Latest Interviews
Showing 181–195 of 3,131 interview transcripts.
Clear all filters- The Economist16 min
Who will be California’s next governor? | The Economist
Charlotte Howard, James Bennet, Aryn Braun, Tom Steyer, Xavier Becerra, Steve Hilton
A contentious California gubernatorial runoff looms as a referendum on the state's affordability crisis, featuring progressive challenger Tom Steyer's aggressive advertising campaign against incumbent Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton's tax-cut proposal backed by Donald Trump. Critics argue that decades of co-opted ballot measures and structural fiscal deficits under Governor Gavin Newsom have driven out-migration and created recurring budget holes, fueling a narrative of state dysfunction that Republicans hope to exploit for a rare statewide victory. The election outcome will ultimately determine whether voters prioritize the status quo or support significant policy shifts intended to reverse California's economic decline and reverse its demographic power loss in Congress.
- All-In Podcast32 min
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar: IPO, AI Rivalries, New Device, and Spending $100B+ on Compute
OpenAI's CFO Sarah Fryer announced a historic $122 billion fundraising round and detailed a strategic pivot toward a 50-50 split between consumer and enterprise revenue while managing a global compute deficit through a $1 billion Michigan data center and diversified cloud partnerships. With ChatGPT serving over 900 million weekly users and a new "agentic" hardware interface set for release, the company aims to leverage vast user data to build a potent advertising model that prioritizes user intent and memory without compromising output neutrality. Looking ahead to 2030, OpenAI projects that rising infrastructure costs will be offset by improved model efficiency, maintaining its position as a single foundational AI utility across multiple global markets.
- 80,000 Hours2h 48m
I lead AGI safety at Google DeepMind – here's the view from the inside | Rohin Shah
Rohin Shah argues that catastrophic AI misalignment is not an inevitable default outcome, contending that current training trajectories and prosaic alignment techniques offer a high probability of success against plausible but non-inevitable risks like deceptive alignment. He advocates for nuanced governance through third-party expert audits and internal safety teams rather than rigid public commitments, noting that corporate constraints often drive apathy rather than active opposition to safety measures. Shah concludes that the field should prioritize concrete, implementable solutions and competent personnel over theoretical frameworks, projecting a gradual timeline for intelligence explosions while dismissing the notion that immediate, hyperbolic growth will render safety efforts obsolete.
- Goldman Sachs26 min
The AI Investment Boom: When Will It Pay Off?
Jim Covello, Alison Nathan, George Lee
In a Goldman Sachs Exchanges episode recorded on May 26, 2026, Jim Cabello and George Lee analyze the divergence between surging AI technology and unproven economic returns. Cabello admits previous misjudgments regarding consumer adoption and hyperscaler spending patterns while warning that the current exclusive profitability of semiconductor firms creates an unsustainable market dynamic. The dialogue concludes that without evidence of enterprise-scale profitability within the next two years, the industry faces a potential correction where hyperscaler stocks are poised to outperform if capital expenditure moderates or profit distribution shifts upstream.
Why Impulse Raised $500M to Move Things in Space | President & COO Eric Romo
Impulse Space has secured a $500 million Series D investment led by 137 Ventures and Banner VC to expand its workforce and manufacturing capacity for the Helios commercial upper stage and the Mira defense vehicle. The company is pivoting its Mira product from a commercial orbital tug to a rapid-repositioning asset for the U.S. Space Force, addressing national security needs by countering adversary satellite constellations in geostationary orbit. With funding allocated to support a production rate of one Mira unit per month and initiate Helios missions next year, Impulse aims to deliver direct-to-GEO transfers that significantly reduce operational costs while leveraging a vertical integration strategy learned from SpaceX.
"We Don't Trust Agents" - What This CTO Knows That You Don't
Shensi Ding, Gil Feig, Molly O’Shea
Merge leverages a three-product suite to power core search and AI connectivity for major enterprise clients like OpenAI and Netflix, maintaining high-reliability SLAs while pivoting its business model toward AI-driven infrastructure. The company aggressively internalizes AI adoption across all departments to accelerate development and defend against sophisticated, automated security threats that plague the industry. Looking ahead, Merge aims to capitalize on the enterprise shift toward headless, agent-managed operations by prioritizing cash efficiency and production-grade governance over speculative valuation multiples.
- Jane Street1h 35m
The Network as a Program with Nate Foster
Nate Foster, a professor at EPFL and visiting researcher at Jane Street, bridges programming languages and networking by advocating for treating networks as verifiable programs through formal methods and Domain Specific Languages like Netcat and P4. His work has evolved from foundational theories on bidirectional data conversion to practical industrial applications, including the Butane system which compiles high-level latency policies into safe, distributed BGP configurations to replace error-prone manual router management. Foster's approach combines algebraic analysis of routing semantics with a software engineering culture that prioritizes rigorous testing and visualization, enabling complex network modifications while challenging traditional end-to-end principles in favor of in-network computing for specialized workloads.
- Bank of America22 min
Inflation and the inflation markets
Mark Capleton, Stephen Juneau, Alessandro Infelise-Zhou, Meghan Swiber
Strategists attribute the current surge in US inflation to Iran-related energy shocks, supply chain pressures, and AI-driven capital expenditure, while noting weaker fiscal stimulus compared to the pandemic era has kept demand-side inflation subdued. Although the Federal Reserve is likely to hold rates until labor market signals improve, forecasts now suggest a first 50-basis-point cut will not occur until the second half of 2026, whereas the Euro Area and UK anticipate earlier ECB rate hikes in mid-2025 followed by a slower cut cycle starting in 2027. Market positioning has shifted to short duration and long risk assets despite underpriced tail risks from prolonged conflict, as five-year inflation expectations remain anchored and European real rates continue to support a bullish bond stance.
- The Economist7 min
Why it’s so much harder to hide on the battlefield | The Economist
Adam Roberts, Shashank Joshi, Raleigh, Anshul
The Ukrainian conflict has transformed into a translucent battlefield where ubiquitous sensors and cheap precision munitions have expanded kill zones to over 30 kilometers, forcing soldiers to face near-certain death from saturated airspace. Top Ukrainian commanders have leveraged this "democratized precision" to inflict monthly casualty rates of 35,000 on Russian forces, effectively testing the limits of Russia's training capacity through a strategy designed to bleed the adversary dry. While this environment empowers weaker nations to challenge superior adversaries, the high lethality of modern drone swarms simultaneously renders traditional amphibious assaults and major ground invasions increasingly untenable for global powers like China.
- All-In Podcast1h 35m
Anthropic's Digital God, Pope vs AI, Job Loss Narrative Flips, Open Source Crackdown Coming?
Bill Gurley, Pope Leo, Dario, Sam Altman, Goldman CEO, Jason, Friedberg, David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya, Nick
Pope Leo XIV issued the encyclical *Magnifica Humanitas* to warn against AI's embedded values and autonomous weapons, sparking a debate among Bill Gurley, Dario Amodei, and Jason Sachs regarding the dangers of centralized power versus the risks of government overreach. Panelists challenged prevailing doomerism by arguing that AI will augment rather than replace human labor, citing data showing rising engineering demand and corporate efforts to establish intelligence sovereignty through open-source models and on-premise hardware. Ultimately, the discussion highlighted a shift in enterprise strategy toward cost-efficient, locally controlled systems as major firms cut spending and regulators face pressure to avoid cementing monopolies by banning open-weight technologies.
- The Economist6 min
Is Colombia heading for its most polarised election yet? | The Economist
Colombia faces a highly volatile presidential election defined by record violence and drug production, featuring three distinct contenders: the austere hard-left Ivan Cepeda, the spectacle-driven hard-right populist Abelardo de la Espiella, and the establishment center-right candidate Paloma Valencia. Cepeda and de la Espiella currently lead the polls by leveraging contrasting strategies against the backdrop of a failed peace process, with experts anticipating a polarized runoff between them while acknowledging Valencia's struggle to gain traction. Despite their divergent platforms, all three candidates remain viable, presenting a fractured political landscape where voters must choose between a socialist-style economic expansion, a punitive security crackdown, or a traditional focus on institutional decency.
- a16z33 min
The New Rule for Picking AI Winners | The a16z Show
Frontier AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI are currently outpacing the combined revenue growth of major tech giants, with a projected collective run rate of $200 billion driving valuations toward $100 billion by September. While current enterprise adoption remains largely efficiency-focused, supply chain constraints are expected to persist until late 2028, preventing an oversupply bubble despite the rapid scaling of $5 trillion in data center capital expenditures. As venture strategies pivot to securing market leaders in a shrinking startup half-life, the industry is poised for a structural shift where dominant AI entities redefine public market dynamics and consumer engagement over the next decade.
- Y Combinator24 min
Why Two IIT Engineers Turned Down $550K Jobs To Build A Startup
GigaML, a Y Combinator-backed startup founded by IIT Kharagpur alumnus Varun and his Stanford-educated co-founder, has pivoted from EdTech to developing AI agents that achieve 60% to 70% support deflection rates for major clients like DoDash and DoorDash. The company addresses the enterprise bottleneck of manual configuration by launching "AI forward deployed engineers" that automatically iterate policies to improve business metrics, a strategy enabled by their "0.1% talent" recruitment philosophy and heavy reliance on human-coded expertise rather than sales teams. By leveraging the YC trust network to secure early contracts with eight-person operations, GigaML aims to unlock broader enterprise AI adoption through a generic automation layer that eliminates the need for extensive human engineering resources.
- Goldman Sachs8 min
Can the Tech Surge Continue?
Goldman Sachs reports a near-historic tech rally driven by an 80% year-to-year surge in semiconductors and robust earnings revisions that support current valuations. The firm projects 2027 capital expenditures to exceed $900 billion as infrastructure orders extend through 2027, while the software sector undergoes a selective re-rating based on demonstrated AI revenue growth. Despite concerns that the market has advanced too rapidly, analysts maintain a constructive medium-term outlook anchored by fundamental financial improvements rather than interest rate dynamics.
- Stanford Online1h 5m
Stanford CS153 Frontier Systems | The Road Ahead: Resilience Required
Joe Sullivan, Mike, Matthew Prince, Travis, John, Brandon, Shov
Former security executives from the US Department of Justice, eBay, Facebook, and Uber detail a high-stakes career trajectory that includes the 2016 Uber data breach, a 2022 obstruction of justice conviction, and subsequent rehabilitation through community support and global speaking engagements. The discussion analyzes the modern threat landscape, highlighting the evolution of ransomware, the operational risks posed by generative AI, and the urgent need for quantum-resistant cryptography. Concluding with strategic advice for 2026, the presentation emphasizes that cybersecurity leadership must evolve into a core executive function capable of navigating complex regulatory environments and ensuring organizational resilience against both digital and physical threats.