Latest Interviews
Showing 16–30 of 175 transcripts.
Clear all filters- RAISE Summit13 min
The Golden Age of Software Engineering | Scott Wu, Cognition | RAISE Summit 2026
Founded two and a half years ago, global firm Cognition leverages its autonomous AI agent, Devin, to generate 90% of committed code while scaling engineering output tenfold with only a 40% headcount increase. By closing the full software development lifecycle autonomously, the company enables asynchronous, event-driven workflows that effectively add 130 engineers to every 1,000-person team through a 10:1 human-to-AI ratio. This shift toward outcome-based delivery signals the imminent "Golden Age of Software Engineering," where the primary constraint moves from labor availability to identifying complex problems worth solving.
- RAISE Summit20 min
Industrializing Intelligence: Building the AI Factory as a System | Vertiv | RAISE Summit 2026
Giordano Albertazzi, Gio Albertazzi
As the AI sector pivots from proven technology to maximizing useful output, infrastructure constraints are driving a shift toward "manufacturing data centers" that prioritize tokens per megawatt over traditional efficiency metrics. Vertiv champions a converged system approach that eliminates seam inefficiencies through pre-engineered modular solutions, enabling grid-interactive powertrains and reducing deployment time by half. This strategy directly lowers the cost per token by ensuring rapid capacity scaling and future-proofing infrastructure for next-generation silicon.
- RAISE Summit12 min
Agents are Here. Compute has to Change | Sachin Katti, OpenAI | RAISE Summit 2026
OpenAI has entered an agentic era where its internal roadmap is realized through AI systems handling nearly all internal token generation and conducting autonomous research tasks. This shift has compressed model release cycles from half a year to monthly intervals by enabling 50x growth in research experimentation and expanding compute demands to include synthetic data and reinforcement learning. As non-engineering departments and AI interns drive adoption, the organization is simultaneously rebuilding its infrastructure with heterogeneous hardware and complex networking to support the iterative, tool-heavy workflows required for this new phase of recursive development.
- RAISE Summit19 min
Scaling AI Infrastructure for the Agentic Era | Charlie Kawwas, Broadcom | RAISE Summit 2026
Frontier artificial intelligence laboratories are increasingly partnering with Broadcom to deploy purpose-built XPU architectures that replace general-purpose hardware, enabling custom designs that eliminate efficiency losses and proprietary ecosystem taxes. This strategic shift supports a massive scaling trajectory where Broadcom projects over $100 billion in revenue by 2027 while delivering 16 times the current compute capacity through modular chiplet technology. As major clients contract for gigawatt-scale power expansions, the collaboration prioritizes rapid time-to-market for specialized "agentic AI" workloads while addressing supply chain constraints through new advanced packaging facilities.
- RAISE Summit18 min
Cheap Tokens, Expensive Mistakes: The Real Economics of AI at Scale | RAISE Summit 2026
Liran Zvibel, Dylan Patel, Karen Kwok
Major AI operators are pivoting from pure pricing power to structural cost efficiency, leveraging advanced KV cache offloading and optimized storage architectures to slash inference expenses. Recent benchmarks reveal that NAND-based memory solutions and strategic hardware combinations, such as high-capacity AMD GPUs, can outperform standard setups by up to 20 times in multi-turn agentic workflows while delivering 7x higher throughput. This shift allows emerging providers and frontier labs to significantly expand gross margins, with companies like Anthropic and OpenAI now projecting substantial operating profits driven by these infrastructure innovations rather than model weights alone.
- Y Combinator13 min
How to Build a Self-Improving Company with AI
The event argues for replacing traditional hierarchical management with recursive AI architectures where organizations function as self-improving loops composed of sensor, policy, and learning layers. It demonstrates this shift through a YC case study where autonomous agents analyzed failures and updated code overnight, enabling companies to transition from headcount-constrained models to token-limited systems. By mandating universal data recording and treating internal software as ephemeral, the presentation defines humans as peripheral "edge interfaces" while AI assumes the role of the central "company brain" for decision-making and execution.
- Sequoia Capital9 min
Inside the Rise of Autonomous AI Hackers: XBOW's Oege de Moor
The presentation argues that the cybersecurity arms race has shifted to autonomous AI attacks, exemplified by an AI agent named XBO that recently achieved global dominance on HackerOne by discovering critical Microsoft Bing vulnerabilities through black-box testing. Because current defensive tools often fail to verify exploitability in live environments, the speaker urges organizations to immediately integrate autonomous AI into their workflows to counter negative exploit velocity before open-weight models close the capability gap within six to nine months. Ultimately, the event posits that future security success depends entirely on adopting AI-driven offensive and defensive systems rather than relying on traditional human-only methods.
- Sequoia Capital14 min
Why the Brain Computes 1,000,000x More Efficiently Than A GPU: Unconventional AI's Naveen Rao
Unconventional AI CEO Navin Rao is deploying a prototype that replaces traditional von Neumann architectures with nonlinear dynamical systems to overcome the impending energy saturation of current AI infrastructure. By leveraging Kuramoto synchronization models, the startup achieved functional generative capabilities in six months while demonstrating energy efficiency comparable to biological neural networks. This physics-based approach aims to bypass the thermodynamic limits of digital lithography, offering a viable pathway to artificial general intelligence within strict global power constraints.
- Sequoia Capital12 min
Starcloud's Philip Johnston: Why the Cheapest Compute Will Be in Space
StarCloud CEO Philip Johnston validated the technical feasibility of space-based high-performance computing through the successful "StarCloud 1" mission, which demonstrated thermal management and radiation tolerance while executing AI inference tasks. The company has filed an FCC application for an 88,000-satellite constellation capable of delivering 20 gigawatts of compute power with sub-50-millisecond latency, targeting a $100 billion capital expenditure that becomes economically viable once launch costs drop below $500 per kilogram. While current operations focus on inference workloads, the roadmap envisions future large-scale training structures that could catalyze a transition toward a Kardashev Type 2 civilization within decades.
- Sequoia Capital9 min
Why Data Is the Real AI Bottleneck: Flapping Airplanes' Ben and Asher Spector
Launched three months ago, Flapping Airplanes is an AI lab founded by Ben, Asher, and Thiel Fellow Aidan Smith that targets data-scarce domains like robotics and scientific discovery. The company differentiates itself through a system-level approach that builds custom hardware-abstraction layers to achieve theoretical 1,000x data efficiency, bypassing the limitations of standard frameworks like PyTorch. This strategy aims to democratize access to advanced AI by overcoming the escalating costs of data acquisition, prioritizing the recruitment of unconventional minds to drive paradigm shifts in system co-design.
- The Economist8 min
Will the Iran war spread across the Middle East?
Greg, Anshul, Adam, Pete Hexeth
Experts warn that regional chaos in Iran could trigger a prolonged conflict, spiking energy prices and threatening the security models of Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. While historically neutral, these nations are shifting toward military alignment with the US and abandoning diplomatic restraint as Iranian strikes backfire by uniting regional populations against Tehran. This escalation occurs amidst a US strategy driven by legacy considerations rather than broad public support, aiming to transform Iran's political landscape while balancing fears of a quagmire against the need to signal power to global rivals like China.
- Y Combinator8 min
The New Way To Build A Startup
Companies such as GigaML, Legion Health, and PhaseShift are redefining operational scale by automating all internal workflows—from code integration to clinical operations—rather than merely augmenting isolated functions. This "20X company" model enables lean teams of just a few employees to service Fortune 500 clients and achieve fourfold revenue growth while maintaining flat headcounts that would traditionally require hundreds of staff. By treating internal processes as the primary product, these organizations achieve AGI-level productivity, allowing them to compete directly with massive incumbents without the corresponding payroll burdens.
- a16z13 min
AI in 2026: 3 Predictions For What’s To Come (a16z Big Ideas)
Oliver Hsu, Bryan Kim, David Haber
Speakers Oliver Hsu, Brian Kim, and David Haber analyze distinct trajectories for AI adoption, ranging from autonomous scientific discovery in life sciences to consumer platforms shifting focus from productivity to digital connectivity. Hsu identifies the maturation of robot learning and simulation as prerequisites for closing the loop on self-driving labs, while Kim argues that future consumer value hinges on AI agents facilitating human relationships through deep emotional engagement. Concurrently, Haber demonstrates that the most robust business models integrate AI to directly reinforce revenue generation and proprietary data loops, as seen in contingency law firms and loan servicing platforms that scale success rather than merely cutting costs.
- a16z14 min
How AI Agents Will Transform in 2026 (a16z Big Ideas)
Marc Andrusko, Stephanie Zhang, Olivia Moore, Steph Ng
The event details a fundamental shift from reactive prompt-based interfaces to proactive AI agents that autonomously diagnose issues and execute actions, expanding the addressable market from software spending to the broader labor economy. Speakers discuss how design priorities are evolving toward machine legibility to enable high-autonomy applications in sales, security, and content discovery, while voice AI agents achieve scalable enterprise deployment in healthcare, finance, and customer service by outperforming humans in compliance and multilingual accuracy. This transition is redefining the human-in-the-loop dynamic, where critical decisions retain oversight while routine tasks are increasingly automated to drive efficiency across nearly every industry vertical.
- All-In Podcast11 min
Bryan Johnson’s Best Health Hack: Lower Your RHR Before Sleep = Sleep Better and Live Longer
Brian Johnson presents an ambitious framework positioning the indefinite extension of human life as a new global ideology, utilizing biological age testing to illustrate that organs age independently and require targeted management. He identifies resting heart rate as the primary health metric and details a specific protocol involving strict sleep hygiene, diet timing, and screen discipline to lower this rate by approximately 10%. This approach aims to reverse aging trends while simultaneously treating sleep as the fundamental intervention for anxiety and depression, ultimately preparing humanity for a future defined by superintelligence.