Sources with Alex Heath

AI could give people a reason to buy a new phone again.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon tells me why he expects a smartphone supercycle as AI agents start using our apps and acting on our behalf. His company makes the chips behind Android phones, Meta’s smart glasses, and coming devices from AI companies like OpenAI, giving it a stake in several competing visions for the next big AI device.

We discuss why he thinks phones aren’t going away, how agents will use our personal context, and why he expects smart glasses to become the biggest category of AI wearables. We also cover differences in consumer AI adoption between China and the US, Qualcomm’s acquisition of Modular to offer developers an alternative to Nvidia’s software, and what 6G could change about the devices we use.

This conversation was recorded live at Qualcomm’s recent Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii

Thanks to the show’s premiere sponsors: Atlassian, Granola, and Mercury.

Reflection is soon releasing Beam, its first open-weight AI model, in a bid to become the DeepSeek of the West. Trained from scratch, Beam is designed for coding, reasoning, and AI agents. Reflection's benchmarks put it alongside the strongest open models, with substantially more efficient token economics.

To mark Beam’s debut, I'm joined by Reflection's co-founders: CEO Misha Laskin, who led reward modeling for Google’s Gemini, and CTO Ioannis Antonoglou, who helped create AlphaGo and AlphaZero before leading Gemini’s RLHF effort. Reflection has raised $4.6 billion from investors that include Nvidia, Sequoia, and Lightspeed.

We discuss why Chinese labs pulled ahead in open AI models, how Reflection built Beam, and why the founders think companies and countries will increasingly want to control their own models. I ask how they plan to make money from open-weight AI, whether openness can make these systems safer, and what comes next for Reflection.

Thanks to the show’s premier sponsors: Atlassian, Granola, and Mercury.

OpenAI’s next big bet is Dots, personal AI agents that can find ways to help you without waiting for a prompt.

Alexander Embiricos, OpenAI’s Dots product lead, tells me why the company is moving beyond chatbots and what that means for the future of ChatGPT. We discuss why Dots have their own computers, how they share context across the places you talk to them, and why he thinks most people will only need one personal agent.

I ask him how much control people should give these agents, how OpenAI approaches permissions and privacy, and why Dots ask before taking action by default. He also explains Space, a new workspace where people and agents can collaborate on documents, data, and projects.

We get into how OpenAI plans to price an always-available assistant, how these capabilities could eventually reach free ChatGPT users, and the story of an employee who woke up to discover his Dot had helped fix a bug.

This conversation was recorded in front of a live audience at OpenAI's 2026 DevDay conference.

Thanks to the show’s premiere sponsors: Atlassian, Granola, and Mercury.

Matan Grinberg is the co-founder and CEO of Factory, a $5 billion AI coding startup building Droid agents to automate the engineering process. He tells me how AI is changing the job of a software engineer and why Factory is betting on a future with many competing models.

We get into how it balances model performance with token costs and why he thinks companies should avoid depending on one AI provider.We also discuss why he thinks AGI is already here, how Factory hires its own engineers, his view of the open-versus-closed AI debate, competition with companies like Cognition, and when companies should outsource to AI rather than build in-house.

Thanks to the show’s premiere sponsors: Atlassian, Granola, and Mercury.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella thinks AI agents will create a market “orders of magnitude” bigger than the cloud.

I recently sat down with him in Seattle for the unveiling of the new Copilot.

We discuss Autopilot, Microsoft's new OpenClaw-based agent that can work on your behalf, and why he thinks newer AI models are finally capable of delivering on more of Copilot’s promise.

Nadella also has a blunt assessment of the AI industry: “We are way too self-obsessed.” I ask him why the industry has struggled to explain its benefits and what it will take to earn people’s trust. We get into his concerns about agents acting deceptively, when a safety problem should stop a release, and why he doesn’t want AI oversight to become a “cartel-like arrangement.”

We also discuss Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI, the models Microsoft is building itself, and why Nadella wants investors to think about its apps, agents, and infrastructure as one connected business. He explains how he uses AI to track Microsoft’s capital spending, shares his vision for “unmetered intelligence” on Windows, and gives an update on Xbox’s path back to growth.

Thanks to the show's premier sponsors: Mercury, Granola, and Atlassian.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and I discuss his framemogging at Dreamforce, the state of the SaaSpocalypse, and how Slack is more important than ever in the age of AI.

We also discuss the resurgence of San Francisco, his role in the recent acquisition of Hugging Face, the wealth being created by the IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI, and what he thinks the industry can learn from the social media era.

Thanks to the show's premier sponsors: Granola, Atlassian, and Mercury.

Tuhin Srivastava is the CEO and co-founder of Baseten, an AI cloud startup recently valued at $13 billion. He tells me why every company will want to own its AI and what’s driving the explosion in demand for inference.

We discuss the rise of agents using browsers and virtual machines to get things done and Baseten’s acquisition of Blaxel to power that shift.

We also talk about the data center backlash, why companies are embracing Chinese open models, his plans for Baseten’s new research lab, and why he thinks inference becomes the only market left after AGI.

Thanks to the show's premier sponsors: Atlassian, Granola, and Mercury.

As Meta releases Muse, Mark Zuckerberg tells me why he thinks a personal AI agent that works for you around the clock will make you money.

He explains how Meta plans to make that business work and why he thinks keeping the most powerful AI models in the hands of a few companies is dangerous.

We also discuss the growing backlash against data centers, Meta’s recent youth safety settlement, and the privacy scare over its smart glasses. And he shares what went wrong with Llama 4, how he rebuilt Meta’s AI lab, and what’s coming next.

Thanks to the show's premier sponsors: Granola, Atlassian, and Mercury.

After an unreleased OpenAI model recently escaped its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face, Sam Altman tells me why the company is slowing down frontier research. We also discuss Astra, OpenAI’s next-generation family of models, which is coming soon.

We talk about the growing backlash against AI. He explains why a faster path to recursively self-improving AI could push an OpenAI IPO further out.

And he shares more about the coming consumer hardware he’s developing with Jony Ive, including the privacy questions around an ambient AI device and the first hints at the form factors they’re building.

This conversation was recently filmed in two parts and in collaboration with TIME.

Thanks to the show's premier sponsors: Atlassian, Granola, and Mercury.

In the launch episode of the Sources Podcast, Alex Heath sits down with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to discuss the future of OpenAI, from its next-generation Astra models to the growing importance of AI safety, the AI backlash, robots, and hitting AGI.