Latest Interviews

Software Tools To Make Robots

Robotics is approaching a pivotal moment as foundation models overcome historical barriers of cost and environmental fragility, enabling robust real-world performance in sectors like industrial inspection and autonomous agriculture. Immediate commercial traction is evident through acquisitions such as John Deere's purchase of Bear Flag Robotics, validating the B2B market over consumer applications. Capitalizing on this maturation, the sector is actively securing funding for software toolkits while investors signal strong bullish sentiment to support founders building the next generation of capable machines.

A Conversation with US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent | Global Conference 2025

Scott Bessent, Richard Ditizio, Michael Milken

The 28th annual Milken Institute Global Conference convened 1,000 speakers under the theme "Toward a Flourishing Future" to address critical resource gaps in health, connectivity, and global wealth distribution while urging for inclusive coalitions to bridge societal divides. Concurrently, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent outlined the Trump administration's economic agenda, which prioritizes trade tariffs to boost domestic manufacturing, a "big beautiful bill" of tax cuts and deregulation, and an aggressive strategy to lower the federal deficit by 1% annually. The administration further signaled a shift toward "safe, sound, and smart" financial regulation, strategic partnerships with Ukraine, and a focus on maintaining U.S. dominance in AI and quantum computing to foster a "new golden age" of prosperity.

Will Open Source AI Overtake Closed Models? Ft. Olama, Fireworks and Open Router

Jeff Morgan, Dmytro Dzhulgakov, Alex Atallah, Dima, Matthew Walkerman

Industry leaders from Ollama, Fireworks, and OpenRouter advocate for a balanced future where open-source and closed-source models each command 50% of inference tokens, driven by the strategic advantages of decentralized innovation and lower capital barriers. While current open adoption sits at 30%, panelists predict this share will expand as foundational models improve through reinforcement learning and enterprises prioritize ownership of proprietary fine-tuned artifacts. This shift relies critically on sustainable decentralized inference infrastructure to compete against the entrenched advantages of large, closed-source providers.

AI for Residential Security

Despite the commercial security sector achieving disruptive growth through AI-driven facial recognition and virtual guards deployed by firms like Verkada and Lumana, the stagnant $20 billion global residential market remains dominated by legacy hardware. The $1 billion acquisition of Ring highlighted the immense value of connected video sensors, yet a critical gap persists in applying advanced artificial intelligence to residential safety. This event focuses on the significant opportunity for a new entrant to leverage AI capabilities and transform the static residential home security landscape into a proactive, intelligent safety ecosystem.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman on Building the ‘Core AI Subscription’ for Your Life

Sam Altman, Jens Nordvigsen, DAN GALPIN, SAM SACCONE

OpenAI has evolved from a 14-person research lab into a commercial powerhouse driven by the GPT-3 API and the viral ChatGPT platform, which now serves 500 million weekly active users. Under Sam Altman's leadership, the organization prioritizes high-impact small teams and a vision of becoming a personalized AI operating system while navigating a market where startups outpace legacy enterprises in agility. The company's roadmap emphasizes the transition from text-based assistants to autonomous agents by 2025, with future infrastructure expected to facilitate seamless agent-to-agent communication and eventual robotics applications.

20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund with Immad Akhund

Immad Akhund, Harry Stebbings

After closing a $26 million institutional fund with a 60/40 split of Fund of Funds and entrepreneur limited partners, Harry expanded his portfolio strategy to target 60 diverse companies while integrating Yash Doshi as a full-time operating partner. Drawing on over 350 prior angel investments and lessons from successes like TrueBill and the regret of rejecting Scale AI, Harry advocates for a "decahorn" hunting approach that prioritizes serial founders and accepts high valuations to preserve optionality. Looking forward, the fund is shifting allocations toward hard tech and AI while positioning Mercury for a $2.5 trillion integrated banking market, with plans to scale the portfolio to 150 companies and potentially lead seed rounds.

The cases for and against AGI by 2030 (article by Benjamin Todd)

Benjamin Todd, Dominic Armstrong, Ben Cordell

Major AI leaders including Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis have drastically compressed their projected timelines for Artificial General Intelligence to the 2026–2030 window, driven by breakthroughs in reinforcement learning, test-time compute, and agent scaffolding that outpace historical hardware growth. While scaling trajectories suggest GPT-6 size capabilities are affordable by 2028, the race faces critical bottlenecks in energy infrastructure, research talent, and funding that could stall progress before 2030 or trigger explosive economic acceleration if overcome. Experts now estimate a 50% probability of transformative AI emerging within a decade, making the next five years a decisive period for career adaptation and strategic planning.

AI AGENTS DEBATE: These Jobs Won't Exist In 24 Months!

Amjad Masad, Bret Weinstein, Daniel Priestley

A panel of experts identifies autonomous AI agents as a new, unpredictable species that is exponentially increasing operational duration and dismantling traditional economic moats. This rapid evolution threatens immediate displacement of both routine and high-skill professions while simultaneously enabling small teams to achieve massive leverage, creating a stark divide between those who can orchestrate AI swarms and those who cannot. As the technology outpaces global regulation, the consensus warns of a perilous "adaptive valley" marked by social inequality, existential risks like autonomous weapons, and a potential demographic collapse before humanity reaches a state of abundance.

Healthcare AI

With administrative tasks consuming roughly one-third of the US healthcare system's $4 trillion annual budget, a new wave of startups has emerged to solve the interoperability crisis caused by absent APIs. These companies are building specialized infrastructure to extract, organize, and integrate data from disparate systems, effectively creating the foundational layer needed for broader data integration. This emerging ecosystem aims to drastically reduce the $1 trillion in wasted administrative spending by enabling secondary startups to address complex data connectivity issues.

Google's Jeff Dean on the Coming Transformations in AI

Jeff Dean, Bill Korn

This presentation outlines the trajectory of deep learning from its 2012 scaling breakthroughs toward a future of multi-modal agents and physical robotics capable of performing thousands of tasks within two years. It details a converging industry landscape where a handful of foundational models drive a secondary ecosystem of efficient, specialized architectures supported by Google's upcoming Ironwood TPU generation and Pathways system. The discussion further projects how these advancements will revolutionize scientific discovery, democratize virtual engineering through junior-level AI assistants, and reshape economic structures via dynamic compute allocation.

Open Evidence Captures Doctors’ Collective Wisdom with AI ft. Zachary Ziegler

Zachary Ziegler, Zach

OpenEvidence, a medical search tool used daily by over 25% of US physicians, recently enabled an internal medicine doctor to successfully manage an in-flight emergency for an immunocompromised cancer patient without diverting the aircraft. By synthesizing current literature and CDC data, the platform confirmed the patient did not require immediate intervention and provided a targeted treatment protocol that ensured a positive outcome upon landing. Building on this high-volume, real-time performance, the company is now expanding into direct workflow integration and developing an Aggregate Clinical Wisdom initiative to encode expert consensus from top specialists across various fields.

AI Personal Tutor for Everyone

Grant Sanderson

Building on JCR Licklider's 1960s concept of human-computer symbiosis, the initiative leverages modern multimodal reasoning models to deliver the interactive, step-by-step visualizations and voice explanations seen in benchmarks like 3Blue1Brown. This approach overcomes historical limitations by offering true personalization that decomposes complex topics into accessible formats for every learner with basic internet access. The project concludes with an open invitation for developers of AI tools to collaborate in realizing a vision where high-quality, personalized tutoring is universally available.

AI Personal Assistant

Driven by recent advances in Large Language Models, a new class of AI personal assistants is emerging to transform static task lists into automated execution systems that act as full-fledged chief of staff. These advanced tools leverage deep contextual understanding of a user's correspondence, scheduling, and work routines to independently handle emails, calendar management, and recurring processes while maintaining user approval controls. The initiative seeks strategic collaboration with startups to bring this executive assistance technology to market, ultimately offloading operational burdens so users can dedicate their attention exclusively to high-value strategic work.

Fed Hesitates on Tariffs, The New Mag 7, Death of VC, Google's Value in a Post-Search World

Philippe Laffont, Jason, Friedberg, Chamath Palihapiti, Jake Allen

During the Miami F1 Summit and Shiso Restaurant visit, hosts of the *All In* podcast engaged with high-profile guests like Sergey Brin and Tony Robbins while highlighting a $19,000 dining incident where owner Chamath waived the bill. The team outlined logistical plans for the 2025 All-In Summit in Los Angeles and analyzed complex macroeconomic factors including Federal Reserve rate decisions, tariff impacts, and antitrust regulations. Furthermore, the discussion detailed the launch of KOTU Management, a new $1.3 billion interval fund backed by Bezos and Dell families designed to invest in a "new Mag 7" across AI, robotics, and autonomous transport sectors.

“Long stocks, short bonds”

Anshul Sehgal, Chris Hussey

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell prioritized stabilizing the domestic labor market while the central bank maintained current interest rates amidst stagflation risks and uncertain tariff impacts. The administration projects $300 billion in annual tariff revenue alongside increased spending, creating a fiscal environment that pressures the dollar and drives a strategic shift toward long equities and short bonds. Investors are compressing their trading horizons to hourly assessments as they navigate high volatility driven by potential job losses and the first significant inflation data release in July.