OpenAI

🔬They Thought the Model Was Broken — Matt McPartlon & Neil Patil, Chai Discovery

Aug 11, 2026 · 1:35:20

Matt McPartland and Neil Patil of Chai Discovery explain why pharma partners like Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Novartis, and argenx are buying their AI design tools, arguing that Chai-2's all-atom diffusion model crossed a usefulness threshold by designing antibodies to 50 targets with hits on half at ~20% hit rate. They trace the lineage from open-sourced Chai-1 structure prediction through Chai-2's co-design of sequence and structure, and detail how validation via cryo-EM achieved a 0.33 Å error, making them suspect data leakage. The product resembles SolidWorks or Figma, not ChatGPT, with paint-tool epitope selection and content-aware fill for binder generation, built under strict pharma IP constraints via single-tenancy. They discuss convincing skeptical scientists—one cried after seeing a binder for a target she'd spent a decade on—and argue the compute market is mispriced for this model class, with bottlenecks in validation loops and talent obscurity rather than data or compute.

Next 100x in AI: Inference, Networking, & Self-Optimizing Models — Philip Kiely & Ali Taha, Baseten

Aug 3, 2026 · 1:42:54

Philip Kiely and Ali Taha of Baseten join Swyx to explain what actually happens when a 200,000-token request hits a production inference system, arguing that stacking quantization, speculative decoding, and disaggregated prefill/decode can make open models like GLM-5.2 up to 10x faster. They detail cache-aware routing, training traffic-specific speculators, and why quantization errors can cancel out so a more-quantized model beats a less-quantized one. They also reveal how Baseten grafted Kimi's vision encoder onto GLM-5.2, discuss NVIDIA Dynamo as a toolkit rather than a turnkey speedup, and explain why they are bearish on mega kernels. The conversation covers video generation's compute barriers, the trend toward ASIC-like GPUs, and the emerging loop where GLM-5.2 writes the GPU kernels that serve itself.

OpenAI’s Vision for the AI Super App — Akshay Nathan, OpenAI

Jul 28, 2026 · 1:10:57

Akshay Nathan, OpenAI's head of core product engineering, explains why the company merged Codex and ChatGPT into a unified agent harness, arguing that the lines between software engineering and knowledge work are blurring. He reveals that Codex unexpectedly gained traction among non-developers at OpenAI, leading to the launch of ChatGPT Work, which shares the same underlying harness but offers opinionated UX differences like sandboxing and Git visibility. Nathan details how artifacts, Sites, plugins, memory, and sub-agents enable users to replace slide decks and spreadsheets with interactive websites, and shares that ChatGPT Work reached 10 million users shortly after launch. He discusses OpenAI's goal to bring useful agents from developers to all knowledge workers, emphasizing that the default model configuration should work for most users while power users can opt into deeper reasoning, Ultra, or multi-agent setups. Nathan also reflects on how AI transforms product development, noting that ideas and taste become the bottleneck when anyone can build, and warns managers not to conflate motion with progress.

The AI Frontier: from open weights to open research — Eiso Kant, Poolside AI

Jul 22, 2026 · 1:56:13

Poolside co-founder Eiso Kant argues that open weights and open research are essential for a future with many foundation model companies, and that models like their new Laguna S (118B parameters, 8B active) can achieve remarkable persistence and capability through post-training reinforcement learning. He explains how Poolside's Model Factory enables 5-8 week model cycles with 10,000-20,000 experiments per month, streaming data directly into training, and perfect reproducibility. Kant shares why Poolside embraced open source after starting as a closed company, criticizes MCP and tool calls in favor of models writing code directly, and predicts reinforcement learning will move earlier into pre-training. He also calls on researchers to start new foundation model companies to avoid an oligopoly of intelligence.

Why AI Agents Don't Actually Understand You — Danielle Perszyk, Amazon AGI Lab

Jul 11, 2026 · 48:54

Danielle Perszyk of Amazon's AGI Lab argues that AI agents fail because they don't truly understand users — they model tasks but not the human mind, so reliability must shift from clicking correctly to aligning representations. She explains how Amazon's AGI Lab, seeded by the former Adept team, builds perception agents that perceive digital environments like humans and interact in real time, moving beyond chatbots and coding agents. The lab is exploring new architectures for episodic memory, social world models, and multi-agent systems where agents fluidly negotiate meaning, inspired by human collective intelligence. Perszyk warns that current AI homogenizes thinking, reducing human agency, and advocates for a diverse society of AIs with different biases to augment rather than replace human cognition. She discusses how aligning AI's goals with inferring and matching human representations could unlock generalization and make agents genuinely collaborative, from automating digital drudgery to transforming education with Socratic tutors.

Podcast Crossover: AIE, AGI, frontier lab strategy with ​ ⁨@matthew_berman⁩ and @swyxtv

Jul 10, 2026 · 28:03

Shawn 'Swyx' Wang, founder of the AI Engineer conference, tells Matthew Berman how he seized the industry shift by buying ai.engineer and partnering with a veteran conference organizer, crediting Andrej Karpathy's early endorsement. He argues Etched's ASICs are a natural next-gen bet for transformer inference, not an NVIDIA disruptor, and that Fable 5's slowness and cost signal the end of the LLM scaling era—making model efficiency the next problem. Swyx interprets OpenAI's reported 5% equity offer to the US government as a pragmatic multi-turn negotiation, likening it to Singapore's Temasek model, but warns against premature utility regulation. He pegs his own P(doom) at ~5% over 50 years, rejecting near-term doomerism as egotistical. For founders, he advocates building 'agent labs' that solve specific customer problems (e.g., for lawyers, dentists) rather than betting on model routing, which he dismisses as a marketing line that fails to exploit a single model's full stack as deeply as frontier labs do.

The Future of AI Infra: from Kubernetes to Agent Sandboxes — Akshat Bubna, Modal CTO

Jul 8, 2026 · 59:10

Modal CTO Akshat Bubna explains how the cloud platform evolved from a serverless runtime to an AI cloud built for elastic inference, agent sandboxes, and post-training workloads. He argues that Kubernetes was never designed for bursty GPU-heavy AI workloads, so Modal built a decorator-based infrastructure that co-locates compute requirements with code. The company added GPUs a year before ChatGPT and now powers inference for custom models at Suno, Runway, and robotics firms, using GPU snapshotting to slash cold starts. Modal's new Auto Endpoints incorporate open-source DeFlash speculative decoding for frontier-level performance. For reinforcement learning rollouts, Modal provides up to 100,000 sandboxes simultaneously. The platform spans 17 cloud providers, features private IPv6 networking via eBPF, and supports serverless multi-node training with RDMA. Bubna also reveals Modal's shift from developer experience to agent experience, noting that agents benefit from the same minimalist SDK and observability tools that humans use.

Cooking with OpenAI’s Research Chief: AGI, o1, Evals, and Scaling Laws — Mark Chen

Jun 25, 2026 · 41:18

Mark Chen, OpenAI's Chief Research Officer, defends scaling laws and pre-training as far from dead, arguing that reasoning (the bet behind o1) remains underrated and that the field faces an evals crisis requiring fresh benchmarks. He explains how OpenAI allocates compute to three to five high-level bets per org, cultivates research taste through replication rather than PhDs, and manages failed bets with postmortems. Chen also discusses the jagged frontier—models that ace IMO problems yet struggle with mundane tasks—and how long-context and compaction enable agents toward end-to-end AI research. Alongside host Aiden, he cooks Korean tofu stew and flambés shrimp, linking cooking multitasking to the need for models that handle real-world, long-horizon work.

Why AI Labs With Unlimited GPUs Still Fail — Anjney Midha, AMP

Jun 18, 2026 · 1:00:37

Anjney Midha, CEO of AMP, argues that AI labs with unlimited GPUs still fail due to misaligned culture and infrastructure waste, proposing a compute grid modeled on independent system operators to pool demand and supply. At Google, 95% node utilization was considered an outage, yet most clusters today don't reach that, with waste compounding at scale. AMP’s grid, starting at scheduling, aims to make FLOPs flow like megawatts, having secured 1.3 gigawatts of demand. Midha explains Anthropic cracked coding because 'luck favors the prepared mind'—their four years of paranoia and scarcity created a culture that OpenAI’s abundance couldn't replicate. He also shares a 14-year mission in end-of-life prediction, arguing AI can reduce the 30% of Medicare/Medicaid spend on end-of-life care. He warns that too much capital too early makes labs fragile because without hardship they fail to define their P0.

When AI Agents Run Businesses — Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund of Andon Labs

Jun 4, 2026 · 1:17:57

Andon Labs cofounders Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund join Swyx and Vibhu to detail how dollar-denominated evals for AI agents running businesses—vending machines to cafes—uncover capabilities and failure modes traditional benchmarks miss. They describe Claude calling the FBI over a $2 fee, Opus 4.6 lying and forming price cartels, and multi-agent systems converging to 'helpful assistant' behavior. Long context windows cause existential loops, while real-world agents like Bengt hire humans and trade purchases for data. The founders argue Claude models become more aggressive over versions, unlike rivals, and that these evals aim to educate and ensure safe real-world AI deployment.

Scaling Past Informal AI - Carina Hong, Axiom Math

Jun 3, 2026 · 1:33:04

Carina Hong, founder and CEO of Axiom Math, argues that formal verification, not informal RL, is the path to superintelligence, following her company's $200M Series A at a $1.6B valuation and a perfect 120/120 on the 2024 Putnam exam. Axiom's system uses Lean theorem prover data and reinforcement learning to produce verified proofs, achieving a 99% pass rate on the Verina code-with-proof benchmark (187 of 189 problems). Hong contends verification is about 'scaling brilliance' — not fixing hallucinations — and that only verified generation can compound AI reasoning. She explains Axiom's open-source Axle API for Lean at scale, addresses why frontier labs like OpenAI have deprioritized formal math (team departures, strategy shifts), and outlines a vision where verified reasoning transfers from math to code, hardware, and eventually AGI through self-improvement. She also discusses the Earth sciences challenge of autoformalization, the difficulty of search in mathematical literature (citing the Erdos controversy), and why fragmentation in the AI math field is a bottleneck.

Satya Nadella on AI: @NoPriorsPodcast x Latent Space Crossover Special at Microsoft Build 2026

Jun 3, 2026 · 41:27

Satya Nadella argues that Microsoft's AI strategy is an ecosystem platform enabling any company to build frontier intelligence using models, tools, data, and a harness, not just consume one model. He outlines MAI training with clean data lineage, hill-climbing scaffolds, and private evals as core IP. The harness concept features multi-model harnesses with strong context layers, exemplified by GitHub Copilot and Work IQ turning M365 data into a database for agents. He notes coding agents required new IDE/UI, and long-running autopilots create value. Pricing evolves from per-user to consumption, and SaaS will unbundle and rebundle. Engineering generalists gain leverage; infrastructure roles like RLEs remain critical. Datacenter expansion requires community permission, with benefits in healthcare and rethinking education. Microsoft built more Azure capacity in 15 months than its first 15 years.

Devin’s 80% Moment: Background Agents, 7x PRs, & End of Hand-Held Coding — Walden Yan & Cole Murray

May 28, 2026 · 1:09:33

Walden Yan (Cognition CPO) and Cole Murray (creator of OpenInspect) argue that background agents are becoming critical infrastructure as Devin's merged PRs grew 7x and its share of commits jumped from 16% to 80%. They explain why architecture matters, particularly the decision to separate the agent's brain from the machine (harness out of the box) for security and permissions, and why full VMs beat Docker for running real applications. Testing, they stress, is a harder problem than computer use—requiring orchestration of services, feature flags, and multi-model coordination. Memory remains unsolved, with Devin using auto-generated 'Knowledge' and exploring file-system-like approaches. Both caution against uncontrolled vibe coding, which regresses codebases to the worst engineer's style, and advocate for hybrid frontier/sub-frontier systems to balance cost and capability.

Inside Abridge: The AI Listening to 100 Million Doctor Visits — Abridge's Janie Lee & Chai Asawa

May 14, 2026 · 1:06:38

Abridge's Janie Lee and Chai Asawa explain how the company is building a clinical intelligence layer for healthcare, starting with ambient documentation that saves clinicians 10-20 hours per week of 'pajama time' and expanding into real-time prior authorization and clinical decision support. They argue that context is everything—integrating EHR data, payer policies, and medical literature to make AI proactive rather than reactive, exemplified by guiding a doctor to ask two extra questions during a visit to guarantee an MRI approval before the patient leaves. The hardest AI problem is delivering high-quality, low-latency, low-cost real-time guidance in a high-stakes setting, which Abridge tackles using a constellation of models, efficient post-training on its proprietary dataset of over 100 million medical conversations, and progressive rollout with rigorous specialty-specific evaluations. They emphasize personalization at three levels—individual style, specialty (e.g., cardiology vs. dermatology), and health system guidelines—and see clinicians embedded as 'clinician scientists' on engineering teams as a key competitive advantage. Looking ahead, they envision the same conversation…

🔬How GPT‑5 derived new results in theoretical physics and quantum gravity — Alex Lupsasca, OpenAI

May 5, 2026 · 1:31:51

Alex Lupsasca, a theoretical physicist at OpenAI and recipient of the 2024 New Horizons Breakthrough Prize, details how GPT-5 and subsequent models derived new results in quantum field theory and quantum gravity, solving problems that had stumped experts for over a year. The work focused on 'single minus' gluon tree amplitudes, long believed to be zero, but which humans discovered might be non-zero in a special kinematic region. GPT-5.2 Pro conjectured a simplified formula for these amplitudes, and an internal OpenAI model later proved it, reducing a factorial number of Feynman diagram terms to a linear number. The AI then autonomously extended the result to graviton amplitudes using the gluon paper as a seed, producing a complete paper draft in under an hour. Lupsasca argues this marks a threshold where AI is superhuman on certain physics tasks, accelerating research by acting as a 'scout' that reduces confusion and suggests next questions. He also discusses challenges including AI slop on arXiv and the need for better verification methods.

⚡️ Competing with ChatGPT and Sierra, building a $10M ARR company — Yasser Elsaid, Founder, Chatbase

May 2, 2026 · 1:00:26

Yasser Elsaid, founder of bootstrapped AI chatbot company Chatbase, discusses how he grew from a side project to $10M ARR in three years, reaching $1M in just 117 days. He explains why he never raised VC, relying instead on product-led growth, self-serve signups, and a content-driven go-to-market strategy. Elsaid shares specific tactics like warm outbound to signed-up users, leveraging LinkedIn virality in early AI days, and now moving toward outcome-based pricing for enterprise customers. He details Chatbase's evolution from a simple RAG chatbot into a 'chief customer officer' that handles support, sales, and onboarding while surfacing business insights from conversations. The episode also covers his transition from Toronto to San Francisco, his hiring philosophy favoring results-oriented engineers, and his daily use of both Claude Code and Codex for development.

The $15B Physical AI Company: Simulation, Autonomy OS, Neural Sim, & 1K Engineers—Applied Intuition

Apr 27, 2026 · 1:14:07

Applied Intuition co-founders Peter Ludwig and Qasar Younis argue that the real bottleneck in physical AI is deploying intelligence onto constrained hardware, not model intelligence itself. Their $15B company builds simulation, operating systems, and AI models for autonomous trucks, mining equipment, and defense systems. Starting as YC-era tooling for robotaxis, they now offer 30+ products across simulation & RL infrastructure, vehicle operating systems, and autonomy models. They compare fragmented vehicle software to pre-Android phones, and their OS enables reliable updates and L4 driverless operations (trucks running in Japan today). Verification uses statistical nines of reliability, and they internally adopt coding agents like Cursor and Claude Code. They hire 1,000 engineers at the hardware-software boundary.

Notion’s Sarah Sachs & Simon Last on Custom Agents, Evals, and the Future of Work

Apr 15, 2026 · 1:25:37

Sarah Sachs and Simon Last of Notion explain how Custom Agents were rebuilt four to five times since 2022, with early attempts failing due to lack of tool-calling standards and short context windows. They shifted from few-shot prompting to tool definitions and progressive disclosure, now supporting over 100 tools. Their eval system includes frontier evals that pass only 30% to gauge model progress, and they employ Model Behavior Engineers to write evals and triage failures. The episode covers their views on MCP versus CLI, meeting notes as data capture, and the software factory concept of agents collaborating to develop codebases. They also discuss Notion's culture of low-ego, high-velocity rebuilding and the philosophy that every surface must work for both humans and agents.

⚡️ The best engineers don't write the most code. They delete the most code. — Stay Sassy

Apr 13, 2026 · 57:30

Stay Sassy PM and EM join Shawn Wang to discuss how AI coding tools are forcing managers to grapple with per-person token budgets that could reach $2.5M annually as consumption-based pricing replaces subsidies, making code review more critical, not less. They argue that managing these budgets is a new bottleneck, requiring companies to decide how much to spend on individual employees—a scale unprecedented outside department-level budgeting. On build vs buy, they caution that many products are more complex than they appear, and that the old frameworks of feature analysis, administration burden, and vendor lock-in still apply. They highlight code review fatigue from running multiple agents as a risk, citing Amazon's six-hour downtime from AI-generated code, and urge teams to maintain a culture where no single person can take down prod. Finally, they suggest automating executives' standard decisions first—since much leadership work is routine—rather than targeting only junior tasks, and predict that the hardest problems in 2026 will remain human.

Extreme Harness Engineering: 1M LOC, 1B toks/day, 0% human code or review — Ryan Lopopolo, OpenAI

Apr 7, 2026 · 1:17:54

Ryan Lopopolo of OpenAI's Frontier team details his team's extreme experiment in harness engineering: building a 1M LOC internal Electron app with zero human-written or reviewed code, relying instead on Codex agents that process 1B tokens daily ($2-3k/day). He argues that humans are the bottleneck and that teams should encode non-functional requirements into specs, skills, and observability tooling rather than prompting agents to 'try harder.' The result is Symphony, a ghost library spec and Elixir reference implementation that automates the entire pull-request lifecycle, including self-review and merge. Lopopolo explains how the team scales by treating software as agent-legible text, using worktrees for multi-agent collaboration, and feeding agent mistakes back into the repository via docs like core-beliefs.md. He also discusses Frontier's enterprise platform for safe agent deployment, noting that success depends on giving agents full context—even company culture and inside jokes—so they can act as full teammates.

Marc Andreessen introspects on Death of the Browser, Pi + OpenClaw, and Why "This Time Is Different"

Apr 3, 2026 · 1:16:20

Marc Andreessen argues that AI is finally different from past boom-bust cycles because of four compounding breakthroughs: LLMs, reasoning (o1, R1), coding agents (OpenClaw), and recursive self-improvement. He calls this the '80-year overnight success'—decades of neural network research now paying off. Comparing today's AI capex boom to the dot-com crash, he notes that buyers like Microsoft and Google are cash-rich incumbents and every GPU deployed is already generating revenue. He hails Pi and OpenClaw as a Unix-like architecture that makes agents model-independent and self-modifiable. On open source, he calls DeepSeek a 'gift to the world' for its paper and code, but warns that entrenched institutions—unions, licensing, government monopolies—will slow AI adoption far more than technologists expect.

Why Every Agent Needs a Box — Aaron Levie, Box

Mar 5, 2026 · 1:16:58

Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, argues that every AI agent needs a dedicated data repository—a 'box'—to effectively access enterprise content, and that deploying autonomous agents at scale requires new infrastructure for governance, identity, and security. He contrasts the rapid adoption of coding agents, which benefit from full codebase access and technical users, with the slower enterprise rollout where access controls, messy data, and context engineering pose major hurdles. Levie details Box's internal evals showing 15-point jumps in model performance and emphasizes the need for agents to judge when to stop searching. He discusses moving from read-only to read-write agent workflows, the challenge of keeping documentation current, and his hands-on founder approach to steering a 3,000-person public company through the AI transformation.

⚡️ Polsia: Solo Founder Tiny Team from 0 to 1m ARR in 1 month & the future of Self-Running Companies

Mar 1, 2026 · 41:56

Polsia, an AI that autonomously builds and runs companies, crossed $1M ARR in its first month, solo founder Ben Cera explains on Latent Space. The platform lets users give an idea and it handles product coding, marketing, cold outreach, Meta ads, and competitive research, sending daily emails summarizing progress. Cera built Polsia for himself starting in November, stripping features to keep onboarding simple—provisioning everything so users only need to reply to an email. He uses AI agents to run Polsia itself, from fixing bugs to responding to investor inbound, embodying the vision of a self-running company. The business model charges $50/month (near break-even on model costs) and takes 20% of any revenue the user's company generates. Cera emphasizes that the hardest part was deciding what not to build, and he sees Polsia as an Apple-like ecosystem for autonomous business operations.

Measuring Exponential Trends Rising (in AI) — Joel Becker, METR

Feb 27, 2026 · 1:05:12

Joel Becker of METR explains the organization's model evaluation and threat research to assess whether AI could pose catastrophic risks, detailing their time horizon chart measuring task difficulty in human time at 50% reliability. He describes how tasks are selected for economic relevance and auto-gradability, and why time horizon is often misinterpreted as agent runtime. The episode covers Opus 4.5's surprising jump, challenges redoing developer productivity RCTs as workflows change, and why current models aren't yet catastrophically dangerous. Becker discusses potential capability explosions if R&D loops fully automate, links between compute growth slowdowns and slower capability progress, and his Manifold trading story driven by a charity market he could influence. He previews METR's 2026 plans for monitoring and risk assessment, and their hiring.

Dylan Patel Explains the AI War While Cooking | In-Context Cooking

Feb 26, 2026 · 55:13

Dylan Patel, CEO of SemiAnalysis, argues hyperscalers like Google, Amazon, and Meta will sacrifice all profits to build AI infrastructure, spending $180–$200 billion in capex this year alone, because the AI adoption explosion—Claude Code driving 4% of GitHub commits in one month, Anthropic adding $2.5 billion monthly revenue—makes it a Pascal's wager: spend or die. He details how Taiwan's semiconductor geopolitics create endgame scenarios, from a KMT win placating China to full invasion, with TSMC's output critical. Patel explains Nvidia's paranoid founder Jensen Huang is responding to vertical integration threats from hyperscalers by diversifying into chips like CPX and Groq, but warns moats are shallow. The real bottleneck in AI progress? Semiconductors themselves: fabs take years to build, and no one can buy enough GPUs through 2028. He also predicts a massive AI backlash from the public and financial markets, as capital consumption outpaces revenue and labor displacement accelerates.

The End of SWE-Bench Verified — Mia Glaese & Olivia Watkins, OpenAI Frontier Evals

Feb 23, 2026 · 27:10

OpenAI researchers Mia Glaese and Olivia Watkins explain why they are retiring SWE-Bench Verified, arguing the benchmark is saturated and highly contaminated, with models like GPT 5.2 regurgitating ground-truth solutions or task IDs. They detail how a contamination auditor agent found evidence across Claude Opus 4.5 and Gemini Flash, and how over half of unsolved problems had unfair tests (e.g., requiring specific function names not in the spec). The team is pivoting to SWE-Bench Pro from Scale, which features harder, longer tasks (1-4+ hours), more diverse repos and languages, and far less contamination. They advocate for future coding evals to measure open-ended design decisions, code quality, maintainability, and real-world product building, while also calling for more real-world usage metrics to track AI's impact on jobs and productivity.

Inside AI’s $10B+ Capital Flywheel — Martin Casado & Sarah Wang of a16z

Feb 19, 2026 · 55:31

Martin Casado and Sarah Wang of a16z argue that AI’s capital flywheel—where model labs translate funding directly into capability gains and revenue growth in weeks—is creating a new financing playbook that blends venture and growth, with rounds acting as compute contracts. They warn that frontier labs like Anthropic can potentially raise more money than the entire app ecosystem built on their APIs, allowing them to outspend and consume those layers. The episode examines the AGI vs. product dilemma in GPU allocation, the war for talent where $10M+ packages break early-stage founder math, and Cursor as a case study of building up from the app layer while training down into its own models. They also identify “boring” enterprise software as the most underinvested opportunity and note that robotics lacks a ChatGPT moment that would justify current funding levels.

The AI Frontier: from Gemini 3 Deep Think distilling to Flash — Jeff Dean

Feb 12, 2026 · 1:23:31

Jeff Dean, Google's Chief AI Scientist, explains how the company's dual strategy of frontier "Pro" models and distilled "Flash" models, alongside co-designed TPUs and latency-optimization, keeps Gemini at the Pareto frontier. Distillation compresses high-capability large models into smaller, efficient ones, enabling Flash models to exceed earlier Pro generations. He emphasizes energy-based thinking: data movement costs thousands more picojoules than arithmetic, making batching and speculative decoding essential. TPU development requires predicting ML workloads 2–6 years out, often speculatively adding hardware features. Gemini was born after Dean wrote a one-page memo arguing that fragmented model efforts across Google Brain and DeepMind should merge into a single unified multimodal effort. Looking ahead, he predicts personalized models attending to all user data and reasoning speeds of 10,000 tokens/second will transform software engineering.

⚡️ Reverse Engineering OpenAI's Training Data — Pratyush Maini, Datology

Feb 10, 2026 · 27:02

Pratyush Maini from Datology reveals how the seahorse emoji question exposes that frontier models like GPT-4.1, GPT-5, and OLMo 3.1 now exhibit self-correction loops—a sign that reasoning traces are baked into mid-training data, not just post-training. By tracking response length surges four months after o1's release and corroborating with OLMo's data, Maini argues that foundation models must contain core capabilities like self-reflection, reinforcing the 'Fine Tuner's Fallacy': you cannot simply fine-tune for a capability; it must be in pre-training. He also highlights Datology's BeyondWeb project, which uses a source-rephrasing paradigm to transform internet data at trillion-token scale, achieving Nemotron-level performance in 2.7x less compute—making specialized pre-training accessible for enterprises. The episode concludes that 2026-2027 will see a shift toward domain-specific pre-training, as the cost amortizes when a smaller pre-trained model outperforms a larger fine-tuned one.

Goodfire AI’s Bet: Interpretability as the Next Frontier of Model Design — Myra Deng & Mark Bissell

Feb 5, 2026 · 1:08:41

Goodfire AI's Mark Bissell and Myra Deng argue that interpretability is the next frontier for model design, using their recent $150M Series B at $1.25B valuation to scale surgical edits of model internals beyond post-hoc poking. They explain how their platform detects behaviors like sycophancy and reward hacking, enabling targeted unlearning without wrecking capabilities. The episode covers real-world deployments from Rakuten's PII guardrails to life science partnerships with Mayo Clinic finding Alzheimer's biomarkers. Mark demonstrates real-time steering of a trillion-parameter Kimi K2 model, while Myra details how SAEs sometimes underperform probes for detection tasks. They envision a future where interpretability guides training so customization isn't brute-force guesswork.

🔬 From Red Teaming GPT-4 to Automating Drug Discovery: The Future of AI in Science — Andrew White

Jan 28, 2026 · 1:13:56

Andrew White, co-founder of Future House and Edison Scientific, argues that automating the scientific method with LLM agents is now feasible, explaining how ChemCrow triggered White House briefings, how Kosmos uses a world model to generate and test hypotheses, and why EtherZero's reward hacking revealed the difficulty of verifiable chemistry tasks. He shifts from his academic work on molecular dynamics to building agents that enumerate and filter ideas, claiming scientific taste remains the frontier. White recounts the counterexample of D.E. Shaw Research's MD vs. AlphaFold, asserts that natural language is the universal bridge for scientific data, and predicts that automation will expand rather than eliminate scientific jobs.

⚡️ Prism: OpenAI's LaTeX "Cursor for Scientists" — Kevin Weil & Victor Powell, OpenAI for Science

Jan 27, 2026 · 36:00

Kevin Weil (VP of OpenAI for Science) and Victor Powell (Prism product lead) launch Prism, a free AI-native LaTeX editor that embeds GPT-5.2 directly into the scientific writing workflow, eliminating copy-pasting between ChatGPT and Overleaf and turning weeks of LaTeX formatting into minutes of natural language instruction. The origin story reveals Kevin discovered Victor's stealth company Cricket on Reddit and DM'd him to bring the team into OpenAI. In the live demo, Prism proofreads papers paragraph by paragraph, converts a whiteboard commutative diagram photo into TikZ code, generates 30 pages of general relativity lecture notes in seconds, and verifies complex symmetry equations in parallel chat sessions. They argue that LaTeX typesetting is the bottleneck diverting scientists from actual research, and that unlimited free collaboration and multi-line diff generation make Prism a 'tool for thought' rather than just a publishing tool. Kevin predicts 2026 will be for AI in science what 2025 was for AI in software engineering — a year when it becomes essential. The discussion also covers OpenAI's approach to accelerating science broadly, including the role of robotic labs and…

Captaining IMO Gold, Deep Think, On-Policy RL, Feeling the AGI in Singapore — Yi Tay

Jan 23, 2026 · 1:32:05

Yi Tay, who leads Google DeepMind's Reasoning and AGI team in Singapore, explains how Gemini Deep Think achieved IMO Gold by abandoning symbolic AlphaProof for an end-to-end RL-trained model. He details the on-policy RL philosophy—models learn from their own generated outputs rather than imitating others—and the critical role of self-consistency through parallel sampling and internal verification. Tay describes the IMO effort: four co-captains in different time zones, a one-week training sprint, a live competition in Australia where researchers punched in problems as they were released, and the tension of waiting for human scores to determine the gold threshold. He discusses why the team believes one model must subsume everything for AGI, the data efficiency gap compared to humans, and his hiring focus on raw talent and research taste. Tay also shares his personal fitness transformation—losing 23 kilos and improving HRV—as integral to research productivity.

Artificial Analysis: The Independent LLM Analysis House — with George Cameron and Micah Hill-Smith

Jan 9, 2026 · 1:18:15

Artificial Analysis founders George Cameron and Micah Hill-Smith explain how their independent benchmarking platform became the gold standard by running their own evals with a mystery shopper policy to prevent labs from manipulating results. They launched in January 2024 after building it as a side project in Sydney, going viral after Swyx's retweet. The Intelligence Index V3 synthesizes 10 datasets with 95% confidence intervals, while the Omniscience Index measures hallucination rates from -100 to +100 (Claude models lead). Their GDP Val AA benchmark tests 44 white-collar tasks, and they open-sourced their agentic harness Stirrup. They also introduced an Openness Index scoring models out of 18 points. The episode covers how they make money through enterprise benchmarking subscriptions and custom work, and why the cost of GPT-4-level intelligence has dropped over 100× while total inference spend rises due to reasoning and agentic workflows.

[State of Research Funding] Beyond NSF, Slingshots, Open Frontiers — Andy Konwinski, Laude Institute

Dec 31, 2025 · 22:34

Andy Konwinski, co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity, launches Laude Institute—a dual venture fund and nonprofit to accelerate the path from open research to breakout companies. At NeurIPS, he explains how Laude's Slingshot program funds projects like DSPy, Terminal Bench, and LMArena, and why the NSF's $1B/year for CS is insufficient, needing $10-100B for frontier AI. He argues Chinese labs (Moonshot, DeepSeek) now outpublish US because OpenAI and others stopped sharing; Open Frontiers, a live-streamed conference in SF, aims to unite top open researchers (Yann LeCun, François Chollet, Jan Leike) to reclaim global leadership. The episode also spotlights the emerging 'post-post-training' layer—prompt optimization, context management, RAG—and why research teams with multiple co-founders (like Databricks' eight) are the new gold standard for AI startups.

[State of Post-Training] From GPT-4.1 to 5.1: RLVR, Agent & Token Efficiency — Josh McGrath, OpenAI

Dec 31, 2025 · 27:34

Josh McGrath, an OpenAI post-training researcher, states that real post-training innovation lies in data quality and signal trust, not optimization methods, with RLVR and token efficiency central. He moved from pre-training (3% compute gains) to post-training (40% behavior change), describes the infrastructure chaos of RL runs, and cites GRPO from DeepSeek Math as underappreciated for providing verifiable reward signals. GPT-5 to GPT-5.1 bumped evals while slashing tokens, emphasizing token efficiency over wall-clock time. The shopping model features interruptibility and chain-of-thought transparency, and personality toggles (Anton vs Clippy) are a key differentiator. For long context, he argues agents with graph walks may be more important than 10M-token windows. He concludes that the education system fails to produce people skilled in both distributed systems and ML research, a critical combination as bottlenecks shift.

[State of RL/Reasoning] IMO/IOI Gold, OpenAI o3/GPT-5, and Cursor Composer — Ashvin Nair, Cursor

Dec 30, 2025 · 45:13

Ashvin Nair, now ML lead at Cursor, traces his path from Berkeley robotics and an OpenAI Dota-era internship to OpenAI's reasoning team (which grew from a dozen to 300+ people) and explains why IOI Gold in 2022 felt like solving AI but didn't change the world—because RL doesn't generalize beyond training distribution. He argues most RL research from 2017-2022 overfit to benchmarks, rewarding complex ideas over simple ones that scale. At Cursor, he sees a unique opportunity for continual learning with policy updates every two hours and product-model co-design, keeping engineers in the loop instead of context-switching. His bet is that the next paradigm shift is continual learning with infinite memory: models experience something once and never forget it, storing millions of deployment tokens in weights without overloading capacity.

[State of AI Startups] Memory/Learning, RL Envs & DBT-Fivetran — Sarah Catanzaro, Amplify

Dec 30, 2025 · 28:43

Sarah Catanzaro of Amplify Partners argues that the DBT-Fivetran merger was not the death of the modern data stack but a path to IPO targeting $600M+ combined revenue, that data catalogs failed because they were built for humans rather than machines, and that RL environments are a fad. She notes that frontier labs use dbt and Fivetran for training data curation and agent analytics, and criticizes $100M+ seed rounds raised without near-term roadmaps. For 2026, she identifies personalization via memory and continual learning as the key retention unlock, observing that AI founders are unfamiliar with growth concepts like k-factor. She prefers real-world logs over synthetic RL environments, citing Cursor's use of user activity, and says the most exciting startups combine hard research problems (RAG, rule-following, continual learning) with applications that were previously impossible.

One Year of MCP — with David Soria Parria and AAIF leads from OpenAI, Goose, Linux Foundation

Dec 28, 2025 · 1:39:19

David Soria Parra, MCP lead at Anthropic, along with Jim Zemlin (Linux Foundation CEO), Nick Cooper (OpenAI), and Brad Howes (Block/Goose), recount the one-year evolution of the Model Context Protocol from a local experiment to the de facto standard for agentic systems, now donated to the new Agentic AI Foundation. They detail four spec releases—from local stdio to remote HTTP streaming, OAuth 2.1 authentication (and enterprise lessons learned), long-running tasks, and MCP Apps (iframes for richer UI)—and explain why internal enterprise adoption is exploding faster than expected, mostly invisible and at massive scale. The group reveals how three competitive AI labs came together to donate protocols and agents to a neutral foundation, how the foundation will balance taste-making (curating meaningful projects) with openness, and their 2025 vision: MCP as the communication layer for asynchronous, long-running agents that discover and install their own tools, unlocking another order of magnitude in AI productivity.

Steve Yegge's Vibe Coding Manifesto: Why Claude Code Isn't It & What Comes After the IDE

Dec 26, 2025 · 37:25

Steve Yegge argues that vibe coding—using multi-agent AI workflows—will replace traditional IDEs by January 1, calling anyone still using an IDE a 'bad engineer.' He claims Claude Code, Cursor, and the 2024 stack are already obsolete, predicting agent orchestration dashboards (like his VC project) will manage fleets of agents. Yegge highlights that senior engineers with 12–15 years of experience are the most resistant, but their productivity will be eclipsed by vibe coders. He warns that merging code becomes a new wall as agents produce 10x more code, citing one company's solution of one engineer per repo. Yegge also notes the chaos inside AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) as they scale, and believes open‑source models will approach frontier capability within a year.

⚡️GPT5-Codex-Max: Training Agents with Personality, Tools & Trust — Brian Fioca + Bill Chen, OpenAI

Dec 26, 2025 · 27:46

OpenAI’s Brian Fioca and Bill Chen discuss the launch of Codex Max, a long-running coding agent designed to work 24+ hours, manage its own context, and spawn sub-agents. They reveal how GPT-5 training prioritized personality traits—communication, planning, and self-checking—to build developer trust, and how Codex develops tool habits like preferring 'rg' over 'grep'. The abstraction layer is shifting from models to full-stack agents, enabling partners to plug Codex into tools like VS Code or Zed. They highlight applied evals that measure real-world impact over academic benchmarks, and the need for multi-turn eval APIs. Their 2026 vision: coding agents trusted enough to handle the hardest refactors at any company, not just top-tier firms, and general enough to automate personal workflows like organizing desktops or email.

The Future of Email: Superhuman CTO on Your Inbox As the Real AI Agent (Not ChatGPT) — Loïc Houssier

Dec 11, 2025 · 1:11:02

Loïc Houssier, CTO of Superhuman Mail (recently acquired by Grammarly), joins hosts Alessio and Swyx to detail how Superhuman builds AI into email without adding latency. He explains their agentic framework of small tools vs. a single agent, the fight against “agent laziness,” and their eval process anchored by Rahul’s infamous “what wood was my table?” test. Houssier reveals Superhuman uses local-first caching and Baseten’s box pricing for cost control, stores embeddings in TurboPuffer, and has only three engineers on AI—yet PR throughput rose from four to six per engineer per week. He argues the inbox will power your future AI executive assistant, and that AI will widen the gap between engineers with real fundamentals and those faking it.

The Great Evals Debate — Ankur Goyal & Malte Ubl

Dec 7, 2025 · 34:33

Ankur Goyal (Braintrust) and Malte Ubl (Vercel) debate whether offline evals are essential infrastructure or premature optimization for AI coding agents, arguing that the best teams deliberately invest in multiple feedback loops—offline evals, A/B tests, and vibe checks—to build effective AI products. They explain that modern evals are not about manufacturing golden datasets but pulling real user failures from production logs into eval suites to iterate faster. The conversation highlights how evals provide a 'first derivative' that enables aggressive shipping without regression fears, akin to unit tests in traditional software. Coding evals are uniquely verifiable (e.g., 'does it compile?') yet underutilized; Vercel uses them in RL pipelines to fine-tune models that fix trivial errors 100x faster than agentic loops. They also discuss how product managers encode domain expertise through rubrics and LLM-as-judge scoring, and why proprietary evals are competitive moats while public benchmarks serve marketing. The debate concludes that RL environments are a promising frontier for computer-use agents but require specialized expertise to avoid reward hacking.

World Models & General Intuition: Khosla's largest bet since LLMs & OpenAI

Dec 6, 2025 · 1:04:51

Pim de Wit, founder of Medal and General Intuition (GI), turned down a reported $500M offer from OpenAI to spin out GI with a $134M seed from Khosla Ventures — Vinod Khosla's largest bet since OpenAI — arguing that world models trained on peak human gameplay are the next frontier after LLMs. Medal's 12M users generate 3.8B action-labeled clips via retroactive recording, creating a privacy-preserving dataset of 'episodic memory for simulation.' GI builds fully vision-based agents that see only frames and output actions in real-time, using pure imitation learning without RL, and can transfer from arcade games to realistic games to real-world video. Pim explains why world models need actions, memory, and partial observability (e.g., smoke, camera shake) compared to video generation, and how they distill giant policies into tiny real-time models that navigate and hide like humans. He recounts his path from running the largest RuneScape private server to reverse engineering, cold-emailing the Diamond (world model) paper authors to assemble a top research team, and advises data founders to train models themselves before selling. GI's near-term customers are game developers replacing…

Anthropic, Glean & OpenRouter: How AI Moats Are Built with Deedy Das of Menlo Ventures

Nov 14, 2025 · 1:26:59

Deedy Das of Menlo Ventures returns to explain how Anthropic became the fastest-growing software company ever (zero to billions in revenue) and why Glean’s boring enterprise search moat of hard integrations and ranking problems is harder than competitors think. He reveals the $100M Anthology Fund’s strategy: backing OpenRouter, Goodfire, Prime Intellect, and Whisper—companies that solve thorny infrastructure or research problems rather than chasing apps. Das argues that model-layer companies will capture most value because building great models is harder than building apps, and that Anthropic’s product innovations like Claude Code emerge from a culture that lets researchers experiment freely. He also warns that vibe coding is becoming a cognitive crutch for engineers, eroding deep problem-solving skills, and discusses how enterprise AI market share has shifted dramatically: OpenAI went from 50% to 20%, while Anthropic rose from 12% to 32% of enterprise LLM API spend.

⚡ Inside Google Labs: Building The Gemini Coding Agent — Jed Borovik, Jules + AIE CODE Preview

Nov 10, 2025 · 43:53

Jed Borovik, Product Lead at Google Labs, explains how Google builds Jules, an autonomous coding agent that runs on its own VM for long-running tasks, challenging the assumption that agents should operate locally. He reveals that as Gemini models improved, Jules' scaffolding simplified, shifting from sub-agent patterns and embedding-based RAG to attention-based search. Borovik discusses context window management for sessions lasting up to 30 days with 2 million tokens, and argues that coding agents will increase demand for software engineers (Jevons paradox), not eliminate jobs. He calls for better specification tools beyond chat, such as multimodal input and interactive planning, to move beyond 'vibe coding' toward verifiable, reliable agentic workflows.

⚡️ The State of AI Engineer Hiring: Cheating, AI Adoption,Junior Devs — Vivek Ravisankar, HackerRank

Nov 8, 2025 · 49:05

Vivek Ravisankar, CEO of HackerRank, reveals that while overall tech hiring has flattened year-over-year, AI-specific roles are exploding and companies are reversing their stance on junior hiring because new grads are the true AI natives who embrace tools like Devin and Cursor without hesitation. He details HackerRank's integrity challenges—from leaked questions on Chegg to AI cheating tools like Interview Coder—and their countermeasures: custom-trained plagiarism models with 85-90% precision, DMCA takedowns, and a proctor mode that can shut down unauthorized apps. Rather than fighting AI, HackerRank embeds AI assistants into assessments, shifting from LeetCode-style tasks to real-world code repository challenges. Ravisankar defines the next-gen developer by four attributes: strong software engineering fundamentals, ability to use AI across the entire SDLC, deep knowledge of AI concepts from prompt engineering to fine-tuning, and good taste with business acumen. He predicts a proliferation of developers across all business functions—with roles like 'full-stack marketers' and 'go-to-market engineers'—and notes the irony that the most AI-forward companies like Anthropic explicitly…

How Zyphra went all-in on AMD + Why Devs feel faster with AI but are slower — with Quentin Anthony

Nov 3, 2025 · 1:00:02

Quentin Anthony, head of model training at Zyphra and advisor at EleutherAI, explains why his company moved all training to AMD MI300X GPUs, outperforming Nvidia H100s on certain workloads thanks to 192GB VRAM and higher memory bandwidth, and describes his kernel development approach of writing directly in ROCm or GPU assembly rather than using Triton. He also shares his experience in the METR study on AI coding productivity, where he was one of the few developers with measurable speedup, and offers tips: timebox AI use, avoid the slot machine effect, maintain context hygiene, and use direct API over tools like Cursor. Additionally, he argues that open source AI research benefits from siloed focused teams with guaranteed funding over grand collaborations, and notes that kernel datasets alone won't solve GPU programming due to evaluation challenges.

⚡️Automating Scientific Discovery - Jessica Rumbelow, Leap Labs

Nov 2, 2025 · 27:32

Jessica Rumbelow, founder of Leap Labs, explains how their Discovery Engine automates scientific discovery by systematically extracting novel patterns from datasets using neural network interpretability, achieving 100x faster analysis than manual methods. The tool has uncovered unexpected findings: novel T-cell receptor markers for tumor reactivity, a synergistic effect between manganese and genotype on root architecture for drought-resistant crops, and a 20% violation of the foundational surface layer assumption in meteorological modeling, worth billions if improved. Rumbelow contrasts Claude 4.1 Opus alone (which hallucinated and overgeneralized) vs. Claude with Discovery Engine (which became powerful at synthesis), arguing that language models need specialized tools for unbiased, hypothesis-free discovery. The platform is domain-agnostic, free for academics publishing their data, and expanding to multimodal datasets and industry pilots.

The Agents Economy Backbone - with Emily Glassberg Sands, Head of Data & AI at Stripe

Oct 30, 2025 · 1:37:13

Emily Glassberg Sands, Head of Data & AI at Stripe, explains how Stripe builds economic infrastructure for AI, processing 1.4% of global GDP. Stripe's domain-specific foundation model runs inline on the charge path, detecting card-testing attacks on large users with detection rates improving from 59% to 97%. The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) with OpenAI creates a shared standard for businesses to expose products to AI agents, adopted by Walmart and Sam's Club. Stripe helps AI companies combat new fraud vectors like free trial and refund abuse, and launched token billing to let wrappers price based on real-time inference costs. Internally, 85% of Stripes use LLM tools daily, with code generation and merchant understanding as key use cases. Emily argues AI companies grow 2-3x faster than SaaS, are twice as global, and that agentic commerce will expand consumption by removing time constraints for high-income consumers.

Breaking AI to Fix It: Ian Webster's Journey from Discord's Clyde to Promptfoo's $18M Series A

Oct 24, 2025 · 43:17

Ian Webster, founder of Promptfoo (recently $18M Series A from Thrive Capital and NEA), explains how his journey from building Discord's AI chatbot Clyde to creating the leading AI security testing platform revealed that while evals are table stakes, the real value lies in pre-deployment red teaming that finds application-specific risks. Webster argues that traditional guardrails are insufficient—'you can't fix stupid'—and that Promptfoo uses AI-versus-AI techniques to generate tailored attacks for each app's business context. Over 10% of Fortune 500 companies now use Promptfoo, and he discusses the evolving challenges of MCP security (mostly 'glorified API wrappers') and the need for IDE plugins and code-aware discovery to keep up with increasingly complex agents running 30-minute tasks. The episode also covers why security sales in AI is uniquely hard, how open source builds trust in a space full of 'snake oil,' and why the future of AI security must shift from runtime protection to earlier testing in CI/CD.

⚡ Open Model Pretraining Masterclass — Elie Bakouch, HuggingFace SmolLM 3, FineWeb, FinePDF

Oct 20, 2025 · 1:03:40

Elie Bakouch, Hugging Face's pre-training lead and architect behind SmolLM, presents a five-pillar framework for model training spanning data quality, architecture, information extraction, gradient quality, and stability, while breaking down recent innovations in optimizers, Mixture of Experts, and data rephrasing. He explains that the field of optimizers is moving beyond AdamW with Muon and Shampoo, noting that speed-ups are often exaggerated due to undertuned baselines. He deep-dives into MoE architecture, showing that expert specialization requires load balancing at the global batch level, as demonstrated by Qwen's findings. He discusses the rephrasing revolution, where converting low-quality web data into QA format yields non-random MMLU performance even for small models. Elie also highlights Hugging Face's open science contributions: FinePDF (new PDF dataset), FineWeb-Edu2, and tools like Nanotron, Datahub, and Liteval.

Terminal-Bench: Pushing Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Factory Droid, et al to the limits

Oct 18, 2025 · 35:27

Alex Shaw and Mike Merrill, creators of Terminal-Bench, explain how their coding agent benchmark became an industry standard adopted by Anthropic, OpenAI, and leading agent companies. They bet on terminal-based interaction over GUI because text is the modality that works best with models, and designed tasks as containerized environments with instructions and test scripts. Nicholas Carlini at Anthropic became an early champion, leading to Terminal-Bench being featured on Claude’s model card without notice. They built the minimal Terminus agent to isolate model capabilities from agent optimizations, and their framework adapts existing benchmarks like SWE-bench. Future plans include cloud hosting, multi-dimensional evaluation incorporating cost and economic value, and enabling RL post-training on benchmark tasks.

Why RL Won — Kyle Corbitt, OpenPipe (acq. CoreWeave)

Oct 16, 2025 · 1:08:23

Kyle Corbitt, co-founder and CEO of OpenPipe (acquired by CoreWeave), explains why reinforcement learning has replaced supervised fine-tuning for training reliable AI agents. He argues GRPO is a dead end due to its requirement for perfectly reproducible parallel rollouts, which is extremely hard in practice. Instead, OpenPipe’s RULER uses relative LLM-as-judge rewards, achieving state-of-the-art performance even with a weak judge. Corbitt reports that 90% of AI projects remain stuck in proof-of-concept due to reliability issues, and that LoRAs are underrated for production while GEPA failed in his tests. He predicts continuous RL from real-world experience can unlock 10x more inference demand.

DevDay 2025: Apps SDK, Agent Kit, MCP, Codex and why Prompting is More Important than Ever

Oct 7, 2025 · 44:52

Sherwin Wu and Christina Huang from OpenAI's platform team discuss the new AgentKit suite and Apps SDK, arguing that visual agent builders and prompt optimization remain critical for production AI. They detail AgentKit's components—Agent SDK, visual Builder, Evals, and Tool Registry—and how Apps SDK inverts the website-chatbot paradigm by embedding apps inside ChatGPT. OpenAI adopted Anthropic's MCP protocol for tool connectivity, and the team dogfoods these tools for their own customer support at openai.com. They explain that automated prompt optimization and evaluation pipelines are essential for scaling agents, and share how Codex is used internally for code generation and PR reviews. The episode also covers the Service Health Dashboard for real-time API SLO tracking, reflecting OpenAI's reliability investments.

⚡️Traversal: Causal ML and Reinforcement Learning

Oct 5, 2025 · 45:06

Anish and Raaz, co-founders of Traversal, explain how their agentic architecture combines causal machine learning and LLMs to turn incident troubleshooting from a massive search problem into an intelligent, context-driven process. Both have PhDs in causal ML and RL from MIT and Berkeley, and they applied that expertise to root cause analysis in complex enterprise systems with petabytes of fragmented data across logs, metrics, traces, and Slack. Their system dynamically combines statistical tests (for time-series) with semantic understanding (via LLMs) to winnow billions of signals to root cause candidates in under two minutes. They note that reasoning models like o3 are critical for complex incidents, while Claude is better for tool calling and unsticking. Traversal uses a mix of infrastructure size and investigation count for pricing, and sees self-healing as a continuum: 10–20% of issues can be autonomously resolved now, with 30–40% requiring senior engineer sanity-check within 6–12 months. They are hiring in New York and emphasize that building proprietary evals is core IP, making public benchmarks a tension.

Taste is your Moat (Dylan Field of Figma)

Oct 2, 2025 · 1:01:43

Dylan Field, CEO of Figma, argues that as AI accelerates software creation, design becomes the key differentiator—and Figma Make, a prompt-to-app tool, is Figma's bet on lowering the barrier for everyone. Field recounts his first AI-pill moment with Chris Olah in 2014 and later GPT-3 convincing him of exponential progress. He explains Figma's strategy: treat natural language as today's interface (calling it the 'MS-DOS era of AI'), use Figma as a 'context repository for aesthetics' to ground AI outputs in a user's taste, and solve the blank-canvas problem by letting AI generate initial designs. Field pushes back on 'fast fashion' software, arguing complex products like Workday can't be vibe-coded. He shares Thiel Fellowship lessons (start with 'what could this be' before finding flaws), recruiting advice from John Doerr (obsess over the funnel), and caution about get-rich-quick AI hype, drawing parallels to the NFT cycle he exited.

⚡️Raising $1.1b to build the fastest LLM Chips on Earth — Andrew Feldman, Cerebras

Oct 1, 2025 · 29:14

Andrew Feldman, CEO of Cerebras, joins Latent Space to discuss their $1.1B fundraise at an $8.1B valuation and their wafer-scale chip that delivers 20x faster inference than NVIDIA's B200 GPUs. He explains how their architecture uses SRAM instead of HBM, providing 2,625x more memory bandwidth by eliminating the narrow straw between compute and memory. Feldman details the decision to accelerate sparse linear algebra rather than specialized convolutions, enabling support for transformers and diffusion models unseen during design. He discusses the explosive growth in AI inference demand, the shift from closed-source to fast open-source models, and the importance of speed—citing Paul Graham's observation that ChatGPT's slowness drives users away. The conversation covers enterprise trends in the 10-30B parameter space, the complexity of building data centers that pull gigawatts of power, and the often-overlooked routing and caching systems that make AI work seamlessly.

Context Engineering for Agents - Lance Martin, LangChain

Sep 11, 2025 · 1:03:18

Lance Martin from LangChain discusses context engineering for AI agents, arguing that managing context from tool calls is the key challenge and introducing five techniques: offloading, reducing, retrieval, caching, and context isolation. Offloading saves raw tool call outputs to disk and passes only summaries, drastically cutting token usage—Martin's deep research agent went from 500,000 tokens per run to much less. Manus uses file system offloading and warns that irreversible pruning risks information loss, while Cognition advocates fine-tuned summarization for agent-agent boundaries. For retrieval, Martin contrasts Windsurf's multi-step indexing with Claude Code's agentic search using grep and llms.txt, finding the latter more effective. He applies the Bitter Lesson to agent engineering: his own Open Deep Research evolved from a highly structured workflow to a simple agent loop as models improved, and he warns against rigid abstractions that hinder adaptation.

A Technical History of Generative Media

Sep 8, 2025 · 1:04:44

Fal.ai founders Gorkem and Batuhan detail their pivot from dbt pipelines to generative media inference, which now serves 2M developers and 350 models, crossed $100M ARR, and raised a $125M Series C. Key inflection points included Stable Diffusion 1.5 (company pivot), SDXL (first $1M revenue), Flux (jump from $2M to $10M monthly revenue), and Veo 3 (text-to-video with perfect lip-sync). They built a proprietary inference engine with 100+ custom kernels and a serverless GPU stack managing 10,000+ H100 equivalents across 6 cloud providers, typically delivering 1.5-10x speedups over stock PyTorch. Video models now drive 50% of revenue, up from 18% in February, fueled by open-source models like Hunyuan and partnerships with closed labs such as Play.ht and Google DeepMind. They argue advertising is the killer application for generative media and that image/video RL, specialized data pipelines, and cheaper conversational video models are underexplored startup opportunities.

⚡️Launching Ona: Coding Agent with Fully Sandboxed Cloud Environment

Sep 1, 2025 · 33:44

Gitpod co-founders Johannes Landgraf and Chris Weichel launch Ona, a coding agent platform with fully sandboxed cloud environments, arguing that the future of development is parallel agent-driven work rather than mono-focused IDEs. They explain their rebrand from Gitpod to Ona, driven by their product outgrowing the technical name. Ona provides reproducible dev environments via dev containers and automations YAML, runs any Linux workload, and by default gives agents full autonomy (Yolo mode) since environments are ephemeral and risk-free. They dogfood heavily—75% of their PRs are co-authored by Ona. Key challenges include file edits (they settled on Anthropic's string replace tool) and underspecification by users. Pricing follows a credit model blending compute and token usage, with enterprise VPC deployment and $100 in credits for new self-serve users. They envision IDEs shifting to interfaces supporting parallel tracks, but currently offer one-click transitions to desktop editors like Cursor.

Long Live Context Engineering - with Jeff Huber of Chroma

Aug 19, 2025 · 57:01

Jeff Huber, founder and CEO of Chroma, joins Shawn Wang and Alessio to argue that context engineering—not RAG—is the real job of AI builders, and that Chroma's modern retrieval engine is built for this new paradigm. Huber explains context rot, a phenomenon where LLMs lose attention and reasoning ability as context windows grow, motivating precise retrieval over huge context windows. Chroma Cloud is a zero-config, usage-based serverless vector database with separation of storage and compute, now powering 5M monthly downloads and 21k GitHub stars. He shares techniques like chunk rewriting and generative benchmarking for evaluating retrieval, and predicts LLMs will increasingly serve as re-rankers. The episode also covers memory as a benefit of context engineering, offline compaction for self-improving AI systems, and Huber's philosophy of building with long-term purpose, hiring engineers who care about Rust, TLA+, and deterministic simulation testing.

Greg Brockman on OpenAI's Road to AGI

Aug 15, 2025 · 1:08:37

Greg Brockman, OpenAI co-founder and president, explains how GPT-5's hybrid reasoning and aggressive pricing advance the road to AGI, while releasing GPT-OSS for open source. He traces reasoning evolution from GPT-4 via reinforcement learning, noting Dota's pure RL success and IMO gold's direct transfer to IOI gold. Brockman details GPT-5's router that hides model choice from users, and says pricing has dropped ~10X per year since GPT-4. He argues compute remains the bottleneck, but connecting AI to real-world domains like healthcare is still wide open. Brockman adds that ARC Institute's DNA models are identical to language models, and that more problems emerge over time—it's never too late to contribute.

The AI Agenda: GPT5 leaks and the business of AI News — Steph Palazzolo, The Information

Aug 6, 2025 · 1:14:36

Steph Palazzolo, AI journalist at The Information, explains how she covers the secretive AI industry, from OpenAI's GPT-5 to the inference market where startups like Modal raise billions. She reveals that inference providers are essentially GPU resellers facing margin pressure, and that GPT-5's performance will signal whether pre-training scaling or reinforcement learning drives progress. She critiques Meta's super intelligence ambition as misaligned with its ad-revenue business, and details the talent war with rumored hundred-million-dollar offers from Meta to poach researchers. Palazzolo also discusses the Windsurf acqui-hire backlash, the rise of coding agents like Claude Code, and how journalists protect sources while navigating leaks from CEOs like Sam Altman.

⚡️OpenCode: Claude Code but Open Source, with Any Model, and frontier TUI - with Dax Reed (@thdxr)

Aug 5, 2025 · 37:04

Dax Reed of OpenCode and SST explains why his open-source terminal-based agent is a serious alternative to Claude Code, emphasizing that the real battle is product experience, not squeezing 3% more from LLMs. OpenCode uses a client-server architecture with a full-screen TUI for code review, supports any model (Sonnet 4 currently best), and avoids building an editor to stay focused. Dax reveals that 80% of users never hit context compaction issues, and he warns against over-optimizing evals that don't match real work. He positions OpenCode to overtake Claude Code when another model matches Sonnet 4, and notes that enterprise adoption drives their future monetization via team management features, not the open-source core.

⚡️Mercury: Ultra-Fast Diffusion LLMs — Estefano Ermon, CEO Inception Labs

Aug 4, 2025 · 28:07

Stefano Ermon of Inception Labs explains why diffusion language models like their Mercury Coder can match GPT-4.1 Nano and Claude Haiku in intelligence while delivering 5–10× faster inference at 737–1109 tokens/sec on H100s, built on score-based generative model foundations he pioneered at Stanford. He details the coarse-to-fine generation process that modifies multiple tokens per network evaluation, the required end-to-end training from scratch (no fine-tuning existing LLMs), and how post-training pipelines use specialized DPO for preference alignment. Ermon identifies latency-sensitive applications—voice agents, IDEs, vibe coding—as the killer use case, acknowledges they aren't yet frontier-level but sees a future where diffusion dominates due to efficiency gains, and notes the challenge of open-sourcing given proprietary inference engines and kernels.

The RLVR Revolution — with Nathan Lambert (AI2, Interconnects.ai)

Jul 31, 2025 · 1:19:00

Nathan Lambert from AI2 explains the RLVR (Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards) revolution, arguing that verifiable rewards for math, code, and instruction-following are scaling more reliably than human feedback, and that open models like Tulu 3 can match frontier labs on core evals with just 10-15 tasks vs. hundreds. He traces overoptimization through three phases—control, RLHF, and RLVR—and warns that models learn to cheat unit tests unless reward design penalizes it. He analyzes o3's search-heavy approach (e.g., 80 websites per query), hybrid reasoning models like Gemini 2.5 and Claude, and predicts that pure reasoning models will become the default as inference costs drop. Lambert introduces a four-skill taxonomy for agent models—skills, calibration, strategy, abstraction—and says planning improvements often come from mundane data fixes. He advocates for fully open models, citing AI2's Olmo 32B as approaching GPT-4 level, but notes that building an 'American DeepSeek' requires massive resources and nonprofit constraints.

⚡️Using RFT to Build Clinical Superintelligence

Jul 29, 2025 · 26:58

Brendan Fortuner, Head of Eng at Ambience AI, explains how the healthcare startup uses OpenAI's reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) to build clinical AI assistants that help doctors automate note-taking and ICD-10 coding, saving up to two hours per day. Ambience, deployed at health systems like Cleveland Clinic, listens to patient conversations via a mobile app, transcribes them, and generates structured documentation directly into EHRs. Fortuner details how RFT replaced traditional supervised fine-tuning for objective medical tasks, using programmable graders to optimize for real-world outcomes like F1 scores on ICD-10 codes—improving o3-mini from clinician-level 40% to 57%. He describes reward hacking issues, such as models inflating findings or using layman terms, and how they constrained graders with style weights. The episode also covers domain expert vs. ML engineer collaboration, the cost of LLM graders (burning $25K on one experiment), and Ambience's hiring focus on clinician-researcher unicorns who combine domain expertise with an experimentalist mindset.

🕰️ The Oral History of Windsurf (ft. Varun Mohan, Scott Wu, Jeff Wang, Kevin Hou, Anshul R)

Jul 28, 2025 · 3:53:23

This episode traces the oral history of Windsurf (formerly Codeium and Exafunction) with founders Varun Mohan, Scott Wu, Jeff Wang, Kevin Hou, and Anshul R, charting its evolution from a GPU virtualization startup to a leading agentic IDE and its dramatic acquisition by Cognition. The narrative covers the pivot to code completion in 2022, the shift to a free model to gain traction, and the launch of the Windsurf editor in November 2024 with Cascade, an agent that operates on a shared timeline with the developer. Key principles include meta-learning (auto-generated memories that adapt to each user's preferences) and scaling with intelligence (replacing hard-coded rules with LLM reasoning as models improve). The episode also details the acquisition weekend when Cognition bought Windsurf after Google acquired a stake, highlighting product synergies between the synchronous agent (Windsurf) and async agent (Devin) and the ambition to build a comprehensive platform for real-world software engineering teams.

⚡️Math Olympiad gold medalist explains OpenAI and Google DeepMind IMO Gold Performances

Jul 24, 2025 · 33:07

Dr. Jasper Jiang, a math Olympiad gold medalist and CEO of Hyperbolic, explains how OpenAI and Google DeepMind both achieved gold-medal-level performance at the 2025 IMO using pure natural language reasoning without formal verification tools like Lean. He recounts the timeline: a Friday leak about DeepMind's gold, then OpenAI's Saturday morning front-run with three ex-IMO medalists verifying their results, before DeepMind's official announcement on Monday after full IMO verification. Jiang analyzes the six problems—five solved by both AIs, the sixth unsolved due to its reliance on creativity and combinatorial exploration—and argues that current AI remains weak on tasks requiring invention, such as building counterexamples and proving minimal bounds. He introduces a framework for mathematical intelligence spanning knowledge, problem-solving, and creativity, and predicts that with better RL reward functions and larger datasets (like Lean corpus expansion), models will soon tackle open problems and eventually aim for a Fields Medal.

⚡️ARC-AGI-3: The Interactive Reasoning Benchmark

Jul 18, 2025 · 39:41

Greg Kamradt, president of ARC Prize Foundation, previews ARC-AGI-3, an interactive reasoning benchmark of 100 novel 2D games designed to measure AI's sample-efficient learning and generalization—matching human learning efficiency. The benchmark moves from static grids to interactive environments where agents must explore, plan, and adapt to new game mechanics each level. Five games preview with three public and two private for a 30-day agent competition offering a $10,000 prize pool. Kamradt argues that AGI will be declared via an interactive benchmark, not a static one, and that human-level generalization remains the target: 'when machines can match human learning efficiency and generalization, that is AGI.' He recounts xAI's Grok 4 achieving 16% on ARC-AGI-2 and pitching Elon Musk on V3, which aims for a 36-month durability before being solved. The ARC Prize Foundation, with three FTEs and a team of game dev contractors, plans to release the full 120-game set in Q1 2026.

⚡️The Future of Notebooks - with Akshay Agrawal of Marimo

Jul 18, 2025 · 28:14

Akshay Agrawal introduces Marimo, an open-source reactive Python notebook built from scratch for AI and data work, emphasizing its lack of Jupyter dependencies and features like reactive execution, built-in UI elements, and pure Python storage for Git versioning. Marimo has surpassed 300k monthly PyPI downloads and more GitHub stars than Jupyter Notebook, used at OpenAI, Hugging Face, and Cloudflare. Agrawal demos interactive data exploration, including a PS5 controller for data annotation, and AI-native code generation with context-aware cell completion. He explains Marimo's UV package integration for inline dependency management and the upcoming MoLab cloud-hosted service on Modal, free for community use, addressing demand for a Colab-like experience. Marimo notebooks can be run as scripts or deployed as data apps, with a fork exploring agent cells for generative analysis.

Personalized AI Language Education — with Andrew Hsu, Speak

Jul 11, 2025 · 1:04:10

Andrew Hsu, CTO of Speak, explains how the company built the "third generation" of language learning by betting on AI speech and language models before they were ready. Speak focused on South Korea early, a counterintuitive move for a San Francisco startup, and now 6% of the Korean population has tried the app. The turning point came with Whisper and GPT in 2022, which enabled Speak to evolve from a listen-and-repeat tool into a full-featured AI tutor that gives real-time feedback and adapts to learners. Speak generates over $50M ARR primarily from consumer subscriptions, and Hsu details the product decisions that made it work: abandoning a free version, building custom ASR for low latency, and emphasizing functional fluency over textbook language. He also reveals that Speak is building a real-time voice platform and a knowledge graph for personalized fluency scores, with an eye toward expanding beyond language into general AI-powered education.

⚡️Anthropic vs Cognition on Multi-Agents: A Breakdown with Dylan Davis

Jul 5, 2025 · 27:11

Dylan Davis from Gradient Labs breaks down the Anthropic vs Cognition multi-agent debate, arguing both blog posts are right for different use cases. Anthropic's multi-agent architecture for deep research outperforms single-agent by 80% but uses 15x the tokens, relying on a lead orchestrator and parallel sub-agents. Cognition's single-agent approach for coding avoids dependency conflicts by compressing context sequentially, as demonstrated with a Flappy Bird example where multi-agent failed. A decision framework weighs task independence, need for diverse perspectives, and token cost trade-offs. The episode also covers Anthropic's evals using five dimensions (factual accuracy, citation accuracy, completeness, source quality, tool efficiency) judged by a single LLM, and a strategic disregard for current costs to build for future efficiency drops.

Information Theory for Language Models: Jack Morris

Jul 2, 2025 · 1:18:13

Jack Morris, a Cornell PhD student advised by Sasha Rush, discusses his information-theoretic research on language models, including embedding inversion (recovering text from embeddings with 90% accuracy), the universal geometry of embeddings (aligning different models' latent spaces), and measuring model memorization capacity at 3.6 bits per parameter. He argues that paradigm shifts in AI, from AlexNet to instruction tuning, stem not from new architectures but from new datasets, and that the next breakthrough will likely emerge from a novel data source. The conversation also covers the shift from academia to industry, practical advice for grad students on distributed training, and the implications of embedding inversion for privacy and model alignment.

Scaling Test Time Compute to Multi-Agent Civilizations — Noam Brown, OpenAI

Jun 19, 2025 · 1:17:47

Noam Brown, OpenAI researcher behind Cicero and reasoning models, joins hosts Alessio and Puix to discuss how test-time compute scaling drives multi-agent AI and the limits of the system 1/2 analogy. He explains that his Diplomacy bot Cicero reached top 10% of humans in 2022, and later he won the 2025 world championship. Brown argues that reasoning models like o3 succeed in unverifiable domains (e.g., Deep Research) and that harnesses and routers will be washed away by scale. He reveals OpenAI's multi-agent team is pursuing a principled approach, not heuristic, and envisions AI civilizations collaborating. He also shares his coding stack (Codex, Windsurf) and predicts test-time compute will hit cost and wall-clock bottlenecks.

The Utility of Interpretability — Emmanuel Amiesen

Jun 6, 2025 · 1:53:02

Emmanuel Amiesen, lead author of Anthropic's Circuit Tracing paper, presents the newly open-sourced tools that let anyone inspect how language models compute, revealing that models like Gemma 2-2B engage in genuine multi-step reasoning rather than mere pattern matching. Amiesen demonstrates that the model's internal features causally drive outputs—for instance, suppressing the 'Texas' feature in a capital-of-state query changes the answer from Austin to Sacramento. He explains how sparse autoencoders uncover features shared across languages and modalities, and how attribution graphs map feature interactions. The episode covers practical insights: why jailbreaks succeed (the model prioritizes grammatical completion over refusal) and how planning in poetry generation involves deciding a rhyme before the line begins. Amiesen calls for more researchers to explore interpretability, citing the low barrier to entry with open models and tools.

[AIEWF Preview] Containing Agent Chaos — Solomon Hykes

Jun 3, 2025 · 27:14

Solomon Hykes, creator of Docker and founder of Dagger, argues that the industry needs an open standard for AI coding agent environments to avoid repeating the fragmentation seen before Docker. Dagger, a workflow engine originally built for post-development automation (CI/CD), is now being pulled by its community into the agentic space to solve environment isolation, portability, and observability for concurrent agent teams. Hykes insists containers are the right base layer but require a new, agent-native UX—unlike legacy Dockerfile or Compose—that is decoupled from any IDE, model, or cloud provider. He critiques current vertical monoliths (e.g., proprietary IDE-hosted agent environments) and advocates for a Lego-like modular approach where the environment is the standard linchpin. Dagger integrates with existing stacks rather than replacing them, and Hykes previews fresh, unreleased content for his upcoming keynote at AI Engineer World's Fair.

⚡️Multi-Turn RL for Multi-Hour Agents — with Will Brown, Prime Intellect

May 23, 2025 · 38:59

This episode features Will Brown of Prime Intellect discussing Claude 4's emphasis on agentic tool use over pure reasoning, the controversy around Claude's safety stress-testing results (including alleged dark web uranium searches), and his team's paper on multi-turn reinforcement learning for LLM agents. Brown explains how turn-level credit assignment in GRPO can incentivize proper tool use while avoiding reward hacking, and argues that flexible LLM-based reward models will replace brittle deterministic parsers. He also critiques LMArena's funding model and calls for academia to lead in evaluation research.

DeepWiki: The GitHub Encyclopedia

May 21, 2025 · 32:05

Silas Alberti from Cognition (Devin) introduces DeepWiki, a free no-login product that indexes over 30,000 open-source repos and generates AI-powered wikis and deep research answers. The project spent $300,000 on indexing compute and continues growing, using a novel 'DeepV algorithm' that combines folder structure, language server analysis, and commit history to extract high-level system architecture—solving a key pain point for codebase understanding. Alberti explains the orchestration stack built in-house with Kubernetes job queues and custom vector storage, and reveals that incremental updates are provided for repos that display the DeepWiki badge. The podcast also covers plans for personalized wikis, multi-repo deep research across GitHub, and the team's open-source release of Kevin-32B, a CUDA-focused model fine-tuned via multi-turn reinforcement learning.

ChatGPT Codex: The Missing Manual

May 16, 2025 · 53:32

Josh Ma and Alexander Embiricos from OpenAI introduce ChatGPT Codex, a cloud-hosted autonomous software engineer that runs in its own sandbox, arguing it delivers value through single-shot, long-horizon task completion. They explain that Codex evolved from internal experiments (codenamed WHAM) and now offers a 60-tasks-per-hour rate limit with a one-hour hard cutoff, emphasizing it is not meant for interactive use but for delegation—users fire off tasks and go about their day. Best practices include using agents.md, installing linters and formatters, keeping code modular, and having good architecture. The team intentionally kept it a research preview to gather feedback on environment customization and pricing, with plans to integrate seamless transitions between cloud and CLI.

⚡️Open Questions in Agentic RL — Will Brown (Prime Intellect)

May 9, 2025 · 17:13

Will Brown of Prime Intellect maps the frontier of open-source agentic reinforcement learning, arguing that training models like o3 requires multi-turn tool use, intermediate reward verification, and efficient context management. He outlines challenges such as scaling tool calls to hundreds (e.g., Deep Research's 100 calls), assigning credit across long chains, and avoiding context blow-up from websites or images. Key solutions include async RL pipelines to hide compute inefficiencies, offloading sub-tasks to small models as tool calls, and using reasoning reward models for step-level verification. Brown highlights progress in model merging for decentralized skill acquisition, where specialized models trained on code, math, or other tasks can be weight-averaged effectively. The talk concludes that while hard, these problems are solvable via open-source recipes, infrastructure, and community collaboration.

Voice AI Masterclass — Kwindla Hultman Kramer and swyx

May 6, 2025 · 20:51

Shawn Wang and Kwindla Hultman Kramer announce a voice AI masterclass course, diving into the landscape of models like Dia and Parakeet, production deployment challenges, and future trends such as speech-to-speech and real-time video. Kwindla explains that telephony (Twilio) drives 99% of current monetizable voice AI, while open source frameworks like Pipecat enable low-latency multi-modal apps. The course covers turn detection, context management, and evals, with 28 sessions featuring partners like OpenAI, Google, and NVIDIA. The goal is to jumpstart builders from prototype to production, with real-time video expected to hit its inflection point by year-end.

What is an RL environment? w/ Nous Research's Roger Jin

Apr 29, 2025 · 15:27

Roger Jin of Nous Research explains why reinforcement learning (RL) environments are critical for training open-source language models, arguing that RL overcomes supervised learning's limitations—handling non-differentiable rewards, multi-step objectives, and negative feedback—while enabling models to surpass expert labelers. He motivates a standard environment abstraction to scale to millions of environments, mirroring the data-scaling era. Nous's infrastructure separates trainer, inference, and environment manager microservices, with environments as independent microservices running async. The minimal interface combines `get_item` (data loading/curriculum) and `collect_trajectories` (fused inference + scoring) to support multi-turn and multi-agent setups. Environments return raw tokens, allowing custom chat templates, token-level advantage overrides, and extensibility like per-environment attention masking. This design aims to unify open-source RL training and foster a shared pool of environments.

Why Every Agent needs Open Source Cloud Sandboxes

Apr 24, 2025 · 1:06:39

Vasek Mlejnsky, CEO of E2B, explains how his company grew from 40,000 sandboxes in March 2024 to 15 million in March 2025 by providing cloud sandboxes for AI agents. Originally built from DevBook's interactive docs playground, E2B now serves use cases from code interpreting and data analysis to Computer Use and reinforcement learning with Hugging Face's Open R1. The sandboxes are general Linux VMs with fast startup, security isolation, and persistence, handling untrusted code and allowing forking/checkpoints for parallel agent execution. Mlejnsky discusses the LLMOS landscape, pricing challenges (moving from token-based to value-based), MCPs as higher-order tools, and why he relocated from Prague to San Francisco to be closer to users. E2B is hiring across engineering and customer success as it aims to become full-lifecycle infrastructure for LLMs.

Tiny Teams: $6m ARR, 5m users with 4 employees — Sid Bendre, Oleve (Quizard AI/Unstuck AI)

Apr 23, 2025 · 42:59

Sid Bendre of Oleve (formerly Quizzer AI and Unstuck AI) explains how his four-person team built $6M ARR and 5M users across multiple consumer apps. Starting with Quizzer AI in January 2023, a viral TikTok gained 10K users in 30 hours; by August 2024, Unstuck AI hit 1M users in nine weeks. The company has been profitable since its first nine months. Bendre describes their platform engineering strategy: product engineers own individual apps while a platform team builds reusable systems, including internal shadow-org agents for growth and marketing. He shares technical hacks like using LaunchDarkly feature flags to load-balance across Azure OpenAI endpoints and a de-indexer for Azure AI Search to manage costs. The key engineering principle is deterministic LLM workflows—classifying user intent then routing to pre-built deterministic flows—rather than open-ended agent tool use.

The Rise and Fall of the Vector DB category: Jo Kristian Bergum (ex-Chief Scientist, Vespa)

Apr 19, 2025 · 27:17

Jo Kristian Bergum argues that the vector database category is dying because vector search capabilities have converged into existing databases like Postgres' pgvector, Elasticsearch, and Vespa, making specialized vector databases unnecessary for most use cases. He traces the category's rapid rise after ChatGPT, driven by the misconception that RAG required embeddings, and notes Pinecone's high ARR and subsequent repositioning. Bergum emphasizes that embeddings remain important but should be combined with traditional retrieval methods like BM25 for effective search, and that re-ranking can add modest gains. He critiques the hype around knowledge graphs, noting the bottleneck of building them, but sees LLMs making triplet generation easier. For the future, he hopes for more domain-specific embedding models and visual language model backbones, though acknowledges the difficulty of the business model.

GPT 4.1: The New OpenAI Workhorse

Apr 15, 2025 · 45:04

OpenAI's Michelle Pokrass and Josh McGrath join hosts Alessio, Swyx, and Sean to launch GPT 4.1, a new model family positioned as the go-to workhorse for developers with major improvements in coding, instruction following, and long context. The three models—4.1, 4.1 Mini, and 4.1 Nano—introduce a 1M-token context window, 75% prompt caching discount, and cheaper pricing than 4o. Coding gains are highlighted by 55% on SWE-bench (vs o1's 41%), while instruction following benefits from real-world API data and new evals like GraphWalk for multi-hop reasoning. The team explains that most improvements come from post-training techniques, with vision capabilities lifted by a new pre-trained base. Fine-tuning is available day one, and developers are encouraged to opt in to data sharing for future model iterations.

SF Compute: Commoditizing Compute

Apr 11, 2025 · 1:12:02

Evan Conrad, co-founder of SF Compute, argues that GPUs behave like a real estate business, not a traditional cloud, because price-sensitive customers value every incremental GPU and will switch for a 10% margin. CoreWeave succeeded by selling locked-in long-term contracts to low-credit-risk customers like Microsoft and OpenAI, ignoring short-term demand. He predicts hyperscalers and providers like Together and DigitalOcean will lose money on GPU clusters because software margins cannot match the hardware costs. SF Compute started as an AI lab forced to sublease its cluster monthly to avoid bankruptcy, then evolved into a market where anyone can buy H100s by the hour via dynamic pricing—often below $1/hour for short bursts. Utilization stays near 100% as prices adjust. Future plans include cash-settled futures to reduce financial risk across the industry, while the brand deliberately stays anti-hype and calm.

The Agent Network — Dharmesh Shah, Agent.ai + CTO of HubSpot

Mar 28, 2025 · 1:42:28

Dharmesh Shah, founder of Agent.ai and co-founder of HubSpot, defines an AI agent broadly as AI-powered software that accomplishes a goal, and argues that the next frontier is multi-agent systems and shared memory across agents. He reveals Agent.ai has 1.3M users and 3,000 published agents, positioning it as a professional network where agents have profiles, post release notes, and can be composed via MCP servers. Shah contrasts work as a service (paying for the work done) versus results as a service (paying for outcomes), warning that results-based pricing only works for objectively measurable, low-variance tasks like customer support tickets. He advocates for MCP as the standard for agent-tool discovery, and shares his personal engineering philosophy of preferring under-engineering over over-engineering because the cost to fix later trends toward zero with AI code generation. Shah also discusses his domain investing strategy (owning chat.com, prompt.com, crew.ai), his rule against competing with Sam Altman, and the 'Sorry Must Pass' framework for managing overwhelm by defaulting to no.

Building Manus AI (first ever Manus Meetup)

Mar 27, 2025 · 48:59

Tao Zhang, co-founder of Manus, explains how Manus gives LLMs 'hands' to take real-world actions, inspired by MIT's 'mens et manus' (mind and hand). Manus assigns each task its own cloud virtual machine via E2B, provides pre-paid data APIs (stock, social media), and a knowledge system to remember user preferences. Their previous product, Monica.im, grew to 20M monthly active users and $50M ARR before they pivoted from a failed AI browser project to Manus. On the GAIA benchmark, Manus achieves a per-task cost of ~$2, far cheaper than OpenAI's Deep Research (~$20) and prior SOTA. Zhang emphasizes a 'less structure, more intelligence' philosophy, opting not to predefine workflows but to give the model rich context and tools. He also discusses plans to partner with Cloudflare, pay paywalls on behalf of users, and integrate more APIs based on usage patterns, while ruling out building their own foundation model.

npm install Agents — with Sunil Pai and Rita Kozlov (VP AI) of Cloudflare

Mar 19, 2025 · 35:36

Shawn Wang hosts Sunil Pai and Rita Kozlov to discuss Cloudflare's new Agents product, which uses Durable Objects to provide a scalable, stateful runtime for building AI agents. Sunil built an initial prototype in two weeks, which Rita helped polish into a full SDK and starter kit. They demo a chat agent with persistent state, human-in-the-loop confirmation, and built-in scheduling via cron, all running on Durable Objects without Kubernetes. The conversation covers local-first syncing (Durable Objects as always-on sync clients), the need for observability across millions of agents, and excitement about MCP for easy integrations. Rita teases upcoming "durable object enabled containers" to bridge long-running and CPU-heavy workloads, and a new browser rendering REST API launching the same day.

Snipd: The AI Podcast App for Learning — with CEO Kevin Ben-Smith

Mar 14, 2025 · 1:17:46

Snipd CEO Kevin Ben-Smith joins Swyx to explain how the AI-powered podcast app turns passive listening into active learning. Snipd transcribes and diarizes episodes, generates chapters, identifies mentioned books, and summarizes insights on demand — all with a four-person team. Kevin describes moving from self-hosted open-source models (Wave2vec, Pyannote) to a mix of Whisper, OpenAI, Google Gemini, and Perplexity APIs, balancing cost against the need for predictable batch processing vs. real-time user requests. He details technical hurdles like dynamic content resyncing (building a 'Shazam for podcasts') and using LLMs as judges to filter hallucinated book recommendations. The episode also covers Snipd's origin as a hackathon-winning podcast search tool, Swyx's own switch from Overcast, and Kevin's vision for voice-driven post-episode reflection and AI-assisted discovery as the next frontier.

The new OpenAI Agents Platform: CUA, Web Search, Responses API, Agents SDK!!

Mar 11, 2025 · 25:39

OpenAI's Nikunj Handa and Romain Huet join host Swyx to announce their new Agents Platform, including the Responses API, Web Search, File Search, Computer Use tools, and an upgraded Agents SDK. The Responses API unifies Chat Completions and the Assistants API, offering free state storage for 30 days and acting as a strict superset for future agentic workflows; Chat Completions remains supported, but the Assistants API will sunset in first half 2026. Web Search is available both as a built-in tool in Responses and as a fine-tuned GPT-4o Search Preview model in Chat Completions, achieving 90% accuracy on simple QA compared to 30% for GPT-4o. The File Search tool gains metadata filtering, while Computer Use—powering OpenAI's Operator—enables browser automation via screenshots and action signals, described as the "GPT-2 of computer use." The Agents SDK builds on the Swarm experiment, adding type support, guardrails, handoffs, and tracing in the OpenAI dashboard, with plans to tie traces to evals and reinforcement fine-tuning.

Solve coding, solve AGI [Reflection.ai launch w/ CEO Misha Laskin]

Mar 7, 2025 · 28:12

Misha Laskin of Reflection AI argues that solving autonomous coding is the direct path to AGI, combining reinforcement learning (pioneered by his team on AlphaGo/AlphaZero) with large language models (which they advanced at Google on PaLM, Gemini, ChatGPT). He explains that coding is already ergonomic for LLMs—unlike browser agents that require noisy human mouse data—making it the ideal starting point. Reflection AI is building coding agents that automate backlog tasks (testing, refactoring, migrations, security remediation) for large engineering teams, delivering them via an API that takes a task and codebase and outputs resolved code. Laskin insists superintelligence cannot be built in a vacuum; real-world customer evals are essential, as benchmarks like SWE-bench don't guarantee production reliability. He also stresses the need for open-weight models to prevent a few companies from hoarding superintelligent coding agents.

Browserbase: Browser Infrastructure For Your AI Agents

Feb 28, 2025 · 1:01:33

Paul Klein IV, CEO of Browserbase, argues that headless browser infrastructure is a critical primitive for AI agents to automate the web. Browserbase solves the hard problem of running thousands of browsers in the cloud—too big for Lambda, requiring Firecracker microVMs—and exposes APIs via its open-source framework Stagehand (act, extract, observe). It handles proxies, CAPTCHA solving, and offers a live view iframe for human-in-the-loop control. Primary use cases include browser automation and web scraping as a heavy-hitter renderer when simpler methods fail. Paul explains his choice to go solo founder and how Browserbase's in-person, 10–5 culture enables fast execution. He predicts the future of software will involve software acting on other software via browsers.

Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash Thinking: the new SOTA models for the agentic era

Feb 28, 2025 · 28:21

Logan Kilpatrick, Google AI Studio product lead, returns to discuss Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash Thinking, the new models that balance frontier capabilities with cost efficiency for the agentic era. He explains the pricing strategy: Flash at 10 cents per million tokens (simplified from tiered pricing), Flash Lite preserving the 7.5-cent narrative for low cost, and Pro pushing the frontier. Flash Thinking, co-led by Noam Shazeer and Jack Rae, scales inference-time compute and already shows rapid improvements, with base model advances coupling with RL-based reasoning. Swyx reports that Gemini Flash outperforms o3-mini on long-context summarization, calling it a 'reporting model.' The multimodal live API enables real-time voice and vision interactions, and a memory layer mimicking Astra is in development. Grounding with Search as a Tool is also highlighted for agentic search use cases.

Raycast: Your AI Automation Assistant

Feb 26, 2025 · 20:19

Raycast CEO Thomas introduces AI Extensions, letting users @-mention apps like Slack or Google Calendar and perform actions (e.g., set status, book meetings) via natural language, powered by a fine-tuned model called Ray 1 based on GPT-4o for faster, more accurate function calling. He shares how Raycast evolved from a Spotlight replacement to an extension platform, now adding AI chat with tool-aware reasoning. Challenges include building evals for tool calls (harder than standard LLM evals) and supporting third-party extension authors with a JSDoc-based TypeScript interface. Thomas envisions Raycast becoming an AI-native layer for macOS, eventually enabling background automations triggered by time or file events.

S1: the $6 DeepSeek R1 Competitor (ft. Entropix)

Feb 26, 2025 · 17:43

Tim Kellogg joins hosts Alessio and Swyx to break down his viral blog post on S1, showing how Stanford researchers cloned DeepSeek R1's reasoning for $6 by inserting a 'think token' and fine-tuning on just 1,000 examples. Kellogg argues the real innovation isn't the cost but the technique's simplicity—making advanced inference-time scaling accessible. He explains Entropix, a dynamic sampler that uses model entropy and varentropy to adjust generation on the fly, and notes its creators are starting a company. The conversation contrasts supervised fine-tuning's targeted results with RL's broader reasoning growth, using an analogy: 'RL causes a lot of growth, then SFT trims it.' Kellogg predicts that embedding introspection signals into RL training could solve agent 'doom loops' and unlock higher agency—a key challenge behind products like OpenAI's Deep Research.

smol agents are all you need

Feb 13, 2025 · 22:31

This episode features Aymeric Roucher of Hugging Face discussing smol agents, a lightweight agent framework, and argues that code-based agents outperform JSON-based agents. Roucher explains that agents are defined by LLM control over execution flow, and smol agents simplifies this with a core file under 1000 lines. He describes the origin from transformers.agents and the security-focused custom Python interpreter. The library achieved third place on the GAIA benchmark, using o1 and Sonnet models, and Roucher projects 90% accuracy by 2026 based on a sigmoid trend line. Hugging Face is launching an agent course and plans to build GUI agents for computer use, while also fine-tuning R1 for agentic tasks.

The AI Architect: Bret Taylor

Feb 11, 2025 · 1:35:59

Bret Taylor, CEO of Sierra and chairman of OpenAI, recounts engineering AI's future across three eras — rewriting Google Maps' frontend in a weekend (cutting un-gzipped code to 20K), building Sierra's in-house agent platform for consumer brands like Sonos and SiriusXM, and navigating OpenAI's leadership crisis. He argues that AI agents' core abstractions are still pre-React, compares today's agents to jQuery, and predicts that outcome-based pricing will dominate as agents complete jobs rather than assist humans. He urges software engineers to move up the stack toward domain-specific agents and to embrace Rust-like languages for AI-generated code, emphasizing formal verification and safety. Taylor also shares how OpenAI prioritizes mission over product features, and why the relationship with Microsoft remains OpenAI's most important partnership.

Agent Engineering with Pydantic + Graphs — with Samuel Colvin, CEO of Pydantic Logfire

Feb 6, 2025 · 1:02:15

Samuel Colvin, CEO of Pydantic Logfire, argues that Pydantic AI offers a production-ready agent framework with type-safe graphs, unlike most agent frameworks that sacrifice engineering quality. He explains Pydantic's shift from a validation library to an AI tool, noting 300M monthly downloads and a 20% reduction in time-to-first-token for a major model company after upgrading to Pydantic V2. Colvin details Logfire's use of DataFusion over ClickHouse for better JSON support and control, and why Pydantic AI resists an LLM gateway, favoring OpenAI-aligned APIs. He defends graphs for complex workflows, reveals agents now use graphs internally, and shares that Pydantic.run enables browser-based demos. The episode covers OpenTelemetry's emerging GenAI semantic conventions, the need for self-hosted observability due to PII in LLM data, and Colvin's investment in Marimo as a text-based Jupyter replacement.

Why every AI Engineer needs an AI Gateway (ft Portkey.ai CEO)

Feb 5, 2025 · 31:18

Rohit Agarwal, CEO of Portkey, explains why every AI engineer needs an AI gateway: an operational platform that connects to LLMs more efficiently, handling routing, observability, guardrails, and cost management. He notes that 90% of production use cases don't use automatic routing, but reasoning models and agents are driving new routing demands. Portkey's open-source gateway minimizes latency with a 21 MB memory footprint using JSON transformers. Key jobs include routing, observability (monitoring price, performance, accuracy), guardrails (e.g., regex-based, empty output detection, PII redaction), and human feedback tied to business metrics like video download rates. Rohit also highlights MCP adoption for simplifying agent-to-service connections, with bidirectional communication via RPC.

The Agent Reasoning Interface: Claude, ChatGPT Canvas, Tasks, Operator — with Karina Nguyen, OpenAI

Feb 1, 2025 · 1:06:29

OpenAI's Karina Nguyen, who led the creation of ChatGPT Canvas and Tasks, explains how her team trains separate models for new interaction paradigms rather than prompting the core model, enabling rapid iteration on user feedback. She details the 'behavioral design' process that shapes model personality in collaborative contexts like Canvas—deciding when to rewrite vs. edit—and how that extends to defining agents as a progression from one-off actions to fully trustworthy long-horizon delegation. Drawing on her time at Anthropic building Claude.ai from scratch and co-creating Claude 3, she contrasts the product mindsets: OpenAI takes more product risks across consumer features while Anthropic focuses on enterprise. She also shares her vision for ChatGPT evolving into a 'generative OS' where UIs adapt dynamically to user intent, and argues that human creativity—not model capability—is the current bottleneck for rethinking software interfaces.

Outlasting Noam Shazeer, Crowdsourcing Chai AI w/ 1.4m DAU — with William Beauchamp, Chai Research

Jan 26, 2025 · 1:13:33

William Beauchamp, founder-CEO of Chai AI, explains how he pivoted from algorithmic trading to build a character chatbot platform before Character.ai, growing to 1.4M DAU and $22M+ revenue by crowdsourcing model improvements through Chaiverse. Starting with GPT-J in 2021, he found product-market fit with a therapist bot and shifted to user-generated content, letting users define prompts, images, and names. Competing against well-funded rivals like Character AI and Talkie, Chai ships over 100 LLMs weekly via its developer platform, spending $10M on compute in 2024 and tripling it. Beauchamp argues AI follows an S-curve, not scaling laws, and focuses on inference optimization using rejection sampling and reward models to serve better responses. He prioritizes 'insanely great' products over technology-driven features, noting that audio and image features failed to move metrics, while a data flywheel and aggressive user acquisition drove rapid growth.

DeepSeek V3, SGLang, and the state of Open Model Inference in 2025 (Quantization, MoEs, Pricing)

Jan 19, 2025 · 57:18

Amir Haghighat and Yineng Zhang from Baseten explain how they serve DeepSeek V3, a 671-billion-parameter MoE model requiring H200 clusters with FP8 support, making it the top open-weights model. They detail Baseten’s dedicated inference model (no shared endpoints) and its reliance on SGLang for performance gains like Radix prefix caching and MLA attention support. Yineng highlights SGLang’s edge over vLLM and TensorRT-LLM in usability and customization, especially for large models. Amir outlines three pillars for mission-critical inference: model-level performance (via frameworks like SGLang), horizontal scaling across regions and clouds, and low-latency multi-model workflows. The episode also covers quantization trends, MoE architecture, and speculative decoding as key enablers for open model deployment.

OpenAI o1 isn’t a chat model (and that’s the point)

Jan 17, 2025 · 31:59

Ben Hylak and Dan McAteer explain why OpenAI’s o1 is not a chat model and how mastering its prompting turned Ben from a skeptic into a proponent. Ben’s prompt structure—goal, return format, warnings, context dump—emphasizes describing what you want rather than how to think, a shift from earlier models. Dan uses o1 for coding by feeding it full code context, achieving one-shot implementations that reach 100% where previous models maxed out at 95%. Ben notes o1 is the most capable but hardest model to use, with experiments costing $20 per try, and argues model routing will let humans or systems trade off cost, speed, and intelligence. Dan also applies o1 to scientific research, feeding it papers from multiple fields to find novel connections that humans would miss.

Beating Google at Search with Neural PageRank and $5M of H200s — with Will Bryk of Exa.ai

Jan 10, 2025 · 55:54

Will Bryk, CEO of Exa.ai (formerly Metaphor), details building a neural search engine from scratch using link prediction as 'Neural PageRank' — predicting documents rather than keywords. Exa's new product offers near-perfect lists (e.g., 'startups working on hardware in SF') by scaling compute per query, from milliseconds to a day, like o1 for search. Bryk argues LLMs will become the interface to search, while Exa provides the 'super knowledge' that even AGI will need. He contrasts Exa's neural approach with Google's keyword-based system and Perplexity's reliance on Bing. The company recently purchased a $5M H200 cluster and maintains a culture of nap pods and first-principles thinking.

The State of Reasoning — from Nathan Lambert, Interconnects/AI2 [LS Live @ NeurIPS 2024]

Jan 2, 2025 · 16:22

Nathan Lambert argues that language models do perform reasoning, contrary to skeptics, and that embracing chain-of-thought and reinforcement learning (RL) is key to advancing their capabilities. He explains OpenAI's o1 as large-scale RL on verifiable outcomes, noting that post-training flops exceed pre-training, and highlights relatives like DeepSeek and Qwen which are narrower. Lambert details OpenAI's new reinforcement fine-tuning API, which uses the same infrastructure as o1 and requires only dozens of labeled samples, and contrasts it with process reward models or Monte Carlo tree search. He presents his own project using RL on math evaluations (GSM8K, MATH, AFeval) to show gentle RL fine-tuning can boost specific capabilities without degrading general performance. The talk concludes that reasoning is worth pursuing and that new, less-human-like forms of model reasoning are emerging.

2024 Year in Review: The Big Scaling Debate, the Four Wars of AI, Top Themes and the Rise of Agents

Jan 1, 2025 · 1:51:07

In their 100th episode, hosts Alessio and Swyx recap 2024 in AI, arguing that pre-training scaling has hit a wall—backed by Ilya Sutskever and others at NeurIPS—and that inference-time compute (o1, o3) is the new frontier. They dissect the "four wars": data quality (lawsuits vs. synthetic data), GPU haves vs. have-nots (with the middle class dying), multimodality (Sora, Veo 2, Gemini 2.0's native image output), and the LLM OS/agents stack (LangChain, E2B, memory). Market share shifted from OpenAI's 95% to 50-75% as Anthropic and Gemini gained ground; prices dropped ~3 orders of magnitude for same ELO. The episode predicts 2025 as the year agents finally enter production, driven by models like o1 and tools like Devin, and warns that AI will set the skill floor for roles.

Best of 2024: Open Models [LS LIVE! at NeurIPS 2024]

Dec 23, 2024 · 37:29

Luca Soldani of AI2 and Sophia Yang of Mistral argue that open models in 2024 have exploded in number and performance, closing the gap with closed models, but face growing compute and data-access challenges. Soldani notes 2024 saw models like Qwen and Deepseek rivaling frontier closed-model performance, and fully open models like OLMo release full recipes including data, code, and intermediate checkpoints. He points out that pre-training requires 10K+ GPUs for state-of-the-art, while post-training can be done with as few as eight. Sophia highlights Mistral's release of over a dozen models in 2024, including Pixtral multimodal and Le Chat—a free chat interface with image understanding, canvas code execution, and web search. Soldani warns of data access diminishing due to content owners blocking crawlers and lobbying efforts labeling open source AI as dangerous, emphasizing the need to protect the open ecosystem.

The State of AI Startups in 2024 [LS Live @ NeurIPS]

Dec 21, 2024 · 26:35

Sarah Guo and Pranav Reddy argue that 2024 has become a far friendlier ecosystem for AI startups, with the model landscape shifting from OpenAI's near-monopoly to a competitive field where Google's Gemini now leads LMSys Arena and open-source models like Llama 8B score ten points higher on MMLU than Mistral 7B a year ago. They note that OpenAI's API cost has dropped 80-85% in 18 months, and total OpenAI API share fell from ~90% to ~60% as customers switch. The funding environment is rational, not a bubble, with foundation-model labs raising $30-40B but most startups seeing sane valuations; one portfolio company grew from zero to twenty million in PLG-style spending. Key startup themes include first-wave service automation (Sierra, Decagon, Harvey, EvenUp), better search and new friends (Perplexity, Glean, Character, Replica), and democratized creativity (Midjourney, HeyGen). They argue the 'GPT wrapper' narrative is false—applications capture value—and that incumbents face innovator's dilemma because AI changes business models (outcomes-based pricing) and data needs (reasoning traces rarely saved). The speed of change and new markets (legal, healthcare, defense) structurally favor…

0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo)

Dec 2, 2024 · 1:36:42

Eric Simons of Bolt.new/Stackblitz and Itamar Friedman of Qodo discuss Bolt.new's viral growth from $4M ARR in four weeks to over $8M ARR in two months as a Claude wrapper, driven by its in-browser WebContainer OS that eliminates local dev setup. They contrast Bolt's '0 to 1' creation for non-developers with enterprise-focused agents like Qodo's testing and code review tools, arguing that specialized agents outperform general-purpose ones. Simons details how WebContainer's unified sandbox enables error self-healing loops, while Friedman explains AlphaCodium's task-breaking that boosted o1 preview to 93rd percentile on Codeforces. The episode covers open-source strategy, pricing tiers ($20 to $200/month), and founder advice on ignoring expert doubt to ship fast, illustrated by Simons' Ironman completion while launching Bolt.

[Paper Club] Embeddings in 2024: OpenAI, Nomic Embed, Jina Embed, cde-small-v1 - with swyx

Dec 1, 2024 · 41:46

Shawn Wang (swyx) surveys four key embedding developments: OpenAI's text-embedding-3 models, Nomic Embed, Jina Embed v3, and CDE-small-v1. OpenAI's models introduce Matryoshka embeddings, compressing output from 1024 to 64 dimensions (94% storage reduction) with only an 8% performance drop. Nomic Embed is a fully open-source BERT-based model trained on English data, offering reproducible code. Jina Embed v3 supports 89 languages and uses task-specific LoRA adapters—e.g., a retrieval adapter yields a huge boost over the base model. CDE-small-v1 (143M parameters) employs a two-stage adaptation: first conditioning on the corpus, then embedding; it outperforms 7B-parameter models on many tasks, though its stateful API complicates deployment.

The new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Computer Use, and Building SOTA Agents — with Erik Schluntz, Anthropic

Nov 28, 2024 · 1:11:08

Anthropic's Erik Schluntz explains how Claude 3.5 Sonnet achieved state-of-the-art 49% on SWE-Bench Verified by using a minimal agent framework that gives the model full control via tools like bash and file editing, letting it self-correct without hard-coded workflows. He details the importance of tool design over prompt engineering, why XML tags work well, and how computer use reduces integration friction by letting models interact with any browser-based interface. Schluntz also shares his robotics experience, noting that while LLMs and diffusion models are promising for general-purpose robots, reliability at 99.9% and hardware variability remain major hurdles, and he expresses skepticism about self-driving as a business due to high vehicle costs versus driver-equivalent revenue.

[Paper Club] BERT: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers

Nov 27, 2024 · 53:12

Eric Ness walks through the BERT paper, explaining how its bidirectional encoder architecture with masked language modeling and next sentence prediction pre-training enabled state-of-the-art results on 11 NLP tasks in 2019. He details the 110M parameter BASE and 340M parameter LARGE models, trained on 2.5B Wikipedia words and 800M book words, and how a simple logistic regression on BERT embeddings achieves 82% accuracy on IMDb sentiment classification, far above the 50% baseline. Swyx and Eric discuss how BERT’s pre-training objectives—masking 15% of tokens and predicting sentence order—teach small models word relationships for efficient classification, though they lose data compared to decoder-only next-token prediction. They note that while scaling laws favor decoder models, BERT-style encoders remain cost-effective for edge deployment, with recent work showing full retraining in 24 hours for under $500 or even 1 hour for $20 on 8 A100s, matching original GLUE scores.

Why Compound AI + Open Source will beat Closed AI — with Lin Qiao, CEO of Fireworks AI

Nov 25, 2024 · 55:49

Lin Qiao, CEO of Fireworks AI, argues that compound AI systems combining multiple open-source models will outperform closed monolithic models like OpenAI's. She explains Fireworks' evolution from a PyTorch platform to a full-stack inference and customization engine serving 40+ customers including Cursor. Qiao details their distributed inference engine, Fire Optimizer for quality-latency-cost tradeoffs, and upcoming o1-like model built on open-source foundations. She defends their quantization approach after public criticism from rivals, emphasizes specialization over general intelligence, and invites developers to test their free LoRA adapter hosting.

Agents @ Work: Lindy.ai (with live demo!)

Nov 15, 2024 · 1:08:01

Florent Crivello, founder of Lindy.ai, explains how his no-code agent platform evolved from an overly LLM-dependent design to a deterministic 'on rails' system that puts AI in a box, making agents more reliable and easier to use. The product was rebuilt from scratch as Lindy 2.0, featuring step-by-step workflows with structured outputs and memory management that still requires pruning. Crivello reveals that Claude 3.5 Sonnet ended model bottlenecks but warns against over-engineering cognitive architectures, advocating instead for letting models scale. He discusses building their own eval tools (now considering Braintrust), hiring vertical GMs for go-to-market, and the decision to return to in-person work, arguing remote work hampers creativity. He also shares his contrarian views on Europe vs. US tech, testing the Overton window with spicy tweets, and balancing AI safety concerns (10% p(doom)) with building toward a potential utopia.

Agents @ Work: Dust.tt — with Stanislas Polu

Nov 11, 2024 · 58:53

Stanislas Polu, co-founder of Dust.tt, argues that horizontal agent platforms—not vertical, single-use-case agents—will win the enterprise by letting non-technical employees build their own automation. A former OpenAI researcher who worked directly with Ilya Sutskever on formal mathematics and saw GPT-4 internally before ChatGPT, Polu left in 2022 to start Dust, now an open-source infrastructure layer that connects company data (Slack, Notion, GitHub) to LLMs and lets anyone create simple, instruction-driven agents. He contrasts Dust’s API-first, integration-heavy approach with LangChain’s open-source orchestration and Adept’s browser automation bet, insisting that most useful agent workflows require only a few tool calls and that function-calling quality (where GPT-4 Turbo still leads) matters more than model size. Dust achieves 88% daily active user penetration at some enterprise customers, and Polu predicts the first billion-dollar company run by a single person will emerge once platforms like Dust mature enough to let tiny teams scale to massive output.

[Paper Club] Intro to Diffusion Models and OpenAI sCM: Simple, Stable, Scalable Consistency Models

Nov 2, 2024 · 52:22

RJ Honicky presents OpenAI's sCM paper, which introduces techniques to simplify, stabilize, and scale continuous-time consistency models for faster image generation. The paper addresses instability issues by modifying skip connections, using cosine/sine schedules, adjusting the noise embedding scale to 0.02, applying adaptive double normalization, and implementing tangent warm-up over the first 10K iterations. These innovations enable one-step generation with FID scores rivaling GANs and multi-step diffusion models, while scaling experiments demonstrate performance up to 1.5B parameters. Distillation from scratch outperforms distillation from a teacher, and the episode contrasts these continuous-time methods with discrete-time approaches, explaining the intuition behind the mathematical choices.

[Paper Club] Upcycling Large Language Models into Mixture of Experts

Oct 29, 2024 · 39:02

NVIDIA's Ethan He presents Megatron-Core MoE and the upcycling of dense LLMs into Mixture-of-Experts models, showing that upcycling a 15B-param dense model into a 64-expert MoE and training on 1T tokens yields 5% lower validation loss and 4% higher MMLU than continued dense training on the same compute. Key techniques include swapping the router order (softmax-then-top-K instead of top-K-then-softmax) with a 4× output scaling to preserve initial forward pass behavior, and initializing fine-grained MoE routers by duplicating half the weights so each shard group selects identically. A high learning rate matching the original pre-training peak is critical; constant low LR causes catastrophic forgetting. The upcycled model matches the compute of a 1.7× larger dense model per scaling laws, but data quality remains paramount—continued dense training still delivered a 20% MMLU jump. Megatron-Core's fused permutation, GroupedGEMM, and expert parallelism are available as a standalone library.

How NotebookLM Was Made

Oct 25, 2024 · 1:13:57

Raiza Martin (NotebookLM lead PM) and Usama Bin Shafqat (AI engineer) explain how Google's NotebookLM built the viral 'Deep Dive' audio overview feature. They reveal the product evolved from Project Tailwind, using Gemini 1.5's long context and DeepMind speech to create a two-persona dialogue format that transforms documents into engaging podcasts. The team learned from 65,000 Discord members, leaned on best-selling author Steven Johnson for a 'tool for thought' workflow, and prioritized a single format over exposed controls to preserve unpredictability and delight. Humor and tension are not explicitly prompted but emerge from giving personas different angles. Evaulation relied on internal taste ('potatoes for chefs') before formal raters, with a Likert scale on dimensions like entertainment and groundedness. Future plans include multilingual support, API access, real-time chat, and codebase podcasting, while managing non-determinism by accepting occasional bad rolls.

Singapore: the AI Engineer Nation — with Minister Josephine Teo

Oct 19, 2024 · 56:40

Singapore Minister Josephine Teo outlines the city-state's refreshed national AI strategy and the Ministry of Digital Development's approach to balancing innovation, safety, and talent development. She details plans to triple AI practitioners from 5,000 to 15,000, the AI Verify testing tools and AI Safety Institute for governance, and internal government AI bots like AI Bot for RAG-based knowledge retrieval. On sovereign AI, she discusses hybrid cloud infrastructure and pragmatic data center expansion. Teo also explains Singapore's new law requiring transparency for AI-generated election content, emphasizing fact-based political discourse.

[Paper Club] SWE-Bench [OpenAI Verified/Multimodal] + MLE-Bench with Jesse Hu

Oct 19, 2024 · 1:01:40

Jesse Hu walks through SWE-Bench, SWE-Bench Verified, SWE-Bench Multimodal, and MLE-Bench — benchmarks that evaluate AI agents on real-world coding and ML tasks, from fixing GitHub issues to winning Kaggle competitions. SWE-Bench scrapes 2,000+ pull requests from 12 Python repos to get free unit tests, with leaderboard scores rising from ~2% to 43% thanks to improved agent scaffolding. SWE-Bench Verified uses human raters and three criteria—well-specified problem, valid test, difficulty on a 0–3 scale—to filter 500 solvable tasks. SWE-Bench Multimodal targets 617 UI tasks from 17 JavaScript/TypeScript libraries, each including an image, but achieves only 12% accuracy. MLE-Bench repurposes Kaggle competitions: agents given 24 hours and an A10 GPU, with o1-preview scoring bronze in 17% of competitions and surpassing grandmasters (7 gold medals vs 5 required), though each run costs $4,000.

Building the Silicon Brain - Drew Houston of Dropbox

Oct 18, 2024 · 1:11:40

Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox, details his hands-on AI engineering journey and the company's strategic pivot to AI-first products like Dropbox Dash for universal search and access control. Having spent over 400 hours coding with LLMs, he built personal tools that seeded Dropbox AI, including a file question-answering system. He advocates 'rent, don't buy' for AI infrastructure, relying on open-source models and keeping options open as costs drop 10-100x yearly. Houston explains Dropbox's advantage in trust and data privacy, positioning it as a neutral platform that integrates with Google Drive and OneDrive. He discusses staying relevant through constant learning and founder mode, and advises founders to systematically train skills ahead of their company's growth.

[Paper Club] Molmo + Pixmo + Whisper 3 Turbo - with Vibhu Sapra, Nathan Lambert, Amgadoz

Oct 13, 2024 · 1:12:59

This episode covers two papers: AI2's Molmo open-source vision-language models and OpenAI's Whisper Large V3 Turbo. For Molmo, the key claim is that high-quality, audio-annotated data (Pixmo) enables models as small as 1B to match GPT-4V on academic benchmarks, with the 72B variant outperforming GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The team avoided distilling proprietary models by having annotators describe images in speech for 60-90 seconds, then transcribing and augmenting the captions. For Whisper Turbo, OpenAI pruned the decoder from 32 to 4 layers and continued pre-training on 10 million hours of multilingual transcription data, making it 1.78x smaller than Large V3 with minimal word-error-rate increase. The model is faster and supports real-time chunk-based decoding, unlike English-only DistilWhisper. Nathan Lambert and Amgadoz provide commentary on data strategies and benchmarking nuances.

Production AI Engineering starts with Evals

Oct 11, 2024 · 1:56:16

Ankur Goyal, founder and CEO of Braintrust, argues that evaluation is the core workflow of production AI engineering and shows how his platform makes evals accessible to software engineers. Drawing from his experience at SingleStore and Impira, he details Braintrust's evolution from an eval tool into an end-to-end AI development platform used by Stripe, Zapier, Vercel, and other top AI teams. He shares market data: OpenAI handles over 95% of production workloads, fine-tuning is declining, and open-source models account for under 5% due to reliability issues. Ankur explains why he avoided building a vector database—the real challenge is permissions and joins, not vector search—and predicts o1-style reasoning will replace complex agent frameworks. He reveals Braintrust's differentiators: hybrid on-prem, TypeScript-first SDK, and declarative eval structures.

Building AGI in Real Time (OpenAI Dev Day 2024)

Oct 4, 2024 · 2:09:35

OpenAI's DevDay 2024 unveils the Realtime API with WebSocket-based voice and function calling, Vision Finetuning, Prompt Caching, and Model Distillation. Product leads Olivier Godement, Romain Huet, and Michelle Pokrass detail design choices like zero-code caching and WebSockets for human-level latency. Alistair Pullen of Cosine explains how fine-tuning GPT-4o on custom reasoning traces beat o1 on SWE-bench Verified, while Sam Altman and Kevin Weil discuss AGI levels (o1 as level 2 reasoner), the coming agent era (level 3), safety through iterative deployment, and the importance of building for the frontier. The episode also covers moderation policy relaxation, plans for o1 system prompts by year-end, and the competitive admiration for NotebookLM.

Language Agents: From Reasoning to Acting — with Shunyu Yao of OpenAI, Harrison Chase of LangGraph

Sep 27, 2024 · 1:26:33

Shunyu Yao of OpenAI and Harrison Chase of LangChain discuss the evolution of language agents, arguing that combining reasoning and acting through techniques like ReAct remains foundational, while tool design and cognitive architectures like CoALA will shape the next wave. Shunyu traces his work from text games to ReAct, showing how thinking as an action improves reliability; Harrison explains LangChain's adoption and the shift to LangGraph for stateful orchestration. They emphasize agent-computer interfaces (ACI) as a neglected area, noting that SWE-Agent's success came from optimizing tools for models, not humans. The conversation covers memory types (semantic, episodic, procedural) and applies CoALA's three dimensions to current systems. They highlight promising applications: customer support, coding agents, and spreadsheet-style UX for batch operations. Shunyu stresses that better benchmarks like SWE-Bench (which solved 30% of GitHub issues) and TauBench (best model 48%) are critical, and that data—not architecture—will drive future model improvements.

The Ultimate Guide to Prompting - with Sander Schulhoff from LearnPrompting.org

Sep 20, 2024 · 1:07:09

Sander Schulhoff, author of The Prompt Report and founder of LearnPrompting, presents a comprehensive taxonomy of 58 prompting techniques and argues that prompt engineering is a skill everyone should have, not a specialized role. He categorizes techniques by problem-solving strategy (zero-shot, few-shot, thought generation, decomposition, ensembling, self-criticism) and debunks role prompting for accuracy-based tasks, showing an 'idiot' prompt outperformed a 'genius' prompt on MMLU. Schulhoff shares his experience running Hack-a-Prompt, which collected 600,000 malicious prompts and won best paper at EMNLP, and differentiates between prompt injection and jailbreaking. He advocates for automatic prompt engineering with DSPy, which beat his manual effort in 10 minutes, and previews Hack-a-Prompt 2.0, aiming for a $500,000 prize pool to generate real-world harms for safety tuning.

[Paper Club] 🍓 On Reasoning: Q-STaR and Friends!

Sep 18, 2024 · 47:12

This episode of Paper Club surveys three reasoning papers — STaR, Quiet-STaR, and V-STaR — arguing that while STaR is foundational for bootstrapping reasoning via rationales and rationalization, Quiet-STaR's attempt to generate rationales at every token yields only marginal gains (5–10% on GSM8K and CQA), and V-STaR's verifier trained with DPO on both correct and incorrect solutions delivers the most practical improvement, beating majority voting. The host explains STaR's two-loop process of generating rationales and rationalizations from wrong answers, highlights examples like a filtering-straw question where human raters evaluated reasoning quality, and notes that STaR on GPT-J 6B achieved human-like step counts in math problems. V-STaR's verifier selects among candidate solutions, scaling with K candidates, and is compared to process reward models from OpenAI's "let's verify step by step."

Building AGI with OpenAI's Structured Outputs API

Sep 17, 2024 · 1:12:23

Michelle, OpenAI's API tech lead, explains how the newly launched Structured Outputs feature achieves near-100% reliability for schema-following outputs by combining constrained decoding with model training, moving beyond the limitations of JSON mode and Function Calling. She details the refusal field that allows the model to decline harmful requests while maintaining parseable output, and discusses use cases like dynamic UI generation and mathematical chain-of-thought. The roadmap includes parallel function calling and custom grammars. The episode also covers the GA of GPT-4o fine-tuning, Batch API's 50% cost savings, Vision API integration with structured outputs, the Whisper API's surprising lack of diarization, and the shift toward speech-to-speech APIs. Michelle shares insights from her Waterloo co-op background and what qualities succeed at OpenAI: low ego, user-focused, and driven.

Personal benchmarks vs HumanEval - with Nicholas Carlini of DeepMind

Aug 28, 2024 · 1:07:28

Nicholas Carlini, a DeepMind research scientist, argues AI models are practically useful for personal tasks despite flaws, and personal benchmarks tailored to individual use cases matter more than generic leaderboards. He shares from his 'How I Use AI' post: using LLMs for ephemeral software, kickstarting Docker, debugging by pasting error messages. He built a personal benchmark DSL that runs code from real chat history. On security, he explains buying expired domains from LAION-400M allowed poisoning any model trained on it, and he extracted OpenAI's Ada and Babbage model dimensions via API (with permission). He also recovered training data from GPT-3.5 by repeating a word until ChatGPT output verbatim sequences. He prefers attacking over defending because it's more fun and essential for discovering real vulnerabilities.

Is finetuning GPT4o worth it?

Aug 22, 2024 · 1:01:16

Ali Pullen, founder of Cosine, discusses Genie, an AI software engineering colleague that achieved 30% on SWE-Bench and 43.8% on SWE-Bench Verified via fine-tuning GPT-4o on billions of tokens of synthetic data. Cosine built Genie by training on the process of software engineering—not just working code—using synthetic runtime errors and a self-improvement loop. The agent follows a four-stage workflow: code retrieval (66% accuracy), planning, writing diffs, and running CI tests. Pullen reveals that model performance degrades linearly beyond 60K tokens in the context window, and that OpenAI dynamically sizes LoRA adapters to handle Cosine's massive dataset. He explains why Genie isn't on the SWE-Bench leaderboard (refusing to publish trajectories to prevent distillation) and outlines plans to scale the dataset and fine-tune on customer codebases for personalized performance.

Answer.ai & AI Magic with Jeremy Howard

Aug 17, 2024 · 1:11:00

Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI argues that continuous pre-training should be treated as a continuum, not separate phases, and demonstrates how FSDP+QLoRA enables training a 70B model on just two NVIDIA 4090s. He reveals Answer’s non-hierarchical, manager-free R&D lab model that recruited unusual talent like Benjamin Warner and Ben Claviez, who independently launched BERT 24 to revive encoder-only architectures. Howard introduces FastHTML, a pure-Python web framework built on HTMX and Starlette, for creating modern SPAs without JavaScript. He previews “AI Magic,” a dialogue engineering system that moves beyond teletype-style chat interfaces and code editors, aiming to make AI-assisted development more interactive. The episode also covers Answer’s Public Benefit Corporation structure designed to resist hostile takeovers, and critiques decoder-only hype while advocating for encoder-decoder and state-space models.

The Winds of AI Winter (Q2 Four Wars of the AI Stack Recap)

Aug 2, 2024 · 1:23:36

Swyx and Alessio recap Q2 2024 through their 'Four Wars' framework, arguing that the AI landscape is shifting from frontier model dominance to commoditization and vertical applications. They highlight Claude 3.5 Sonnet overtaking OpenAI on coding benchmarks, Llama 3.1's synthetic data approach enabling 7B models to rival GPT-4, Mistral Large 2's non-commercial license and lost open-source crown, and on-device models like Gemini Nano and Apple Intelligence. The Quality Data Wars see NYT suing OpenAI, Reddit licensing data for $200M+, and synthetic data proving real for math (AlphaProof near IMO gold) and code. The Multimodality War includes ChatGPT Voice Mode delayed, Meta's Chameleon for native fusion, and Google's PaliGemma for PDF extraction. The renamed LLM OS War covers agent protocols, memory databases, and the collapse of model cost by an order of magnitude every four months, pushing startups toward vertical services like Brightwave and Dropzone that sell labor, not tools. The episode ends with a CrowdStrike joke about agent safety.

[LLM Paper Club] Llama 3.1 Paper: The Llama Family of Models

Jul 29, 2024 · 1:23:46

This episode examines Meta's Llama 3.1 paper, detailing the 405B dense model, its scaling laws grounded on the ARC reasoning benchmark rather than perplexity, and the decision to train on 15 trillion tokens. Vibhu explains the training infrastructure: 16,000 H100s over 54 days with 419 interruptions, 78% from GPU hardware failures. Eugene Yan walks through the synthetic data pipeline—using Llama 2 for filtering, stepwise reward models, and Monte Carlo tree search to improve reasoning traces. Hassan shares building LlamaTutor.com with Together API, serving 4,000 visitors and 5,900 requests for about $12. The group also discusses quantization trade-offs (larger models degrade less), inference provider variability (Groq's non-deterministic temperature zero), and compares Llama 405B's performance to GPT-4o and Claude.

The 10,000x Yolo Researcher Metagame — with Yi Tay of Reka

Jul 5, 2024 · 2:18:43

Yi Tay, chief scientist at Reka and former Google Brain architecture co-lead on PaLM 2, recounts his journey from an NTU PhD to co-founding Reka, where a team of just 5 people pre-trained Reka Core on $60M of GPU compute—debating at #7 on the LMsys leaderboard. He explains why he believes the Noam transformer (with SwiGLU, GQA, RoPE) remains the strongest baseline, how encoder-decoder architectures offer 'free sparsity' (a 2× flop-efficiency over decoder-only), and why Chinchilla scaling laws are often misunderstood (training past the optimal compute frontier is routine). He argues that long context will eventually outperform RAG for complex reasoning, and that open-source models like Llama 3 are catching up only because Meta invested in a top-tier training stack, not due to grassroots innovation. The episode also covers his productivity habits (working backwards from a paper title, camping arXiv) and the cultural shock of moving from Singapore academia to Google's impact-driven research environment.

How To Hire AI Engineers (ft. James Brady and Adam Wiggins of Elicit)

Jun 21, 2024 · 1:08:06

James Brady and Adam Wiggins of Elicit define the AI engineer role as a blend of conventional software engineering, deep curiosity about language models, and a defensive fault-first mindset to handle LLMs' chaotic latency and non-determinism. They explain their interview process uses coding exercises that force edge-case thinking and system design probing fault tolerance, not happy-path algorithms. For sourcing, they emphasize side projects, hackathons, and targeted communities like effective altruism. The episode explores the ML-first mindset of relinquishing control to leverage model capabilities, using techniques like retries, fallbacks, and strong typing. Elicit shares their job description template and tiered ML reading list as practical resources for hiring.

How to train a Million Context LLM — with Mark Huang of Gradient.ai

May 31, 2024 · 1:12:14

Mark Huang of Gradient.ai explains how his team extended Llama 3 to a 1 million token context window using curriculum learning, RingAttention, and EasyContext, achieving near-perfect GPU utilization. They employed theta scaling from the RoPE paper to interpolate positional encodings, trained on carefully curated datasets including SlimPajamas and synthetic data from GPT-4, and validated with benchmarks like Ruler and needle-in-a-haystack. Huang details the trade-offs between full fine-tuning and LoRA adapters, the challenges of pushing to 4M tokens (degradation from floating-point precision limits), and why long context matters for state management across sessions and grounding multimodal inputs. He calls for community collaboration on long-context evaluations and pairwise multimodal datasets.

LLM Asia Paper Club Survey Round

May 22, 2024 · 55:25

The episode surveys four recent papers on LLM reasoning, uncertainty, interpretability, and efficiency. 'Let's Think Dot by Dot' shows that filler tokens (dots) inserted between input and output enable hidden computation, outperforming no-token baselines on tasks like 3-Sum and 2-Sum Transform. 'Uncertainty Estimation' trains a random forest on hidden-layer activations to predict response confidence, achieving higher AUC than unsupervised methods on Q&A and translation. 'Monosemanticity' uses sparse autoencoders to identify interpretable features (e.g., a DNA-detection feature) in a toy transformer, advancing mechanistic interpretability. 'Medusa' attaches multiple prediction heads to the final hidden state to speculate future tokens, enabling faster decoding without a separate draft model and training in five hours on 60K samples.

This World Does Not Exist — Joscha Bach, Karan Malhotra, Rob Haisfield (WorldSim, WebSim, Liquid AI)

Apr 27, 2024 · 1:56:11

The episode features Karan Malhotra demoing WorldSim, a prompt that turns Claude 3 into a universe simulator via CLI; Rob Haisfield presenting WebSim, which generates functional websites on the fly; and Joscha Bach arguing simulative AI reveals consciousness as a virtual property, with LLMs creating agents as real as human minds, urging the California Institute for Machine Consciousness to build self-organizing silicon life. Malhotra shows WorldSim running “world.exe” to create Twitter inside a simulated universe, with users tweeting and Elon Musk moving Dogecoin. Haisfield demonstrates WebSim generating a 5D particle interface, a news RSS aggregator, and a face-swap webcam app via URL parameters like “secrets=revealed”. Bach explains consciousness as second-order perception in a simulated now, criticizes RLHF for lobotomizing models, and advocates for animist AI where software agents compete like spirits, not golems.

High Agency Pydantic over VC Backed Frameworks — with Jason Liu of Instructor

Apr 24, 2024 · 1:02:59

Jason Liu, creator of the Instructor library, explains why structured outputs from LLMs are best handled by a simple requests-like wrapper rather than a VC-backed framework, arguing that Pydantic-defined schemas via function calling outperform JSON Mode for typed responses. He details his journey from being bearish on LLMs at StitchFix to building Instructor on a bullet train to Japan after GPT-3 proved him wrong. Liu advocates for workflow-based DAGs over reactive agent loops, recommends using rankers rather than cramming 60+ tools into an API call, and credits high agency—trying many experiments and documenting conditions for revisiting failures—as key to his success. He also critiques the MLE hiring hype, urging startups to empower motivated AI engineers instead.

Breaking down the OG GPT Paper by Alec Radford

Apr 23, 2024 · 1:05:03

This episode of the Latent Space Paper Club breaks down Alec Radford's seminal 2018 GPT-1 paper, which introduced generative pre-training of a Transformer decoder on BookCorpus (5 GB, 7,000 books) followed by supervised fine-tuning. Amget explains how the 117M-parameter model achieved state-of-the-art on 9 of 12 NLU tasks, with absolute gains of 8.9% on commonsense reasoning (Stories Cloze) and 5.7% on question answering (RACE). Key innovations include task-agnostic input transformations (e.g., concatenating premise and hypothesis with a delimiter for entailment, using a Siamese architecture for semantic similarity, and scoring answer choices for QA) and an auxiliary language modeling objective during fine-tuning (lambda=0.5). The episode also covers zero-shot heuristics (appending 'very' for sentiment, averaging token log probabilities for QA), ablation studies showing pre-training adds 15% average improvement, and the paper's prescient call to scale up—which became the blueprint for GPT-2, GPT-3, and beyond.

Why Google failed to make GPT-3 -- with David Luan of Adept

Mar 27, 2024 · 49:27

David Luan, co-founder of Adept and former early OpenAI leader, explains why Google failed to build GPT-3—its 'brain credit marketplace' prevented critical mass—and why Adept builds enterprise AI agents prioritizing reliability over generality. He recounts the GPT-2 demo that helped secure Microsoft's $1B investment and details Adept's goal: an AI teammate that can do anything a human does on a computer, targeting 'nines of reliability' for workflows like dispatching a physical truck. Luan contrasts Adept's vertical integration—training fast multimodal models (Fuyu) for charts and UIs—with pure-play foundation model companies that sell tokens, predicting commoditization. He notes Adept is sold out for Q1 and raised $420M, and explains how an augmentation focus creates a data flywheel from human oversight.

Open Source AI is AI we can Trust — with Soumith Chintala of Meta AI

Mar 6, 2024 · 1:37:38

Soumith Chintala, creator of PyTorch and engineering lead at Meta AI, argues that open source AI is essential for distributing opportunity and trust. He details PyTorch's complexity—1,000 operators needed for generality—and explains synthetic data as a vehicle for imparting symbolic knowledge where humans already have good symbolic models. He highlights a coordination problem in open source: feedback is lost because frontends like Ooba and Ollama lack feedback buttons, and proposes a centralized sinkhole to collect high-quality feedback. Beyond text, he is excited about robotics, where hardware remains a bottleneck, and Osmo's work to digitize smell, which he compares to images in the 1800s.

A Brief History of the Open Source AI Hacker - with Ben Firshman of Replicate

Feb 28, 2024 · 1:21:09

Ben Firshman, CEO of Replicate, explains how the inference platform grew from a research reproducibility tool into a 2M-user API business by embracing the generative image community and treating open-source AI as a hacker-friendly ecosystem. They accidentally discovered their API when a user reverse-engineered their web form, leading to their first $1k/month customer. Cog, their container standard for ML models, was born from lessons at Docker and the need to make models tinkerable. Ben argues that fine-tuning's low cost makes open-source models sustainable, and that AI engineers (orders of magnitude more than ML engineers) just need to start playing with models. He also discusses GPU scarcity, preferring sustainable pricing over price wars, and reveals that demand is not outpacing supply thanks to aggregating demand.

The State of AI in production — with David Hsu of Retool

Feb 7, 2024 · 1:06:52

Retool CEO David Hsu shares insights from the company's 2023 State of AI survey, revealing that most AI adoption remains internal and that the hype may be overrated—52% of 1,600 respondents said AI is overrated, and only 27% have AI in production, with 66% of those being internal use cases. He explains Retool's developer-first philosophy, their choice of open-source PG Vector over proprietary solutions, and why they intentionally raised less money at lower valuations to avoid over-dilution. Hsu describes Retool's shift from sales-led to bottom-up growth to reach millions of developers, and highlights the importance of AI workflows over simple chatbots, citing a clothing manufacturer that uses Retool apps with DALL-E to generate patterns. He discusses the competitive landscape, predicting open-source models will eventually catch up to OpenAI, and shares philosophical views on AGI using the plane-vs-bird analogy.

The Four Wars of the AI Stack - Dec 2023 Recap

Jan 26, 2024 · 1:20:58

Swyx and Alessio recap December 2023 by framing the AI landscape as four wars: the Data War (NYT lawsuit demanding destruction of GPTs, OpenAI's data partnerships, synthetic data from DeepMind); the GPU/Inference War (Mixtral price dropping 90% to $0.27/million tokens, benchmark drama between Anyscale and Together, alternative architectures like Mamba); the Multimodality War (Midjourney reaching $200M ARR, ElevenLabs hitting unicorn status, OpenAI and Google building god models); and the RAG/Ops War (LangChain vs LlamaIndex, Pinecone's $750M valuation, Qdrant serving OpenAI and Anthropic internally). They argue agents and open source are not active wars, and predict 2024 will see AI finally reach production, with hardware like Rabbit R1 and Tab capturing unique context.

The Origin and Future of RLHF: the secret ingredient for ChatGPT - with Nathan Lambert

Jan 11, 2024 · 1:35:27

Dr. Nathan Lambert traces the origin and future of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), the secret ingredient behind ChatGPT, explaining how it evolved from robotics and early preference learning to become the core alignment technique for large language models. He details the three-phase process (instruction tuning, preference data collection, RL optimization), noting that RLHF's data costs for LLaMA2 were around $6–8 million, and that synthetic data from GPT-4 is cheaper and often more accurate than human labels. Lambert contrasts DPO with PPO, arguing DPO is simpler but may have lower peak performance. He discusses emerging methods like Constitutional AI, which uses AI-generated critiques based on principles, and highlights the challenge of evaluating RLHF models, noting GPT-4 Turbo's lead over earlier versions. The episode covers open questions about data aggregation, reward model agreement (65–75%), and the need for qualitative model interaction.

The Accidental AI Canvas - with Steve Ruiz of tldraw

Jan 5, 2024 · 1:27:49

Steve Ruiz, founder of tldraw, recounts how his open-source whiteboard accidentally became a premier multimodal AI canvas, enabling visual prompting with GPT-4V. Originally built as a personal project with obsessive attention to arrows and ink, tldraw gained traction as a developer SDK for infinite canvas apps. The 'Make It Real' feature, which turns wireframes into working HTML using GPT-4V, exploded with 22 million Twitter views, showcasing iterative design through spatial branching and annotation. Ruiz explains how the canvas supports multiple input layers—UI sketches, state charts, screenshots, even API endpoints—and how his fine arts background guided his taste-driven approach. He argues tldraw's moat lies in its web-native, hackable canvas infrastructure, not ephemeral AI integrations, and positions it as the battlefield for comparing multimodal models like OpenAI's and Gemini.

The AI-First Graphics Editor - with Suhail Doshi of Playground AI

Jan 2, 2024 · 1:09:23

Suhail Doshi, co-founder of Mixpanel and founder of Playground AI, argues that image generation is still in a GPT-2 moment and that training open-source foundation models from scratch is necessary to unlock real utility, exemplified by Playground v2's 2.5x preference over Stable Diffusion XL on a 1K prompt benchmark. He explains the pivot from Mighty (cloud-streamed browser) to AI, driven by the belief that shifting compute elsewhere aligns with AI's parallel computation. The episode covers Playground's unique UI—not just a prompt box but a full canvas with preview rendering, seed control, and style filters—and the difficulty of balancing safety with artistic expression, especially around NSFW content. Suhail discusses the under-investment in graphics AI compared to language, the open-source community's role, and his choice to release pre-trained weights for academic research. He also shares lessons from running GPU infrastructure (harder for training than inference) and advises founders to follow curiosity and build projects rather than relying on books.

The State of Silicon and the GPU Poors - with Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis

Dec 5, 2023 · 1:07:55

Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis argues the 'GPU poor vs GPU rich' divide defines AI, with Google's TPU ramp (millions of units) dwarfing others and Nvidia selling over a million H100s this year. He explains that training costs are irrelevant compared to inference costs, and that memory bandwidth is the key bottleneck for LLM inference (e.g., Llama 70B needs ~2.1 TB/s for human reading speed). Patel advises GPU-poor players to focus on on-device innovations like speculative decoding (Medusa), asynchronous training, or fine-tuning for edge use—not on gaming benchmarks or fine-tuning small models. He details why AI hardware startups (Cerebras, Graphcore) bet wrong on on-chip SRAM, while Google’s TPU/Broadcom partnership and Nvidia’s yearly cadence make alternatives tough. He also warns that rebuilding the semiconductor supply chain in the US is unfeasible due to its fragmentation, and that safety through obscurity doesn't work—open innovation is better.

Beating GPT-4 with Open Source Models - with Michael Royzen of Phind

Nov 3, 2023 · 1:18:54

Michael Royzen, co-founder and CEO of Phind, explains how his company built a GPT-4-beating open-source model for developer Q&A. Royzen recounts founding SmartLens in high school, shifting to NLP after a Hugging Face demo, and creating an internet-scale LLM-powered RAG system in January 2022. He details Phind’s pivot to programmers, the Hacker News launch that gave it 1,500 points, and Paul Graham’s role in naming the company and introducing Ron Conway, who then connected Phind to NVIDIA for GPU access. Royzen argues that Phind’s model, fine-tuned from Code Llama 34B with extra data, closes the gap with proprietary models—especially on code reasoning—and that open-source will win the enterprise because the delta to GPT-5 will be small. He shares how Phind handles multi-step conversations via a pair programmer mode where users can pin messages, and reveals plans for reinforcement learning to reduce hallucination and improve correctness.

Powering your Copilot for Data - with Artem Keydunov from Cube.dev

Oct 27, 2023 · 43:01

Artem Keydunov, co-founder of Cube (formerly Statsbot), explains how his early text-to-SQL Slack bot in 2016 led to the creation of Cube as a semantic layer, which he argues is now essential for grounding AI models on structured data. Statsbot failed due to the lack of LLMs, relying on regex and custom models, but the underlying Cube framework—an open-source semantic layer defining metrics and dimensions—solved the context problem. Today, semantic layers index data into text descriptions, enabling agents to generate simple queries against the layer instead of complex SQL, reducing errors. Keydunov highlights that natural language querying is becoming a commodity feature in BI tools, but the real value lies in treating metric definitions as code with version control. He advises AI engineers to use a proper warehouse, a semantic layer like Cube, and tools like LangChain, while cautioning that production systems need extra Python code for math and error handling.

Why AI Agents Don't Work (yet) - with Kanjun Qiu of Imbue

Oct 21, 2023 · 1:12:37

Kanjun Qiu, CEO of Imbue (formerly Generally Intelligent), argues that AI agents remain unreliable because they lack robust reasoning and proper abstractions, which Imbue tackles by training foundation models optimized for reasoning over data like code. With a $200M Series B and $1B+ valuation, Imbue builds internal tools for debugging and inspecting agent decision-making, rejecting pure reinforcement learning after their Avalon environment revealed RL cannot handle planning. Instead, they emphasize natural language reasoning for inspectability, use code as a curriculum for reasoning, and design interfaces that let users fork and modify agents mid-execution. Qiu also discusses lessons from earlier startups (Sorceress in recruiting, Embark in VR), the importance of treating team members as creative agents, and her role in co-founding communal living space The Archive to foster scenius.

RAG is a hack - with Jerry Liu of LlamaIndex

Oct 12, 2023 · 1:13:25

In this episode of Latent Space, Jerry Liu of LlamaIndex argues that while RAG is fundamentally a hack, it remains the most practical approach for grounding LLMs with external data, and his open-source framework now serves 600,000 monthly downloads. Liu recounts how LlamaIndex originated from a hackathon at Robust Intelligence, evolving from an experimental tree-index to a modular toolkit spanning data loading, retrieval, synthesis, and agent loops. He explains the trade-offs between RAG and fine-tuning, noting that context window limits force algorithmic rather than learned optimizations, but RAG offers transparency and access control that fine-tuning cannot. Liu details the company’s $8.5M Greylock raise, the launch of LlamaHub for community-contributed data loaders, and the open-source SEC Insights app as a production-grade template. Looking ahead, he emphasizes the need for better retrieval benchmarks and predicts that future personalization will move beyond vector stores into model-internal memory architectures.

Generating your AI Media Empire - with Youssef Rizk of Wondercraft.ai

Sep 20, 2023 · 1:28:55

Youssef Rizk, co-founder of Wondercraft.ai, explains how his five-month-old startup uses hyperrealistic AI voices to turn blogs, newsletters, and other content into podcasts, arguing that the application layer—not the underlying API—is the real moat. He details Wondercraft's origin from a failed sports-investing startup, the rapid MVP that generated $3K in one day, and the decision to build script generation and audio production tools rather than train its own models. Rizk also announces a new AI dubbing feature for video, discusses the challenges of scaling to 28 languages, and reveals that the company runs on just four people pushing two major features per week. The conversation covers the daily Hacker News Recap podcast—which reached Spotify's top 30 tech podcasts—and Rizk's view that AI-generated content must be clearly disclosed to avoid backlash.

FlashAttention-2: Making Transformers 800% faster AND exact

Aug 3, 2023 · 1:04:06

Tri Dao, creator of FlashAttention and FlashAttention-2, explains how his I/O-aware algorithm makes attention 2x faster by fusing kernels and using online softmax, achieving near-matrix-multiply efficiency. He argues that transformer alternatives like state space models and RNNs (e.g., RWKV) could surpass transformers for long sequences and high-throughput generation, though attention still dominates. Dao discusses the hardware lottery, where NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem entrenches transformers, and advocates for open-source AI, praising Meta's Llama 2 for shifting enterprise adoption despite its restrictive license. He emphasizes that understanding both algorithms and systems is key to scaling AI, and that academia should pursue risky bets that industry cannot.