Latest Interviews

Mapping the Mind of a Neural Net: Goodfire’s Eric Ho on the Future of Interpretability

Eric Ho, Sonya Huang, Roelof Botha

Founded by Eric Ho, Goodfire is an independent AI interpretability firm utilizing mechanistic techniques to transform neural networks from opaque black boxes into surgically editable systems. The company has secured strategic investment from Anthropic and assembled a team including former DeepMind and OpenAI researchers to develop tools like the "Ember" interface, which allows for precise latent space manipulation. Operating on the prediction that full neural decoding will be achieved by 2028, Goodfire applies these capabilities to diverse fields ranging from genomic analysis with the Arc Institute to legal auditing and enterprise automation.

The Real Moat

The startup sector faces a critical juncture where founders must balance personal branding with substantive venture building to avoid relevance loss. Success is increasingly defined by a specific archetypal profile combining elite engineering proficiency with exclusive, deep domain knowledge to secure localized competitive moats. This narrow niche of multibillion-dollar founders leverages specialized software tailored to specific audience segments to maintain long-term market dominance.

Author Talk: Jonathan Haidt, "The Anxious Generation" | Global Conference 2025

Jonathan Haidt, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Conrad Kieschel

At the Milken Institute Global Conference, social psychologists Jonathan Haidt and California First Lady Jennifer Siebel Newsom addressed the youth mental health crisis by identifying the 2012 shift to smartphones as the primary driver of surging depression, anxiety, and social skill atrophy among teenagers. They advocated for four specific policy norms—delaying smartphone access until high school, mandating phone-free schools, raising the age of internet adulthood to 16, and promoting unsupervised free play—to counter the addictive designs of tech giants and facilitate proper neurodevelopment. The session concluded with a call for collective community action and a "mother's rebellion" to enforce these boundaries, aiming to restore physical interaction and resilience for future generations.

Big Beautiful Bill, Elon/Trump, Dollar Down Big, Harvard's Money Problems, Figma IPO

Elon, Trump, Friedberg, David Sacks

The fourth All-In Summit scheduled for September 7 will feature Elon Musk alongside potential trillion-dollar market cap leaders, occurring amidst intense debates over the Senate-passed "Big Beautiful Bill" and its controversial removal of federal AI preemption and renewable energy tax credits. While the legislation triggers concerns about a fragmented regulatory landscape and economic instability, the event highlights shifting dynamics between Musk and President Trump regarding fiscal responsibility and a potential new political alignment. Concurrently, the summit context includes discussions on the Trump administration's grant cuts to Harvard, the evolving higher education sector due to AI disruption, and a surge in SaaS M&A and IPO activity driven by robust market liquidity.

Why a16z Bet $15 Million on THIS Controversial Startup

Bryan Kim, Roy Lee, Molly O'Shea

Brian Kim secured a $15 million investment in Cluely by leveraging a "momentum as a moat" strategy that prioritizes velocity and personal rapport over traditional fundraising pitches. His investment thesis for the AI era emphasizes rapid scaling and efficiency, as evidenced by his high-velocity deals with 11 Labs and Function Health while navigating regulatory headwinds regarding deepfakes. Kim argues that the current technology landscape requires building "in the plane as it falls," with companies achieving profitability through smaller teams and massive growth trajectories.

Commodities Outlook: What’s Driving Oil, Gold, and Base Metals

Daan Struyven, Alison Nathan

Goldman Sachs forecasts a divergent commodity outlook for the second half of the year, projecting oil prices to decline $10 per barrel amidst global supply surpluses while anticipating gold to reach $4,000 per ounce driven by record central bank accumulation. The firm identifies significant upside for U.S. copper due to imminent tariff-induced supply tightness and rising defense-related demand, contrasting sharply with a structural peak in Chinese oil consumption. These macro trends position fiscal spending and energy diversification as primary drivers, favoring industrial metals over traditional energy assets despite recent geopolitical volatility.

Fei-Fei Li: Spatial Intelligence is the Next Frontier in AI

Fei-Fei Li, Diana, Alex, Karl, Yashna, Annie

Dr. Fei-Fei Li, founder and CEO of World Labs, leads a team of renowned technologists to develop spatial intelligence and 3D "world models" as the essential pathway to achieving Artificial General Intelligence. The venture addresses the unique mathematical and physical complexities of reconstructing and generating the three-dimensional world, distinguishing its approach from current language-centric large language models. By combining rigorous data quality standards with a focus on fundamental, interdisciplinary research, the company aims to power next-generation applications ranging from the metaverse to advanced scientific discovery.

Why Voice Will Be the Fundamental Interface for Tech ft ElevenLabs’ Mati Staniszewski

Mati Staniszewski, Pat Grady

Founded in late 2021 by co-founders Piotr and Maddie Staniszewski, ElevenLabs distinguishes itself through a specialized architecture that predicts acoustic output to capture nuanced emotion and tone. The remote company leverages a global team of research engineers and specialized voice coaches to deliver high-fidelity speech synthesis used in healthcare, customer support, and interactive education platforms like Chess.com. With a strategic focus on achieving human-level interaction by 2025, the firm prioritizes low-latency infrastructure and proactive safety measures to enable universal translation and ambient computing.

AI for Scientific Discovery

Sam Altman

The speaker forecasts the emergence of unimaginable super intelligence within a 10-to-20-year horizon, positioning artificial intelligence for science as the primary catalyst for this trajectory. This technological acceleration is expected to fundamentally drive long-term economic growth and human well-being by rapidly increasing the rate of new scientific discovery. Such breakthroughs, combined with reasonably effective global governance, will compound to produce incredible increases and wonders for the world's population.

David Friedberg Reacts to Zohran Mamdani’s NYC Mayoral Run

David Friedberg, Zohran Mamdani, Chamath, Jason, Nick, Sax

Assemblyman Zoryn Mamdani defeated former Governor Andrew Cuomo to secure the New York Democratic nomination, capitalizing on a 39-point margin among college-educated voters. Mamdani's victory platform centers on aggressive socialist policies, including a $30 minimum wage, police defunding, and free public transit, driven by a demographic shift caused by $1.5 trillion in student debt. While analysts project this trend will reshape the national political landscape toward socialism, critics warn of economic collapse and capital flight similar to the "doom spirals" observed in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Author Susan Morrison, "Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live" | Global Conference 2025

Susan Morrison, Lorne, Laraine Newman

Susan Morrison's biography *Saturday Night* chronicles Lorne Michaels' decade-long evolution of *Saturday Night Live* from a conservative variety show into a global franchise that balances alternative comedy with broad national appeal. The narrative highlights how Michaels' management philosophy evolved from personal trauma-induced non-confrontation to a "sports franchise" model, emphasizing operational flexibility, mentorship strategies like *Weekend Update* for new talent, and a strict hierarchy to manage host egos during the high-pressure final dress rehearsal. This deep dive into Michaels' "friendship economy" and adaptive leadership explains the show's thirty-plus year longevity and its successful international licensing, which requires navigating diverse cultural standards while maintaining the show's core identity.

12 Day War, Socialism Wins in NYC, Stocks All-Time High, AI Copyright, Science Corner

Zohran Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg

Mark Ruto's private launch of the All-in Tequila, featuring poker-chip-inspired packaging and barrels aged in American oak, coincided with a deep dive into President Trump's "Operation Midnight Hammer" against Iran's nuclear sites and the surprising primary victory of socialist candidate Zoran Mamdani in the New York mayoral race. The discussion further examined Federal Reserve interest rate debates amid record NASDAQ highs, legal rulings establishing that AI pre-training on copyrighted text constitutes legal fair use, and breakthrough research from China demonstrating significant age reversal in monkeys via FOXO3 gene expression.

How AI Will Impact Emergency Response: The Tech That Could Soon Save Your Life w/ Michael Chime

Michael Chime, Kimberly Tan

Prepared is an AI assistant platform currently deployed across 6,000 US 911 centers that automates non-emergency workflows and augments emergency response with real-time transcription, translation, and quality assurance. Founded by an industry veteran who recognized critical infrastructure gaps in legacy dispatch systems, the company has scaled to process over 20 million calls annually after securing $130 million in Series C funding. By offloading mundane tasks and filling capability gaps such as language barriers, the system allows operators to function more like air traffic controllers while maintaining strict data privacy compliance.

Legendary Consumer VC Predicts The Future Of AI Products

Kirsten Green, Gary

The event analyzes the rapid consumer adoption of conversational AI as a platform shift driving a transition toward emotional operating systems that prioritize long-term user relationships over mere utility. Industry leaders and investors highlight critical strategies for navigating this landscape, including the necessity of product-led growth, the emergence of voice interfaces, and emerging investment opportunities in proactive health, wellness, and personal security sectors. Ultimately, the discussion outlines a future where successful startups leverage generative AI's continuous learning capabilities to build specialized, category-defining experiences rather than relying on generic chat interfaces.

Former Microsoft Executive Explains Where We Are in the AI Cycle w/ Anish Acharya & Steven Sinofsky

Anish Acharya, Steven Sinofsky, Erik Torenberg, Stephen

The discussion characterizes the current AI industry as an emerging "64K IBM PC" era where foundational integration challenges and "jagged intelligence" prevent seamless tool replacement, contrasting the prototyping struggles of "vibe coding" with the near-autonomy achievable in "vibe writing." Experts outline a decade-long timeline for true agentification, distinguishing high-judgment domains like medicine that resist automation from lower-stakes tasks where AI now functions effectively as a specialized editor rather than a full creator. While historical parallels suggest inevitable over-promising, the analysis concludes that legacy giants like Google must pivot their internal contexts to survive, acknowledging that future success will rely on broader content accessibility and the human capacity to manage ambiguity rather than total machine autonomy.