Latest Interviews
Showing 256–270 of 6,386 interview transcripts.
Clear all filters- Goldman Sachs20 min
Can Markets Withstand AI Risks, Fed Hikes, and Oil Shocks?
Tony Pasquariello, Josh Schiffrin, Dominic Wilson
Dominic and Josh analyze how supply shortages in AI infrastructure and geopolitical tensions in the Middle East are creating a complex investment environment driven by oil market friction and Federal Reserve policy shifts. While the S&P 500 remains near record highs, the duo warns that diverging market performance from lived economic reality, combined with intensifying inflation pressures and a move away from central bank guidance, signals potential volatility ahead. Consequently, they highlight a strategic pivot toward the long end of the yield curve and credit markets, suggesting that concentrated asset exposure is prudent as liquidity is expected to thin in the coming months.
- Y Combinator29 min
What Big Tech Missed And How Startups Can Still Win
Alexandre LeBrun, Zuckerberg, Jan, Alex
Ami Labs is raising approximately one billion euros in seed funding to develop foundational world models that train on sensory data rather than text, addressing the limitations of current large language models for robotics applications. Co-founded by Alex K. and Yann LeCun following their shared history at Meta and various startups, the Paris-based company aims to build general-purpose robots capable of operating safely in open environments by solving the compute bottlenecks and latency issues inherent in existing vision-language-action architectures. While the venture tackles the high capital demands of securing thousands of GPUs and top-tier talent, it operates under a strict strategic constraint where failure to deliver visible progress within two years could render the company unsustainable due to the intense external expectations created by the massive funding round.
- Y Combinator20 min
Why Physical AI Is the Next Platform Shift
Anchored, founded by former quantitative trader Eric Landau, constructs the data layer for physical AI by managing petabytes of multimodal data to power robotics and autonomous systems. After pivoting from healthcare vision to broader industrial applications, the company established a production-ready facility in the Bay Area and refined its sales culture through iterative hiring challenges. With the post-ChatGPT market accelerating demand for specialized physical AI infrastructure, Anchored now leads a crowded sector by offering scalable data collection that moves clients from proof-of-concept to enterprise production.
- All-In Podcast1h 34m
The Fight Over Open Source AI, Anthropic's $1.5B Payout, NYC Socialists: Evictions = Violence?
Chamath, Jason, Friedberg, David Sacks
Following Moonshot AI's release of the cost-effective open-source Kimi K3 model, US markets now face a 45% probability of a government ban on Chinese open-source software by 2026, a move critics like Chamath Palihapitiya and White House official David Saks argue would be regulatory capture by Anthropic to protect its $70 billion business. As Google and Tesla report massive capital expenditure increases driven by AI infrastructure while SpaceX faces post-IPO valuation drops, hosts warn that banning distillation techniques or enforcing strict KYC protocols would force American enterprises to pay a prohibitive "token tax" compared to global competitors. Meanwhile, Anthropic's recent $1.5 billion copyright settlement highlights a contradiction in their stance on IP theft, just as New York housing policies by Zohran Mamdani are predicted to reduce supply and worsen living conditions for tenants.
- Y Combinator30 min
What Top AI Labs Are Really Doing With Observability
Founded by IBM veterans Olivier Pomel and Alexi Laurent, Datadog disrupted the monitoring industry by merging Dev and Ops into a single platform, overcoming initial Y Combinator rejections and regional venture capital biases to achieve a 2019 IPO. Under a leadership philosophy that prioritizes direct customer engagement over written values, the company has expanded its product suite to serve top AI firms while executing a radical shift where engineers will primarily automate code generation within two quarters. This strategic pivot aims to drastically increase development velocity and reorganize the company around smaller, high-autonomy teams, even as it navigates post-lockup valuation volatility and the rapid evolution of AI-driven observability.
- RAISE Summit18 min
The Invisible Backbone of AI: Why Light Powers Intelligence | Lumentum | RAISE Summit 2026
Lumentum outlines a four-stage data center evolution from kilometer-scale interconnects to millimeter-level optical PCB integration, a shift driven by copper's inability to support 1.6 terabit speeds. This transition promises a 100 to 1,000-fold expansion in optical lanes, with scale-up rack integration expected by mid-2027 and commercial scale-in adoption projected by 2029. To meet the demand for hundreds of millions of lasers, the company has expanded Indium Phosphide wafer fabrication while strategic investments from NVIDIA secure supply for these critical semiconductor components.
- Y Combinator44 min
He Built the World's #1 Open-Source Coding Agent
Jay V, Gary Tan, Mark Mandelmann, Seth Vargoevic, Frank, Dax, Dylan Patel, Soyal, PG, Jay Poldinger
OpenCode, a sixteen-year-old platform founded by Jay Poldinger and Frank, has grown to 13 million monthly active users and processes 7 trillion daily tokens by serving as a neutral model harness that bypasses vendor lock-in. The company's strategy of supporting over 70 open-source models, which became critical after Anthropic restricted open usage, generated $160,000 in monthly subscription revenue and an estimated $33 million in inference revenue as of June. With significant adoption in China, Brazil, and the United States, OpenCode validates its product-market fit through enterprise organizations that proactively seek security agreements to integrate its agent loops into internal workflows.
BlackRock's Tony Kim on AI's Next Winners? Chips, Memory, Robotics & Quantum
Kim outlines a fundamental shift in the global technology sector where a $30 trillion hardware-centric economy is driven by a 10,000x increase in compute density and severe memory shortages known as the "Rampocalypse." Leading institutions are responding through silicon co-design and gigawatt-scale energy infrastructure while BlackRock allocates capital toward immediate compute needs and long-term bets on quantum and orbital data centers. The narrative concludes with strategic observations on China's robotics acceleration and the restructuring of traditional enterprises into AI-native entities through proprietary token flow architectures.
- Goldman Sachs12 min
Are Hedge Funds Still Bullish on AI Stocks?
Vincent Lin, Chris Hussey, Vinny Lin
Following a historic 32% drawdown in high-beta momentum strategies, the market has stabilized as hedge funds reduced semiconductor exposure from record levels while managing a four-fold surge in volatility. Despite the sharp correction driven by heavy selling pressure in technology sectors, equity funds have maintained healthy returns and are currently repositioning near median exposure to capitalize on dipping AI infrastructure valuations. Analysts now advise utilizing limited-loss option structures to navigate upcoming earnings for mega-cap hyperscalers, while monitoring the risk of rising stock correlations that could undermine the current low-correlation alpha opportunities.
- Y Combinator22 min
How Photoroom Trained Themselves To Dream Bigger
PhotoRoom, the largest Y Combinator company headquartered in Europe, leveraged a strategic pivot to e-commerce photography to achieve 300 million downloads and serve major clients like Amazon and Uber. Its founders attribute this exponential growth to a cultural shift fostered by YC, which replaced European risk aversion with a "failure-safe" mindset that treats a billion-dollar valuation as an attainable target. By enforcing English-only offices, prioritizing deep vertical focus, and utilizing aggressive resource constraints, the company instilled a mandatory ambition across its team to drive rapid scaling and execution speed.
- Y Combinator2 min
Scientists Are Built for Startups
Arvind Veluvali, Ayman Saleh, Dima Yanovsky
The speaker leverages their experience engineering fungus-based materials and simulating the NASA Perseverance rover to argue that scientists, particularly those from structured space agencies, possess the ideal mindset for startup entrepreneurship. Contrasting NASA's rigid, decade-long project lifecycles with the high-pressure, iterative environment of seed-stage ventures, the speaker demonstrates that technical feasibility and the willingness to conduct long-term experiments are more critical than formal business training. Ultimately, the presentation posits that researchers accustomed to managing massive-scale contractor coordination and undefined success metrics are uniquely prepared to lead new ventures despite the inherent risks.
- Stanford Online56 min
Stanford MS&E435 Economics of the AI Supercycle | Spring 2026 | The GPU Economy
Sunny Madra, Brad Gerstner, Apoorv Agrawal
Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital and Grok co-founder Sonny Maduro outline a transformative shift where AI distribution costs are now compute-intensive, driving the integration of deterministic architecture with Nvidia's GPU ecosystem to accelerate inference. This strategic fusion, which led to Nvidia's $20 billion acquisition of Grok, enables a 2.5x increase in token generation while addressing critical power and memory constraints to support the transition from chat-based tools to autonomous agents. As the industry approaches Artificial General Intelligence faster than anticipated, the convergence of these hardware innovations and emerging regulatory frameworks aims to redefine global economic output and the future value of human labor.
- The Economist7 min
Elon Musk on Europe, the far right and civil war in Britain | The Economist
Elon Musk, Zanny Minton Beddoes
Elon Musk and an interviewer clashed over the classification of his political views and his claims that civil war in Britain is inevitable due to demographic shifts. While Musk defended his promotion of a film depicting vigilante violence and rejected accusations of racism by citing his personal relationships, the interviewer challenged his assertions with crime statistics and labeled his influence on UK politics as irresponsible and based on a distorted American perception. Despite Musk's dismissal of his critics as a minority, the discussion highlighted a fundamental disagreement over his role in shaping public discourse and the validity of his warnings regarding Western safety and immigration.
- RAISE Summit21 min
Energy and AI: Sustainable, Sovereign Industrial Campuses | Alain Wilmouth, 2CRSi | RAISE 2026
2CRSI advances its direct liquid cooling technology through the ITER consortium to power a French AI gigafactory while addressing energy mandates and carbon sovereignty via biomass gasification. The company plans to scale operations from 42 to 400 megawatts across 17 decentralized European sites by 2030, offering on-premise infrastructure that protects intellectual property against geopolitical restrictions. This strategy leverages unused agricultural land to generate jobs and targets space-deployable server models, positioning the firm as a leader in sustainable, sovereign high-performance computing.
- RAISE Summit20 min
Fireside Chat with William Falcon & Ozan Kaya of Lightning AI | RAISE Summit 2026
William Falcon, Ozan Kaya, Olivier Huez, Will
Following a rapid expansion to 160 employees, Voltage Park merged with Lightning.ai to transition from a GPU-as-a-service provider into a full-stack platform serving Gen AI enterprises. This combination integrates 24,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs across six data centers with Will's software tooling to help clients own their open-source models rather than relying on hyperscalers. The strategic alliance addresses the market gap for dedicated compute, prioritizing high-uptime infrastructure and digital sovereignty for customers like Cursor.