AI is moving inside the database, and it keeps hitting problems databases already solved.

Stephanie Wang (staff engineer at MongoDB, founding engineer at MotherDuck) joins Mehdi and Jacob Matson to dig into Snowflake's Cortex AISQL and why AI inside SQL is really a query-optimization and cost problem, the compute crunch pushing RAM and inference prices up, RadAgents and Sakana's Fugu model router, open weights vs open development, and the "elephant and goldfish" method for designing before you let AI write the code.

All links and full show notes: motherduck.com/explain-analyze

00:00 Intro and guest intro (Stephanie Wang)

01:35 Cortex AISQL: AI operations native to SQL

10:14 SpaceX rents out idle compute for AI inference

12:11 Compute is the new database engine for AI

13:43 DRAM price hikes and the margin squeeze

18:40 Local AI models and sandboxing agents

22:39 RadAgents: multi-agent reasoning for radiology

27:34 Sakana Fugu and dynamic model routing

30:12 Open weights vs open development

33:43 The elephant and goldfish: design before you code

42:07 MPP: machine-to-machine payments for agents

46:56 Wrap-up