This Week in AI

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Today’s show:

On a podcast this week, Sam Altman made a bold declaration: “We are now, like, in the singularity.” A bold claim which Alex puts bluntly to this week’s panel. Grant Lee of Gamma and Philip Johnston of Starcloud sound off… Is this actually the Singularity, and if so, why do things still feel so normal?

Plus the panel and guest host Alex Wilhelm discuss the infrastructure and economics that will make singularity-scale AI buildout possible… NVIDIA’s strongly worded letter about open-weight models… Moonshot’s new Kimi K3 twist on open-source licenses… Stripe’s reported $10B run at OpenRouter… and more.

Guests

Grant Lee on X: https://x.com/thisisgrantlee

Gamma: https://gamma.app/

Philip Johnston on X: https://x.com/PhilipJohnston

Starcloud: https://www.starcloud.com/

Relevant Links

TechCrunch: Gamma hits $110M ARR: https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/10/ai-powerpoint-killer-gamma-hits-2-1b-valuation-100m-arr-founder-says/

Nvidia: How Starcloud is Bringing Data Centers to Space: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/starcloud/

Open Weights and American AI Leadership letter: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/open-weight-models-letter-1.pdf

CNBC on Nvidia-OpenAI infrastructure plans: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/27/nvidia-and-openai-in-talks-for-up-to-250-billion-dollar-ai-backstop.html

Kimi K3: https://www.kimi.com/en

Crusoe announces strategic Starcloud partnership: https://www.crusoe.ai/resources/newsroom/crusoe-to-become-first-cloud-operator-in-space-through-partnership-with-starcloud

Andrej Karpathy on YouTube: “Let’s Build GPT”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY

Demis Hassabis Starcloud post on X: https://x.com/demishassabis/status/1999296127276126417

RAISE Summit: https://www.raisesummit.com/

Lilian Weng exits Thinking Machines post: https://x.com/lilianweng/status/2081816923088814421

Baseten: https://www.baseten.co/

Fireworks AI: https://fireworks.ai/

Legora: https://legora.com/

OpenEvidence: https://www.openevidence.com/

Yahoo: Stripe in talks to acquire OpenRouter: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/stripe-talks-acquire-openrouter-potential-215104525.html

Sam Altman on the Relentless podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv3CEAS_w34

TechCrunch: Cursor India-only pricing tier: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/27/cursor-makes-its-biggest-india-push-yet-ahead-of-spacex-acquisition-with-localized-pricing/

Gergely Orosz: The Pragmatic Engineer: https://www.pragmaticengineer.com/

Timestamps:

0:00 Guest intros: Grant Lee (Gamma) and Philip Johnston (Starcloud)

1:22 Nvidia's open weight letter

8:11 Starcloud's first H100 in space

19:47 Series A extension economics

20:39 How Gamma stayed lean and balanced work and fun

30:40 Betting on a compute-constrained world

35:48 Different approaches to pricing

44:59 Where does the AI moat really live?

57:41 Are we in the Singularity?

1:04:42 Starcloud's mission to Alpha Centauri

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LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis

Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/

Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland

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Today’s show:

This week, our panel of AI experts — Anand Kannappan (Patronus AI), Ori Goshen (AI21 Labs), and Alex Finn (Henry Intelligent Machines) — join special guest host Lon Harris to debate whether Washington will move to formally limit powerful foreign AI models like Moonshot’s Kimi K3 and Z.ai’s GLM-5.2.

What does “winning the AI race” actually mean on a practical level? Why is cybersecurity, not benchmarks, likely the actual battleground. And why did Hugging Face have to use GLM-5.2 to investigate their recent breach rather than a frontier US model like Fable 5?

PLUS why agents still fail so much on long horizon tasks, why proper model routing has such a HUGE impact on enterprise AI bills, and we take a look at Alex’s hacked digital typewriter he uses to code without distractions.

Guests:

Anand Kannappan on X: https://x.com/anandnk24

Patronus AI: https://www.patronus.ai/

Ori Goshen on X: https://x.com/origoshen

AI21: https://www.ai21.com/

Alex Finn on X: https://x.com/AlexFinn

Alex’s Vibe Coding Academy: https://www.skool.com/vibe-coding-academy/about

Relevant Links:

Axios: “The Secret Trump Administration Battle to Fight Chinese AI”: https://www.axios.com/2026/07/20/ai-us-china-open-source-kimi

Chamath post on US AI options: https://x.com/chamath/status/2079457219892871458?s=20

Brian Armstrong post on spend vs. token usage: https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/2070670644577280109

Hugging Face: Security incident disclosure: https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026

VentureBeat Hugging Face coverage: https://venturebeat.com/security/safety-guardrails-blocked-hugging-faces-defenders-not-the-attacker-when-an-ai-agent-breached-its-systems

David Sacks post on cyber guardrails: https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2078984980588531855

Databricks Unity AI Gateway: https://www.databricks.com/product/artificial-intelligence/unity-ai-gateway

Ramp’s Router: https://ramp.com/router/

Timestamps:

0:00 Will the US limit foreign open source models?

5:40 Are the American frontier AI labs in danger of bankruptcy?

7:15 The risks of over-regulating AI

10:20 What does it mean to win the AI race?

17:08 Is self-hosting agentic Chinese models safe?

20:08 Why agents still fail when models are so smart

25:28 Simulating the digital world for agents

36:51 Why picking the right model for the task is so hard

46:29 Alex is developing "ambient intelligence"

52:35 What we know about the Hugging Face breach

53:46 Are safety guardrails kneecapping our best models?

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X: https://twitter.com/Jason

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis

Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/

Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland

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Today’s show:

The price of tokens keeps tumbling down, and it’s changing who controls AI.

Grok 4.5 and GLM-5.2 landed within two weeks of one another, offering powerful alternatives at a fraction of frontier prices. But are SpaceXAI’s latest offering and open weight models truly ready to replace Opus, GPT-5.5, and Fable? Are enterprises finally ready to stop renting and start owning their intelligence?

On TWiAI Episode 22, Jason and Lon welcome three top founders — Sara Hooker (Adaption Labs), Manu Sharma (Labelbox), and Spiros Xanthos (Resolve AI) — to break down the global AI price war, and what it means for the frontier labs and customers alike. Plus Denis Hassabis’ call for an AI Standards Body, Uber and Waymo duke it out over DC robotaxis, and is SpaceXAI really going to put data centers in orbit any time soon?

Guests:

Sara Hooker on X: https://x.com/sarahookr

Adaption Labs: https://adaptionlabs.ai/

Manu Sharma on X: https://x.com/manuaero

Labelbox: https://labelbox.com/

Spiros Xanthos on X: https://x.com/spirosx

Resolve AI: https://resolve.ai/

Relevant Links

Introducing Grok 4.5**:** https://x.ai/news/grok-4-5

GLM from Z.ai: https://z.ai

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index: https://artificialanalysis.ai/

Demis Hassabis: “A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age”: https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718

Cerebras: https://www.cerebras.ai/

Austin Allred post cited by Jason: https://x.com/Austen/status/2076745226387902925

TechCrunch coverage of DC autonomous driving bill: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/ubers-robotaxi-lobbying-effort-has-put-it-on-a-collision-course-with-waymo/

DoorDash: Meet Dot: https://about.doordash.com/en-us/dot

TechCrunch coverage of orbital data center debate: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/sam-altmans-space-data-center-trash-talk-is-what-most-experts-already-believe

Falcon 9 booster’s record 36th flight: https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/07/09/live-coverage-spacex-to-launch-falcon-9-rocket-on-record-breaking-36th-flight/

Timestamps:0:00 A new generation of lower-cost models

4:10 Enterprises want their own intelligence stack

6:10 Frontier vs. open source: where does the value go?

10:03 Is enterprises destined to go small?

30:04 Self-improvement as the real fix

31:52 Should the AI industry regulate itself?

47:14 Uber vs. Waymo in DC

1:03:53 Can AI data centers in space really work?

1:14:47 You get a plug! Everyone gets a plug!

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis

Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/

Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland

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Today’s show:

China is weighing a ban on foreign access to its top AI models… the same low-cost open-weight systems on which half of the Valley’s startups are building. So we asked our two all-star panelists — Arena CEO/Co-Founder Anastasios Angelopoulos and Hippocratic AI CEO/Co-Founder Munjal Shah — what happens to US companies when their favorite cheap, powerful models vaporize overnight.

PLUS why Hippocratic runs 31 models in parallel to ensure clinical-grade safety, the latency-vs-intelligence tradeoff no one is optimizing for, and why a company’s benchmarks might become their most valuable IP.

Guests:

Anastasios Angelopoulos on X: https://x.com/ml_angelopoulos

Arena AI: https://arena.ai/

Agent Arena: https://arena.ai/leaderboard/agent

Munjal Shah on X: https://x.com/munjalshah

Hippocratic AI: https://hippocraticai.com/

Relevant Links:

Reuters: “Beijing is looking at curbing overseas access…”: https://www.reuters.com/world/beijing-is-looking-curbing-overseas-access-chinas-top-ai-models-sources-say-2026-07-07/

Z.ai: https://z.ai/

Alibaba’s Qwen: https://qwen.ai/

Google’s Gemma: https://ai.google.dev/gemma

Reflection AI: https://reflection.ai/

Nvidia: “How Open Models are Driving Research”: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/open-models-icml-2026/

DoorDash: “How we learned to trust our AI code reviewer”: https://careersatdoordash.com/blog/how-we-learned-to-trust-our-ai-code-reviewer-at-doordash

Harvey AI: https://www.harvey.ai/

ElevenLabs: https://elevenlabs.io/

Anthropic: “A global workspace in language models”: https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace

CNN: “Trump rings opening bell to mark first day of trading for Trump Accounts”: https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/06/business/trump-accounts-launch

Brown University Health: https://www.brownhealth.org/

Timestamps:

0:00 Will US companies lose access to Chinese models?

1:42 Open source makes running 31 models viable

5:01 How deep is the West's open source bench?

13:20 Jagged Intelligence and why post-training matters

25:22 Benchmarks as living quality checks

32:49 Why models still struggle with drug names

42:58 Fine-tuning TV, cough, and sob detection

46:08 What is Arena actually selling?

1:08:29 Nationalization vs. buying stakes in AI companies

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X: https://x.com/alex

LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm

Follow Jason:

X: https://twitter.com/Jason

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis

Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/

Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland

Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis

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This Week In Startups is made possible by:

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Today’s show:

The US government won’t let you use the most powerful releases from US AI labs… but a Chinese lab is giving away their latest frontier model for free.

This week, we’ve got three AI CEOs building in image generation (Victor Perez of Krea), mobile agents (Div Garg of The AGI Company), and enterprise governance (Andrew Berman of Runlayer). Together, they’re breaking down what’s really happening underneath all this chaos, and why the industry’s more focused on “minimum viable intelligence” over breaking benchmarks.

Guests

Victor Perez on X: https://x.com/viccpoes

Krea AI: https://www.krea.ai/

Krea 2 Raw and Turbo on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/krea/Krea-2-Raw

Div Garg on X: https://x.com/divgarg

The AGI Company: https://theagi.company/

Andrew Berman on X: https://x.com/berman66

Runlayer: https://www.runlayer.com/

Relevant Links

Anthropic: “Introducing Claude Sonnet 5”: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-5

Z.ai: GLM-5.2: https://docs.z.ai/guides/llm/glm-5.2

Yuchen Jin X post: “GLM-5.2 is the open source Claude moment”: https://x.com/Yuchenj_UW/status/2071278256817574297

TechCrunch: GPT-5.6 restricted rollout coverage: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/26/openai-limits-gpt-5-6-rollout-after-government-request-says-restrictions-shouldnt-be-the-norm/

AndroidWorld benchmark on GitHub: https://github.com/google-research/android_world

The Information Higgsfield valuation article: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-video-startup-talks-quadruple-valuation-5-billion

Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF): https://aaif.io/

Tomasz Tunguz: “When AI Costs More Than The Engineer”: https://tomtunguz.com/ai-spend-breakeven-2029/

Fortune Runlayer raise coverage: https://fortune.com/2026/06/24/exclusive-vinod-khosla-felicis-runlayer-nanit-30-million-enterprise-ai/

Gusto: https://gusto.com/

Timestamps:

0:00 Making sense of US AI policy

5:09 Tiny Action Models vs. LLMs

7:02 Runlayer, AGI Inc, and computer-use agents

10:05 What does "trusted access" really mean?

12:37 Why Krea open sourced its image model

22:21 BREAKING: Claude Sonnet 5 is here

26:00 GLM-5.2 is the open source Claude moment

31:58 Personalization and corporate ontology

41:25 Can we trust Higgsfield's numbers?

50:39 Distillation: The threat is real

58:01 Agentic personhood and corporate rights

1:03:19 Everyone's AGI timeline and p(doom) score

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LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm

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X: https://twitter.com/Jason

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis

Thank you to our partners:

Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/

Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland

Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis

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Today’s show:

*When we think of “Physical AI,” most of us conjure images of humanoid robots and self-driving cars. But there’s a lot more to the category than just breakdancing Chinese bots and Waymos, from excavators autonomously digging tomorrows worksites, to a robot the size of four pizza boxes deploying to the ISS.

Guest host Alex Wilhelm sits down with three founders in the trenches of the Physical AI Space:

Boris Sofman of Bedrock Robotics, which builds autonomous construction equipment

Jeff Hawke of Odyssey, a frontier AI lab specializing in world models for robotics and video games

Ethan Barajas of Icarus Robotics, designers of the free-flying Joy robot that will join the ISS crew in 2027

Guests:

Boris Sofman on X: https://x.com/bsofman

Bedrock Robotics: https://bedrockrobotics.com/

Jeff Hawke on X: https://x.com/jeffrey_hawke

Odyssey: https://odyssey.ml/

Ethan Barajas on X: https://x.com/ethanbarajas11

Icarus Robotics: https://www.icarusrobotics.com/

Relevant Links

Bedrock Excavators Remove 65,000 Cubic Yards of Dirt: https://www.enr.com/articles/61982-bedrock-robotics-excavators-remove-65-000-cubic-yards-of-dirt-on-southwest-project

Odyssey $310M Series B article: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/world-model-maker-odyssey-nabs-1-45b-valuation-backed-by-amazon-and-other-big-names/

Icarus “Joyride” Mission announcement: https://thedebrief.org/icarus-is-building-the-robotic-labor-force-for-space-voyager-technologies-is-sending-a-next-generation-zero-gravity-robot-on-a-joyride-to-space/

PROWL: Prioritized Regret-Driven Optimization for World Model Learning: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18803

NVIDIA Cosmos 3 report: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3/technical-report.pdf

ISS Columbus Laboratory Module: https://www.nasa.gov/international-space-station/columbus-laboratory-module/

NASA’s Astrobee flying robot: https://www.nasa.gov/astrobee/

Voyager Technologies: https://www.voyagerspace.com/

Vast Space: https://www.vastspace.com/

Blue Origin’s New Glenn: https://www.blueorigin.com/new-glenn

“Red Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson: https://www.amazon.com/Red-Mars-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0553560735

“Rendezvous with Rama” by Arthur C. Clarke: https://www.amazon.com/Rendezvous-Rama-Arthur-Clarke/dp/0553287893

Theo Von “This Past Weekend” podcast: https://www.theovon.com/podcast

Anthropic statement on Fable/Mythos suspension: https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access

Timestamps:

0:00 The Year of Physical AI

1:28 Why everyone's bullish on world models

7:03 Physical AI is harder, but probably bigger

9:08 How to think about world models

16:00 When data becomes "adversarial"

25:00 How Bedrock powers autonomous excavators

30:48 Why teleoperation gets a bad rap

39:10 Meet Joy the space robot

41:33 Laser comms coming to next-gen stations

46:29 Why everyone hates data centers

57:33 When does Claude Fable come back?

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Follow Jason:

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis

Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/

Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland

Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis

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SpaceX bought Cursor for $60 billion. Satya Nadella says companies need to stop relying on third party AI models and build their own “token capital.” The focus is shifting from LLMs to the application layer sitting on top of them. Here to unpack what that means are guest experts Ali Ansari (Micro1) and Ryan Daniels (Crosby).Plus we get a sneak peek at their new contract redlining benchmark, a crucial eval for how well LLMs don’t just answer questions about the law, but demonstrate actual legal reasoning.Timestamps:0:00 SpaceX acquires Cursor7:36 Distillation vs. building your own model19:43 Nadella's "Frontier Without an Ecosystem"30:21 AI in the courtroom32:15 Ando: the intriguing new workplace tool1:05:38 Inside Micro1 and Crosby's new benchmark1:07:14Guests:Ali Ansari: https://x.com/aliansarinikMicro1: https://www.micro1.ai/Ryan Daniels: https://x.com/ryanjdanielsCrosby: https://crosby.ai/Relevant Links:Bloomberg: “SpaceX acquires Cursor for $60B”: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-16/spacex-cements-60-billion-deal-to-take-over-ai-startup-cursorQuinn Thompson “brilliant corporate finance” post: https://x.com/qthomp/status/2066859672749977988Business Insider: “Inside Cursor’s Wild Rise”: https://www.businessinsider.com/cursor-ceo-michael-truell-spacex-elon-musk-anthropic-2026-6Satya Nadella: “A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable”: https://x.com/satyanadella/article/2066182223213293753Joshua Browder’s Do Not Pay: https://donotpay.com/Harvard Magazine: “AI Outperforms Doctors in Emergency Room Tasks”: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/ai/ai-outperforms-doctors-diagnosis-harvard-studyJoshua Kushner “Long Humans” post: https://x.com/JoshuaKushner/status/2065093542809092465Ando: https://ando.so/Nim Ravid on X: https://x.com/Nim_Ravid1Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisCheck out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.com

Apple just paid a rival a billion dollars a year because it could not build Siri itself, and that tells you where the AI platform war actually stands: the edge has moved up the stack, from the model to the agent layer sitting on top of it.

This week's roundtable makes the case that whoever controls that layer controls the experience, and we brought in three founders building it from different angles: Hermes Agent, NotebookLM, and LiveKit. Their through-line is that the harness is temporary, the model keeps eating it, and the people building agents right now are designing for capabilities that do not exist yet.

This week's roundtable:

Jeffrey Quesnelle (Co-founder & CEO, Nous Research, the open source AI lab behind Hermes Agent)

Steven B Johnson (Editorial Director of NotebookLM & Google Labs, co-creator of NotebookLM)

Russ d'Sa (Co-founder & CEO, LiveKit, the open source real-time voice/video infrastructure behind ChatGPT voice mode)

Thank you to our exclusive sponsor: PayPal Open, One Platform for All Business: https://paypalopen.com

Timestamps:

0:00 Cold open

1:08 Welcome to Episode 17

1:40 Jeffrey Quesnelle on Hermes Agent and the open source agent race

5:03 Steven Johnson on NotebookLM, source-grounding, and going agentic

7:32 Why AI got booed at commencement: the first generation raised on ChatGPT

10:48 Russ d'Sa on LiveKit powering ChatGPT, Tesla, Grok, and Salesforce voice

27:50 Apple's $1B Gemini deal and the Siri UX problem

52:49 "Functional AGI, unevenly distributed": where the models actually are

57:24 The harness is temporary: why agent builders design for the next model

Guests:

Jeffrey Quesnelle, Nous Research: https://nousresearch.com | https://x.com/theemozilla

Steven Johnson, NotebookLM (Google Labs): https://notebooklm.google.com | https://x.com/stevenbjohnson

Russ d'Sa, LiveKit: https://livekit.io | https://x.com/dsa

Referenced in this episode:

Nous Research / Hermes Agent: https://nousresearch.com

NotebookLM: https://notebooklm.google.com

LiveKit: https://livekit.io

OpenAI ChatGPT: https://openai.com

Tesla: https://www.tesla.com

Grok (xAI): https://x.ai

Salesforce Agentforce: https://www.salesforce.com/agentforce

SAP Joule: https://www.sap.com/products/artificial-intelligence/ai-assistant.html

Apple Intelligence: https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence

Google Gemini: https://gemini.google.com

Anthropic Claude Code: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code

OpenRouter: https://openrouter.ai

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Apple Podcasts: https://thisweekinai.ai/apple

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#ThisWeekInAI #AI #NousResearch #NotebookLM #LiveKit #OpenSourceAI #AIAgents #Siri #Gemini #VoiceAI

The future of AI isn't about whether the model is smart enough. It's about whether we can afford to run it. We dug into the AI cost panic, the energy wall that's coming for compute, and why "developers are disappearing" gets the economics exactly backwards.This week's roundtable: Naveen Rao (CEO of Unconventional AI, building brain-inspired analog chips, formerly sold companies to Intel and Databricks) and Alex Finn (founder of Henry Intelligent Machines and Creator Buddy).Thank you to our exclusive sponsor: PayPal Open, One Platform for All Business: http://paypalopen.com/Timestamps:0:00 Cold open1:21 Welcome to Episode 162:44 Is the AI cost panic real, or just "token maxing"?5:08 It's not the intelligence, it's how people use AI9:40 Surgeons vs. shotguns: prompt discipline & matching models to tasks13:10 Naveen's path from Intel and Databricks to Unconventional15:08 Why developers aren't disappearing18:37 How energy overtook CapEx in the cost of compute21:34 The energy wall & getting to 3 orders of magnitude more efficient25:52 AI's PR problem & the data center backlash27:55 China's hunger vs. America's AI boogeyman30:38 Data center taxes, equity stakes & the politics of AI upside37:54 The Anthropic IPO & how these founders actually invest🔗 Guests:Naveen Rao, Unconventional AI: https://unconv.ai | https://x.com/AlexFinnAlex Finn, Henry Intelligent Machines: https://meethenry.ai | https://x.com/NaveenGRao🔗 Host:Alex Wilhelm, This Week in Startups: https://x.com/alex🔗 Referenced in this episode:Unconventional AI (analog chips for AI): https://unconv.aiMosaicML (acquired by Databricks): https://www.databricks.com/research/m...Nervana Systems (acquired by Intel)Creator Buddy: https://creatorbuddy.ioQwen (open-weight model Alex runs locally): https://qwenlm.aiNVIDIA DGX Spark: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/products...Anthropic (filed to go public): https://www.anthropic.comHenry Intelligent Machines: https://meethenry.ai/🔗 Subscribe and follow:Newsletter and all platforms: https://thisweekinai.ai#ThisWeekInAI #AI #UnconventionalAI #NaveenRao #AlexFinn #AnalogComputing #AIcompute #AIenergy #TokenMaxing #AIlayoffs #AnthropicIPO

The AI jobs panic is here. Meta cut 8,000. Intuit cut 3,000. CapEx went up. Nobody can agree if anyone has actually lost a job to AI, or just to the promise of it. We dug into the GPU squeeze, the new craft of "reward engineering," Pope Leo's call to disarm AI, and why Chinese open-source models just blew past American ones in token usage.

This week's roundtable: Erik Bernhardsson (CEO of Modal Labs, the serverless GPU cloud), Tanay Kothari (CEO of Wispr Flow, the voice dictation app every VC in the valley uses), and Richard Socher (CEO of Recursive Superintelligence and You.com).

Thank you to our exclusive sponsor:

PayPal Open, One Platform for All Business: http://paypalopen.com/

Timestamps:

0:00 Cold open

0:53 Welcome to Episode 15

5:53 Recursive's plan to build a self-improving "Eureka machine"

8:10 Token spend now exceeds headcount at the frontier

9:56 GPU crunch, Hopper prices, and the Anthropic-Colossus shockwave

12:23 Wispr Flow's 90% gross margin playbook

14:30 Running $100M in marketing with two humans and a swarm of agents

18:29 Reward hacking, paperclips, and the rise of the "reward engineer"

24:39 Why CEOs put one person in charge: multi-objective AI

28:17 Meta's 8,000 layoffs, $145B CapEx, Goldman vs. Stanford

33:23 "Nobody lost their job to AI, just the promise of AI"

37:57 Jevons paradox: software demand is infinite, illustrations aren't

39:48 Meta's keystroke monitoring and the back-channel reaction

42:55 Equity, Trump accounts, and rooting for your old employer

44:06 The Bloomberg/Indeed dev jobs chart

47:34 Jason's pitch: hiring a 22-year-old AI-native "software valet"

50:29 Pope Leo: "AI needs to be disarmed"

57:41 Chris Olah on AI displacement and the global poor

1:00:46 Chinese models hit 9 trillion tokens, DeepSeek V4 Flash goes #1

1:03:04 Strange biases, Tiananmen Square, and the US open-source vacuum

1:05:07 Who they're hiring

🔗 Guests:

Erik Bernhardsson, Modal Labs: https://modal.com | https://x.com/bernhardsson

Tanay Kothari, Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai | https://x.com/tankots

Richard Socher, Recursive Superintelligence / You.com: https://recursive.com | https://x.com/RichardSocher

🔗 Referenced in this episode:

Modal Labs: https://modal.com

Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai

Recursive Superintelligence launch: https://recursive.com

You.com: https://you.com

Anthropic / SpaceX Colossus 1 compute deal: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-spacex

TechCrunch on the $1.25B/month Anthropic-xAI compute deal: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-will-pay-xai-1-25-billion-per-month-for-compute/

Meta's 8,000 layoffs and 2026 AI CapEx of $145B: https://www.reuters.com

Intuit cuts 3,000 jobs to fund AI integration: https://www.reuters.com

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon NYT op-ed on AI job loss: https://www.nytimes.com

Stanford study on entry-level AI-exposed jobs (-16%): https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu

Pope Leo XIV: "AI needs to be disarmed": https://www.vatican.va

Chris Olah (Anthropic) on AI and the global poor: https://www.anthropic.com

OpenRouter token usage leaderboard: https://openrouter.ai/rankings

DeepSeek V4 Flash: https://www.deepseek.com

Qwen 3 Max (Alibaba): https://qwenlm.ai

🔗 Subscribe and follow:

Newsletter and all platforms: https://thisweekinai.ai

#ThisWeekInAI #AI #ModalLabs #WisprFlow #Recursive #YouCom #DeepSeek #Qwen #MetaLayoffs #Anthropic #Colossus #PopeLeo #RewardHacking #AIJobs #OpenSource