Latest Interviews

How SpaceX's $3trn valuation affects the whole market | The Economist

Josh Roberts, Rosie Blau

Elon Musk bypassed traditional roadshows to directly announce a $135 per share IPO that briefly valued SpaceX at $3 trillion, instantly making him the world's first trillionaire. The offering allocated 20% of shares to retail investors and raised an additional $25 billion in debt, though the stock subsequently corrected by one-third as the company relies on future revenue streams from AI and space tourism rather than current profits. While initial speculation was driven by Musk's personal influence and a manic market sentiment toward growth stocks, long-term exposure for the general public will likely increase once the company enters major indices like the S&P 500.

What does the next training paradigm look like?

Current AI labs are betting on scaling reinforcement learning to achieve AGI, though the field faces significant stagnation in "computer use" tasks due to the lack of deterministic, replayable web simulators. While proponents argue that extended context windows can substitute for weight updates, critics point to performance degradation in long-horizon scenarios and the inefficiency of discarding inference data without feedback loops. To overcome these barriers, researchers are exploring On-Policy Self-Distillation and simulated "dreaming" to accumulate tacit knowledge from real-world deployment, aiming to shift future progress from pre-training toward continuous, weight-based learning.

Emma Grede on Building Iconic Brands and the Inspiration Behind 'Start with Yourself'

Emma Grede, Kim Posnett

Entrepreneur Emma Greed challenges conventional views on networking and work-life balance, advocating instead for resilience built on professional excellence and the acceptance of life's fluctuating "seasons." In her book *Start With Yourself*, she urges leaders to discard the "self-made" myth, embrace strict trade-offs based on core principles, and prioritize financial fluency to navigate AI-driven disruption. By promoting a mindset that separates personal identity from risk outcomes and values team assembly over individual heroics, Greed offers a pragmatic roadmap for sustainable success and equitable power acquisition.

Brian Armstrong: Rebuilding Coinbase Around Intelligence

Brian Armstrong, Molly O’Shea

Coinbase is launching tokenized equities to democratize access to U.S. stocks for four billion unbrokered users while deploying a network of 1,200 AI agents to drive engineering productivity and financial advisory services. CEO Brian Armstrong outlines a strategic pivot toward an "Everything Exchange" that merges global liquidity with pre-IPO markets, aiming to protect wealth against inflation by enabling a 24/7 agentic economy. This initiative unifies regulatory compliance with advanced infrastructure to replace traditional accredited investor barriers with accessible financial literacy pathways and a proprietary, human-in-the-loop AI architecture.

Why US Stocks Could Climb Higher

John Flood, Chris Hussey

Goldman Sachs Head of US Equity Sales Trading John Flood characterizes the current market as a "buy dip" environment driven by record-breaking trading volumes and robust earnings momentum that has lifted the S&P 500 toward the 8,000 mark. Key supply-side dynamics, including $140 billion in recent IPOs and broadened corporate buyback activity, are offsetting sector rotation into semiconductor stocks while institutional investors continue to dominate demand. Despite macroeconomic risks centered on potential interest rate hikes, the prevailing outlook remains bullish with a strategic preference for high-momentum assets in the United States and Asian markets.

8 Figures on a Design Doc

Jacob Baskin

Before launching its "Superstore" system, Jane Street authorized a small team to purchase 10 petabytes of storage appliances for approximately $80 million based solely on a design document. This rapid, high-stakes capital expenditure of eight figures, which starkly contrasts with the centralized allocation processes the decision-maker previously encountered at Google, highlights the firm's unique operational agility. The speaker describes this unprecedented scale of immediate spending as both impressive and nervously significant for an organization of its size.

Author Talk: Arthur C. Brooks, "The Meaning of Your Life" | Global Conference 2026

Arthur C. Brooks, Conrad Kiechel

Arthur Brooks, the author of a recent bestseller and former Harvard professor, addresses a psychogenic epidemic of mental distress by attributing rising loneliness and anxiety to a societal over-reliance on technology and "left-brain" complexity at the expense of human connection and "right-brain" meaning. Drawing on neurobiological research and logotherapy, Brooks advocates for a three-step digital detox and a shift toward vertical and lateral transcendence to reclaim fulfillment, arguing that lasting satisfaction stems from managing desire and cultivating relationships rather than chasing the elusive goal of happiness. His analysis further distinguishes between the damaging pursuit of "specialness" and the liberating reality that love is an unearned gift, offering a framework for individuals to navigate the AI-driven economy by prioritizing complex human problems over complicated technical solutions.

Zynga Founder: Consumer Is Not Investible Right Now - Thats Why You Should Build It

Mark Pincus, Garry

Mark Pincus identifies the current era as a third computing revolution driven by AI agents capable of acting as trusted peers, with a predicted consumer revolution expected by 2029 as inference costs plummet. He outlines a "Proven Better New" product framework and a "squandering" R&D strategy that encourages founders to leverage high-current compute costs to build infrastructure for a future of unlimited intelligence. Pincus argues that while the market gap between technological possibility and affordability remains an "abyss," the window to establish generational businesses is now, provided leaders maintain "Founder Mode" and apply backward design thinking.

Germany’s army chief on AI, drones and the future of the tank | The Economist

Lieutenant General Christian Freuding, Shashank Joshi

German land forces are prioritizing five critical capability gaps, including indirect fires, electronic warfare, and AI-enabled command and control, to support a future where tanks serve as manned "motherships" for unmanned systems. Concurrently, military strategists are treating data as a vital ammunition reserve that requires automated exploitation to overcome human processing limits on the modern battlefield. This transition faces significant NATO-wide debate regarding the optimal balance between emerging technologies and legacy platforms, a tension recently highlighted by high-profile resignations in the UK defense ministry over innovation concerns.

DeepSeek Raises at $50B | The Rise of Open Source vs OpenAI & Anthropic | OpenAI Builds Own Chip

Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings

Generational DeepMind researchers Noam Shazeer and John Jumper recently defected to Anthropic to escape bureaucratic constraints, highlighting a market shift where top talent prioritizes autonomy over massive financial packages. Simultaneously, China's DeepSeek secured $7.4 billion with exclusive state voting rights to drive AI sovereignty, while its open-source models are closing the performance gap with US closed-source competitors and threatening the profitability of the industry's middle tier. Amidst this geopolitical and technological realignment, hyperscalers face a $725 billion infrastructure spend against a $100 billion revenue gap, forcing a pivot toward strict ROI verification and labor displacement to justify future trillion-dollar investments.

Billionaire's WARNING: I'm SELLING. The Crash Is Already Here!

Jeremy Grantham

Renowned investor Jeremy Grantham warns of an imminent AI and U.S. equity bubble, urging investors to shift 60-70% of portfolios into non-U.S. markets while rejecting cryptocurrencies and speculating on SpaceX's future. Beyond market cycles, Grantham highlights collapsing global fertility rates driven by endocrine-disrupting chemicals and extreme wealth inequality that he believes will inevitably trigger a violent economic reset. To navigate this projected crisis, he advises prioritizing practical survival skills, avoiding toxic environments, and relocating to nations with stronger social safety nets while preparing for a contraction in global prosperity.

Rewriting the Rules: Scaling Innovation for Rare Diseases | Global Conference 2026

Becky Quick, Nicola Blackwood, David Fajgenbaum, Michael Hund, Neil Kumar, William H. Lewis

Panelists including David, Will Osborn, and Michael discussed how AI-driven repurposing of generic drugs and patient-led "venture cure" models are accelerating the discovery of treatments for the over 300 million people globally affected by rare diseases. The dialogue highlighted transformative regulatory shifts, such as the UK's newborn sequencing trials and FDA-authorized umbrella CRISPR studies, which aim to bypass traditional trial inefficiencies while addressing barriers like pricing models that stifle global drug launches. Ultimately, the event concluded that converging data infrastructure with proactive patient advocacy is essential to de-risk development and deliver rapid therapeutic interventions for currently untreatable conditions.

Building a Data Warehouse From Scratch with Jacob Baskin

Jacob Baskin, Ron

Jacob Baskin's career spans mechanism design research at Brown, building real-time ad exchanges at Google, and attempting to digitize urban parking infrastructure. At Jane Street, he engineered the SuperStore distributed database to replace legacy monoliths and designed the auction-based resource allocation system for the massive Hive compute cluster. His current work focuses on refining these mechanisms by addressing utility gaps in bidding models and implementing scalable data distribution architectures to support large-scale machine learning and simulation tasks.

Memory and Continual Learning: Engram's Dan Biderman and Jessy Lin

Dan Biderman, Jessy Lin, Sonya Huang, Shaun Maguire

Ngram addresses the scalability and cognitive limitations of current retrieval-augmented generation by training custom, continually learning models directly within workspace environments. This approach utilizes adapter fine-tuning to internalize organizational knowledge into model weights, reducing inference token consumption by a factor of 100 while enabling true intuition rather than static fact retrieval. By shifting the focus from pre-training generic AI to perpetual, private adaptation, the platform aims to create personalized neural interfaces that evolve alongside a team's data.

Stanford MS&E435 Economics of the AI Supercycle | Spring 2026 | Applications, Coding AI

Guillermo Rauch, Apoorv Agrawal

Vercel, a $9.3 billion infrastructure firm founded by Guillermo Rauch, is pivoting its business model from standard web pages to "agentic infrastructure" to support the exponential growth of AI coding agents and token-based consumption. The company leverages a full-stack approach anchored in open source frameworks like Next.js, enabling enterprises such as Meta and Notion to deploy self-driving cloud capabilities that automate software configuration and security. This strategic shift, which has driven a threefold growth rate since October 2024, positions Vercel as the dominant platform for high-velocity, agent-generated code while redefining industry pricing and deployment standards.