Latest Interviews

Things That Will Blow Your Mind | Global Conference 2025

Richard Sandler, JC Btaiche, Rowland Illing, Christyl Johnson, Jeb Terry, Crystal Johnson

Led by moderator Richard Sandler, a panel of industry leaders from NASA, FUSE, AWS, and Cosm explored the technological interdependencies required to achieve sustainable lunar habitation by 2040, commercial fusion energy within a decade, and AI-driven healthcare advancements. Speakers detailed critical innovations ranging from NASA's use of digital twins and inflatable habitats for Mars missions to FUSE's "Radiation as a Service" model and AWS's multimodal generative AI applications that accelerate biological discovery. The consensus emphasized that while government funding is necessary, scalable progress in space, energy, and health relies heavily on structured public-private partnerships to incentivize private capital and navigate the growing energy demands of these transformative sectors.

The Ultimate AI Video Stack: Up-to-Date Best Tools to Make Content With AI

Justine Moore

Justine, a partner at A16C and the "Venture Twins" creator, outlines a comprehensive workflow for early-stage AI video production that leverages Google Flow for text-to-video generation and Cling 2.1 for consistent character animation. The presentation details how Hedra facilitates precise lip-syncing with voice cloning capabilities while Higgs Field and Crea manage specialized visual effects and multi-model comparison to refine output quality. By synthesizing these distinct tools into a unified pipeline, creators can currently overcome limitations in audio generation and scene continuity despite the field remaining in its nascent, rapidly evolving stage.

Fusion Energy Will Power the AI Boom

Gustaf Alströmer

Helion Energy is accelerating commercial fusion development by deploying a compact, linear machine that uses helium-3 fuel and direct energy capture to bypass traditional inefficiencies and safety concerns. The company recently secured a strategic partnership with Microsoft to power a data center, marking a pivotal shift from experimental research to real-world utility deployment. With this transition, Helion aims to establish the world's first affordable, carbon-free electricity source that cannot be weaponized, potentially transforming global energy standards within a decade.

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.

How OpenAI Built its Groundbreaking Deep Research Product ft. Isa Fulford

Isa Fulford

OpenAI's Deep Research introduces an agentic o3 model capable of executing complex, multi-step online investigations over five to thirty minutes to generate analyst-level reports. Targeted at professionals like venture capitalists and academics, the system synthesizes cross-lingual data through interactive clarifications and real-time transparency into its reasoning process. While current versions prioritize read-only browsing and citation granularity, the roadmap outlines plans to integrate these tools into broader reasoning models and enable autonomous action-taking based on findings.

GPT-4.5 = Big Model Energy | YC Decoded

Tom Blomfield

OpenAI has released GPT-4.5, a significantly larger and more human-like model that surpasses its predecessor in emotional intelligence and creative fluency while facing higher costs and specific limitations in complex STEM reasoning. Market reception remains measured as benchmarks show incremental rather than revolutionary improvements, leading researchers to predict a future convergence of general and reasoning capabilities in the upcoming GPT-5 architecture. Simultaneously, YC is hosting a free AI Startup School in San Francisco featuring industry leaders such as Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Satya Nadella to support emerging AI talent.

AI Interfaces Of The Future | Design Review

Aaron Epstein, Raphael Schaad

This event analyzes the industry shift from static, noun-based interfaces to dynamic, verb-centric workflows driven by AI agents and voice technologies. Speakers highlighted emerging tools like VAPI, Gumloop, and AnswerGrid, which prioritize low-latency voice interaction, visual workflow canvases, and parallel data processing to enhance system autonomy and trust. The discussion concludes by projecting a decade-long transition toward touch-first design patterns and standardized canvas models that will fundamentally redefine software interaction paradigms.

OpenAI’s Deep Research Team on Why Reinforcement Learning is the Future for AI Agents

Isa Fulford, Josh Tobin, Sonya Huang, Lauren Reeder

Launched three weeks ago, OpenAI's Deep Research is an agentic system powered by a fine-tuned O3 model that executes complex, multi-hour tasks like market analysis and medical research in 5 to 30 minutes. Utilizing reinforcement learning to optimize browsing and coding strategies, the tool distinguishes itself through a pre-research clarification flow that refines user prompts for higher-quality synthesis. As part of a broader 2025 shift toward agent-driven workflows, this technology aims to amplify knowledge workers by automating information-intensive processes previously deemed too time-consuming.

Could AI build cities in space?

Ed Mayer, Mark Woods, Alok Jha

Leading aerospace organizations and private innovators like Machina Labs and Relativity Space are deploying AI-guided robotics to establish autonomous manufacturing capabilities essential for constructing a trillion-dollar space economy by 2040. These dual-robotic systems and advanced 3D printing technologies address critical communication latency and maintenance challenges by enabling independent decision-making for infrastructure projects on the Moon and Mars. Ultimately, this technological paradigm shift facilitates NASA's Artemis program and private ambitions to transition from temporary exploration to a permanent, multi-planetary human presence.

You Don’t Have To Be A Billionaire To Launch Satellites

John Gedmark, Ryan MckLinko, Jason Carman

Eight years after transforming from a two-person apartment startup into a multi-billion dollar entity, Astronis became the first Y Combinator-backed company to successfully launch a commercial satellite into space. The firm, founded by John and Ryan, disrupted the $122 billion geostationary orbit market by securing a dedicated Falcon 9 launch for four low-cost satellites while internalizing critical manufacturing and testing processes at their Pier 70 facility. This historic achievement validates a strategy where scrappy engineering and a working prototype overcame traditional funding barriers, proving that regular domain experts can build successful hard tech aerospace companies without billionaire backing.

Why OpenAI's o1 Is A Huge Deal | YC Decoded

OpenAI has released the O1 Preview and O1 Mini models, a new class of systems designed for advanced reasoning that match PhD-level performance on complex scientific and coding benchmarks through self-generated chain-of-thought processes. Unlike previous architectures requiring manual prompt engineering, these models utilize large-scale reinforcement learning to decompose problems into verifiable steps, with accuracy improving dynamically as they allocate more "thinking time" to correct errors. While early testing shows mixed preference over GPT-4o for creative tasks, Sam Altman characterizes the technology as a foundational leap comparable to the GPT-2 stage, promising rapid evolution toward GPT-4 capabilities and future multi-modal integration within months.

Why Design Matters: Lessons from Stripe, Lyft and Airbnb

Katie Dill

Stripe Head of Design Katie Dill explains how the company unifies its creative functions to embed design directly within product squads, prioritizing intentional craft over speed to build the high level of trust required for financial transactions. By implementing rigorous quality frameworks like "Our Essential Journeys" and a "pre-flight" mindset for flaw detection, Stripe has successfully launched tools like Workbench that eliminate developer context switching while driving significant conversion gains through refined user interfaces. Dill emphasizes that founders must cultivate taste and defer to design expertise, as the resulting utility and beauty are fundamental drivers of long-term product value rather than superficial enhancements.

OpenAI's Noam Brown, Ilge Akkaya and Hunter Lightman on o1 and Teaching LLMs to Reason Better

Noam Brown, Ilge Akkaya, Hunter Lightman, Sonya Huang, Pat Grady

OpenAI's O1 model, internally codenamed Project Strawberry, introduces a paradigm shift by employing "inference time compute" to enable systems to engage in extended, self-correcting reasoning processes akin to human System 2 thinking. This architecture has delivered unprecedented capabilities in STEM domains, allowing the AI to solve complex Olympiad-level programming problems, pass research engineer interviews, and assist in scientific discovery by bridging the gap between difficulty in generation versus verification. While the project faces limitations in speed and creative tasks compared to predecessors like GPT-4, its demonstrated ability to scale performance through increased thinking time marks a significant advancement toward the operational goal of Artificial General Intelligence.

Stripe Head of Design Katie Dill Reviews Startup Websites

Katie Dill, Aaron Epstein

This session establishes core web design principles prioritizing immediate value clarity and mobile responsiveness while critiquing six specific healthcare and B2B technology sites. Reviewers identified critical usability failures across these platforms, including excessive scrolling on Mito Health, visual clutter on Cygnaz, and confusing brand identity on Taiv, which collectively risk user abandonment. The discussion concludes with actionable recommendations to align visual hierarchy, consistent typography, and clear calls-to-action with user scanning behaviors to boost trust and conversion rates.

War or less? Lebanon on the brink

Greg Karlstrom, Jason, Rebecca Jackson, Mark Robinson, Kunal Patel, Claire Reid, Alyssia Burrell, Dasha, Harriet Noble, Margot Alexander, Jiehao Chen, David Rennie, Mr. Wu, Sam Western

Israel has escalated its aerial campaign against Hezbollah by targeting northern Lebanon, prompting ballistic missile strikes on Tel Aviv and raising fears of an imminent ground invasion alongside a severe humanitarian crisis involving over 90,000 displaced persons. Simultaneously, diplomatic efforts by the US and France to secure a three-week ceasefire have stalled due to conflicting strategic demands regarding Gaza and the Litani River. In a separate development, the US North Carolina gubernatorial race has been destabilized by a sex scandal involving Republican candidate Mark Robinson, creating significant electoral volatility in this key swing state.