Latest Interviews
Showing 1–15 of 107 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- RAISE Summit16 min
Dr. Ilya Burkov (Nebius): Powering Next‑Gen Biotech Research with High‑Performance AI and Cloud GPUs
Nebius, a vertically integrated Dutch cloud provider, leverages its unique pay-as-you-go infrastructure and top-tier supercomputer ranking to support biotech and healthcare firms in overcoming hardware bottlenecks. The platform enables critical advancements in drug discovery and radiology diagnostics for organizations like Converge Bio and Simulacra AI, which achieved significant accuracy gains and speedups over hyperscaler alternatives by utilizing on-demand H100 GPU capacity. Looking toward 2025, the company aims to expand its global footprint by integrating agentic AI and multi-omics data processing to address workforce shortages and accelerate time-to-market for new treatments.
- RAISE Summit9 min
Yuri Frayman, Co-Founder & CEO, Cast AI: Robots Will Feed the World… If We Build the Rails
SoftBank Vision Fund portfolio companies are constructing the physical infrastructure necessary to transition AI from knowledge work into the global economy, aiming to replicate the prosperity seen with previous industrial revolutions. While addressing critical constraints in energy and compute, these initiatives prioritize workforce re-education and decentralized, open-source architectures to navigate regulatory fragmentation and ensure fair access against well-funded commercial labs. The deployment of large-scale, cloud-agnostic inference networks over the next decade will ultimately determine which entities successfully harness this AI abundance.
- RAISE Summit20 min
Karl Havard, COO, Nscale on 3 Things Sovereign AI Must Deliver: Control, Compliance, and Growth
Carl, CCO of Nscale, defines "sovereign AI" as a full-stack alternative to US hyperscalers that integrates energy generation, data center construction, and model hosting to ensure total infrastructure control. Geopolitical instability and US legislative threats, such as the Patriot Act and potential tariffs, are driving European governments to adopt this "Sovereign First" model to secure data compliance and economic growth through localized "AI Growth Zones." By coordinating renewable energy surpluses with high-density AI hardware requirements, this strategy aims to retain domestic research talent and bypass the physical and legal vulnerabilities of reliance on foreign cloud providers.
- RAISE Summit18 min
Ramine Roane, CVP @ AMD: Unlocking the Next Wave of AI Open Foundations for Intelligent Systems
AMD outlines a strategic pivot where AI intelligence growth now relies on distributed compute across pre-training, post-training, and reasoning inference, supported by a hardware roadmap featuring the MI350 and MI400 series with superior memory capacity compared to competitors. The company promotes an open software ecosystem via the ROCm stack and optimized inference architectures like LMD, which are already deployed in top global supercomputers and sovereign data centers in the US, Europe, and the Middle East. By advocating for multi-vendor strategies and open standards, AMD aims to establish a global industrial-scale foundation for AI that prevents single-supplier dependency while delivering performance metrics that exceed current closed-source alternatives.
- RAISE Summit15 min
Craig Tavares, President of BuzzHPC: The Global Contest for AI Sovereignty
Craig Taveras, President and CEO of BuzzHPC, leads a Canadian-owned sovereign GPU cloud provider that constructs power-dense, hydroelectric-powered infrastructure to ensure domestic data control against foreign legal influences like the U.S. Cloud Act. Responding to a 4x increase in rack density and a shift from air to liquid cooling, the company deploys over 300 megawatts of capacity to support high-performance AI workloads while addressing critical national talent retention in Montreal, Toronto, and Alberta. This sovereign approach combines accelerated government funding with strict Protected B compliance to offer enterprises a unified, secure environment for training and hosting applications that traditional cloud providers cannot guarantee.
- RAISE Summit10 min
Jack Collier, Chief Growth & Marketing Manager, IO.Net: Why Open Models Need Open Infrastructure
A recent analysis identifies a critical infrastructure bottleneck where centralized control of compute power and API dominance force 70% of users toward closed-source models despite 83% preferring open alternatives. To dismantle these barriers, io.net leverages a global distributed network of over 1,000 GPUs to slash costs from $15 to $3.50 per million tokens while offering transparent, blockchain-verified access for training and inference. The platform is further expanding its ecosystem through a new "Training as a Service" feature and an inaugural hackathon, aiming to accelerate the shift toward a permissionless, decentralized AI future.
- RAISE Summit19 min
Tanuja Randery, Managing Director EMEA of AWS: Unlocking the AI Mindset
Tanuja Randery, Tineja Ranjari
A global presentation highlighted that AI adoption is outpacing mobile growth, with companies like Amazon and British Telecom reporting hundreds of millions in savings through generative coding agents. While the European market faces a critical talent shortage, AWS outlined its strategy to bridge this gap by training millions of individuals and launching a sovereign cloud infrastructure to ensure data security. The event concluded by urging organizations to accelerate from experimental pilots to high-impact deployments in sectors like healthcare and manufacturing to unlock the projected €600 billion economic potential.
- RAISE Summit15 min
Liran Zvibel, Cofounder, CEO of WEKA: Rise of the Token Economy The New Economics of AI
Scheduled for 2025, this event frames the fourth industrial revolution as the dawn of artificial general intelligence, shifting focus from pattern matching to reasoning models that distinguish true AGI capabilities from simple skill replication. Industry leaders and technical experts will address the critical economic divergence between massive training expenditures and the urgent need for cost-efficient inference, highlighting how latency and tokenomics currently dictate profitability. Strategic infrastructure solutions, including server elasticity and pre-fill disaggregation, will be presented as the essential mechanisms for enabling sustainable, just-in-time AI deployment while securing the industry's path to mass adoption.
- RAISE Summit17 min
Alex Laubscher, CTO of Windsurf: Engineering at the Speed of Change
Alex Laubscher, Dimitris Bontolos
Windsurf has transitioned from a basic coding tool to an AI agentic IDE, rapidly evolving to enable enterprises to write approximately 90% of their code while tackling complex legacy systems through advanced retrieval and memory capabilities. The platform supports this high-velocity adaptation by integrating design files, reducing project iteration times from months to days as seen with partners like Ferrovial, and targeting a 99% productivity increase in software engineering. To secure global enterprise adoption, the company recently established a Frankfurt data center to guarantee GDPR and FedRAMP compliance, ensuring data sovereignty for clients in sensitive sectors while preparing to scale from 100 to hundreds of large European organizations.