Latest Interviews
Showing 661–675 of 3,136 interview transcripts.
- The Economist8 min
Why is Saudi Arabia buying up the video game industry?
Led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, a consortium is acquiring Electronic Arts for $55 billion while deploying a $38 billion Savvy Games portfolio to dominate the global gaming sector. This strategy targets the 330 million Arabic-speaking demographic and diversifies the Kingdom's oil-dependent economy by creating 39,000 jobs and leveraging competitive gaming for soft power. Although immediate content changes to existing Western franchises remain uncertain, the initiative integrates local cultural narratives and sports assets to eventually establish a distinct "Saudi accent" in international game development.
Inside The $2.2B AI Research Accelerator | Turing
Jonathan Siddharth, Molly O'Shea
Turing, a profitable AI infrastructure firm valued at $2.2 billion, serves nine frontier labs by deploying a global network of four million engineers to generate expert data for training superintelligence models. The company distinguishes itself from traditional data labelers by combining smart human sourcing with proactive research to advance coding, reasoning, and multi-modality pillars while challenging the dominance of commodity data services. Facing a market where internet-based pre-training data is exhausted, Turing aims to capture a $30 trillion opportunity by replacing legacy consulting models with agentic systems that automate complex enterprise knowledge work.
- Goldman Sachs8 min
Can the Rally Continue?
Ashok Varadhan maintains a constructive outlook on U.S. equities, projecting a policy interest rate normalization near 3% within the year and a market consolidation in the fourth quarter before a 2026 resumption. While advising investors to remain long and hedge downside risks through cheaply priced puts during a low-volatility environment, he identifies a structural shift away from fiat currencies into assets like Bitcoin and AI-driven stocks as a response to fiscal expansion. This strategy navigates potential Q4 risks from a government shutdown that delays critical economic data, ensuring the portfolio capitalizes on the enduring technological investment cycle while accounting for tariff absorption and crowded consensus positions.
- The Economist13 min
Has science finally cracked the secret to invisibility?
Alok Jha, Professor Sir John Pendry, John Pendry
Physics professor John Pendry introduced metamaterials as geometrically engineered structures capable of manipulating light paths to achieve the effects described in his "invisibility cloak" concept. This theoretical framework, initially named by Pendry's wife to aid a 2005 DARPA presentation, faced early skepticism before David Smith's team at Duke University successfully constructed a functional prototype for radar waves. The field has since evolved from resolving debates over negative refraction to experimental recreations of conditions existing near black holes.
- All-In Podcast28 min
Sequoia’s Roelof Botha: Why Venture Capital is Broken & How Great Companies Are Built
Sequoia Capital, led by a third generation of partners, sustains its legacy by prioritizing long-term value creation and consensus decision-making over aggressive fee maximization. The firm counters industry capital overhang by deploying proprietary AI tools and maintaining a selective investment strategy that has historically generated trillions in public market value through companies like Apple and Nvidia. While navigating geopolitical shifts by separating its Chinese operations and adapting to a regulatory landscape that has drastically reduced startup formation there, Sequoia continues to back founders with exceptional curiosity despite unconventional profiles.
- Y Combinator13 min
This Startup Is Trying To Delete 29% Of All CO2 Emissions
Remora has launched a solid-pellet based carbon capture system that reduces CO2 emissions by up to 90% in hard-to-electrify diesel trucks and freight trains, converting the captured gas into beverage-grade CO2 for commercial reuse. Backed by $117 million in venture capital, the Detroit-based company is vertically integrating its manufacturing to deploy modular retrofits to major partners like Ryder and Union Pacific while testing the technology on a repurposed locomotive. Co-founders Paul Gross and Christina Reynolds aim to scale this point-source solution to capture one billion tons of carbon annually by overcoming the logistical challenges of retrofitting diverse vehicle fleets.
- Goldman Sachs18 min
The Future of Software Engineering: Cognition’s Russell Kaplan
Cognition, founded by former Olympiad medalists and now valued at $4 billion, is advancing software engineering by deploying Devin, an autonomous AI agent capable of executing end-to-end development tasks. The company differentiates itself through a dual-product strategy combining Devin for independent execution with the recently acquired Windsurf IDE for human-in-the-loop collaboration, targeting enterprise integration into proprietary codebases. While AI capabilities in coding are projected to double every seven months, Cognition aims to elevate Devin to senior engineer status within a year, though future growth is anticipated to be constrained by energy availability rather than data scarcity.
- Goldman Sachs21 min
The Shutdown’s Economic Impact
A partisan role reversal has precipitated a broad federal government shutdown as Democrats withhold support for clean spending bills to demand the extension of ACA health insurance subsidies, a move that polling suggests is driving voter blame toward Republicans. The crisis faces a critical resolution pressure point on October 15 when active-duty military personnel miss a pay cycle, a deadline that historically compels congressional action to avoid widespread economic disruption. While the shutdown projects to reduce Q4 GDP by approximately 0.3 percentage points and delay key economic data releases, market analysts and the Federal Reserve anticipate the stalemate will resolve quickly through a targeted fiscal compromise.
- All-In Podcast28 min
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan on AI, Censorship & the Future of Creators
Neal Mohan, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg, Ari
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan outlined the platform's dominance with 2 billion monthly active users and over $70 billion paid to creators, while addressing tensions between its 55/45 revenue model and high-profile creators who opt for direct monetization. Mohan defended YouTube's algorithmic fragmentation as a driver of niche engagement while highlighting new AI initiatives that prioritize creator likeness rights and transparency labels over blanket bans. The discussion further detailed strategies to balance global moderation complexities with evolving regulations and a renewed focus on YouTube Premium and TV to reinvent the viewer experience.
Base Power Raises $1B led by Addition, with Trust Ventures, Lightspeed, a16z, Altimeter, Elad Gil
Elad Gil, Zach Dell, Justin Lopas, Molly O'Shea
Base secured an oversubscribed $1 billion Series C led by Addition, accelerating from its previous $200 million round to fund its "Speed to Power" product designed to bypass traditional grid interconnection delays for data centers. Backed by strategic investors like Lennar and Starwood alongside founders from SpaceX and Tesla, the company is deploying gigawatt-scale battery capacity from its Austin "Factory One" at a target rate of 100 megawatts per month. This capital infusion supports a strategic pivot to replace fossil fuels with cost-efficient solar and storage, aiming to solve critical energy bottlenecks for AI development while expanding operations into high-solar states like California and Florida.
- a16z49 min
Sam Altman on Sora, Energy, and Building an AI Empire
Sam Altman, Ben Horowitz, Erik Torenberg
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman outlines a strategic shift toward extreme vertical integration, establishing a massive global infrastructure stack to support research, consumer products, and hardware while securing partnerships with Nvidia, AMD, and Oracle. The organization prioritizes scientific advancement and world model development, predicting that within two years AI systems will autonomously conduct complex research in physics and biology, though this rapid scaling necessitates new per-generation monetization models. Concurrently, Altman advocates for a measured regulatory approach focused only on superhuman capabilities to avoid stifling innovation, while emphasizing that the ultimate economic value of this infrastructure lies in the successful and gradual deployment of artificial general intelligence.
- The Economist7 min
Mark Carney on dealing with Donald Trump
Mark Carney, Donald Trump, Zanny Minton Beddoes, Prime Minister Carney, Sani
Prime Minister Carney attributes Canada's recent economic stagnation to persistent tariff uncertainty while characterizing U.S. trade policy as a coercive "mafioso" strategy driven by President Trump. In response to this geopolitical rupture, Ottawa is pivoting toward strategic sovereignty by bolstering Arctic defense and cultivating a "variable geometry" of trade alliances to reduce reliance on the American market. This dual approach acknowledges a permanent shift toward high-tariff U.S. protectionism, compelling Canada to prioritize self-sufficiency and diversify global partnerships beyond traditional transatlantic frameworks.
- RAISE Summit22 min
Inception Fund & AI: From Inception to Exit Building AI Giants from Europe and the Nordics
Former professor Peter Sarlin founded the private AI lab Silo AI in 2017 and led the bootstrapped company to a $700 million exit when acquired by AMD in 2022, establishing the largest pure-play AI acquisition in Europe. Sarlin attributes this success to a contrarian philosophy that prioritized functional machine learning over hype while hiring primarily from academia, resulting in a workforce of over 220 AI scientists before the strategic sale. Beyond this specific case study, Sarlin highlights that the fragmentation of the European single market remains the primary barrier preventing regional startups from scaling into trillion-dollar enterprises, forcing founders to adopt a global-first strategy despite Europe's strengths in industrial AI applications.
- RAISE Summit18 min
A fireside Chat with Paddy Srinivasan, CEO of DigitalOcean ft. Semafor
DigitalOcean CEO Patti and Reid Hoffman discuss the platform's role in serving 3 million developers by providing specialized AI infrastructure for both native startups and traditional firms integrating large language models. The conversation highlights critical global bottlenecks, including power constraints necessitating nuclear energy and a talent war driving new hiring protocols for AI automation engineers. Hoffmann forecasts a massive economic expansion where AI increases the technology sector's share of global GDP to 25% within a decade, alongside a predicted dispersion of value beyond current market leaders.
- RAISE Summit23 min
Oege De Moor (XBOW) & Apoorv Agrawal (Altimeter): Hackers with GPUs Offensive Security in the AI Era
Oege De Moor, Apoorv Agrawal, Uhey Dhimur
Altimeter Capital-backed startup Expo has deployed an autonomous AI agent that ranks as the world's top ethical hacker, identifying over 1,200 vulnerabilities including critical zero-days in enterprise giants like Palo Alto Networks and Salesforce within a single week. This superhuman capability forces a strategic industry shift toward AI-driven defense to combat a "skill shortage" in malicious actors that has enabled nation-states to automate attacks with unprecedented speed. While the market anticipates a major cyber incident within twelve months due to rising AI-generated code risks, human security roles are expected to evolve from technical execution to the strategic orchestration of these autonomous systems.