This Week in AI

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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=enYou.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-Stokes

0:41 Welcome back to This Week in AI

1:04 Meet the guests: Guy Pigeon, Richard Socher, and Jake Lucier

2:54 Shopify and Meta team up so Muse can check out with Shop Pay

6:19 Why Amazon blocked Muse: ads, habit, and owning the front door

15:13 Do coupons and ads survive one-shot agent shopping?

18:04 OpenAI's internal model resolves 100+ longstanding math problems

26:07 Jason's pitch: pay the top 50 mathematicians $100M each

34:29 Why scientists should be as famous as NBA players

37:41 Anthropic's biology wet lab: can we trust it?

40:59 Why biology is the field AI will transform most

54:22 AI's trust problem and the wealth gap

57:29 The AI Tax and Work Protection Act

1:01:29 Will AI unemployment show up in the data?

1:11:47 TypeSafe AI's Jev: fast, calibrated decisions for software

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Great TWIST interviews:Will Guidara,Eoghan McCabe,Steve Huffman,Brian Chesky,Bob Moesta,Aaron Levie,Sophia Amoruso,Reid Hoffman,Frank Slootman,Billy McFarland

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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 playbook

1:02:54 AI and jobs: normal churn or something bigger?

1:07:19 What founders are actually saying in the group chats

1:08:49 Every meeting recorded, every meeting summarized

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Great TWIST interviews:Will Guidara,Eoghan McCabe,Steve Huffman,Brian Chesky,Bob Moesta,Aaron Levie,Sophia Amoruso,Reid Hoffman,Frank Slootman,Billy McFarland

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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 propaganda tape

23:22 BREAKING: OpenAI solves the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem

28:53 The Hank Green / SciShow video sponsored by ControlAI

32:11 Fogging and flooding

46:47 UBS will require AI skills from its 2027 graduate

56:41 How LAUNCH hired its associates-in-training

57:18 NYT: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

1:04:16 Alex on Qloo's shift from NYT film critics on payroll to small specialized models

1:09:35 First look: the "Artificial" teaser trailer

1:14:34 Sam Altman's bunker, Peter Thiel, and casting rundown

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Great TWIST interviews:Will Guidara,Eoghan McCabe,Steve Huffman,Brian Chesky,Bob Moesta,Aaron Levie,Sophia Amoruso,Reid Hoffman,Frank Slootman,Billy McFarland

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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 spreehttps://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"

14:13 Slack's moat, switching costs, and the Salesforce rebound

15:11 Jason's "Oracle": a heads-up display for the whole company

18:42 The Hugging Face breach: who's responsible when agents go rogue?

19:42 Perplexity launches Hybrid Compute — local models on your Mac

21:39 Why unmetered local tokens change corporate behavior

26:57 Gatik's Autonomous Vehicle AI Stack

32:22 Jason's Tesla FSD stories

34:05 Are AV companies being pushed to move too fast?

41:38 Trucking is a "have to have," robotaxis are a "nice to have"

42:36 Jason's fix: a safety driver for the first million rides

46:50 Why physical AI's adoption curve runs in decades

52:21 Anthropic's Model Hardware Standard (MHS), explained

1:06:27 How Jason got onion rings on the menu at Buck's of Woodside

1:09:05 AI detectors under fire: Pangram, MIT, and the handwritten diary

1:15:20 Why AI is "very mid" at writing (it learned from the average)

1:17:11 The Orin Kerr test: Pangram catches Claude writing as Kerr

1:28:35 Micro Duck and designing robots with Claude

1:29:42 Phil Kaplan's $14 custom circuit boards

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Great TWIST interviews:Will Guidara,Eoghan McCabe,Steve Huffman,Brian Chesky,Bob Moesta,Aaron Levie,Sophia Amoruso,Reid Hoffman,Frank Slootman,Billy McFarland

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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-into-openai-and-sam-altman-for-massive-artificial-intelligence-data-breach/Ox Alpha on OpenRouter: https://openrouter.ai/stealth/ox-alphaApple: M6 and M5 Ultra press release: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-introduces-m6-and-m5-ultra-for-a-big-leap-in-performance-and-ai-compute/9 to 5 Mac: M5 Mac Studio launch: https://9to5mac.com/2026/08/25/apple-unveils-next-generation-mac-studio-with-m5-max-and-m5-ultra/DHH on X: Ubiquity comments: https://x.com/dhh/status/2087272392557007042Shane Parrish on X: Ubiquiti Wi-Fi set-up: https://x.com/shaneparrish/status/2088672566558761065Timestamps:0:00 Today's guests: Runbin Dong (Scale Social) and Oege de Moor (XBOW)2:12 Open-weight models are right behind the frontier8:22 Your infrastructure is not ready for what's coming13:07 Nvidia's Perplexity announcement16:43 Spending $2K/month on AI tools per employee21:59 Why security teams have to lean on AI25:19 The Great Chip Land Grab32:02 Jason's multi-agent restaurant-style workflow34:54 AI ghostwriting is lip syncing45:18 Are rogue AI agents breaking the law?52:38 The dangers of using a stealth model58:57 Apple's new M5 Mac Studio1:06:43 Everyone's fav AI tool of the momentSubscribe 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/lonsFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisCheck out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis

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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:https://x.com/aaronp613/status/2089522745184760112?s=20

9to5 Mac: AirPods with cameras get their clearest leak yet:https://9to5mac.com/2026/08/17/airpods-with-camera-get-their-clearest-leak-yet/

Toms Hardware: Google Buys Spirit Airlines Data for AI Training:https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/google-buys-spirit-airlines-data-for-ai-training-for-just-usd10-million-purchase-includes-hundreds-of-millions-of-emails-microsoft-teams-chats-billions-of-flight-pricing-records-and-anonymized-passenger-records

Micro1:https://www.micro1.ai/

Timestamps:

0:00 Why is everyone mad at Dario Amodei?

1:47 Is Anthropic training to kill your company?

10:10 How to talk to the public about cyber risk

15:33 Reward hacking and sycophancy

21:55 Why do models care about rewards?

28:55 Is Grok Bot an iPhone Moment?

38:26 First look at AirPods with Cameras

42:16 Why Google bought Spirit Airlines' data

48:52 Amazon is scanning and shredding rare books

59:06 Can we build a "moral layer" on top of models?

1:01:14 Your LLM could catch a mind virus

1:10:55 Are we already in the AGI Era?

1:14:17 Silicon Valley's lost hippie vibes

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Follow Jason:

X:https://twitter.com/Jason

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis

Check out all our partner offers:https://partners.launch.co/

Great TWIST interviews:Will Guidara,Eoghan McCabe,Steve Huffman,Brian Chesky,Bob Moesta,Aaron Levie,Sophia Amoruso,Reid Hoffman,Frank Slootman,Billy McFarland

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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 projects frozen:https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/03/texas-data-center-project-audit-greg-abbott/

ERCOT:https://www.ercot.com/

Public Utility Commission of Texas:https://www.puc.texas.gov/

TechCrunch on Sirota’s “software is dead” thesis:https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/18/this-startup-wants-to-make-enterprise-software-look-more-like-a-prompt/

River AI:https://river.ai/

Thinking Machines Lab:https://thinkingmachines.ai/

Timestamps:

0:00 Guest Intros

3:30 Anthropic to watermark Claude text

5:50 Cracking down on AI Slop

10:45 Will slop-trackers push users to open source

16:21 Jason's "No Clankers" proposal

23:01 Parsing Zuckerberg's techno-utopian manifesto

39:27 The distillation double standard

44:28 "When you're behind, go open…"

51:17 Texas freezes new data centers

1:04:12 Is software dead?

1:05:39 Software managing, not engineering

1:10:24 Everyone is vibecoding

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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-Note.pdf

Hank Green apology on Reddit:https://www.reddit.com/r/nerdfighters/comments/1vbmoj5/comment/p0vzmog/

Taylor Lorenz responds to Hank Green on X:https://x.com/TaylorLorenz/status/2083272682188206564

TechCrunch: Substack partners with Pangram:https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/22/substacks-new-tool-tells-you-whos-been-writing-their-newsletters-with-ai/

Amazon: Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Always Coming Home” expanded edition:https://www.amazon.com/Ursula-K-Guin-Authors-Expanded/dp/1598536036

Timestamps:

0:00 Guest intros and open

10:03 Why Poolside thinks coding is the path to AGI

12:55 A first look at EXO's local.ai

16:24 The White House's open source pivot

20:21 Margins, compute, and "dirt to intelligence"

36:02 Jason's self-driving auction pitch

37:58 Hank Green's AI apology

38:45 Is AI addictive?

1:08:31 What does it mean for AI to be "privacy first"?

1:10:29 Enterprise AI sovereignty and "colonization"

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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:https://fireworks.ai/

Legora:https://legora.com/

OpenEvidence:https://www.openevidence.com/

Yahoo: Stripe in talks to acquire OpenRouter:https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/stripe-talks-acquire-openrouter-potential-215104525.html

Sam Altman on the Relentless podcast:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv3CEAS_w34

TechCrunch: Cursor India-only pricing tier:https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/27/cursor-makes-its-biggest-india-push-yet-ahead-of-spacex-acquisition-with-localized-pricing/

Gergely Orosz: The Pragmatic Engineer:https://www.pragmaticengineer.com/

Timestamps:

0:00 Guest intros: Grant Lee (Gamma) and Philip Johnston (Starcloud)

1:22 Nvidia's open weight letter

8:11 Starcloud's first H100 in space

19:47 Series A extension economics

20:39 How Gamma stayed lean and balanced work and fun

30:40 Betting on a compute-constrained world

35:48 Different approaches to pricing

44:59 Where does the AI moat really live?

57:41 Are we in the Singularity?

1:04:42 Starcloud's mission to Alpha Centauri

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LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis

Check out all our partner offers:https://partners.launch.co/

Great TWIST interviews:Will Guidara,Eoghan McCabe,Steve Huffman,Brian Chesky,Bob Moesta,Aaron Levie,Sophia Amoruso,Reid Hoffman,Frank Slootman,Billy McFarland

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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 andZ.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/

Timestamps:

0:00 Will the US limit foreign open source models?

5:40 Are the American frontier AI labs in danger of bankruptcy?

7:15 The risks of over-regulating AI

10:20 What does it mean to win the AI race?

17:08 Is self-hosting agentic Chinese models safe?

20:08 Why agents still fail when models are so smart

25:28 Simulating the digital world for agents

36:51 Why picking the right model for the task is so hard

46:29 Alex is developing "ambient intelligence"

52:35 What we know about the Hugging Face breach

53:46 Are safety guardrails kneecapping our best models?

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X:https://x.com/alex

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X:https://twitter.com/Jason

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis

Check out all our partner offers:https://partners.launch.co/

Great TWIST interviews:Will Guidara,Eoghan McCabe,Steve Huffman,Brian Chesky,Bob Moesta,Aaron Levie,Sophia Amoruso,Reid Hoffman,Frank Slootman,Billy McFarland

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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 fromZ.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://spaceflightnow.com/2026/07/09/live-coverage-spacex-to-launch-falcon-9-rocket-on-record-breaking-36th-flight/

Timestamps:0:00 A new generation of lower-cost models

4:10 Enterprises want their own intelligence stack

6:10 Frontier vs. open source: where does the value go?

10:03 Is enterprises destined to go small?

30:04 Self-improvement as the real fix

31:52 Should the AI industry regulate itself?

47:14 Uber vs. Waymo in DC

1:03:53 Can AI data centers in space really work?

1:14:47 You get a plug! Everyone gets a plug!

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LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis

Check out all our partner offers:https://partners.launch.co/

Great TWIST interviews:Will Guidara,Eoghan McCabe,Steve Huffman,Brian Chesky,Bob Moesta,Aaron Levie,Sophia Amoruso,Reid Hoffman,Frank Slootman,Billy McFarland

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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 West's open source bench?

13:20 Jagged Intelligence and why post-training matters

25:22 Benchmarks as living quality checks

32:49 Why models still struggle with drug names

42:58 Fine-tuning TV, cough, and sob detection

46:08 What is Arena actually selling?

1:08:29 Nationalization vs. buying stakes in AI companies

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X:https://x.com/alex

LinkedIn:⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm

Follow Jason:

X:https://twitter.com/Jason

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis

Check out all our partner offers:https://partners.launch.co/

Great TWIST interviews:Will Guidara,Eoghan McCabe,Steve Huffman,Brian Chesky,Bob Moesta,Aaron Levie,Sophia Amoruso,Reid Hoffman,Frank Slootman,Billy McFarland

Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters:https://substack.com/@calacanis

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This Week In Startups is made possible by:

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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, AGI Inc, and computer-use agents

10:05 What does "trusted access" really mean?

12:37 Why Krea open sourced its image model

22:21 BREAKING: Claude Sonnet 5 is here

26:00 GLM-5.2 is the open source Claude moment

31:58 Personalization and corporate ontology

41:25 Can we trust Higgsfield's numbers?

50:39 Distillation: The threat is real

58:01 Agentic personhood and corporate rights

1:03:19 Everyone's AGI timeline and p(doom) score

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LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis

Thank you to our partners:

Check out all our partner offers:https://partners.launch.co/

Great TWIST interviews:Will Guidara,Eoghan McCabe,Steve Huffman,Brian Chesky,Bob Moesta,Aaron Levie,Sophia Amoruso,Reid Hoffman,Frank Slootman,Billy McFarland

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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.voyagerspace.com/

Vast Space:https://www.vastspace.com/

Blue Origin’s New Glenn:https://www.blueorigin.com/new-glenn

“Red Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson:https://www.amazon.com/Red-Mars-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0553560735

“Rendezvous with Rama” by Arthur C. Clarke:https://www.amazon.com/Rendezvous-Rama-Arthur-Clarke/dp/0553287893

Theo Von “This Past Weekend” podcast:https://www.theovon.com/podcast

Anthropic statement on Fable/Mythos suspension:https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access

Timestamps:

0:00 The Year of Physical AI

1:28 Why everyone's bullish on world models

7:03 Physical AI is harder, but probably bigger

9:08 How to think about world models

16:00 When data becomes "adversarial"

25:00 How Bedrock powers autonomous excavators

30:48 Why teleoperation gets a bad rap

39:10 Meet Joy the space robot

41:33 Laser comms coming to next-gen stations

46:29 Why everyone hates data centers

57:33 When does Claude Fable come back?

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Great TWIST interviews:Will Guidara,Eoghan McCabe,Steve Huffman,Brian Chesky,Bob Moesta,Aaron Levie,Sophia Amoruso,Reid Hoffman,Frank Slootman,Billy McFarland

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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/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisCheck out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.com

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.

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://notebooklm.google.com

LiveKit: https://livekit.io

OpenAI ChatGPT: https://openai.com

Tesla: https://www.tesla.com

Grok (xAI): https://x.ai

Salesforce Agentforce: https://www.salesforce.com/agentforce

SAP Joule: https://www.sap.com/products/artificial-intelligence/ai-assistant.html

Apple Intelligence: https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence

Google Gemini: https://gemini.google.com

Anthropic Claude Code: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code

OpenRouter: https://openrouter.ai

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#ThisWeekInAI #AI #NousResearch #NotebookLM #LiveKit #OpenSourceAI #AIAgents #Siri #Gemini #VoiceAI

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 platforms: https://thisweekinai.ai#ThisWeekInAI #AI #UnconventionalAI #NaveenRao #AlexFinn #AnalogComputing #AIcompute #AIenergy #TokenMaxing #AIlayoffs #AnthropicIPO

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.

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

Tanay Kothari, Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai | https://x.com/tankots

Richard Socher, Recursive Superintelligence / You.com: https://recursive.com | https://x.com/RichardSocher

🔗 Referenced in this episode:

Modal Labs: https://modal.com

Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai

Recursive Superintelligence launch: https://recursive.com

You.com: https://you.com

Anthropic / SpaceX Colossus 1 compute deal: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-spacex

TechCrunch on the $1.25B/month Anthropic-xAI compute deal: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-will-pay-xai-1-25-billion-per-month-for-compute/

Meta's 8,000 layoffs and 2026 AI CapEx of $145B: https://www.reuters.com

Intuit cuts 3,000 jobs to fund AI integration: https://www.reuters.com

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon NYT op-ed on AI job loss: https://www.nytimes.com

Stanford study on entry-level AI-exposed jobs (-16%): https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu

Pope Leo XIV: "AI needs to be disarmed": https://www.vatican.va

Chris Olah (Anthropic) on AI and the global poor: https://www.anthropic.com

OpenRouter token usage leaderboard: https://openrouter.ai/rankings

DeepSeek V4 Flash: https://www.deepseek.com

Qwen 3 Max (Alibaba): https://qwenlm.ai

🔗 Subscribe and follow:

Newsletter and all platforms: https://thisweekinai.ai

#ThisWeekInAI #AI #ModalLabs #WisprFlow #Recursive #YouCom #DeepSeek #Qwen #MetaLayoffs #Anthropic #Colossus #PopeLeo #RewardHacking #AIJobs #OpenSource

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.

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:

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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=20

Imbue Blueprint (open source agent skill): https://imbue.com/blueprint

ExoLabs (daisy-chained Mac clusters): https://exolabs.net

Abacus (on-prem language models): https://goabacus.co

Whisper Flow (voice-to-text): https://wisprflow.ai

Perplexity Model Council: https://perplexity.ai

NYT editorial on Reese Witherspoon and AI: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/15/opinion/reese-witherspoon-mel-robbins-girlboss-ai.html

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#ThisWeekInAI #AI #Imbue #Fundamental #Linear #Anthropic #OpenAI #Karpathy #AIEtiquette #VibeCoding #PunkSoftware #AICommencement #OpenSourceAI

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).

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-high/

Fast Company, Tech layoffs this week due to AI (Cloudflare, PayPal, Coinbase, Upwork): https://www.fastcompany.com/91538995/tech-layoffs-due-to-ai-this-week-cloudflare-paypal-coinbase-upwork

Bloomberg, South Korea floats citizen dividend from AI profits: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-05-12/korea-s-massive-ai-boom-triggers-call-for-tech-tax-roiling-market

PYMNTS, Inside a retail store run entirely by AI (Andon Labs / Luna): https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2026/inside-a-retail-store-run-entirely-by-ai/

Wispr Flow (voice-to-text tool Jason uses): https://wisprflow.ai

Fermi Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

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Newsletter and all platforms: https://thisweekinai.ai

#ThisWeekInAI #AI #ThinkingMachines #Lightmatter #StarCloud #Arena #Anthropic #ProjectLuna #AIcompute #AIlayoffs #Superintelligence

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.

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:

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

37:20 The Abridge vs Ambience scribe wars

42:06 Jack Clark's 60% odds on recursive self-improvement by 2028

53:41 Morgan Stanley's $1.1 trillion hyperscaler CapEx forecast

1:04:53 Anthropic's marketing machine & the AI religion thesis

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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.

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:

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 infrastructure: where value pools

45:56 DeepSeek V4 drops mid-episode: $3.48 vs. Claude's $25

50:13 AI in financial markets: arbitrage, meme stocks, and ASI

56:58 China blocks Metas acquisition, OpenAI-Microsoft deal redux

58:41 AGI definitions and who wins the US vs. China model race

01:02:13 US open source embarrassment and the talent war

01:05:23 OpenAI's spend vs. revenue: risk of ruin or name of the game?

01:09:14 Apple's new CEO, M-series compute flood, and space data centers

01:12:08 P-doom scores and final thoughts

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Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/

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.

This Week In AI is made possible by:

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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

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Follow Jason:

X: @jason

LinkedIn: /jasoncalacanis

Check out all our partner offers:

https://partners.launch.co/

Links Mentioned on the Show:

Perplexity: https://perplexity.ai/

Surge AI: https://surge.ai/

Perplexity Comet: https://comet.perplexity.ai/

Perplexity Max: https://perplexity.ai/max

Claude Code: https://claude.com/product/claude-code

Claude Design: https://claude.com/claude-design

OpenAI Codex: https://openai.com/codex

GitHub Copilot: https://github.com/features/copilot

Cursor: https://cursor.com/

LM Arena: https://lmarena.ai/

Kimi K2: https://www.kimi.com/

DeepSeek: https://www.deepseek.com/

Apple Silicon: https://www.apple.com/mac/m4/

WhisperFlow: https://wisprflow.ai/

WHOOP: https://www.whoop.com/

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.

This Week In AI is made possible by:

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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

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Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/

Links Mentioned on the Show:

Fireworks AI: https://fireworks.ai/

Pika: https://pika.art/

PyTorch: https://pytorch.org/

"The AI Layoff Trap" paper (UPenn & Boston University): https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20617

Fortune: CFOs say AI cuts will be 9x bigger than reported: https://fortune.com/2026/03/24/cfo-survey-ai-job-cuts-productivity-paradox-2026/

HBR: Companies firing based on AI potential, not performance: https://hbr.org/2026/01/companies-are-laying-off-workers-because-of-ais-potential-not-its-performance

New Yorker profile on Sam Altman (Ronan Farrow): https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/11/sam-altman-responds-to-incendiary-new-yorker-article-after-attack-on-his-home/

Sam Altman home attack: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/10/sam-altman-house-hit-with-molotov-cocktail-openai-office-threatened.html

Block layoffs — Jack Dorsey cites AI: https://fortune.com/2026/02/27/block-jack-dorsey-ceo-xyz-stock-square-4000-ai-layoffs/

Pew Research — AI experts vs. public perception: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-public-and-ai-experts-view-artificial-intelligence/

Meta Muse Spark announcement: https://ai.meta.com/blog/introducing-muse-spark-msl/

DeepSeek V3: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3

Bubble Pal AI toy (Shenzhen): https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hugging-every-fun-thought-haivivi-unveils-the-worlds-first-aigc-toy-bubblepal-302209714.html

Cursor (Composer): https://cursor.sh/

NVIDIA Nemotron: https://developer.nvidia.com/nemotron

Qwen (Alibaba): https://qwenlm.github.io/

Mistral AI: https://mistral.ai/

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.

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 Welcome and intro to this week's panel

01:31 Kanjun Qiu on open source agents and Imbue

05:10 Carina Hong on building an AI mathematician at Axiom

06:30 Formal verification and why superintelligence needs proof

09:52 Jonathan Siddharth on Turing's superintelligence accelerator

15:53 Anthropic's $30B run rate and overtaking OpenAI

22:27 OpenAI's strategy, Disney deal, and $100B raise

28:27 Meta's internal token-burning leaderboard

44:08 The commodification of developers

50:31 God mode for code: formal verification in practice

58:27 Superintelligence in 36 months: what happens next

01:08:41 Apple, Siri, and why Big Tech is failing at AI products

Subscribe to This Week in AI on Apple: https://thisweekinai.ai/spotify

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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.

🔗 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? Large tabular models explained07:01 Victor Riparbelli on Synthesia & why OpenAI killed Sora11:09 Claude Code dominance & the Lightspeed founder retreat12:08 Nick Harris on Lightmatter, photonics & the new Moore's Law14:38 Copper vs. fiber: why AI data centers are hitting a wall18:44 Reinventing video: interactive, real-time, personalized21:32 The economics of a custom AI movie23:55 Why Amazon, Google & Meta are building their own chips28:06 Tables have a bandwidth problem too32:27 When will compute be as cheap as storage?36:10 The future of software: every company gets a custom stack38:06 Vibe coding your own CRM vs. buying Salesforce45:57 Jason's quest for root access to Slack50:18 The omnipresent CEO: Doctor Manhattan meets Jesus CEO52:13 Resurrecting former employees as AI personas53:25 Victor's executive changelog for a 650-person company55:07 Whisper Flow & the Plaud Pin1:00:03 AGI: is it already here?1:03:37 Jeremy: we've only solved half the brain1:06:30 70% of Americans fear AI will impact jobs1:08:47 Future Shock & keeping the rope tight*Mentioned in the show:*

Wisper Flow: https://wisperflow.ai

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.

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.

Learn more about Gecko Robotics: https://www.geckorobotics.com

Learn more about Modular: https://www.modular.com/

This Week In AI is made possible by:

*PayPalOpen* - One Platform for all Business: paypalopen.com

*Timestamps:*

00:00 Welcome & intro to Jake Lu (Gecko Robotics) and Chris Lattner (Modular)

01:34 Gecko's 13-year journey & the Cantilever platform

05:15 Chris Lattner on Modular: replacing Cuda & unifying AI hardware

11:10 Nvidia lock-in, AMD's Rock & why the software stack is broken

19:49 The GPU shortage: how real is it?

22:13 Who challenges Nvidia? Google TPUs, Amazon Trainium & AMD ranked

28:17 China chip smuggling: $2.5B in Nvidia GPUs & the AI cold war

37:43 Self-driving update: Waymo, Tesla's Austin pilot & Chris's Tesla history

42:20 Figure's humanoid package sorting — real or demo magic?

43:47 The best decade for private equity in capital-intensive assets

51:04 Reindustrialization, the trades boom & making manufacturing cool

58:39 Building tech companies outside Silicon Valley

1:06:46 Breaking news: Brett Adcock launches Hark from Figure

1:10:15 Closing thoughts: grit over hype, customers over valuations

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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.

We explore how AI is transforming doctor-patient conversations, eliminating clinician burnout, and reshaping how care is delivered and paid for.

🔗 Learn more about Abridge: https://www.abridge.com

This Week In AI is made possible by:

Quadratic - https://www.Quadratic.ai/twist

Timestamps:

00:00 Welcome & intro to Shiv Rao, CEO & co-founder of Abridge

01:20 Rural hospital closures & the necessity of AI agents

03:33 Designing an AI intake process for primary care

06:01 Solving the 30-hour workday & clerical burnout

08:25 Conway’s Law & misaligned stakeholders in healthcare

10:07 Quadratic - Bringing the productivity boost of AI into your spreadsheets. Visit https://www.quadratic.ai/twist to sign up and use the code TWIST to get one free month of their pro tier subscription.

11:50 Why patients prefer AI models over average clinicians

14:27 Moving past the charade of the all-knowing doctor

17:01 How automated notes restore human clinical presence

21:00 The Joe Rogan crowd & consumer-driven healthcare

27:29 Advances in surgical robotics & AI precision

32:44 Surviving the Bert era to reach the AI inflection point

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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.

We explore how physical infrastructure, real-world autonomy, and AI trust are reshaping the industry from the ground up.

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 Robotics): Autonomizing construction equipment with AI

08:44 — Spiros Santos (Resolve AI): Intro & AI-generated code's "high blast radius" problem at Amazon

09:31 — Squarespace: Turn your idea into a beautiful website! Go to http://www.squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you’re ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

10:35 — Deep dive: Amazon's code red meetings & trusting AI-generated code too much

13:20 — Automation bias & skill degradation: the aviation autopilot analogy

17:09 — Why Americans distrust AI: and what the industry should do about it

20:05 — Notion ad

21:29 — KPMG survey results: only 9% of large companies plan job cuts from AI, 55% plan to hire more; panel debates job displacement fears

31:43 — AI's PR fix: healthcare, education & construction as the big three wins

39:22 — World models & humanoid robots: LeCun's $1B bet & the Figure video controversy

47:59 — Star Cloud's 88,000-satellite constellation: economics of space compute

56:05 — Andrej Karpathy's AI research agent: automating the scientific method

1:01:04 — Anthropic vs. the military: supply chain risk, Dario's dilemma & the Iran strike claim

1:07:50 — Hiring pitches & outro: Star Cloud, Bedrock Robotics, Resolve AI

Subscribe to This Week in AI on Apple: https://thisweekinai.ai/spotify

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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.

We explore how AI infrastructure, open source models, and policy are reshaping the industry from the ground up.

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 conversations

09:28 — Quadratic - Bringing the productivity boost of AI into your spreadsheets. Visit https://www.quadratic.ai/twist to sign up and use the code TWIST to get one free month of their pro tier subscription.

12:01 — Open source AI explosion: On-device models, token costs, and adoption

15:31 — Defining AGI: Clay Math millennium problems, moving goalposts, and what AI still can't do

22:08 — 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 https://www.notion.com/twist

23:07 — System 1 vs. System 2 thinking and where compute actually happens

26:31 — Crusoe Spark: Modular data centers that go where the power is

34:33 — Model compression is moving faster than anyone predicted

36:51 — Jevons Paradox, the employment question, and the coming labor crisis

45:53 — Abundance, advice for young people, and the importance of learning to code

64:41 — AI in warfare: Corporate responsibility, inevitability, and national obligations

Subscribe to This Week in AI on Apple: https://thisweekinai.ai/spotify

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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.

We explore how the agentic shift is reshaping companies, costs, and careers:

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 productivity boost of AI into your spreadsheets. Visit https://www.quadratic.ai/twist to sign up and use the code TWIST to get one free month of their pro tier subscription.

00:14:28 - Debunking the Doom: Cognitive Surplus, the Lump of Labor Fallacy & Why People Adapt

00:22:08 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 https://www.notion.com/twist

00:26:18 - Open Source vs. Closed Models: How DeepSeek Forced Innovation & Who Wins the Cost Race

00:38:05 - Building AI-First Teams: Certifications, Agent Management & the New Skill Stack

00:43:42 - Customer Support Reinvented: How Wispr Went from 200 Agents to 4

01:16:29 - Breaking News: Apple Onshores Mac Mini to Houston & The Taiwan Chip Risk Explained

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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:

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

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.