't disappearing18:37 How energy overtook CapEx in the cost of compute21:34 The energy wall & getting to 3 orders of magnitude more efficient25:52 AI's PR problem & the data center backlash27:55 China's hunger vs. America's AI boogeyman30:38 Data center taxes, equity stakes & the politics of AI upside37:54 The Anthropic IPO & how these founders actually invest🔗 Guests:Naveen Rao, Unconventional AI: https://unconv.ai | https://x.com/AlexFinnAlex Finn, Henry Intelligent Machines: https://meethenry.ai | https://x.com/NaveenGRao🔗 Host:Alex Wilhelm, This Week in Startups: https://x.com/alex🔗 Referenced in this episode:Unconventional AI (analog chips for AI): https://unconv.aiMosaicML (acquired by Databricks): https://www.databricks.com/research/m...Nervana Systems (acquired by Intel)Creator Buddy: https://creatorbuddy.ioQwen (open-weight model Alex runs locally): https://qwenlm.aiNVIDIA DGX Spark: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/products...Anthropic (filed to go public): https://www.anthropic.comHenry Intelligent Machines: https://meethenry.ai/🔗 Subscribe and follow:Newsletter and all platfo… Lees meer
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"Nobody Lost Their Job to AI, Just the Promise of AI" - This Week in AI Ep 15
27 mei 2026 · 1 uur 7 min
The AI jobs panic is here. Meta cut 8,000. Intuit cut 3,000. CapEx went up. Nobody can agree if anyone has actually lost a job to AI, or just to the promise of it. We dug into the GPU squeeze, the new craft of "reward engineering," Pope Leo's call to disarm AI, and why Chinese open-source models just blew past American ones in token usage. Lees meer
This week's roundtable: Erik Bernhardsson (CEO of Modal Labs, the serverless GPU cloud), Tanay Kothari (CEO of Wispr Flow, the voice dictation app every VC in the valley uses), and Richard Socher (CEO of Recursive Superintelligence and You.com).
Thank you to our exclusive sponsor:
PayPal Open, One Platform for All Business: http://paypalopen.com/
Timestamps:
0:00 Cold open
0:53 Welcome to Episode 15
5:53 Recursive's plan to build a self-improving "Eureka machine"
8:10 Token spend now exceeds headcount at the frontier
9:56 GPU crunch, Hopper prices, and the Anthropic-Colossus shockwave
12:23 Wispr Flow's 90% gross margin playbook
14:30 Running $100M in marketing with two humans and a swarm of agents
18:29 Reward hacking, paperclips, and the rise of the "reward engineer"
24:39 Why CEOs put one person in charge: multi-objective AI
28:17 Meta's 8,000 layoffs, $145B CapEx, Goldman vs. Stanford
33:23 "Nobody lost their job to AI, just the promise of AI"
37:57 Jevons paradox: software demand is infinite, illustrations aren't
39:48 Meta's keystroke monitoring and the back-channel reaction
42:55 Equity, Trump accounts, and rooting for your old employer
44:06 The Bloomberg/Indeed dev jobs chart
47:34 Jason's pitch: hiring a 22-year-old AI-native "software valet"
50:29 Pope Leo: "AI needs to be disarmed"
57:41 Chris Olah on AI displacement and the global poor
1:00:46 Chinese models hit 9 trillion tokens, DeepSeek V4 Flash goes #1
1:03:04 Strange biases, Tiananmen Square, and the US open-source vacuum
1:05:07 Who they're hiring
🔗 Guests:
Erik Bernhardsson, Modal Labs: https://modal.com | https://x.com/bernhardsson
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Grads boo AI, Reese Witherspoon gets dunked + Karpathy joins Anthropic | TWiAI E14
20 mei 2026 · 1 uur 39 min
The frontier labs are coming for the application layer, and they're going to steal your idea. We dug into Andrej Karpathy's move to Anthropic, the new rules of AI etiquette, and why graduates are booing AI at commencement speeches. Lees meer
This week's roundtable: Kanjun Qiu (CEO of Imbue, building open source agents), Jeremy Fraenkel (CEO of Fundamental, large tabular models for enterprise data), and Karri Saarinen (CEO of Linear, the product development system used by OpenAI, Coinbase, Cursor, Ramp, and Cash App).
Thank you to our exclusive sponsor:
PayPal Open, One Platform for All Business: http://paypalopen.com/
Timestamps:
0:00 Cold open
1:02 Welcome to Episode 14 of This Week in AI
1:45 Kanjun Qiu on Imbue's GPU cluster bet that funds the company
5:38 Jeremy Fraenkel on why LLMs choke on structured enterprise data
9:36 Karri Saarinen on Linear and product work for AI agents
12:50 Design in the age of AI: why early-stage product design is getting worse
21:18 Jason coins "AI etiquette": your output is your responsibility
33:30 Andre Karpathy joins Anthropic
40:00 The cult of each AI lab: SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI
47:00 Anthropic's pricing misstep and the "punk software" movement
50:00 The verticalization war coming for the application layer
55:00 "Claude knows more about me than my partner": power concentration in AI
58:30 Mac M5 clusters and confidential compute on AWS
1:07:30 Graduates boo AI at commencement: Schmidt, Borchetta, Cawfield
1:22:00 Four founders deliver their own commencement speeches
1:28:30 Reese Witherspoon vs the New York Times
1:33:00 Plugs and where to find the guests
🔗 Guests on X:
Kanjun Qiu, Imbue: https://imbue.com | https://x.com/kanjun
Jeremy Fraenkel, Fundamental: https://fundamental.tech | https://x.com/fraenkelj
Karri Saarinen, Linear: https://linear.app | https://x.com/karrisaarinen
🔗 Referenced in this episode:
Andre Karpathy joins Anthropic (announcement): https://x.com/karpathy/status/2056753169888334312?s=2…
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How the 1% Will Own Compute (and What It Means for You)
13 mei 2026 · 1 uur 8 min
The future of AI isn't a smarter chatbot. It's a model that watches your screen, listens to the room, and acts on what it sees. We dug into Thinking Machines' new interaction model, what it means for compute, and the layoff wave that's already here.This week's roundtable: Anastasios Angelopoulos (CEO of Arena, formerly LMArena), Nick Harris (CEO of Lightmatter, photonic computing chips), and Philip Johnston (CEO of StarCloud, building megawatt data centers in space). Lees meer
Thank you to our exclusive sponsor:
PayPal Open, One Platform for All Business: http://paypalopen.com/
Timestamps:
0:00 Cold open
1:21 Welcome to Episode 13
2:51 Is China closing the AI gap? Arena's data
5:16 Lightmatter and the photonic interconnect bottleneck
9:42 StarCloud 2, Nvidia Space Ruben 1, and orbital data centers
17:24 Thinking Machines' interaction model: what's actually new
28:22 Whisper Flow and the 3-pedal desk setup
33:48 Real-time desktop and camera awareness as the real unlock
40:25 Why this 100x's compute demand
42:43 The polarization of compute and $10M personal data centers
49:25 The layoff wave: Cloudflare, PayPal, Coinbase, Upwork
54:48 The 10x gap between AI-first and non-AI-first employees
59:52 Unlimited agency and the abundance future
1:00:46 Anthropic's Project Luna runs a retail store
1:03:45 Decoupling labor from value creation
1:05:03 P(doom) round
🔗 Guests:
Anastasios Angelopoulos, Arena: https://arena.ai | @ML_Angelopolous
Nick Harris, Lightmatter: https://lightmatter.co
Philip Johnston, StarCloud: https://starcloud.com | @philipjohnston
🔗 Referenced in this episode:
Thinking Machines, Introducing Interaction Models: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interaction-models/
LMArena leaderboard: https://lmarena.ai
Lightmatter: https://lightmatter.co
Starcloud: https://www.starcloud.com
TechCrunch, Cloudflare says AI made 1,100 jobs obsolete: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/08/cloudflare-says-ai-made-1100-jobs-obsolete-even-as-revenue-hit-a-record-…
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Is Anthropic a Cult? AI Beats ER Doctors & Recursive Self-Improvement | This Week in AI E12
6 mei 2026 · 1 uur 17 min
This week, JCal sits down with two builders working on opposite ends of the AI stack: Naveen Rao, co-founder and CEO of Unconventional AI (his $4.5B startup rethinking the computer from first principles), and Trey Holterman, co-founder and CEO of Tennr, the platform automating the messy paperwork that decides whether millions of patients ever get the care they need. Lees meer
They break down why AI already beats ER doctors at diagnosis, why Epic is the most hated company in healthcare, what it takes to disrupt healthcare's $5 trillion incumbents, and whether $1.1 trillion in hyperscaler CapEx will pay off before the energy runs out.
Mentioned in the show:
Unconventional AI: https://unconv.ai
Tennr: https://tennr.com
Abridge: https://abridge.com
Ambience Healthcare: https://ambiencehealthcare.com
Epic: https://epic.com
Plaud (NotePin): https://plaud.ai
Whoop: https://whoop.com
Function Health: https://functionhealth.com
Oura: https://ouraring.com
Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com
Perplexity: https://perplexity.ai
Databricks: https://databricks.com
Harvard / Beth Israel ER study: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/ai/ai-outperforms-doctors-diagnosis-harvard-study
Jack Clark on recursive self-improvement: https://jack-clark.net
This Week In AI is made possible by:PayPal Open - One Platform for all Business: https://paypalopen.com
Timestamps:
00:00 Cold open
00:51 Welcome & intro to Naveen Rao (Unconventional AI) and Trey Holterman (Tennr)
05:43 Tennr's mission: fixing the U.S. healthcare "black hole"
06:23 Why primary care is changing in the AI era
09:09 The radiologist that wasn't replaced & what AI got right in 2015
15:31 Harvard study: AI beats ER doctors 67% to 55%
20:16 Plaud Pin & the always-on AI in the exam room
22:29 AI scribes, EMR privacy & how Abridge actually works
24:01 Whoop, Aura & when wearable data finally meets the clinic
25:20 Epic, FHIR & the 800-pound gorilla of healthcare
34:21 Disrupting Epic with an open-source EMR play
37:2…
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Cursor's $60B Deal, DeepSeek V4 & the Death of the AI Moat | This Week in AI E11
30 april 2026 · 1 uur 14 min
This week Jason sits down with three founders at the frontier of AI infrastructure, software development, and vertical AI: Matan Grinberg, co-founder and CEO of Factory; Russ d'Sa, co-founder and CEO of LiveKit; and George Sivulka, founder and CEO of Hebbia. Lees meer
They break down why AI coding agents are more powerful than vibe coding, how voice became the default interface for AI, why LLMs are becoming commoditized like RAM, and what it actually takes to build a moat in 2026.
Mentioned in the show:
Factory: https://factory.ai
LiveKit: https://livekit.io
Hebbia: https://hebbia.com
Cursor: https://cursor.com
DeepSeek V4: https://deepseek.com
SpaceX / xAI: https://x.ai
Polymarket (Cursor acquisition odds): https://polymarket.com/event/will-spacex-acquire-cursor
LM Arena (model benchmarks): https://lmarena.ai
SWE-bench (coding benchmarks): https://swebench.com
Silicon Valley HBO clip (Son of Anton): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0b_D2JgZgY
This Week In AI is made possible by:
PayPal Open - One Platform for all Business: https/:/paypalopen.com/
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro & AGI debate: where are we really?
02:26 Meet the guests: Matan Grinberg, Russ d'Sa, George Sivulka
03:30 Factory's mission: bringing autonomy to software engineering
04:29 LiveKit's origin: open source WebRTC to ChatGPT voice backbone
07:40 Learned helplessness and the raptor fence: a founder story
10:31 Hebbia: financial superintelligence for capital markets
13:21 SpaceX acquiring Cursor for $60B: the deal breakdown
17:28 Why enterprises can't standardize on one model provider
21:50 The Silicon Valley clip: when AI deletes all the software
23:09 How AI coding tools have changed internal dev workflows
26:28 Moats in the age of vibe coding: what actually protects you
30:12 The relentless iteration promise as a company's core moat
33:40 Slack example: the buy vs. build calculation in 2026
38:10 Deterministic agents and encoding institutional expertise
41:17 LLMs as commoditized i…
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Aravind Srinivas & Edwin Chen: The $1B Bootstrap, Apple's AI Edge, and Benchmarks | TWiAI E10
23 april 2026 · 1 uur 20 min
This week we sat down with Aravind Srinivas and Edwin Chen. Aravind is the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, whose revenue has grown from $100M to $500M on the back of Perplexity Computer. Edwin is the co-founder and CEO of Surge AI, the data training company teaching frontier models how to think, which quietly bootstrapped past $1B in revenue without ever raising a dollar. Lees meer
This Week In AI is made possible by:
PayPal Open - One Platform for all Business: https://paypalopen.com/
Timestamps:
00:00 Cold open
01:00 Welcome & intro to Aravind Srinivas and Edwin Chen
02:40 Why Perplexity Comet and Perplexity Max are taking off
05:25 Edwin on Surge AI and why "data labeling" is the wrong term
10:47 Tim Cook steps down — what Apple's new CEO should do
13:56 Owning your agent loops: why Apple wins
21:20 "The iPhone is not getting disrupted by AI at all"
23:09 $242B raised in Q1 2026 and the late-stage capital flood
23:55 Edwin on bootstrapping Surge past $1B without raising
25:09 The ChatGPT "one weird trick" story and clickbait models
30:58 Claude Code as a loss leader to dominate token collection
33:30 Are we in the endgame for coding?
35:35 Autocomplete to auto-diff to auto-outcomes
38:54 The death of the no-code movement
41:34 30% headcount growth, 5x revenue, the efficiency playbook
45:41 AI in Hollywood, Gal Gadot, and $70M movies that should cost $200M
50:29 "People don't buy models, they buy products"
57:20 Specialization vs commoditization — what actually accrues value58:00 "LM Arena is a cancer on AI"
63:34 Perplexity's heuristics for measuring user intent65:41 Model Council, Jensen Huang, and orchestrating frontier models
71:23 Most impressive AI experiences — WhisperFlow, Grok on X, Claude Design, and WHOOP
78:29 Hiring at Surge AI and Perplexity
Subscribe to This Week in AI on Apple:https://thisweekinai.ai/apple
Subscribe to This Week in AI on Spotify:https://thisweekinai.ai/spotify
Follow Jason:
X: @jason
LinkedIn: /jasoncalacanis
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The Future of AI: Personal Agents, Taste & Private Data | Lin Qiao & Demi Guo | E9
15 april 2026 · 1 uur 14 min
This week we sit down with Lin Qiao and Demi Guo on This Week in AI Episode 9. Lin is the co-founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, a frontier inference platform processing tens of trillions of tokens per day, built by seven ex-Meta engineers who created PyTorch. Demi is the co-founder and CEO of Pika, building humanized AI agents for creative work, agents you interact with like a person, not a prompt box. Lees meer
This Week In AI is made possible by:
PayPalOpen - One Platform for all Business: https://paypalopen.com/
Timestamps:
00:00 Welcome & intro to Lin Qiao and Demi Guo
02:38 Lin's journey from Meta to Fireworks AI
05:13 Building PyTorch and bootstrapping AI infrastructure
06:58 Who Fireworks competes with and why enterprises need it
08:43 Activating the 95% of private data locked in enterprises
11:31 Demi's journey building Pika and the pivot to humanized agents
16:03 The best interface for creation is a human-like agent
16:42 The AI layoff trap — a prisoner's dilemma for firms
19:00 Cambrian explosion of startups and the hobbyist-to-inventor pipeline
22:07 Flattening organizations and the death of middle management
28:03 Taste, judgment, and why "slop" is the real risk
31:22 Why agents drift and the case for constant iteration
33:40 Rethinking agents: not tools, but children you raise
39:36 How close are open-source models to frontier?
43:20 Token usage and the economics of running agents
46:15 Toys becoming tools — the hobbyist signal
48:59 Public perception of AI: America vs. China vs. Silicon Valley
53:04 Agents as self-expression and identity creation
57:06 The expert vs. public perception gap on AI's impact
63:17 Meta's Muse model and the open-source debate
68:26 Data drought, synthetic data, and the next architecture leap
72:06 Hiring at Fireworks AI and Pika
Subscribe to This Week in AI on Apple: https://thisweekinai.ai/spotify
Subscribe to This Week in AI on Spotify: https://thisweekinai.ai/apple
Follow Jason:
X: https://twitter.com/Ja…
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What's Left for Humans When AI Builds Everything?
8 april 2026 · 1 uur 27 min
This week on TWiAI, Jason sits down with three founders at the center of the AI stack: Kanjun Qiu (CEO of Imbue), Carina Hong (CEO of Axiom), and Jonathan Siddharth (CEO of Turing). They break down Anthropic's explosive $30B run rate, why it just overtook OpenAI in revenue, Meta's bizarre internal token-burning leaderboard, and what happens when every person on Earth has 100 AI agents running for them. Lees meer
Anthropic's Revenue Explosion: Anthropic hit a $30B run rate, up from $9B just six months ago, and appears to have overtaken OpenAI in token sales. The panel breaks down where the money is coming from and why Meta might be the biggest customer.
Meta's Token-Burning Leaderboard: Reports surfaced of an internal Meta contest rewarding teams for burning the most tokens, with employees building bots that loop just to rack up usage. Is it brilliant adoption strategy or pure waste?
Open Source Agents vs. Lock-In: Kanjun argues that handing your entire business, memories, and workflows to closed AI platforms is a recipe for lock-in. She's building open agent infrastructure so users can swap models freely and own their data.
OpenAI's Identity Crisis: The panel dissects OpenAI's dropped Disney deal, its $100B+ raise, internal CFO tensions, and whether the company is doing too many side quests while Anthropic eats its lunch.
The Commodification of Developers: A year ago, the debate was whether AI makes developers 5% or 15% more efficient. Now the question is whether everyone is a developer, and what that means for the industry.
Why Open Source Must Win: From Apple Silicon to local models, the case for owning your AI stack and why Jason is going all-in on open source hardware and software.
Learn more about Imbue: https://imbue.com
Learn more about Axiom: https://axiommath.ai
Learn more about Turing: https://www.turing.com
This Week In AI is made possible by:
PayPalOpen - One Platform for all Business: https://paypalopen.com/
Timestamps:
00:00 Cold open
01:03 Welcom…
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How Focus Killed Sora and Saved Anthropic | This Week in AI with Victor Riparbelli, Nick Harris & Jeremy Fraenkel
1 april 2026 · 1 uur 12 min
This Week in AI, JCal sits down with three CEOs building the infrastructure, intelligence, and interfaces for the next era of AI: Jeremy Fraenkel (CEO, Fundamental), Victor Riparbelli (CEO, Synthesia), and Nick Harris (CEO, Lightmatter). We break down what's actually happening beneath the AI hype: the data modality LLMs completely missed, why copper is the real bottleneck in AI data centers, OpenAI shutting down Sora, the build vs. buy debate for AI tools, and how close we really are to AGI. Lees meer
AI's Biggest Blind Spot, Tabular Data: LLMs transformed text, images, and code, but 70-80% of enterprise data lives in rows and columns.
Copper Can't Keep Up: Nick explains why AI data centers are hitting a wall. GPUs compute faster than they can communicate. Lightmatter's photonic chips push 1.6 terabits per fiber and can 3x training speed.
Why OpenAI Killed Sora & Anthropic's Focus is Winning: Victor breaks down why even OpenAI had to learn the lesson of focus, and why Claude Code has every founder talking.
Vibe Coding Your Own CRM vs. Buying Salesforce: Jeremy reveals Fundamental built their own internal CRM using vibe coding. The panel debates when building beats buying and when it's a distraction.
The Omnipresent CEO: Jason shares how he's using AI agents for root access to Slack, Gmail, and Notion, resurrecting former employees as AI personas, automating SDR workflows, and summarizing employee inboxes while they're on vacation.
Are We Already at AGI?: Nick says the rate of progress is a double exponential. Jeremy argues AGI is a moving goalpost. Victor warns of "Future Shock" and societal disruption.
🔗 Learn more about Fundamental: https://fundamental.tech🔗 Learn more about Synthesia: https://www.synthesia.io🔗 Learn more about Lightmatter: https://lightmatter.coThis Week In AI is made possible by:PayPal Open - One Platform for all Business: paypalopen.comTimestamps:00:00 Welcome & intro to Jeremy Fraenkel, Victor Riparbelli, and Nick Harris01:47 What is Fundamental…
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$2.5B Chip Heist, The Future of American AI, and Purpose-Built Robots | This Week in AI Ep 6
25 maart 2026 · 1 uur 15 min
This week Jason sat down with Jake Loosararian and Chris Lattner on Episode 6 of This Week in AI. Jake is the CEO and co-founder of Gecko Robotics, a company deploying purpose-built robots and AI for mission-critical infrastructure inspection across energy, defense, and manufacturing. Chris is the CEO and co-founder of Modular, building a universal software layer that lets developers run AI models across Nvidia, AMD, and Apple silicon without being locked into any single hardware vendor. Lees meer
We explore the GPU shortage, why China's chip smuggling reveals the stakes of the AI cold war, how purpose-built robotics are beating humanoids on ROI, the case for American reindustrialization, and why the next decade could be the best ever for private equity in capital-intensive industries.
Purpose-Built Robots vs. Humanoids: Jake has been building mission-critical robots for 13 years. He explains why general-purpose humanoids still have too little ROI for industrial use, and why specialized robots that find and fix problems are winning in the field.
The GPU Shortage Is Real: Chris breaks down why you can't just go buy 100 Blackwell chips today, why Nvidia's Cuda creates massive lock-in, and how Modular is building a unified software layer across all major chip architectures.
Google TPUs Are the Sleeper: Chris ranks Google as the number one threat to Nvidia's dominance, ahead of Amazon's Trainium and AMD.
China's Chip Smuggling & the AI Cold War: A Supermicro co-founder allegedly smuggled $2.5B in Nvidia chips to China using fake serial numbers and a hairdryer.
The Best Decade for Private Equity: Jake makes the case that capital-intensive, commoditized infrastructure assets: waste-to-energy, water treatment, old power plants will all generate incredible returns.
Self-Driving State of Play: Chris, a former Tesla Autopilot lead, gives his read on Waymo's lead, Tesla's small Austin pilot, and why the real signal is when Tesla starts filing for fully autonomous permits in Cali…
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How Abridge Built A $5B AI Healthcare Unicorn | Shiv Rao, CEO - This Week in AI Ep 5
19 maart 2026 · 36 min
This week, JCal sat down with Shiv Rao at LAUNCH Fest 2026. Shiv is a cardiologist, CEO, and co-founder of Abridge, a $5B+ company that's raised close to $1B to build vertical large language models for healthcare. Shiv breaks down why the US healthcare system is broken, how AI is already outperforming doctors on average, and what it took to build a unicorn in one of the most regulated industries on the planet. Lees meer
We explore how AI is transforming doctor-patient conversations, eliminating clinician burnout, and reshaping how care is delivered and paid for.
Doctors Need 30 Hours a Day: An American Journal of General Internal Medicine study found physicians can't complete their daily workload in 24 hours. Shiv explains where all that time goes anAbridge is clawing it back.
AI Has Better Bedside Manner Than Your Doctor: Research from Harvard and other institutions now shows AI delivers more consistent answers and patients actually prefer it. Shiv explains why that's not as scary as it sounds.
The Healthcare Stakeholder Problem: Shiv invokes Conway's Law to explain why every player in the system, doctors, insurers & hospitals are pointing guns at each other instead of aligning around the patient.
A Real-Time AI Copilot for Doctors: Abridge's live assistant listens to conversations, pulls context from years of patient data, and prompts doctors with follow-up questions mid-visit to unlock insurance approvals on the spot.
The Self-Directed Patient Explosion: Nearly every patient walks in armed with ChatGPT research. Shiv explains why this is compounding the burnout crisis, not solving it.
Go-To-Market in Regulated Industries: Why "start small and swim upstream" can be a death trap in healthcare, and how Abridge's decision to target large health systems early became a core part of their moat.
Being Early Isn't Being Wrong: Abridge started three months after "Attention Is All You Need" and raised a $3M seed on a $12M pre. Shiv shares what it was like waiting years for t…
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Data Centers in Space, AI Excavators & Fixing AI Slop | Philip Johnston, Boris Sofman, Spiros Xanthos
11 maart 2026 · 1 uur 10 min
This week we sit down with three founders building at the frontier of AI in space, autonomous hardware, and software reliability: Philip Johnston (StarCloud), Boris Sofman (Bedrock Robotics), and Spiros Xanthos (Resolve AI). We dig into why data centers are heading to orbit, how AI is taking the wheel on construction sites, and whether the industry is moving too fast for its own good. Lees meer
We explore how physical infrastructure, real-world autonomy, and AI trust are reshaping the industry from the ground up.
Sam Altman vs. Space Data Centers: He said it won't matter "this decade." But Philip breaks down why the economics of space compute are about to flip.
The Construction Labor Crisis: Half the skilled workforce is retiring in the next seven years while data center construction spend hits $700B this year alone. Boris explains why autonomous excavators aren't replacing workers, they're the only way to keep up.
AI Broke Amazon's Code: Generative AI is shipping software faster than engineers can understand it. Spiros warns that accelerating code velocity without upgrading reliability is a disaster waiting to happen.
Automation Bias & Skill Degradation: What aviation taught us about over-trusting autopilot, and what developers need to learn fast.
Why Americans Don't Trust AI: A KPMG survey puts AI's favorability between ICE and Iran. The panel debates whether healthcare, education, and construction are the three wins that could turn the tide.
Karpathy's AI Research Agent: A weekend project that fires off entire teams of AI grad students running experiments overnight. Is this what automating the scientific method actually looks like?
Anthropic vs. the Pentagon: The U.S. government threatened to label a leading domestic AI company a supply chain risk. Who gets to decide how AI is used in warfare?
Timestamps:
00:00 — Welcome to This Week in AI: Episode 4
01:22 — Philip Johnston (Star Cloud): Why data centers in space will dominate
03:35 — Boris Sofman (Bedrock Rob…
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AI in Warfare, OpenClaw & The Stargate Mega-Campus | This Week in AI E3
4 maart 2026 · 1 uur 16 min
This week we sit down with three founders building at the frontier of AI infrastructure, evaluation, and hardware: Chase Lochmiller (Crusoe), Naveen Rao (Unconventional AI), and Anastasios Angelopoulos (Arena). We dig into the real bottlenecks slowing down the AI buildout, how to standout in the job market as AI matures, and the explosive government standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon. Lees meer
We explore how AI infrastructure, open source models, and policy are reshaping the industry from the ground up.
The Anthropic-Pentagon Standoff: The U.S. government blacklisted a leading domestic AI company for the first time. Who sets the rules for AI in warfare?
Jevons Paradox & AI: Every efficiency gain in intelligence-per-watt creates more demand, not less. AI infra is positioned to capture the largest market humanity has ever built.
OpenClaw & Open Source Mania: The open-source AI agent that just became GitHub's most-starred project. It now runs locally on your phone.
Should You Learn to Code?: Yes, but not as a trade skill. Bootcamp-style training is dead. Understanding how machines work is what separates leaders from everyone else.
Rethinking the Computer from Scratch: Naveen's team is building chips that mimic biology, targeting 1,000x efficiency gains.
The Coming Labor Crisis: Anastasios argues most valuable work is just training humans for repeatable tasks, and that work is disappearing. Chase counters that digital labor is a new variable in the GDP equation.
This Week In Startups is made possible by:
Notion - https://www.notion.com/twist
Quadratic - https://www.Quadratic.ai/twist
Timestamps:
00:38 — Welcome to This Week in AI
01:21 — Show intro and guest introductions (Chase from Crusoe and Anastasius from Arena)
02:22 — Crusoe's Stargate partnership: 1.2GW campus for Oracle and OpenAI in Abilene, Texas
03:09 — Rethinking computing from first principles for 1,000x efficiency
06:53 — How Arena went from a Berkeley side project to half a billion conve…
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The new rules for hiring, building, and betting on AI | This Week in AI E002
25 februari 2026 · 1 uur 28 min
Jason Calacanis sits down with two founders building at the frontier of AI products and infrastructure: Tanay Kothari (Wispr Flow) and Richard Socher (You.com & AIX Ventures). They dig into the Citrini "doom post" that rattled markets, the real economics of automation waves, and how AI-first teams are being rebuilt from the ground up. Lees meer
We explore how the agentic shift is reshaping companies, costs, and careers:
The AI Doom Post Debunked: Why the viral Citrini Substack predicting 10% unemployment and an S&P crash is completely wrong.
AI-First Hiring: How Wispr Flow shipped their #1 Android voice app with one engineer running ten Claude agents simultaneously — and stopped hiring junior developers entirely.
Customer Support at Scale: How Wispr went from needing 200 support agents to 4 by automating 15 distinct support loops, from bug tickets to product feedback.
The Cognitive Surplus: Why automation doesn't destroy jobs, it creates the next wave of businesses nobody has predicted yet.
Open Source vs. Closed Models: Why DeepSeek forced every major lab to innovate faster, and how Wispr built its own 90% gross margin voice model by starting on open source.
Taiwan & the Chip Risk: Apple's Mac Mini onshoring, the 2027 CCP military warning, and the five contingency plans the world is quietly building around TSMC.
OpenClaw Mania: Producer Oliver joins the show to talk about how he is using OpenClaw to do his tasks for him.
This Week In Startups is made possible by:
Notion - https://www.notion.com/twist
Quadratic - https://www.Quadratic.ai/twist
Timestamps:
00:01:16 - Welcome & Guest Introductions: Tanay Kothari (Wispr Flow) and Richard Socher (You.com)
00:03:33 - Why Voice Dictation Finally Works: How Wispr turns rambling speech into send-ready messages
00:05:43 - Foot Pedals, Rings & the Future of Voice Input Modalities
00:09:32 - The Citrini "Doom Post": The viral Substack predicting 10% unemployment and an S&P crash
00:11:52 - Quadratic - Bringing the prod…
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What is Holding OpenClaw Back?! | This Week in AI Episode 1
18 februari 2026 · 1 uur 13 min
Jason Calacanis sits down with three CEOs building at the bleeding edge of the agentic revolution: Mitesh Agrawal (Positron AI), Alex Elias (Qloo), and Kash Ali (TaxGPT). They discuss the rapid rise of Open Claw, an open-source platform that is fundamentally changing work by allowing users to create autonomous agents. "Saving 30 minutes a day... that’s like getting three more weeks a year back." "I don't need a technical recruiter today." We explore how autonomous agents are moving beyond "Copilots" to become independent teammates: Lees meer
The AI Executive Assistant: How Mitesh Agrawal uses agents to automate inbox filtering and Slack drafts, recapturing 6% of his year.
The Hiring Hiatus: Kash Ali screened 1,000 job applications in two hours with "flawless" accuracy, replacing 40+ hours of manual labor.
The $1M One-Person Firm: How AI is solving the shortage of 340,000 accountants by allowing a single person to command an "army of agents".
Democratizing Luxury: Scaling the "chauffeur and concierge" experience to everyone through taste-based AI and structured inference.
Autonomous Media: A demo of an agent that transcribes, clips, and captions viral content in five minutes, a process that previously took an hour.The agent era is here. Are you building your replicant, or are you being left behind by a 10x more efficient workforceThis Week In Startups is made possible by:Notion - https://www.notion.com/twistQuadratic - https://www.Quadratic.ai/twistTimestamps: 00:00 Welcome to This Week in AI!03:17 How are CEO’s using OpenClaw?09:25 Notion - Notion brings all your notes, docs, and projects into one connected space that just works with AI built right in. Try Notion, with Notion Agent, at notion.com/twist00:19:09 — Automating the "Great Hiring Hiatus”00:19:20 Quadratic - Bringing the productivity boost of AI into your spreadsheets. Visit [quadratic.ai/twist](https://www.quadratic.ai/twist) to sign up and use the code TWIST to get one free month of their pro tier subscripti…
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How to Secure Your OpenClaw Agent | Interview with ZioSec Founders
4 februari 2026 · 46 min
Welcome to the very first episode of This Week in AI! Host Oliver Korzen kicks things off with an exclusive interview featuring Aaron Walls (CEO) and Andrius Useckas (CTO), the founders of ZioSec. Together, they dive deep into the world of OpenClaw security—exposing the vulnerabilities they've discovered in the wild, breaking down real attack vectors, and revealing the essential steps you need to take to protect your agent from exploitation.🔒 Key Takeaways:1. Why Mac Mini might be your safest local setup2. The "Lethal Trifecta" that makes AI agents vulnerable3. How indirect prompt injections hijack your agent through email & documents4. Why 26% of OpenClaw skills contain vulnerabilities5. Input sanitation & judge models as defensive layersZioSec: AI agent assisting in penetration testing | https://ziosec.comTimestamps:00:00 - Why Mac Mini isn't the right setup for everyone12:30 - The right way to host OpenClaw (hint: not AWS)16:11 - Understanding your attack surface27:33 - Why third-party skills are a security risk36:30 - Start with sandboxes & read-only permissions40:03 - Career advice for college students Lees meer
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Everything You Need to Know About Gemini 3.0!
1 december 2025 · 9 min
Google released Gemini 3.0 this week, and I’ve been hands-on with it every day since launch. After diving into all the new capabilities, performance upgrades, and quality-of-life improvements, I’ve distilled the most important updates you should know. In this breakdown, I walk through the biggest feature changes, what they mean in real-world use, and how Gemini 3.0 stacks up against the other frontier models. Lees meer