Sabrina Halper Show

Alex Atallah co-founded OpenRouter in 2023 and recently signed an agreement to be acquired by Stripe for a reported ~$7B+. Before that, he co-founded OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace. Alex is a deep thinker and a one-of-a-kind company builder. I was honored to sit down with him again.We also talk about why OpenRouter and Stripe fit together, and their shared belief in an economy where value can come from many different models, businesses, and agents, rather than a handful of giant labs. We get into how Alex finds ideas before they seem obvious, what OpenRouter has taught him about how people actually use AI, why there won’t be one model that wins everything, and how agents will change the way we use software, spend money, and interact with the internet. More than anything, this is a conversation about how Alex thinks, builds companies, and sees the next few years of AI unfolding.Alex Atallah on X: https://x.com/alexatallahSabrina Halper on X: https://x.com/SabrinaHalper XPRESENTING SPONSORThe Sabrina Halper Show is presented by micro1.Micro1 is building the infrastructure for advancing intelligence through expert human data, real-world training environments, and contextual evaluations.Learn more: https://www.micro1.ai/ TIMESTAMPS00:00 Preview01:05 What is OpenRouter?04:17 Why ChatGPT ended his sabbatical07:30 Why Stripe is buying OpenRouter11:26 What happened on Jan 1, 2026?15:22 OpenRouter’s moat18:03 Homepage for all models19:30 Agent purchasing power24:01 Ox Alpha, Stealth models, & brand bias26:50 How AI models get priced & chosen29:29 Chinese open-weight models, evals & security32:39 An internet built for agents34:11 Stablecoins & the economics of AI agents37:25 What humans will still want to own39:21 Why engineers are becoming scientists41:47 What is the next "open" opportunity? 45:55 Our personal relationships with AI48:53 AI advice, accountability & safety51:24 Comparing AI model personalities53:29 Why Alex is optimistic about human creativity56:51 ClosingSubscribe for more conversations with the founders, scientists, and researchers shaping what comes next.#OpenRouter #AI #Stripe

Most of what you hear about AI's impact is a projection. David Holtz has the data.

He’s behind some of the most rigorous studies of AI’s actual impact today. And the results are surprising. His work cuts through the noise around AI to a key question: what is AI actually doing to people, companies, and the economy today?

David is a professor at Columbia, currently on leave to lead AGI economics research at OpenAI. We recorded this before he started there.

If you enjoy this one, subscribe! It genuinely helps the show grow and improve every week.

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Presented by micro1: ⁠micro1.ai

LinkedIn: ⁠micro1

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Sabrina Halper

X: https://x.com/SabrinaHalper

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sabloves/?h...

Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...

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David HoltzX: ⁠https://x.com/daveholtz

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Intro

01:26 Is AI as significant to the economy as we hear?

04:05 ChatGPT as a general purpose technology shift

06:41 Inside OpenAI: The Shift From Chatbots to Agents

08:56 Why AI Could Make Us Work More, Not Less

10:56 Structuring Companies In a New Way

15:02 What Will the Agent Economy Look Like?22:03 What Becomes a Moat When Everyone Has the Same AI?

25:02 Model Improvement Study: 50% of AI’s Gains Come From the Human

33:03 What Should We Still Learn in the Age of AI?

36:58 The Kenya Experiment: Does AI Democratize Expertise?

45:11 Could AI Let Developing Economies Leapfrog the Internet?

49:50 One-Person Companies, Job Loss & the Future of Work

Matan Grinberg left a string theory PhD at Berkeley to start Factory, betting on full autonomous software engineering in 2023.

It started with a cold email to Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire and a three-hour walk that helped convince Matan to leave his PhD and build a company. Three years later, Factory is valued at $1.5B, with recent reports putting its newest valuation north of $3.5B.

We get into: what string theory teaches you about making decisions, the three phases every company goes through with AI adoption, how to measure ROI of AI spend, why he'd take Chinese open models over a closed-model monopoly, the sleeper-agent risk hiding in open weights, what he thinks about recent security incidents from large labs, and why he believes we're already living in a post-AGI world.

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Sabrina Halper Show is presented by Micro1. Micro1 is building the infrastructure for advancing intelligence through expert human data, real-world training environments, and contextual evaluations. Learn more: https://www.micro1.ai/.

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TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00) Intro

(02:00 Young Matan

(5:30) String Theory

(11:10) Leaving academia, the IMDb 250, and getting nerd-sniped by code generation

(16:53) Cold-emailing Shaun Maguire and founding Factory

(18:27) The desert years, and what finally made autonomous engineering work

(20:55) The new bottleneck is deciding what to do

(23:30) The three phases of enterprise AI adoption, and the end of token maxing

(28:18) Chinese open models, and the monopoly to end all monopolies

(30:30) Sleeper agents, poisoned code, and the labs cybersecurity incidents

(34:30) The White House open-weights policy and the distillation problem

(37:30) The coming billion-dollar agent incident

(42:30) "We're already post-AGI" and AI taking on math

(49:30) Building your own software

(52:20) Reflections & best advisors

I sat down with Reed Jobs to discuss one of medicine’s hardest problems: why we’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting cancer, yet still don’t have a cure.

Reed explains why there may never be a cure for cancer and why that’s actually the wrong goal. Instead, the future is making cancer a disease that no one dies from.

He gives an inside look at Yosemite, the venture firm he founded to rethink how to bring breakthrough therapies to patients. We go deep on how AI is reshaping biology, why Yosemite combines grants with venture capital to fund ambitious science, how to de-risk breakthrough research, and the extraordinary biology that makes our bodies work.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Intro

00:36 Early Cancer Mission

03:41 Working at a Cancer Lab as a Teen

05:16 Immunotherapy Breakthrough

07:05 Emerson Collective

09:20 Founding Yosemite

10:17 Making Cancer Nonlethal12:28 Using Grants to De-Risk Biotech Investing

15:33 Academic vs. CEO Role

19:11 Biology Is a Miracle22:52 Next-Decade Tooling

25:22 His Dream of In Vivo CAR-T Cell Therapy

28:51 Cracking Solid Tumors

29:27 Same-Day Cell Editing

33:46 The AI Era of Biology

37:00 Cutting Clinical Trial Costs

41:43 Highest-ROI Philanthropy

45:10 Taylor Francis

47:28 Yosemite’s Long-Term Impact

50:29 San Francisco Today#CancerResearch #Biotech #AI #Medicine #ReedJobs

The secret to staying young may already be inside your cells. We just need to figure out how to unlock it.

NewLimit is one of the world's leading longevity companies, co-founded by Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong, investor Blake Byers, and stem cell biologist Jacob Kimmel. NewLimit has already shown it can take old human liver and immune cells and restore them to a younger, healthier-working state and it's now preparing its first medicine for human trials.The company has raised over $600M - including a $435M round in 2026 that valued it at $3.1B - from investors like Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Thrive Capital, and Khosla Ventures.

We hear the word "longevity" all the time. But what's actually real? And how do we meaningfully extend lifespan for our generation, our kids, and our grandkids?

Jacob Kimmel shares his world-leading expertise as we discuss everything from evolutionary tradeoffs to epigenetic reprogramming to AI biorisk.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Aging as Entropy

01:25 Why Evolution Limits Lifespan

03:13 Evolution Tradeoffs Explained

07:44 Why Women Live Longer

10:15 Lessons from Long Lived Species

16:20 Peak Intelligence and Aging

23:26 What Aging Really Is

26:23 Epigenetics and Reprogramming

27:59 Yamanaka Factors 101

32:18 New Limit's Approach

33:56 AI for Factor Discovery

37:28 Organ by Organ Longevity

40:28 Is Immortality Possible?

42:04 Lifespan Progress Curve

45:44 Testing Longevity Drugs

49:30 Placebo Mind Body Link

53:56 What longevity hacks are actually work?

57:25 Peptides And Stem Cells

01:00:34 Germline Gene Editing

01:05:10 Personalized Medicine Abundance

01:08:48 Longer Lifespans and Power Turnover

01:14:57 Living Off Earth

01:16:55 AI And Biosecurity Risks

#longevity #antiaging #biotech

Jack Dent, co-founder of Chai Discovery, gives us a look at how AI could change the way we discover drugs, understand biology, and treat disease. Jack went from cold-emailing Stripe and joining as a teenager to co-founding Chai Discovery, the AI drug design company Sam Altman asked him and Josh to start years before they did. Chai has since raised $225M from investors including OpenAI and Thrive Capital, and built a model that hit a drug-design breakthrough far faster than expected, with roughly 200x better antibody success rates.We talk about whether people could one day help cure their own diseases with AI, whether each of us might have a personalized biology model, and whether medicine shifts from treating sickness to preventing it before it starts. Jack also gets into whether frontier AI labs will build these biology models themselves, what AI can and can’t fix in our current healthcare system, why clinical trials are still such a bottleneck, and how much of science may become less random when AI can generate and test better hypotheses.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Intro

02:28 Inside Stripe When It Was Only 100 People

08:45 How Sam Altman Sparked Chai’s Origin Story

10:52 Why Chai Discovery Exists

16:20 The Chai-2 Antibody Breakthrough

19:24 Approaching Biology as Engineering

24:45 Using AI to treat ourselves26:52 Robotics in labs

27:22 Why Pharma Is Finally Moving on AI

29:49 Can AI Fix Clinical Trials?

32:53 Personalized biology models

36:24 Longevity, Peptides, and Trillion-Dollar Drugs

39:02 Does it matter that the government cuts exploratory science grants?

41:00 What Next-Gen Chai Models Will Do

42:08 Will Frontier AI Labs Build Biology Models?

43:26 Biology is hard

Keri Findley, founder of Thiel-Backed fund Tacora Capital, shares a rare glimpse into her life and career: her path to Wall Street, eventually becoming one of the youngest partners at hedge fund Third Point while building its structured credit business from scratch, founding Tacora Capital with Peter Thiel anchoring the first fund as his biggest check ever.

Along with wild success comes a target on your back and Keri reflects on difficult moments of litigation, divorce, and betrayal that ultimately informed her outlook on life. She pulls back the curtain on Wall Street: big wins, pressure, risk, and competition. We discuss venture credit, what contrarian investing actually looks like, the AI boom, today's tumultuous private credit markets, and what it means to be a high-ethics person in business.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 – From Columbia grad to Third Point partner: building a trading desk at 25

03:30 – Discovering Wall Street by accident and landing at Morgan Stanley

06:00 – The 2008 financial crisis and making her first high-stakes trades

10:00 – Hedge fund life: massive trades, pressure, and doubling money in mortgage bonds

14:00 – Wall Street rivalries and the fallout with Morgan Stanley 18:00 – The Bloomberg article

22:00 – Calling Alex Spiro and discovering the investigation might not exist

24:00 – Peter Thiel offering to fund the entire first fund and founding Tacora Capital

36:00 – Silicon Valley venture capital, AI hype, and herd mentality in investing

46:00 – The dark side of startups: unethical founder behavior and financial fraud

55:00 – Carrie’s advice to her 21-year-old self: resilience, integrity, and ignoring titles

Edward Saatchi (Saatchi & Saatchi family, former Head of Oculus Story Studio, Founder of Fable Studios) joins us to make the case that Hollywood is sleepwalking into the most radical disruption in the history of storytelling."Creativity is at a deep blue and Kasparov moment"

"AI isn't just a tool in the toolbox for filmmakers. It's a competitor"

We talk about:

★ Whether AI can be truly creative - Edward says yes

★ Silicon Valley's quiet takeover of Hollywood

★ Tech companies becoming media companies

★ The rise of the one-person film

★ Why AI will bring an aesthetic shift to cinema

Then we go deeper into what this actually means for authorship, storytelling, and who gets to have a creative voice, when the cost of making a film collapses to near zero.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Finding the New Medium of AI Art

00:57 From Obama Campaign Tech to VR Storytelling at Oculus

03:02 Why VR Didn’t Pan Out

04:03 Fable Studios’ Vision

04:20 Why “Cheaper VFX” Misses the Point of AI in Hollywood

07:09 The Playable Star Wars Thought Experiment (and Studio Pushback)

09:08 AI Media: Interactive, Remixable, Personal

12:48 Simulation-First Story Worlds

14:51 AI Will Be Creative

16:43 World-Building vs. Prompt Engineering

20:03 Hollywood’s Shifting Attitude

24:37 One-Person Films, YouTube Discovery, and AI-Generated Feeds

29:21 Can AI Art Have a Point of View?

31:10 From Creativity to Consciousness: Why Simulations Matter

32:13 ‘Exit Valley’: Using AI Satire Against Tech Power

36:50 Silicon Valley vs. Hollywood

40:52 Video Models, Robotics, and the ‘War on Cliché’

44:45 Generated Media’s Role in Globalizing Content

50:51 ‘AI Aesthetic’ in Film

56:06 Saatchi & Saatchi: Edward’s Family Roots

Moxie Marlinspike founded Signal, the nonprofit privacy messenger used by millions. He’s now building Confer, a fully private, end-to-end encrypted AI chat. This conversation covers everything.TIMESTAMPS:00:00 Intro 01:09 Building Physical World Projects Centered on Experiences07:43 Tales from Hitchhiking15:04 The Birth of Signal22:23 Privacy in the Digital Age31:21 Introducing Confer: Private AI Chat37:17 Generative AI and Developer Responsibility38:21 Encryption and Cryptography: A Historical Perspective39:15 Skepticism Towards Crypto41:24 The Impact of Self-Publishing and Cancel Culture44:01 Imagining MoxieLand49:41 Why Do Conspiracy Theories Exist58:00 Signal Gate1:02:30 Limits of Solo Ambitions1:05:09 Solving Aging1:09:00 Moxie’s Next Physical World Project FOLLOW:Follow MoxieSign up for ConferFollow SabrinaPlease support this show by subscribing!

Ken Liu: Renowned sci-fi author of The Paper Menagerie, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, and his new book All That We See or Seem; producer of Pantheon; futurist who works with world governments to prepare for what’s ahead.

TIMESTAMPS:

(0:00) Introduction

(1:41) Mechanism vs meaning: what science explains vs what stories explain

(5:47) What is consciousness, really?

(6:42) Psychedelics and the mystery of the mind

(7:55) Can intelligence exist without consciousness?

(12:10) How mind-uploading might actually work (and the Singularity)

(19:15 — Falling in love with AI - why “imaginary companions” aren’t new

(23:40) Modern day myths around romantic love

(27:15) Preservation vs. transformation of humanity

(32:37) When technical skill disappears: what is craft?

(40:00) When using AI actually makes us feel more human

(41:05) Writing, imagination, and “All That We See or Seem”

(47:35) Dreams, reality, and how we know what’s real

(54:45) Privacy in an age of digital selves

(58:03) Data, the commons, and how knowledge should be shared

Follow Ken: https://x.com/kyliu99

Buy his new book All That We See or Seem : https://www.amazon.com/All-That-Seem-Julia-Novel/dp/1668083175

• When will AI become conscious and how would we even know if it did? We talk about the decoupling of intelligence and consciousness in today's LLMs, and the ethical questions in regulating models.

• Ken walks me through a thought experiment to understand the singularity: what uploading our minds might actually look like, a theme explored in his Netflix series Pantheon. If we replace our minds piece by piece with silicon, at what point do “we” disappear?
• In the age of AI, when many technical skills are made obsolete, who are the experts of craft?
• We explore why falling in love with AI may be grounded in our religious history, and is an act of falling in love with our own reflection.
• We discuss how phones have killed daydreaming and access to the collective unconscious, and the mysteries of psychedelics, natural intelligence, and the universe at large.
• “We are willing to die for the sake of a story. In fact, it’s the only thing humans have ever willingly died for.” Most of human life, Ken argues, has two levels of explanation: 1.Evolution & 2.Stories — the way we make sense of the world and find meaning in it.