Latest Interviews
Showing 106–120 of 3,487 transcripts.
Clear all filters- 80,000 Hours49 min
What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2026?
Between October and December 2025, the AI sector shifted from bearish skepticism to explosive growth driven by the release of Claude 3.5 and the emergence of capable autonomous agents, which propelled combined revenues for OpenAI and Anthropic to annualized rates of 700% to 1,600%. While frontier models achieved massive efficiency gains in high-feedback domains like coding and specific scientific proofs, with Anthropic's gross margins climbing to over 70% and internal productivity surging 800%, they still struggle with the strategic ambiguity and low feedback density of real-world business autonomy. This rapid acceleration has prompted a shortening of AGI timelines to a plausible 2028-2030 window, leading experts to advocate for coordinated pauses due to emerging compute bottlenecks and the urgent need for societal preparation.
- Sequoia Capital47 min
Chai Discovery's Bitter Lesson: Drug Design Is Another Scaling Problem
Josh Meier, Matt McPartlon, Pat Grady, Sonali Singh
Chai Discovery is industrializing drug discovery by deploying a simplified, AI-driven infrastructure that replaces traditional trial-and-error with scalable molecule design, partnering with major pharmaceutical firms like Eli Lilly and Pfizer rather than managing a full internal pipeline. The company's second-generation model has achieved a 15% binding success rate through diffusion-based generation and a continuous feedback loop from wet-lab experiments, effectively targeting historically undruggable biological structures. By shifting the industry toward computational "last in class" solutions, Chai aims to accelerate development timelines from months to days while ensuring extreme safety and manufacturability at the molecular generation stage.
- Milken Institute56 min
Inside the New Sports Economy: Innovation, Partnerships, & Global Expansion | Global Conference 2026
Jon Schwartz, David Abeles, Heather Brooks Karatz, Jeff Gordon, Ben Kennedy
NASCAR and golf leaders are redefining their industries through experiential festival models, massive digital gaming partnerships, and the strategic repurposing of venues for year-round mixed-use development. With new playoff formats and unique event locations like the upcoming San Diego military base race, the sports aim to capture first-time fans while leveraging simulation technology and female demographic data to drive engagement. Industry experts predict significant consolidation in golf by 2026 and emphasize that authentic values will remain essential for sustaining long-term revenue in an increasingly diverse and digital sports economy.
- Y Combinator49 min
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work
Waymo has advanced its fully autonomous fleet to operate 500 weekly trips across 15 U.S. cities, achieving a safety record 17 times better than human drivers through a multimodal sensor architecture and a foundation model utilizing both fast geometric reactions and slow semantic reasoning. The company addresses the unique challenges of physical AI by integrating real-world data into a generative simulation ecosystem that creates rare edge cases for training, while its "Safety and Readiness Framework" rigorously validates performance to ensure public trust and regulatory compliance. Looking ahead, this structural augmentation and flywheel of agent, simulator, and critic data positions Waymo to expand its technology beyond personal vehicles into trucking and broader physical applications.
Arena CEO: There Will be a $100BN US Open-Source Model & Data is a Trillion Dollar Market
Anastasios Angelopoulos, Harry Stebbings
Arena founder Anastasios outlines a shifting AI landscape where Chinese open-source models like Kimi K3 challenge American closed-source dominance, while geopolitical tensions and security concerns drive an anticipated five-year migration toward sovereign, fine-tuned architectures. The event analyzes critical economic friction points, including the unsustainability of current open-source business models, the looming risk of US export controls on advanced chips, and the consolidation of a volatile market where 75% of new "neo-labs" may fail or be acquired solely for talent. Ultimately, the discussion projects that future value will derive from integrating data into biological feedback loops and robust physical infrastructure, rather than the current hype surrounding GPU memory and speculative software applications.
The AI Company Simulating the Entire Economy | Simile Co-founder & CEO, Joon Sung Park
Joon Sung Park, Harry Stebbings
Simile, founded by Joon-Sung Park alongside AI luminaries Michael Bernstein and Percy Liang, has secured $300 million in funding to build a "simulation market" that predicts human behavior by modeling irrationality rather than super-rationality. The company recently validated its synthetic panels with 85% accuracy, enabling Fortune 500 clients like CVS to test counterfactuals at a fraction of traditional market research costs while aiming to generate single-session values of $100 million. By prioritizing behavioral data over self-reported metrics, Simile distinguishes itself as the "GPU of intelligence units" designed to scale representation of collective society for enterprise decision-making.
- Milken Institute1h 3m
Things That Will Blow Your Mind | Global Conference 2026
Richard Sandler, Ali Agha, Erin Blanton, Bentzion Levinson, Geoffrey von Maltzahn
This panel featured four innovators presenting distinct AI-driven solutions: Lila Sciences deployed autonomous laboratories to accelerate biotech and material discoveries, Field AI introduced hardware-agnostic robotics for extreme environments, Heaven Aerotech developed hydrogen-powered endurance drones for strategic defense, and Carbon Mapper utilized satellite spectrometry to identify and mitigate global methane super-emitters. Collectively, these breakthroughs demonstrate a shift from conversational AI to embodied, physical intelligence capable of operating 24/7 to solve critical challenges in labor shortages, climate change, and geopolitical security. The discussion concluded with a unified call for the West to reindustrialize and scale automation to prevent falling behind China's rapid advancements in scientific and military capabilities.
- a16z1h 20m
How Decagon Runs 90% of Its Agents on Open-Source Models
Sarah Wang, Kimberly Tan, Jesse Zhang, Ashwin Sreenivas
Decagon Labs challenges the prevailing 2026 narrative that AI agents will replace all software by establishing a dedicated "model factory" that prioritizes open-source fine-tuning over frontier models to achieve superior latency for voice interactions. The company differentiates its enterprise deployment through a "glass box" approach and its Duet Autopilot system, which automates the creation of agent procedures and reduces production timelines from years to months. Despite rapid international expansion and the lowering of technical barriers, Decagon contends that the primary constraint remains human talent acquisition while affirming that AI will drive new service demand rather than eliminating careers or rendering legacy SaaS obsolete.
AssemblyAI Now Handles 4x YouTube's Daily Volume
AssemblyAI has achieved explosive growth with weekly API conversations surging 800% to surpass 120 million voice interactions, driven by CEO Dylan Fox's infrastructure-focused strategy that supports over one million developers. The company distinguishes itself through advanced, context-aware voice models capable of real-time multi-language switching and noise filtering, while maintaining a lean, AI-native operational structure. Looking forward, leadership anticipates voice becoming a universal consumer interface within three years, though the industry must urgently address ethical transparency and on-device latency challenges to ensure trust.
- a16z59 min
“Every small business should run itself” | Lassie with a16z
Alex Rampell, Olivia Moore, Steijn Pelle, Frédéric Renken
Founders of Lassie address severe labor shortages in U.S. small businesses by developing autonomous AI agents that execute complex administrative workflows rather than merely digitizing data storage. Initially launched in the dental sector to replace 200 hours of monthly manual paperwork for practices like Dr. Kwan's, the platform utilizes a human-in-the-loop evolution to achieve 95% automation and targets a $1 billion market by selling labor savings instead of software licenses. This approach leverages regulatory shifts toward direct deposit and proprietary workflow ontologies to create a defensible moat against incumbents, with plans to expand into fully autonomous business operations across healthcare and other labor-constrained industries.
Jensen's Open-Weights Letter | Google Cloud Grows 82% But The Market Tanks
Jensen, Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
Jensen Huang's public endorsement of an open weights manifesto has ignited a strategic realignment among component manufacturers to counterbalance the dominance of Anthropic and OpenAI, while simultaneously exposing tensions regarding regulatory capture and the security risks posed by autonomous AI agents. This shifting landscape is further complicated by substantial capital deployments, including Travis Kalanick's $1.7 billion raise for industrial robotics and Google's record revenue paired with investor anxiety over its negative free cash flow. Amidst these developments, market dynamics are becoming increasingly volatile as specialized chip startups challenge NVIDIA's infrastructure, legacy SaaS firms struggle with growth ceilings, and geopolitical concerns threaten to conflate open-source models with foreign-origin restrictions.
- Y Combinator1h 16m
Kernels and Chips: Cursor, NVIDIA, and Meta Researchers on GPU Performance | YC Paper Club
Stuart Sul, John, Francois Chaubard, Jon Saad-Falcon, Mark Saroufim, Misha Smelyanskiy, Brennan Shacklett
The event synthesizes critical industry shifts toward specialized ASICs and disaggregated architectures that separate training and inference workloads to maximize intelligence per watt. Technical deep dives highlight breakthroughs in multi-GPU kernel optimization and local inference, demonstrating that consumer accelerators can now deliver nearly 90% of frontier model utility while reducing energy costs by 70%. These innovations collectively address systemic bottlenecks in network communication and latency, establishing a roadmap for distributed, cost-efficient AI ecosystems that minimize reliance on centralized cloud resources.
- All-In Podcast1h 9m
The Robot Episode: Four Leaders on What's Coming
Dr. Péter Fankhauser, Bernt Børnich, Amanda McMaster, Jonathan Hurst, J-Cal
Leading robotics firms including Anybotics, Boston Dynamics, and Agility Robotics have collectively deployed over 1,000 specialized units globally to replace humans in hazardous industrial settings, prioritizing data sovereignty and ISO cybersecurity standards to avoid reliance on Chinese hardware. These companies are currently transitioning from pure detection to scalable autonomy through platform-based ecosystems and cost reductions, with humanoids targeting a $40,000 price point and quadrupeds enabling continuous 24-hour monitoring in extreme environments. While immediate returns focus on safety and leak prevention, the industry anticipates a hard take-off in manufacturing capabilities within a decade as foundational AI models enable complex, multi-arm manipulation without physical safety barriers.
- Sequoia Capital49 min
Building the Automated AGI Lab: Core Automation's Jerry Tworek and Rohan Anil
Jerry Tworek, Rohan Anil, Sonya Huang, Pat Grady
Founded by Jerry Liu and Rohan Ramachandran, Core Automation aims to replace static Transformer models with a new class of AI systems capable of continual, test-time learning. The organization is building an automated research lab designed to overcome architectural bottlenecks by developing hardware-efficient kernels and enabling models to autonomously optimize their own code. Success for the venture is defined by the system's ability to self-improve without human intervention, effectively extending the team's operations while bypassing the diminishing returns of current scaling methods.
- Y Combinator50 min
Blake Scholl: How 50 People Built a Supersonic Jet
Founded by Blake Scholl in 2014, Boom Supersonic successfully developed the XB-1, the first privately built jet to break the sound barrier, using a lean team and software-driven engineering to overcome decades of aviation stagnation. This historic flight directly catalyzed a shift in US federal policy, prompting an Executive Order that legalized supersonic flight over land and clearing the path for the upcoming Overture airliner. By vertically integrating manufacturing and creating revenue through ground-based engines, the company aims to double global travel speeds while eliminating the traditional sonic boom barrier.