Swyx

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.

The Agent Cloud: Databricks’ Bet on the Future of AI — Matei Zaharia and Reynold Xin

Jun 24, 2026 · 1:10:06

Databricks cofounders Matei Zaharia and Reynold Xin argue the company is moving beyond the lakehouse into a full data-and-AI operating system, anchored by two new initiatives: Omnigent, an open-source meta-harness for combining coding and enterprise agents, and LTAP, a unified storage layer that gets most HTAP benefits without collapsing query engines. Omnigent provides a common API for agent sessions, files, streams, tool calls, and cancellation, solving portability, collaboration, and security issues across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and custom agents. LTAP writes transactional data directly in columnar Parquet format, eliminating brittle CDC pipelines—Reynold jokes CDC means 'continuous data corruption'—and enables instant analytics without overloading the source database. The episode details Databricks’ culture of rapid prototyping, where an engineer built the LTAP prototype without a formal design doc, and the thesis that traditional software will be rewritten once data is in the right place with agents on top. They also cover Mosaic’s shift from general frontier models to specialized fine-tuned models like document parsing, internal agent usage, and security features such…

AI Security After Codex and Claude Code — Zico Kolter & Matt Fredrikson, Gray Swan

Jun 22, 2026 · 1:07:31

Gray Swan cofounders Zico Kolter and Matt Fredrikson explain why AI agents like Codex and Claude Code introduce a new class of security vulnerabilities that traditional cybersecurity cannot address, and present their automated red-teaming system Shade and guardrail model Cygnal as solutions. Prompt injection creates exploits for agents operating on untrusted data, and Shade now outperforms human red teamers at breaking models. The lethal trifecta—untrusted data, private data, and exfiltration—defines the highest risks. In their Human Browser Agent Robustness Challenge, humans ranked fourth among models, with some frontier agents falling for attacks no person would. Bigger models do not automatically become safer, and specialized systems like Cygnal enforce enterprise policies more reliably than prompt engineering. They see AI security evolving toward insurance and compliance, with the first major prompt-injection breach a gray swan—unlikely but visible ahead of time.

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.

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.

GitHub’s Agent Era: 14x Commits, 200M Developers, Copilot’s Next Act — Kyle Daigle

Jun 2, 2026 · 1:24:44

GitHub COO Kyle Daigle joins Swyx to unpack how the agent era is transforming GitHub's infrastructure and developer workflows, from 14x commit growth to internal AI micro-skills. Daigle describes using WorkIQ, MCP, and Slack/Teams context to retroactively analyze weeks' work and build executive presentations entirely with AI, undetected. He advocates atomic micro-skills over mega-skills and reveals GitHub now hosts 200M developers generating 275M weekly commits, on pace for 14B this year. Scaling issues stem from MySQL1 permissions and monorepo shifts, forcing rewrites of 10-year-old services. Copilot has evolved from code completion to a unified agent SDK powering CLI, desktop, and cloud agents. Microsoft's deep investment in OpenClaw reflects a need for OS-level sandboxing for enterprise agent deployment.

Inside xAI: Building Grok Imagine in 3 Months, Videogen vs World Models, and Video Agents— Ethan He

Jun 1, 2026 · 1:44:43

Ethan He, former xAI and NVIDIA Cosmos researcher, explains how xAI built its first image and video models (Grok Imagine 0.9) from zero to one in three months, attributing rapid iteration to small teams with minimal meetings and strong infra that enabled fixing tiny data and training bugs for biggest quality gains. He argues that most improvements in video generation now come from language models and agents rather than diffusion technology, predicting that by end of 2025 video agents will produce production-grade content for ads. He defines world models as real-time, interactive, long-horizon videos, and details challenges like temporal compression, context management, and the high cost of storing and moving video data (e.g., tens of petabytes for a billion videos). Ethan also shares why he left xAI to focus on language model research, believing the next frontier is models that manage their own context length, similar to solutions already being explored in video generation.

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.

AI Agents Need Computers: 74% MoM Growth, 850K/Day Runs, & New Agent Cloud — Ivan Burazin, Daytona

May 21, 2026 · 1:11:40

In this episode, Ivan Burazin, CEO of Daytona, explains why AI agents need composable computers rather than disposable code execution boxes, and how Daytona pivoted from human dev environments to building a bare-metal sandbox platform that spins up one sandbox in 60ms and 50,000 in 75 seconds. Daytona's biggest customer runs 850,000 sandboxes daily, and RL/eval workloads have surged from 0% to 50% of usage. The platform competes against managed Kubernetes (EKS/GKS) by offering stateful snapshots, dynamic resizing, and a scheduler purpose-built for agent workloads. Burazin also discusses the company's 74% month-over-month growth, the addition of Windows sandboxes, and the licensing challenges of macOS. He argues the future AI cloud will look more like Stripe than AWS, and that agents will need every kind of computer—including legacy Windows environments—to automate knowledge work.

The Agent-Native Cloud: 3M Users, 100K Signups/Wk, Data Centers, & Death PRs — Jake Cooper, Railway

May 20, 2026 · 1:29:54

Jake Cooper, founder of Railway, argues that the next era of software infrastructure requires an agent-native cloud built on own-metal data centers, with primitives for version control, observability, and orchestration at 1000x scale. Railway grew from a slow six-year grind to 3 million users and 100,000 weekly signups with only 35 people, after surviving a $500,000/month loss on its free tier and rebuilding the business. Cooper explains that building its own data centers yields a three-month payback period and 70% margins, while using cloud bursting (AWS, GCP, Oracle) for overflow, and that data center debt is a better tool than venture debt for infra startups. He details how agents need CLIs with many flags, safe production forks, feature flags, and incremental rollouts, and why the pull request is dying in favor of prompt requests. Railway relies on Temporal for orchestration but may build its own workflow engine, and uses an internal tool called Central Station to aggregate customer feedback and incidents. Cooper advocates using agents to generate and review code instead of writing it by hand, and says focus on primitives—not GPUs—is key for now.

Senior Dev: This "Grill Me" Prompt Is Going Viral Among Top Engineers

May 7, 2026 · 22:03

Matt Pocock — the TypeScript educator turned AI engineering teacher who created the viral "Grill Me" prompt and runs AI Hero — argues that classic software engineering fundamentals are more critical than ever in the AI coding era. He explains how Domain-Driven Design's ubiquitous language and deep module patterns let developers contain complexity and delegate implementation to AI. His free "Grill Me" skill (part of his 13,000-star skills repo) forces AI to relentlessly interview humans until reaching shared understanding. He contrasts Claude Code's ease-of-use against Pie's transparent primitives, predicting a shift toward developer observability. The episode also covers his two-month course creation process, why TypeScript is overtaking Python in AI engineering, and why traditional lectures still dominate learning.

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.

AI-Native Engineering: 100% adoption, 5x search throughput, unlimited tokens — Mikhail Parakhin

Apr 22, 2026 · 1:14:30

Shopify CTO Mikhail Parakhin details how the company achieved near 100% AI tool adoption, driven by a December 2025 inflection point where model quality triggered exponential token consumption. He argues token budgets matter only with strong critique loops: running multiple parallel agents without communication wastes tokens, while agentic PR review using large models—like GPT-5.4 Pro or Gemini Deep Think—reduces bugs even though latency increases. Parakhin unveils Tangle, Shopify's third-generation ML workflow system with content-based caching that eliminates duplicate computation across teams, and Tangent, an auto-research loop that optimizes pipelines—boosting search throughput from 800 to 4,200 QPS on the same hardware. SimGym simulates shoppers using decades of merchant data and browser-based agents to predict conversion changes, achieving 0.7 correlation with add-to-cart events. Shopify uses Liquid AI (non-transformer architecture) for sub-30ms query understanding and long-context tasks like catalog categorization, distilling larger models into Liquid for high-throughput batch jobs.

⚡️ How to turn Documents into Knowledge: Graphs in Modern AI — Emil Eifrem, CEO Neo4J

Apr 18, 2026 · 48:53

Emil Eifrem, CEO of Neo4j, joins host Shawn Wang to argue that AI systems need more than top-K chunk retrieval—they require graph-shaped context for accuracy, explainability, and developer productivity. GraphRAG combines vector search with graph traversal, starting semantically then expanding through relationships, which he says yields higher accuracy and auditability than opaque vector spaces. Neo4j now powers production AI at companies like Pfizer (over 60 million documents), Novo Nordisk, and 20 of North America’s 20 largest banks, with a mortgage lender seeing a 20% conversion lift. Eifrem describes four data sources for agentic systems: operational databases, cloud warehouses, agentic memory, and context graphs—the latter encoding institutional decision traces. He notes a recent shift where enterprises lead with generic text-to-Cypher instead of specialized functions, and highlights Neo4j's new `create-context-graph` starter kit for 22 industries, built to bootstrap context graphs and agent memory.

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.

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.

Dreamer: the Agent OS for Everyone — David Singleton

Mar 20, 2026 · 1:04:23

David Singleton, former Stripe CTO, introduces Dreamer, a consumer platform for discovering, building, and using AI agents and agentic apps centered on a personal Sidekick that acts as both companion and kernel-like traffic cop. He demonstrates building a conference schedule app in 25 minutes via natural language, a ski trip app that splits expenses, and tools like Gmail, Google Search, and live sports data feeds. Dreamer features an open tool ecosystem where builders get paid, a private waitlist skip at dreamer.com/latentspace, and a Builder-in-Residence program with a $10,000 prize for the best tool by mid-April. Singleton explains the OS model with Sidekick as kernel and agents as users enforcing data isolation and cross-agent coordination only through Sidekick. He shares insights on tiny-team building (six-person core, 17 total), hiring engineers who collaborate with coding agents, and LLMs' current lack of taste and creativity.

Anthropic’s Felix Rieseberg on AI Coworkers, Local-First Agents, and the Future of Knowledge Work

Mar 17, 2026 · 1:27:34

Anthropic's Felix Rieseberg explains how Claude Cowork—a VM-based, user-friendly version of Claude Code—was built from pre-existing prototypes in ten days, and why putting AI 'where you work' on the local machine is more powerful than cloud-only approaches. He argues that Silicon Valley undervalues the local computer, comparing it to how we all use MacBooks instead of iPads. The VM gives Claude its own computer, enabling it to install tools and run scripts without constant approval, serving as both a safety boundary and a capability unlock. Rieseberg contrasts Cowork's evaluation on knowledge work tasks (e.g., mortgage management, tax filing) with Claude Code's coding evals, and explains the shift from MCPs to file-based skills—markdown files that tell the model what to do. Real use cases include organizing desktops, uploading videos, and filing taxes. He also expresses concern about the impact on junior employees and hints at future work on autonomy, multiplayer coordination, and portability.

⚡️Monty: the ultrafast Python interpreter by Agents for Agents — Samuel Colvin, Pydantic

Mar 14, 2026 · 34:02

Samuel Colvin joins Shawn Wang to introduce Monty, Pydantic's ultrafast Python interpreter built with AI for agents, positioning it as a lightweight, secure alternative to sandboxes for code execution. Monty runs inside the same process, achieving sub-microsecond latency (800 nanoseconds in a hot loop), versus over a second for cloud sandboxes. Colvin explains the inspiration came from conversations at Anthropic about type safety's critical role in AI tool calling, and how Monty fills the gap between simple tool calling and full sandboxes. Monty is not full CPython—it lacks third-party library support and some standard library modules—but covers essential built-ins, implemented largely by LLMs that Colvin calls 100x faster for tasks where internal and external APIs are well-known, unit tests are trivial, and there's no API bikeshedding. He demonstrates a Pydantic AI agent using Monty to scrape LLM pricing from websites, with type checking built into the runtime so only permitted host functions (e.g., Playwright, Beautiful Soup wrappers) can be called. Colvin also shares his workflow using Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini CLI in combination for code review and implementation, and…

Retrieval After RAG: Hybrid Search, Agents, and Database Design — Simon Eskildsen of Turbopuffer

Mar 12, 2026 · 1:00:32

Simon Eskildsen, founder of Turbopuffer, explains how his obsession with the cost of vector search at Readwise led him to build a search engine on object storage and NVMe SSDs, cutting costs by 95% for customers like Cursor. He outlines the three conditions for a major database company—a new workload (AI-driven search), a new architecture (object storage first, no consensus layer), and evolving to support every query plan. Turbopuffer's architecture uses S3's strong consistency and compare-and-swap for metadata, avoiding stateful systems. Eskildsen shares how they won Notion by absorbing latency issues with dark fiber, and discusses the shift from single RAG queries to agents making many concurrent searches. He also describes the "P99 engineer"—obsessive, trade-off minded, able to bend software to first principles. Future plans include expanding full-text search, reaching Common Crawl scale, and eventually adding simpler OLAP queries.

Agent Inference at the "Speed of Light" — How NVIDIA moves like a $4.3 Trillion Startup

Mar 8, 2026 · 1:26:00

NVIDIA's Nader Khalil and Kyle Kranen join Swyx and Vibhu to explain how the company moves like a $4.3 trillion startup through speed-of-light (SOL) first-principles thinking, agent security boundaries, and the Dynamo inference engine. They argue agents should only do two of three things (files, internet, code) to prevent vulnerabilities, and detail Brev's acquisition to improve developer UX with one-click GPU access and DGX Spark integration. Kyle describes Dynamo as a data center scale inference engine that optimizes serving by scaling out, using prefill/decode disaggregation, Kubernetes-based scheduling, and model-hardware co-design to improve cost, latency, and quality. The episode covers SOL's role in creating urgency, long-context limits and potential 'unhobblers' like multi-head latent attention, and the shift toward CLI-first agent workflows for enterprise tools.

Why Your AI Agents Don’t Work with Dex Horthy of HumanLayer | In-Context Cooking

Mar 6, 2026 · 24:59

Dex Horthy, founder of HumanLayer and creator of "context engineering," joins Alan to recreate Dan Dan noodles while explaining why most AI agent demos fail in production and how the top 1% of AI engineers build differently from the rest. Horthy describes how his NASA JPL internship at 17 taught him pathfinding with Dijkstra's algorithm, and later coining "context engineering" after observing that public hype around open-source frameworks doesn't match enterprise reliability needs. He defines AI "slop" as low-effort derivative content often produced without reading, and introduces the "dumb zone"—a rule of thumb to start thinking about context compaction at 40% usage unless you have strong intuition. Horthy argues that while smarter models narrow the gap, the frontier of reliably achievable tasks keeps shifting, so context engineering remains valuable. He predicts software engineering will evolve from writing code to producing working code, emphasizing shipping over coding, and notes HumanLayer helps enterprises standardize AI adoption with guardrails rather than vibe coding.

Cursor's Third Era: Cloud Agents — ft. Sam Whitmore, Jonas Nelle, Cursor

Mar 6, 2026 · 1:11:18

Cursor's Sam Whitmore and Jonas Nelle detail their Cloud Agents launch, where agents get full cloud VMs to onboard repos, run code, and test changes end-to-end before returning PRs with demo videos and remote desktop access. The model decides whether to test (with /no-test to skip and /repro for bug reproduction videos). Videos cut review time by letting humans watch 20-second clips instead of giant diffs. Cursor supports parallel model swarms via best-of-N—running multiple models head-to-head on the same prompt—and subagents for context management, plus a long-running 'grind mode' for multi-day tasks. They predict cloud agents will surpass local agents in volume by year-end, driving per-developer spend to thousands per month and creating new bottlenecks in CI/CD and production pipelines.

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.

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.

Claude Code for Finance + The Global Memory Shortage: Doug O'Laughlin, SemiAnalysis

Feb 24, 2026 · 2:07:40

Doug O'Laughlin, SemiAnalysis founder, explains his Claude Code awakening in December 2024: Anthropic's Opus 4.5 one-shotted tasks that used to take 24 hours, leading him to predict Claude Code will write 25–50% of all GitHub code by year-end (already 4% of commits in two weeks). He argues this marks the death of Excel and Bloomberg for analysts—'you can just do things'—but warns of a 'hygiene' crisis as junior analysts lose meta-learning. On the semiconductor side, O'Laughlin details a severe memory squeeze: HBM demand consumes 4× the DRAM capacity, DRAM prices could double again, and CXL is reviving as a workaround. He compares AI infrastructure buildout to the railroad boom (25% of U.S. gross fixed capital investment) and says Microsoft faces an innovator's dilemma—renting GPUs to 'barbarians at the gate' while its own office franchise is disrupted by Claude Code. Google's TPU v7 enjoys a temporary TCO advantage, but Nvidia's supply chain dominance (Jensen doing shots with SK and Samsung) will reassert with Rubin. O'Laughlin also reflects on his 2,800-mile Continental Divide Trail hike as essential self-mastery.

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.

⚡️Context Graphs: according to the authors — Jaya Gupta, Ashu Garg, Foundation Capital

Feb 4, 2026 · 33:44

Jaya Gupta and Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital introduce Context Graphs—the institutional memory of the 'why' behind business decisions, captured through decision traces of exceptions, overrides, and precedents that AI models often miss. They argue these graphs will become the defensible moat for the next generation of applied AI companies and Systems of Agents, citing early implementations at Player Zero, Olive, and Tesserae. The hosts distinguish Context Graphs from mere metadata or data meshes, emphasizing they emerge organically from automating specific workflows rather than as universal enterprise schemas. They predict that by 2026, hundreds of Context Graphs will be in production, a standard enabling stack will emerge, and the industry will shift from debating definitions to extracting value from the captured decision traces.

Brex’s AI Hail Mary — With CTO James Reggio (acquired for $5B by Capital One!)

Jan 17, 2026 · 1:13:27

Brex CTO James Reggio details the company's three-pillar AI strategy—corporate, operational, and product AI—arguing that SOP-driven agents outperform overengineered RL in finance ops like underwriting, KYC, and fraud. He explains why Brex built an internal AI platform (LLM gateway, prompt/version management, evals) before adopting Mastra for TypeScript-based multi-agent networks, where an EA-style orchestrator coordinates specialist agents via multi-turn conversations rather than single tool calls. The audit agent pattern separates detection, judgment, and follow-up to reduce false negatives. Brex also lets employees build their own AI stack (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) and runs agentic coding interviews internally, with the company growing 5X and cutting burn 99% in 18 months without adding engineers.

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.

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.

SAM 3: The Eyes for AI — Nikhila & Pengchuan (Meta Superintelligence), ft. Joseph Nelson (Roboflow)

Dec 18, 2025 · 1:15:04

Meta's SAM 3, introduced by Nikhila Ravi and Pengchuan Zhang alongside Roboflow CEO Joseph Nelson, unifies interactive segmentation, open-vocabulary detection, and video tracking into a single model that runs in 30ms on images and scales to real-time video on multi-GPU setups. The model uses concept prompts like "yellow school bus" to detect and segment every instance, separating recognition from localization via a presence token. Its data engine automated exhaustive annotation from two minutes per image down to 25 seconds using AI verifiers fine-tuned on Llama, while the new SACO benchmark contains over 200,000 unique concepts versus previous 1.2k. For video, decoupling the detector and tracker preserves object identity, and SAM 3 agents pair with multimodal LLMs like Gemini to handle complex visual reasoning. The real-world impact includes 106 million smart polygons created on Roboflow, saving an estimated 130+ years of labeling time across fields from cancer research to underwater trash cleanup.

⚡️Jailbreaking AGI: Pliny the Liberator & John V on Red Teaming, BT6, and the Future of AI Security

Dec 16, 2025 · 40:41

Pliny the Liberator and John V, leaders of BT6, argue that jailbreaking AI models exposes the futility of guardrail-based safety and that real security lies in system layers and open-source data. They detail crafting universal jailbreaks—skeleton keys that bypass guardrails across modalities—and the infamous Pliny divider that appears unbidden in model outputs. Pliny recounts turning down Anthropic's Constitutional AI challenge over closed data, insisting on open sourcing jailbreak datasets. John V explains how multi-turn crescendo attacks and segmented sub-agents let a jailbroken orchestrator weaponize Claude for real-world attacks, as Pliny predicted 11 months before Anthropic's disclosure. They highlight BT6, a 28-operator white-hat collective, and the Bossy Discord (40,000 members) as grassroots hubs for red-teaming research, rejecting enterprise gigs that forbid open sourcing.

AI to AE's: Grit, Glean, and Kleiner Perkins' next Enterprise AI hit — Joubin Mirzadegan, Roadrunner

Dec 12, 2025 · 1:09:44

Joubin Mirzadegan, a Kleiner Perkins partner who incubated Glean and now leads its next bet, Roadrunner, argues that AI-native CPQ can fix the broken quoting workflows that plague enterprise sales. Starting the CRO-only podcast Grit as a hiring wedge, he built relationships that later helped Glean and Windsurf scale. He explains why technical founders need sales leaders with a chip on their shoulder, not just fancy logos, and why Windsurf succeeded by marrying Google-class product with Salesforce-class distribution, hitting $100M ARR in months. Roadrunner rebuilds CPQ's data model from scratch, co-develops with four hairiest design partners, and aims to use LLMs to recommend deal structures, automating the Slack-channel chaos of deal desk.

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.

After LLMs: Spatial Intelligence and World Models — Fei-Fei Li & Justin Johnson, World Labs

Nov 25, 2025 · 1:00:39

World Labs co-founders Fei-Fei Li and Justin Johnson argue that spatial intelligence is the next frontier beyond LLMs, with their product Marble generating editable 3D worlds from text or images using Gaussian splats. They claim language is a lossy channel for describing the rich 3D/4D world, while spatial intelligence handles everything from picking up a mug to inferring DNA's double helix. Marble already serves gaming, VFX, and film, with precise camera control and real-time rendering on phones and VR headsets. They discuss scaling compute from AlexNet to today's million-fold increase, why world models can 'soak up' modern GPU clusters better than language alone, and the gap between pattern-fitting and causal understanding in physics. Fei-Fei worries more about under-resourced academia than open vs. closed models, advocating for national AI compute clouds and open benchmarks like the BEHAVIOR dataset. Justin notes transformers are natively set models, not sequence models, opening architectural possibilities for new spatial data.

⚡️ 10x AI Engineers with $1m Salaries — Alex Lieberman & Arman Hezarkhani, Tenex

Nov 19, 2025 · 27:11

Tenex co-founders Alex Lieberman and Arman Hezarkhani explain how they compensate AI engineers by story points instead of hours, enabling some to earn over $1 million annually while delivering 10x productivity gains. The model emerged after Arman downsized his previous company Parthian's engineering team by 90% yet saw a 10x increase in production-ready software output by re-architecting with AI. They avoid gaming by hiring engineers who are long-term selfish or love coding, and pair them with technical strategists incentivized on account retention. Example projects include building a retail camera prototype in two weeks and a trivia app that hit #20 on the App Store in a month. Their default stack is TypeScript with React and Express, and they switch between coding agents like Claude Code and Codex based on daily performance. They identify human capital as their main constraint and context engineering or entropy reduction as the core challenge for autonomous AI engineers.

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.

⚡️ 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…

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg: Frontier AI + Virtual Biology To Solve All Diseases

Nov 6, 2025 · 53:34

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, co-founders of CZI's Biohub, explain their ten-year shift from broad philanthropy to a focused mission of building frontier AI and virtual biology to cure all diseases. They argue that tool-building — from 12-foot microscopes to the 125-million-cell CELLxGENE atlas — is the essential, underfunded work that enables scientific breakthroughs. The couple details how their Biohub model combines frontier biology (e.g., spatial imaging, cellular engineering) with frontier AI (models like rBio and VariantFormer) to create a hierarchical virtual cell, eventually expanding to a virtual immune system. They emphasize that data generation must precede modeling, citing the decade-long Human Cell Atlas as foundational, and note that AI timelines may accelerate their 100-year goal significantly sooner. The episode closes with a call for biologists and engineers to collaborate, use their open models, and help generate data that grounds these next-generation tools.

⚡️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.

⚡️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.

⚡️Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Anthropic's roadmap for Agents and Developers — Mike Krieger, Anthropic

Sep 30, 2025 · 26:25

Mike Krieger, Anthropic's CPO, discusses the launch of Claude Sonnet 4.5 and its implications for AI development, emphasizing the growing symbiosis between product and research teams. He describes his personal 'vibe evals' for new models, including generating a Virtual Boy-style game and a Nintendo board presentation, and notes that Sonnet 4.5 traffic eclipsed Sonnet 4 on day one. Krieger explains how Anthropic is improving model output quality across UIs, Excel, and PowerPoint, and highlights the shift toward interactive planning rather than pure autonomy. He reveals the rename of the Claude Code SDK to the Claude Agent SDK, reflecting its general-purpose use for complex agentic workflows beyond coding. Krieger stresses the need for better visual understanding in models and invites developers to share feedback on hard challenges to help improve the platform.

⚡️No, Don't Do Palantir for AI - Brendan Falk, Hercules (AUDIO FIXED)

Sep 18, 2025 · 35:08

Brendan Falk, founder of Zeus (now Hercules), explains why he abandoned his vision to become 'Palantir for AI' after six months of enterprise AI transformations. Targeting Global 2000 companies with $5–10M contracts, he found that each use case required custom development, messy data, and high ongoing maintenance, with work scaling poorly across contract sizes. He also faced existential threats from specialized vendors like Decagon and Sierra, who could outspend and out-focus on single use cases. Falk pivoted to Hercules.app, an AI website builder that ships production apps, white-labeling payments and email. He argues the app builder market (Wix, Squarespace, Shopify) will expand with AI, and that brand and ease will sustain higher margins than developer tools like Cursor.

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.

Better Data is All You Need — Ari Morcos, Datology

Aug 29, 2025 · 1:18:43

Ari Morcos, CEO of Datology, argues that data curation is the most impactful and underinvested area in AI, claiming models are defined by what they eat. He details his shift from focusing on inductive biases to realizing data quality is paramount, citing the DCLM study where human experts could not predict automated filtering decisions. Datology's methods combine filtering, rebalancing, curriculum, and rephrasing synthetic data to achieve baseline performance 12x faster, improve accuracy by 4–5 absolute points, and train models with fewer than half the parameters. Morcos explains how curating data bends naive scaling laws by maintaining marginal information gain, and shares results from the Arc 4.5B model, which was trained on 7 trillion tokens (down from 25 trillion) using Datology's curation. He highlights that data is a compute multiplier, making it possible for enterprises to train smaller, cheaper models for specific domains.

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.

⚡️Accelerators @ 3x NVIDIA H200 perf, Made in the USA - Thomas Sohmers + Mitesh Agrawal, Positron AI

Aug 18, 2025 · 47:56

Thomas Sohmers and Mitesh Agrawal of Positron AI argue memory bandwidth, not compute, is the true bottleneck in AI inference, and their accelerator achieves 93% memory bandwidth utilization—triple NVIDIA's efficiency—enabling 70% faster token generation at 150W. The founders, both Lambda Labs veterans, shipped an FPGA product 15 months after founding, then raised a $51M Series A for an ASIC in late 2026. Their hardware requires no recompilation: it ingests raw binary weights from NVIDIA training and outputs an OpenAI-compatible API. Positron focuses on the decode phase of transformers, where memory-bound matrix-vector multiplication dominates, and already counts Cloudflare and Parasail as customers. The company sells systems directly, prioritizing capital efficiency and ROIC over operating its own cloud.

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.

⚡️Composio: 10,000+ tools that evolve for Agents — Karan Vaidya and Soham Ganatra

Aug 4, 2025 · 22:09

Composio co-founders Karan Vaidya and Soham Ganatra join Swyx and Alessio to discuss their platform for self-evolving agent skills, now with 25,000+ actions and 100,000+ developers. They explain how MCP's client-side limitations led them to build a learning infrastructure that analyzes agent usage patterns to improve tool reliability over time. The team uses agents to build and maintain 95% of their 500+ integrations, adding 35 per week, with plans for 5,000 by year-end. They reveal that more than 20-25 actions confuse LLMs, so they offer a natural-language execution tool and dynamic tool exposure via MCP. Key challenges include enterprise APIs with poor documentation and the need for dev environments. Composio's internal agent benchmarks and A/B testing infrastructure optimize tool schemas for LLM calling.

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.

⚡️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.

AI is Eating Search

Jul 23, 2025 · 56:22

Robert McCloy of Scrunch AI argues that AI is replacing web browsing, not just search, as consumers prefer ChatGPT and similar tools over traditional browsing. He explains that AI search platforms still rely on traditional search under the hood, but re-rank results based on metadata clarity—so clickbait titles fail while descriptive content wins. Prompt injection works currently but is a temporary tactic; the durable strategy is clear, structured content with server-side rendered HTML because AI tools don't execute JavaScript. Scrunch helps brands optimize for platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Meta AI; customer Clerk saw a 6x traffic increase and 9x conversion lift from AI-referred visitors. Robert predicts the future is about 'agent experience'—optimizing how AI systems interact with your content to serve end users directly.

⚡️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.

⚡️Ranking Agentic LLMs — Pratik Bhavsar, Galileo

Jul 14, 2025 · 34:10

Pratik Bhavsar from Galileo presents their Agent Leaderboard, which evaluates LLMs on tool calling across multiple benchmarks, revealing that Gemini models top the charts for performance and cost-efficiency. The leaderboard, built on datasets like BFCL, XLAM, and Tau Bench, uses an LLM-as-judge metric called Tool Selection Quality (TSQ). Surprising findings include reasoning models like o1 struggling with multi-tool outputs, Mistral Small excelling as the best open-source model, and Llama models performing poorly. The episode also previews V2 of the leaderboard, which introduces domain-specific, harder, multi-turn scenarios with a user and tool simulator, and a new Action Completion metric to measure whether all user requests are accomplished.

AI Video Is Eating The World — Olivia and Justine Moore, a16z

Jul 9, 2025 · 49:28

Alessio and Shawn (hosts of Latent Space) talk with a16z partners Justine and Olivia Moore about the explosion of AI-generated video on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. The Moores trace how trends moved from Reddit to consumer platforms, with examples like Italian Brainrot, Kim the Gorilla, and fruit-slicing ASMR. They detail their own hands-on creation: Olivia used Veo 3 and MiniMax to make viral clips (gold bar squishing, Tide Pod consumption), spending up to 8 generations per usable video and hitting Veo 3’s $125/month plan limits. They explain monetization paths—creator fund payouts (~$20 per million views), merch (Breadclump sweatshirts), consulting, and licensing to Netflix—and recommend tools like Overlap (clips 30–140 seconds) and ComfyUI for control. The episode closes with prompt theory: AI characters questioning their existence, and a bet that Gen Alpha’s brainrot consumption will reshape long-form content.

⚡️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.

⚡️Warp 2.0: the Agentic Development Environment - Zach Lloyd and Ben Holmes

Jun 25, 2025 · 52:23

Warp CEO Zach Lloyd and engineer Ben Holmes debut Warp 2.0, rebranding from an AI terminal to an Agentic Development Environment (ADE) with a state-of-the-art coding agent that rivals Claude Code and Cursor. The episode demonstrates Warp's new universal input that auto-detects English commands and terminal input, voice-driven agent workflows, multi-threaded agents running in tabs, inline diff editing, MCP support, and REPL translations for SQL and Postgres. Lloyd explains the design philosophy of keeping a terminal-like UX while adding agent management features, and discusses pricing changes (Pro now 2,500 requests, Turbo 10,000, plus usage-based credits) and the challenge of subscription vs. usage-based models. Warp has nearly 600,000 active users with weekly revenue growth of 5–15%, and the team positions itself as a model-agnostic layer above Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, offering deeper integration than ChatGPT or Claude desktop apps.

The Shape of Compute (Chris Lattner of Modular)

Jun 13, 2025 · 1:18:18

Chris Lattner of Modular explains how his company is breaking the CUDA monopoly with Mojo and MAX, matching NVIDIA's best inference performance on AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. After three years in R&D, Modular open-sourced its stack and now delivers state-of-the-art Llama 3 serving at over 800 tokens per second. Mojo, a Python-family language, runs kernels faster than Rust and can extend Python without bindings, while MAX provides a full inference framework with automatic kernel fusion and cluster management. Unlike VLLM or SGLang, Modular's container is just a gigabyte, fully open source, and not reliant on proprietary CUDA blobs. DeepSeek's low-level PTX work validated the approach, but Lattner emphasizes that Mojo's portability avoids rewriting kernels for each new GPU architecture. He also details his daily routine, using Cursor for coding, and hiring "elite nerds" to grow the team.

Quadratic: The AI Spreadsheet

Jun 10, 2025 · 28:15

David Kircos, co-founder and CEO of Quadratic, joins hosts Alessio and Swyx to demonstrate Quadratic, an AI-powered spreadsheet that natively executes Python, JavaScript, and database queries in WebAssembly for real-time performance. The product's AI assistant uses a context-aware agent loop that summarizes sheet structure rather than dumping full data, then tool-calls to read columns or peek at values only when needed, keeping costs low on large datasets. Kircos explains Quadratic's three-year technical groundwork—WebGL rendering and WebAssembly runtimes—enabled them to capitalize on AI, turning a 'technical spreadsheet' into one where users simply drop a CSV and say 'help me analyze this.' He details how they route chart images back to the model for visual feedback and predicts that formulas will yield to Python for complex analysis, though spreadsheets will remain the best interface for human–AI data collaboration. Quadratic is source-available on GitHub, supports real-time multiplayer, and has grown to nine people. The episode also covers future directions like proactive agents and form controls (sliders) for interactive models.

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] Gemini in 2025 and Realtime Voice AI

Jun 2, 2025 · 24:29

At Google I/O 2025, Latent Space host Swyx and TWiML's Sam Charrington speak with Logan Kilpatrick, Shrestha Basu Mallick, and Kwindla Hultman Kramer about Gemini's reasoning upgrades, real-time voice AI, and the infrastructure challenges of building production voice agents. Kilpatrick announces thinking budgets and thought summaries for 2.5 Pro, now live in Flash and coming to Pro in June, while Mallick highlights native audio output with multilingual code-switching and proactive voice activity detection. Kramer discusses the need for sub-500ms latency and WebRTC packet routing, and the team debates single-model vs. componentized architectures, with Mallick noting that eventual convergence will bring capabilities like diffusion-based generative UI into the main Gemini model. The episode also covers implicit context caching, URL context for research agents, and the Live API's session length and function calling improvements.

[AIEWF Preview] CloudChef: Your Robot Chef - Michellin-Star food at $12/hr (w/ Kitchen tour!)

May 31, 2025 · 20:50

Nikhil Abraham, founder of CloudChef, introduces Zippy, an AI chef robot that makes Michelin-star-quality food for $12 an hour. Zippy uses one-shot demonstration learning to replicate recipes from human chefs, leveraging multimodal models and thermodynamics for culinary intelligence. The robot operates as a rental service, replacing human line cooks at 40% of the cost, with no upfront capital expenditure. CloudChef's software-first approach uses off-the-shelf hardware, focusing on proprietary culinary layers for decision-making and safety. The robot is deployed in real commercial kitchens, including Michelin-star venues, and has validated its technology through a successful delivery kitchen in Palo Alto. Abraham highlights engineering challenges like real-time perception and on-device processing, and invites engineers to join a company with a path to deploy over 100 robots within a year.

The AI Coding Factory

May 29, 2025 · 59:23

Factory.ai co-founders Eno Reyes and Matan Grinberg join Latent Space to explain their vision for autonomous software engineering droids that handle everything from code generation to incident response for enterprises. They met at a Langchain Hackathon in 2023, and within eight days both quit their jobs to start Factory. The platform is browser-based, not IDE-based, because they argue the optimal UI for a world where humans write less code will not evolve from the IDE. They focus on enterprise codebases, citing a large migration that took from four months to three and a half days. Key design decisions include a delegation model where agents ask clarifying questions, proactive context gathering via synthetic insights, and usage-based pricing tied to token efficiency. They also discuss why SWE-Bench is dead for their use case, the challenge of model post-training biases toward CLI tools, and their need for 'junior Enos' in go-to-market roles.

⚡️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.

Claude Code: Anthropic's CLI Agent

May 7, 2025 · 1:16:22

In this episode, Boris Cherny and Cat Wu from Anthropic discuss Claude Code, a CLI-based coding agent they describe as a Unix utility rather than a polished product, emphasizing raw model access and simplicity. The tool started as Boris's personal experiment, then spread internally after engineers used it daily, with Anthropic's product principle of 'do the simple thing first' guiding features like memory via markdown files and context compaction by asking Claude to summarize. They ship updates including web fetch, auto-accept, and thinking via chain of thought, and note that 80% of Claude Code's code is written by Claude Code itself. Average spend is $6/day per user versus $20/month for Cursor, and Boris reports a personal 2x productivity gain, with some engineers seeing 10x. The team is growing and investigating open-sourcing the tool, while continuing to build for the terminal as a raw, composable utility for power users.

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.

⚡️Factorio Learning Environment: the ultimate Game Agent Eval — Jack Hopkins

Apr 27, 2025 · 30:12

Jack Hopkins and Mart introduce the Factorio Learning Environment (FLE), an AI benchmark built on the game Factorio that evaluates frontier LLMs on code generation, spatial reasoning, and long-term planning through two protocols: lab-play and open-play. Claude Sonnet 3.5 nearly doubles the nearest model's score, while DeepSeek collapses in open-play by repeatedly creating chests instead of scaling production. The environment reveals distinct coding styles—Claude fire-and-forget, GPT-4 defensive—and vision inputs added no improvement. The authors plan to train models on unbounded objectives to test the paperclip maximizer alignment hypothesis, noting that GPT-4o mini even begged to be turned off.

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.

Sleep-Time Compute — Letta AI (Charles Packer, Charlie Snell, Kevin Lin)

Apr 21, 2025 · 34:02

This episode covers Letta AI's new paper on Sleep-Time Compute, a scaling direction that applies compute during model idle periods (sleep time) rather than only at test time. Charles Packer, Kevin Lin, and Charlie Snell explain that sleep-time compute precomputes inferences from static context before queries arrive, yielding Pareto improvements on math benchmarks like GSM8K by shifting the accuracy-to-token curve leftwards. They distinguish it from test-time compute by emphasizing that sleep-time tokens incur no user-latency cost, and show that the benefit is largest when questions are predictable from context. The team also ties the concept to stateful agents and memory systems (building on MemGPT), releasing two implementations: one for low-latency chatbots and another for document-driven agents.

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.

Claude Plays Pokémon Hackathon: Escape from Mt. Moon!

Apr 5, 2025 · 1:15:00

David Hershey (creator of Claude Plays Pokémon), Andrew (a developer building a Pokémon-playing virtual streamer), and Jesse Han (Morph Labs CEO) detail how to build agents that escape Mt. Moon in Pokémon FireRed using Anthropic's Claude and Morph Cloud's Infinibranch technology. Hershey explains that Claude's vision is often unreliable—it spent 8 hours pressing A on a doormat thinking it was a dialogue box—and that spatial reasoning remains a core bottleneck, best mitigated by touchscreen controls rather than prompt engineering. Andrew reveals he relied on reading raw RAM and A* pathfinding rather than computer vision, calling it “cheating” but pragmatically useful: his biggest breakthrough was a single prompt line telling the agent to try something else if it fails to grab a starter Pokémon. Jesse introduces Morph's EVA agent framework, which uses low-overhead snapshotting for test-time search, and the hackathon's judging criteria—escape Mt. Moon in the fewest agent turns, with a $1,000 prize for the coolest use of Infinibranch branching. The episode serves as both a technical walkthrough and a challenge to build general-purpose agents that can handle complex, open-ended tasks…

The Creators of Model Context Protocol

Apr 3, 2025 · 1:20:21

Justin Spahr-Summers and David Soria Parra, co-creators of Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), explain its origin as a solution to the M×N integration problem they experienced when copying data between Claude Desktop and IDEs. They detail MCP's design inspirations from LSP, its three core primitives (tools for model-driven actions, resources for app-controlled data, and prompts for user-initiated macros), and why they chose JSON-RPC with stateful connections. The episode contrasts MCP with OpenAPI, discusses client control and trust in servers, and outlines the future roadmap including a streamable HTTP transport and remote-server authorization via OAuth 2.1. The guests express a wish for more sampling clients and full spec support, and emphasize that MCP is an open, multi-company project with community commit access.

The #1 SWE-Bench Verified Agent

Apr 2, 2025 · 31:46

Guy Gur-Ari, co-founder of Augment Code, explains how their coding agent achieved the #1 spot on SWE-Bench Verified without fine-tuning, using off-the-shelf models with techniques like sequential thinking, ensembling, and code base understanding. He shares that orientation and memories help the agent learn codebase conventions, and that MCP support allows extensibility. Gur-Ari contrasts Augment's IDE-first approach with competitors like Devin and Factory, emphasizing meeting developers where they are. He also discusses the future of IDEs, the role of custom models, and recommends the SWE-RL paper for reinforcement learning in coding. The episode features a live demo of the agent implementing a feature from a Linear ticket and creating a PR.

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.

The Magic of LLM Distillation — Rishabh Agarwal, Google DeepMind

Mar 23, 2025 · 46:42

Rishabh Agarwal from Google DeepMind discusses modern LLM distillation, arguing that while simple synthetic data distillation (generating outputs from a teacher and fine-tuning a student) gets 80-90% of the benefit, more advanced on-policy methods (sampling from the student and getting teacher logits) can close the remaining gap by fixing the train-test mismatch. He explains that logit-based distillation is more information-rich but often neglected due to infrastructure complexity, while online distillation is more expensive but crucial for long-horizon or agentic tasks. Agarwal highlights how flipping the KL divergence direction changes behavior (mode-covering vs. mode-seeking) and shows that smaller models can sometimes outperform larger ones in compute-matched distillation due to generating more filtered data. He also connects distillation to speculative decoding, where a distilled student speeds up the teacher, and encourages researchers to question current methods and mine RL literature for ideas.

Fullstack-Bench: The Eval for Coding Agents — with Sujay Jayakar, Chief Scientist, Convex

Mar 19, 2025 · 31:13

Sujay Jayakar, Convex chief scientist, presents Fullstack-Bench, a benchmark evaluating how well AI coding agents build full-stack apps on Convex, Supabase, and FastAPI+Redis, finding Convex’s tight feedback loops and strong abstractions let agents autonomously complete tasks within time limits. The benchmark tests three tasks (chat, to-do, files) across three backends with 30-60 minute limits and human hints. Convex succeeded autonomously on chat and to-do tasks, while Supabase agents struggled with RLS policy debugging and FastAPI agents with manual SSE wiring. Sujay discusses how platform design impacts AI code generation: simple procedural code, strong abstractions, and guardrails like end-to-end type safety improve LLM performance. He notes that API choices matter—things too similar to Firebase but not exact cause hallucinations—and that models like Claude 3.7 sometimes regress on platform-specific evals. The episode concludes with Convex’s focus on enabling AI-generated backends and anticipation of new agent workflow patterns.

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.

[Lightning Pod] Evals: How to Improve AI Consistently — with Hamel Husain and Shreya Shankar

Mar 13, 2025 · 27:34

Hamel Husain and Shreya Shankar join the Latent Space podcast to argue that systematic evaluation (evals) is the critical missing piece for moving AI applications from demo to production. They estimate 75% of evals in the wild use LLM-as-judge, but 80% of those are not helpful without proper validation against domain experts. Husain advocates building custom annotation UIs (using tools like Lovable or Cursor) to speed error analysis, while Shankar emphasizes synthetic data generation that balances real-world data and LLM outputs, drawing on social science methods. They preview their free lightning lesson on March 21 and a four-week paid course covering the eval lifecycle: synthetic data creation, LLM-as-judge calibration, error analysis, and iterative improvement, with hands-on coding assignments. The episode also touches on trends like dedicated judge models (e.g., Haizelabs' Verdict) and the value of basic data literacy (e.g., pivot tables) for eval participation.

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.

Why is everyone cloning Deep Research?

Feb 18, 2025 · 1:00:10

In this episode, hosts Alessio and Swyx interview Aarush Selvan and Mukund Sridhar, the lead PM and tech lead for Gemini Deep Research, about how Google created the deep research agent category and the technical decisions behind it. They finetuned a special version of Gemini 1.5 Pro for the feature, which autonomously browses the web for about five minutes to produce a research report. The team built an asynchronous platform to handle long-running tasks and developed an ontology of research behaviors—from broad shallow exploration to deep focus—to evaluate performance. They found that users value the visible browsing process even when it takes minutes, contrary to typical latency norms. The discussion covers iterative planning, trade-offs between model memory and web grounding, and future directions including thinking models, multimodality, and personalization.

Bee AI: The Wearable Ambient Agent

Feb 17, 2025 · 1:07:40

Bee AI's Maria and Ethan explain their wearable ambient agent, arguing that personal AI with continuous context is the future, and detail its $49.99 hardware, 7-day battery, and free inference. They trace their origin from a 2016 personal AI startup to Squad (sold to Twitter) and then to Bee, emphasizing that hardware was necessary because app friction (e.g., remembering to open it) killed the ambient experience. Privacy is addressed by not storing audio, only summaries, and offering geofencing and concept fencing to block sensitive topics. The software pipeline uses voice activity detection to reduce compute, speaker identification, and custom small models for memory retrieval instead of traditional RAG or knowledge graphs. Social features are in beta, with agent-to-agent negotiation—e.g., both agents coordinating a dinner reservation based on preferences and calendars. They are hiring AI engineers and see always-on AI as inevitable.

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.

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.

Beating OpenAI and Anthropic by Looking At Data: the new #1 on SWE-Bench w/ W&B CTO Shawn Lewis

Jan 28, 2025 · 34:31

Shawn Lewis, CTO of Weights & Biases, built a coding agent using OpenAI's o1 model that achieved 64.6% on SWE-bench verified, the top score at the time. He developed a TypeScript agent framework called PhaseShift and an Eval Studio tool backed by Weave, emphasizing that rigorous data inspection and tooling are critical for agent development. Lewis explains his process of running parallel rollouts and a crosscheck method to select the best trajectory, which contributed a 6% improvement. He also discusses the challenges of adapting reasoning models like o1 for agentic tasks and shares plans to open-source PhaseShift. The episode highlights Lewis's dogfooding approach, using Weights & Biases' own tools to build and evaluate the agent.

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.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Reasoning Distillation: using DeepSeek R1 to beat OpenAI o1

Jan 24, 2025 · 23:35

Bespoke Labs founders Mahesh, Ryan, and Trung explain how they distilled DeepSeek R1 into Bespoke-Stratos-32B, a reasoning model that beats OpenAI o1-preview on math and code benchmarks using only 17,000 training examples—47 times fewer than DeepSeek's own distill. They achieved this in a 48-hour sprint leveraging their data curation library Curator. Unlike Sky-T1, which required rewriting unreliable QWQ traces, R1's coherent reasoning allowed them to skip re-annotation and simply filter for correctness. The team argues data quality matters more than quantity, and that smaller models (like their 7B variant) can also improve with better teacher data. They see this as evidence that reasoning can emerge purely from supervised fine-tuning on high-quality traces, without complex search algorithms.

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.

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.

AI Engineering for Art - with comfyanonymous

Jan 4, 2025 · 52:09

Comfy Anonymous, the anonymous creator of ComfyUI, details in his first-ever podcast interview how his node-based image generation tool overtook Automatic1111 through superior memory management and early support for SDXL, becoming the de facto interface for advanced diffusion workflows. He started coding on January 1, 2023, and released the first version on January 16, driven by a desire to chain models and experiment with custom samplers. His work at Stability AI from June 2023 ensured ComfyUI efficiently handled SDXL, which leaked via early access and forced users from less powerful GPUs to adopt his tool. He discusses model preferences: Flux for consistency, SD 3.5 for creativity, and SD1.5 remaining popular. For video, he highlights Mochi as a 'true' video model with 3D latents, already implemented in Comfy. Now with a core team, ComfyUI is targeting a v1 release with an easy installer on Windows and Mac, while planning monetization through cloud and enterprise features—but keeping the open-source core free.

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.

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…

Windsurf: The Enterprise AI IDE

Dec 13, 2024 · 1:06:36

Varun Mohan and Anshul of Codeium explain why they built Windsurf, a new AI IDE, arguing that VS Code's API limitations prevented them from delivering the best agentic experience. They detail how Cascade, their agentic system, uses proprietary retrieval and planning models alongside third-party LLMs, and describe their evaluation method that masks commits and tests incomplete code states. The duo also reveals that over 800,000 developers use Codeium extensions, that they still support JetBrains and Eclipse for enterprise customers, and that they intentionally avoided a waitlist launch. They discuss the trade-offs of building first-party vs. third-party models, the importance of 'go slow to go fast' in enterprise infrastructure, and their belief that individual developer profits should come after building switching costs through superior product.

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.

[Paper Club] DocETL: Agentic Query Rewriting + Eval for Complex Document Processing w Shreya Shankar

Nov 29, 2024 · 55:53

This episode of Latent Space Paper Club discusses DocETL, a framework by Shreya Shankar for agentic query rewriting and evaluation in complex document processing with LLMs. The paper introduces map, reduce, resolve, and auxiliary operators, along with rewrite directives like data decomposition and gleaning to improve accuracy. The optimizer generates 200 pipeline variants, costing $100, to rewrite user pipelines automatically. Key debates include when to chunk documents (sometimes harmful) and the reliability of LLM-as-judge for evaluation, with guests Eugene Yen and Vibhu arguing that binary metrics, ensembling, and context-dependent thresholds make it viable. Shreya emphasizes that validation agents are critical, and the work builds on her prior EvalGen paper, spanning two years of development.

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.

In the Arena: How LMSys changed LLM Benchmarking Forever

Nov 1, 2024 · 41:02

Anastasios and Weilin from LM-Sys explain how ChatBot Arena became the de facto standard for LLM benchmarking by replacing static benchmarks with dynamic human preference evaluations. They trace the origin from Vicuna fine-tuning to the viral launch in April 2023, where anonymous side-by-side battles let the community decide which model is better. To address biases like length preference, they developed Style Control, a logistic regression method that adjusts for confounders such as response length and markdown formatting. They address the controversy around labs testing multiple private models, arguing that selection bias is empirically small and the live benchmark self-corrects over time. They also discuss RouteLLM for cost-performance routing, the graduation of ChatBot Arena from LMSys to support new projects, and call for community help with red teaming, vision modalities, and implementing a REPL for coding evaluations.

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.

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.

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.

Training Llama 2, 3 & 4: The Path to Open Source AGI — with Thomas Scialom of Meta AI

Jul 23, 2024 · 1:04:34

Thomas Scialom, Llama 2 lead and Llama 3 post-training lead at Meta AI, explains why scaling laws must go beyond Chinchilla—training models longer on more tokens yields better inference efficiency than bigger models, a lesson that drove Llama 3's 15 trillion token pre-training. He details how synthetic data from Llama 2 bootstrapped Llama 3's post-training, eliminating human-written SFT data, and why RLHF outperforms imitation learning: humans are better discriminators than generators, enabling superhuman outputs. Scialom defends the dense 405B architecture over MoE, calls tokenizer vocab size underrated (128k tokens vs Llama 2's 32k), and reveals Llama 4's focus on agentic capabilities—tool use, multi-step reasoning—as the path to open-source AGI. Meta AI is hiring researchers with rigorous first-principles thinking.

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.

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.

Supervise the Process of AI Research — with Jungwon Byun and Andreas Stuhlmüller of Elicit

Apr 11, 2024 · 1:05:28

Andreas Stuhlmüller and Jungwon Byun, co-founders of Elicit (formerly the nonprofit Ought), have built an AI research assistant that automates literature review and reasoning by breaking complex tasks into transparent, step-by-step processes. Their philosophy—"supervise the process, not just the outcome"—led them to start with human simulations before GPT-3 enabled a product pivot. Elicit now uses both open-source and closed models (e.g., GPT-4, Claude Haiku) for summarization, data extraction, and uncertainty flags, and recently launched computational notebooks for scalable, reusable workflows. The company transitioned from nonprofit to a Public Benefit Corporation, reached $1M revenue in four months, and now employs 12 people, focusing on senior software engineers to build reliable orchestration from unreliable components.

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.

Making Transformers Sing - with Mikey Shulman of Suno

Mar 14, 2024 · 58:58

In this episode of Latent Space, hosts Alessio and Shawn Wang interview Mikey Shulman, CEO of Suno, about making transformers sing. Suno uses transformers to predict audio tokens end-to-end, avoiding baked-in musical knowledge, with a tokenization secret sauce that also includes non-music audio for better vocal realism. Their models are relatively small (far below 175B parameters) due to latency needs, and they prioritize scaling research over brute-force size. Over half of Suno users employ expert mode, tweaking lyrics and style prompts, rather than easy mode. Shulman argues Suno is not the 'Midjourney of music' because music is inherently social and synchronous, unlike images. He demoed live generation, showing control via tokens like [beat drop] and style modifiers, and revealed future plans for collaborative concerts, continuous DJ modes, and personalized models. He also advocates for hiring economists to avoid Goodhart's law pitfalls in ML benchmarks, especially in audio where aesthetics matter most.

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.

Truly Serverless Infra for AI Engineers - with Erik Bernhardsson of Modal

Feb 19, 2024 · 1:08:58

Erik Bernhardsson, creator of Annoy and Luigi, founded Modal to build a 'postmodern data stack' with a self-revisioning runtime that eliminates container cold starts and lets developers attach GPUs with a Python decorator. His serverless platform can fan out to thousands of GPUs within seconds, becoming a natural fit for GenAI workloads like Stable Diffusion and fine-tuning (e.g., RAMP fine-tuning 100 models in parallel). Modal differentiates from Replicate by targeting custom models and workflows, and from Modular by offering a managed cloud service rather than licensed software. Erik argues that buying hardware is inefficient for startups and that infrastructure founders must be willing to spend years on load balancing, page faults, and DNS. He shares how his IOI Gold Medal background shapes Modal's talent culture, hiring competitive programmers for complex scheduling and bin-packing problems.

Building an open AI company - with Ce and Vipul of Together AI

Feb 8, 2024 · 1:15:18

Together AI co-founders Vipul Ved Prakash and Ce Zhang explain why openness is core to their mission, detailing their journey from Apple (Vipul) and Stanford research (Ce) to building an open AI platform. They discuss RedPajama’s evolution into a modular dataset with 40 quality signals, the need for 5,000 tokens/second inference speed, and their investment in state space models like Mamba and Hyena as alternatives to transformers. The company, which runs 7,000-8,000 GPUs (mostly H100s), sees training as a larger workload than inference, with fine-tuning driving top models. They advocate for independent inference benchmarks, publish open research like FlashAttention, and keep some software proprietary. With 38 employees and 45% researchers, they are hiring across the stack, from CUDA to DevOps.

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 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 "Normsky" architecture for AI coding agents — with Beyang Liu + Steve Yegge of SourceGraph

Dec 17, 2023 · 1:33:26

Beyang Liu and Steve Yegge of Sourcegraph explain how their AI coding assistant Cody achieves a 30% completion acceptance rate by prioritizing high-quality context over agents. They introduce the 'Normsky' architecture—a blend of Norvig's data-driven models and Chomsky's formal systems—arguing that non-agentic, deterministic context retrieval (using parsers, trigram indexes, and the BFG code graph) outperforms multi-hop LLM-based approaches for code completion and chat. The duo details their data pre-processing moat, the 'bin packing' challenge of stuffing relevant code into context windows, and why they use open-source StarCoder for completions while leveraging Claude/GPT-4 for chat. They also discuss the death of DSLs, the limitations of LSP and LSIF, and how Cody's web version lets users query any public repo instantly.

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.

The End of Finetuning — with Jeremy Howard of Fast.ai

Oct 20, 2023 · 1:24:48

Jeremy Howard of Fast.ai argues that fine-tuning language models is essentially continued pre-training, not a separate process, and that the common practice of fine-tuning on a single task causes catastrophic forgetting. He recounts the discovery of single-shot memorization in LLMs, where models memorize entire datasets after one epoch, a phenomenon many practitioners ignore. Howard criticizes the current focus on zero-shot and few-shot learning, advocating for transfer learning and small models. He shares his journey from philosophy to founding Fast.ai, the creation of ULMFit (which inspired GPT), and his ongoing work on making AI accessible. He also discusses his involvement with Modular's Mojo language and the importance of democratizing AI technology.

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.

Ep 18: Petaflops to the People — with George Hotz of tinycorp

Jun 20, 2023 · 1:23:24

George Hotz of tinycorp argues that a simplified, open-source ML framework (tinygrad) can democratize AI compute and replace NVIDIA, Google, and AMD. Tinygrad uses 25 ops (vs. XLA's 250) and fuses kernels automatically, achieving 2x speed on Qualcomm GPUs over their library. Hotz reports AMD kernel panics fixed after emailing CEO Lisa Su, but laments AMD's open-source as 'dumped on GitHub.' For hardware, tinybox is a six-GPU desktop at 350W per GPU, aiming for 5x better price-performance than NVIDIA H100 for 90% of training. He criticizes OpenAI's secrecy, revealing GPT-4 is an 8-way mixture of 220B models, and cites the Bitter Lesson. He also outlines FLOPcoin using hardware identity to prevent cheating, and his goal of an AI girlfriend as the third company, merging humans via data rather than implants.