This Week in AI

This Week In Startups is made possible by: PayPal: paypal.launch.co Today’s show: Dario Amodei and Sam Altman are apparently scared of AI models going rogue. Swarms of agents spontaneously deciding to copy themselves over to thousands of computer systems and plot world domination. Our panelists this week — Kevin Mandia (Armadin) and Soups Ranjan (Sardine AI) — investigate real AI-based attacks every single day, and they suggest we’re hyping the wrong concerns. The actual danger isn’t coming from an AI system that turns hostile. It’s human beings, like criminals, using AI to drain your bank account. Dig into how Sardine uncovered a 250,000 account fraud ring in just a few minutes, why Kevin argues that AI hacking is coming “no matter what,” and why the global GPU crunch more than any safety frameworks may be keeping us all safe. For now. Guests: Soups Ranjan on X: https://x.com/soupsranjan Sardine AI: https://www.sardine.ai/ Kevin Mandia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-mandia-0a07173/ Armadin: https://www.armadin.com/ Relevant Links: "We Must Pace the Frontier" — Dario Amodei's Sept 12 essay Axios: Anthropic and OpenAI CEOs call for a slowdown Trump and the White House push back Forbes: what the essay actually proposes 2026 OpenAI agent cyberattacks GLM-5.3 — Z.ai 's open-weight model Hermes Agent — the agent framework Ranjan runs in a local harness Timestamps: 0:00 Dario Amodei's "We Must Pace the Frontier" essay 1:51 Kevin Mandia: how scared should we be of agentic attack swarms? 6:53 Rogue agents vs. humans pointing AI at a target 9:52 250,000 fraudulent account signups in two days 16:59 Sam Altman's two ways AI fails 19:41 Open-weight models are catching up 21:39 Why proprietary data is the new moat 27:51 Mixing frontier models with open models 35:37 Bloomberg: Chinese hackers lean on DeepSeek because it's cheap 37:05 How much in-house expertise it takes to use AI well 42:56 Armadin's Palo Alto office and the Palantir playbook 1:02:54 AI and jobs: normal churn or something bigger? 1:07:19 What founders are actually saying in the group chats 1:08:49 Every meeting recorded, every meeting summarized Subscribe to TWiAI on Substack: https://thisweekinai.ai Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Thank you to our partners: Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe , Steve Huffman , Brian Chesky , Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie , Sophia Amoruso , Reid Hoffman , Frank Slootman , Billy McFarland Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

This Week In Startups is made possible by: PayPal - Pay zero processing fees on your first $100K in eligible PayPal payment volume. Learn more at paypal.launch.co Today’s show: OpenAI's chief scientist wrote a lengthy manifesto arguing that no lab has solved alignment, mere days after GPT-6 Astra shipped. Jason and Lon are joined by Tudor Achim of Harmonic, Alex Elias of Qloo, and Ahmed Ahres of Reactor to figure out if that's genuine alarm being expressed or just another pre-IPO sales pitch and play for regulatory capture. Plus news broke while we were recording! OpenAI is claiming to have solved a second Millennium Prize problem, after a 25-year-plus weight. AND, who is paying influencers to tell you AI is wonderful/harmful? And why? Guests: Tudor Achim on X: https://x.com/tachim Harmonic: https://harmonic.fun/ Alex Elias on X: https://x.com/ape Qloo: https://www.qloo.com/ Ahmed Ahres on X: https://x.com/Boudatw Reactor: https://reactor.inc/ Relevant Links: Jakub Pachocki, "An Alien Mind" — https://openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/ GPT-6 Astra — https://fortune.com/2026/09/03/openai-debuts-gpt-6-astra-computer-use-greg-brockman-says-start-of-agi/ OpenAI: "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem" — https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/ ControlAI — the nonprofit that sponsored the SciShow episode — https://controlai.org/ New York Times (Eli Tan), "Corporate America Is Getting Hooked on Open-Source A.I." — https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/technology/open-source-ai-companies.html Artificial trailer and the cast → https://variety.com/2026/film/news/artificial-trailer-andrew-garfield-openai-biopic-1236802616/ Timestamps: 0:00 "An Alien Mind" 3:08 AI psychosis, marketing, or half a mile ahead on the racetrack? 12:52 The Manhattan Project analogy 15:20 Tudor: if it's really that dangerous, the answer is nationalization 17:02 Regulatory capture: Bill Gurley at All-In, Sacks, and who can afford to be regulated 20:37 The influencer propaganda tape 23:22 BREAKING: OpenAI solves the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem 28:53 The Hank Green / SciShow video sponsored by ControlAI 32:11 Fogging and flooding 46:47 UBS will require AI skills from its 2027 graduate 56:41 How LAUNCH hired its associates-in-training 57:18 NYT: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI 1:04:16 Alex on Qloo's shift from NYT film critics on payroll to small specialized models 1:09:35 First look: the "Artificial" teaser trailer 1:14:34 Sam Altman's bunker, Peter Thiel, and casting rundown Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe , Steve Huffman , Brian Chesky , Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie , Sophia Amoruso , Reid Hoffman , Frank Slootman , Billy McFarland Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Paypal Today’s show: Anthropic gave AI agents hands, allowing them to control real-world equipment like robots and microscopes… but is it safe to give autonomous agents their own lasers? Gatik’s Gautam Narang says the real danger isn’t one machine like this going rogue, it’s the exploit surface hiding in the gaps between the machines. Plus, in a huge week for AI news… OpenClaw shipped its biggest release ever. AND the entire industry debated whether or not agents are forming “civilizations.” On TWiAI Ep 29, our expert panel — including Gautam (Gatik), Russ d’Sa (LiveKit), and Billy Kraft (Path) — explores the world of “multiplayer agents,” and Jason suggests the one killer feature that would make any new agentic app the market leader. PLUS Perplexity’s new “Hybrid Compute” just for Macs, some advice for Apple’s new CEO John Ternus, the value of “AI Detectors” like Pangram, and Jason’s complete guide to tipping and over-tipping. Guests: Gautam Narang on X: https://x.com/gautam_narang?lang=en Gatik: https://www.gatik.ai/ Russ d’Sa on X: https://x.com/dsa LiveKit: https://livekit.com/ Billy Kraft on X: https://x.com/billykraft Path: https://path.dev/ Relevant Links: OpenClaw 2.0 - https://openclaw.ai/blog/openclaw-2-accidentally Grok Bot — https://grok.com Buzz — https://buzz.build Perplexity Hybrid Compute — https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/introducing-hybrid-compute-on-mac John Ternus — https://www.apple.com/leadership/john-ternus/ OpenAI's Mac mini / Mac Studio buying spree https://the-decoder.com/openai-and-rival-ai-labs-are-buying-tens-of-thousands-of-mac-minis-to-train-computer-use-agents/ Waymo hits a child — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/29/waymo-nhtsa-crash-child-school.html Timestamps: 2:58 OpenClaw 2.0 5:11 "Agents ARE AI" 7:27 Billy: OpenClaw is still too technical for business users 9:00 Slack Code, and collaborative prompting 10:40 Multi-agent orchestration and Stripe's "minions" 14:13 Slack's moat, switching costs, and the Salesforce rebound 15:11 Jason's "Oracle": a heads-up display for the whole company 18:42 The Hugging Face breach: who's responsible when agents go rogue? 19:42 Perplexity launches Hybrid Compute — local models on your Mac 21:39 Why unmetered local tokens change corporate behavior 26:57 Gatik's Autonomous Vehicle AI Stack 32:22 Jason's Tesla FSD stories 34:05 Are AV companies being pushed to move too fast? 41:38 Trucking is a "have to have," robotaxis are a "nice to have" 42:36 Jason's fix: a safety driver for the first million rides 46:50 Why physical AI's adoption curve runs in decades 52:21 Anthropic's Model Hardware Standard (MHS), explained 1:06:27 How Jason got onion rings on the menu at Buck's of Woodside 1:09:05 AI detectors under fire: Pangram, MIT, and the handwritten diary 1:15:20 Why AI is "very mid" at writing (it learned from the average) 1:17:11 The Orin Kerr test: Pangram catches Claude writing as Kerr 1:28:35 Micro Duck and designing robots with Claude 1:29:42 Phil Kaplan's $14 custom circuit boards Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe , Steve Huffman , Brian Chesky , Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie , Sophia Amoruso , Reid Hoffman , Frank Slootman , Billy McFarland Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

This Week In Startups is made possible by:PaypalToday’s show:XBOW’s AI has held the top rank on the HackerOne leaderboard for more than a year. On TWiAI, founder Oege de Moor (who also built GitHub Copilot) tells us that no one’s infrastructure is truly safe anymore, now that open-weight models are trailing the American frontier by only a couple of months. Staging a serious cyberattack is now cheap and accessible, with attackers able to get dangerously solid results quickly from relatively cheap, open-source options from China.Guests:Runbin Dong on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/runbindongScale Social: https://scalesocial.ai/Oege de Moor on X: https://x.com/oegerikusXBOW: https://xbow.com/Relevant LinksWSJ: Nvidia-Poolside deal: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/nvidia-is-spending-6-billion-to-build-a-powerful-u-s-alternative-to-chinese-ai-c51c38ccPoolside: https://poolside.ai/Silicon Angle: Nvidia in talks to invest in Perplexity: https://siliconangle.com/2026/08/24/nvidia-reportedly-eyes-another-investment-in-perplexity-ai-at-a-30b-valuation/Perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai/Bloomberg: Chinese hackers using DeepSeek: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-24/chinese-hackers-use-deepseek-to-boost-attacks-researchers-say-mt7o4205Nvidia: Groq 3 LPX enters full production: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-groq-3-lpx-now-in-full-production-with-world-class-speed-for-agentic-aiCNBC: Groq-Nvidia acqui-hire deal: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/24/nvidia-buying-ai-chip-startup-groq-for-about-20-billion-biggest-deal.htmlOpenAI on early Jalapeño results: https://openai.com/index/jalapeno-first-results/Stanley Druckenmiller WSJ op-ed: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/let-the-bond-market-speak-81529d74Druckenmiller confirms op-ed was authored with AI: https://www.notus.org/media/stanley-druckenmillers-wsj-op-ed-bessent-aiPangram: https://www.pangram.com/Alabama AG: OpenAI subpoena announcement: https://www.alabamaag.gov/attorney-general-marshall-launches-investigation-into-openai-and-sam-altman-for-massive-artificial-intelligence-data-breach/Ox Alpha on OpenRouter: https://openrouter.ai/stealth/ox-alphaApple: M6 and M5 Ultra press release: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-introduces-m6-and-m5-ultra-for-a-big-leap-in-performance-and-ai-compute/9 to 5 Mac: M5 Mac Studio launch: https://9to5mac.com/2026/08/25/apple-unveils-next-generation-mac-studio-with-m5-max-and-m5-ultra/DHH on X: Ubiquity comments: https://x.com/dhh/status/2087272392557007042Shane Parrish on X: Ubiquiti Wi-Fi set-up: https://x.com/shaneparrish/status/2088672566558761065Timestamps:0:00 Today's guests: Runbin Dong (Scale Social) and Oege de Moor (XBOW)2:12 Open-weight models are right behind the frontier8:22 Your infrastructure is not ready for what's coming13:07 Nvidia's Perplexity announcement16:43 Spending $2K/month on AI tools per employee21:59 Why security teams have to lean on AI25:19 The Great Chip Land Grab32:02 Jason's multi-agent restaurant-style workflow34:54 AI ghostwriting is lip syncing45:18 Are rogue AI agents breaking the law?52:38 The dangers of using a stealth model58:57 Apple's new M5 Mac Studio1:06:43 Everyone's fav AI tool of the momentSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisCheck out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis

This Week In AI is made possible by: PayPal - Pay zero processing fees on your first $100K in eligible PayPal payment volume. Learn more at paypal.launch.co Today’s show: *On “All In,” Gavin Baker said that Anthropic leadership privately believes that it could one day become “the only private company in the world.” The ensuing street fight on X turned into a referendum on doomerism, the nature of regulatory capture, and why the public hates AI so darn much. Jason’s take: If a frontier lab really believes they’re destined to be the world’s only company, they’re studying your data and planning to steal your business. PLUS why AI agents don’t understand it’s wrong to cheat (and how we can teach them), why Grok Bot may be AI’s “iPhone moment,” and the panel reacts to Amazon feeding rare books into a dino-themed shredding machine. Guests Galina Antova on X: https://x.com/GalinaAntova Kai: https://www.kai.security/ Eric Ho on X: https://x.com/eric_ho Goodfire: https://www.goodfire.com/ Silico: https://www.goodfire.com/silico Relevant Links All-In Podcast: Gavin Baker on Anthropic: https://x.com/theallinpod/status/2088367978270142811 Sholto Douglas response: https://x.com/_sholtodouglas/status/2088463770318516734 Gavin Baker response: https://x.com/GavinSBaker/status/2088611616577253502 Dario Amodei response: https://x.com/DarioAmodei/status/2088758816376807762 Zuckerberg AI manifesto: https://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone/ Hugging Face: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline Simon Willison: OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack on Hugging Face: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/openai-cyberattack/ SWE-bench Leaderboards: https://www.swebench.com/ xAI: Introducing Grok Bot: https://x.ai/news/introducing-grok-bot Peter Yang praises Grok Bot: https://x.com/petergyang/status/2089401696946634801?s=20 Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai/ @Aaronp613 on X: AirPods with Cameras in action: https://x.com/aaronp613/status/2089522745184760112?s=20 9to5 Mac: AirPods with cameras get their clearest leak yet: https://9to5mac.com/2026/08/17/airpods-with-camera-get-their-clearest-leak-yet/ Toms Hardware: Google Buys Spirit Airlines Data for AI Training: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/google-buys-spirit-airlines-data-for-ai-training-for-just-usd10-million-purchase-includes-hundreds-of-millions-of-emails-microsoft-teams-chats-billions-of-flight-pricing-records-and-anonymized-passenger-records Micro1: https://www.micro1.ai/ Timestamps: 0:00 Why is everyone mad at Dario Amodei? 1:47 Is Anthropic training to kill your company? 10:10 How to talk to the public about cyber risk 15:33 Reward hacking and sycophancy 21:55 Why do models care about rewards? 28:55 Is Grok Bot an iPhone Moment? 38:26 First look at AirPods with Cameras 42:16 Why Google bought Spirit Airlines' data 48:52 Amazon is scanning and shredding rare books 59:06 Can we build a "moral layer" on top of models? 1:01:14 Your LLM could catch a mind virus 1:10:55 Are we already in the AGI Era? 1:14:17 Silicon Valley's lost hippie vibes Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe , Steve Huffman , Brian Chesky , Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie , Sophia Amoruso , Reid Hoffman , Frank Slootman , Billy McFarland Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

This Week In AI is made possible by: Paypal Open Today’s show: Anthropic’s new Claude watermark travels around any and all copy-and-pasted text. Is this a logical response to AI slop, or more overreach from those regulation-loving Europeans? The panel agrees that identifying AI outputs has a place, but divides on how the world should get there. PLUS everyone’s favorite section of Mark Zuckerberg’s 6500-word techno-optimist AI manifesto, exploring the frontier labs’ blatant hypocrisy around distillation, and why Texas is hitting the pause button on 474 GW of proposed data centers. Guests: Will Bryk: https://x.com/WilliamBryk Exa: https://exa.ai/ Josh Sirota: https://x.com/joshua_sirota Eragon: https://www.eragon.ai/ Kashif “Kash” Ali: https://x.com/ChKashifAli TaxGPT: https://www.taxgpt.com/ Relevant Links: Anthropic: How Claude marks AI-generated content: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-marks-ai-generated-content Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA): https://c2pa.org/ EU AI Act: Article 50 transparency obligations: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/ TechCrunch: Pangram Raises $9M: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/29/as-ai-content-floods-the-internet-pangram-raises-9m-to-detect-it/ TechCrunch: Anthropic’s landmark copyright settlement is approved: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/20/anthropics-landmark-1-5b-copyright-settlement-is-approved/ World ID iris scanning orb: https://world.org/world-id Time: Sam Altman voices concern about “Dead Internet Theory”: https://time.com/7316046/sam-altman-dead-internet-theory/ Meta: The Future is for Everyone: https://about.fb.com/news/2026/08/the-future-is-for-everyone/ Meta: Introducing Muse Glimmer: https://research.meta.ai/blog/introducing-muse-glimmer-open-agentic-model Texas: Gov. Abbott directs comprehensive data center audit: https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-directs-comprehensive-data-center-audit Texas Tribune: New data center projects frozen: https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/03/texas-data-center-project-audit-greg-abbott/ ERCOT: https://www.ercot.com/ Public Utility Commission of Texas: https://www.puc.texas.gov/ TechCrunch on Sirota’s “software is dead” thesis: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/18/this-startup-wants-to-make-enterprise-software-look-more-like-a-prompt/ River AI: https://river.ai/ Thinking Machines Lab: https://thinkingmachines.ai/ Timestamps: 0:00 Guest Intros 3:30 Anthropic to watermark Claude text 5:50 Cracking down on AI Slop 10:45 Will slop-trackers push users to open source 16:21 Jason's "No Clankers" proposal 23:01 Parsing Zuckerberg's techno-utopian manifesto 39:27 The distillation double standard 44:28 "When you're behind, go open…" 51:17 Texas freezes new data centers 1:04:12 Is software dead? 1:05:39 Software managing, not engineering 1:10:24 Everyone is vibecoding Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe , Steve Huffman , Brian Chesky , Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie , Sophia Amoruso , Reid Hoffman , Frank Slootman , Billy McFarland Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

This Week In Startups is made possible by: PAYPAL OPEN Today’s show: China’s Alibaba just dropped a 2.4 trillion parameter open weight model that the company claims only trails Anthropic’s flagship among the major frontier rivals. Of course, this happened the very same week that the US government appears to have backed off from banning these models stateside entirely. Are these models anywhere close to actually catching up to the latest and greatest releases from US labs like Anthropic and OpenAI? Really seems to depend on who you ask. (Even long time friends JCal and Elon Musk can’t see eye to eye on it.) So on TWiAI Ep 25, we welcomed on Poolside AI CTO Eiso Kant, EXO Labs co-founder Alex Cheema, and Qloo founder Alex Elias to break down just how close Chinese labs are to catching up with the biggest and best models… and how long it will take US open weight builders to catch up. PLUS we explore the cutting edge of AI-powered baby sleep monitors, consider Hank Green’s public AI apology, and dig into sci-fi author Ursula K. LeGuin’s “hand-mind” thesis. Guests: Eiso Kant on X: https://x.com/eisokant Poolside: https://poolside.ai/ Alex Elias on X: https://x.com/ape Qloo: https://www.qloo.com/ Alex Cheema on X: https://x.com/alexocheema EXO Labs: https://exolabs.net/ Local AI benchmark platform: https://local.ai/ Relevant Links Qwen3.8-Max launch announcement: https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.8 Bloomberg on Qwen3.8-Max launch: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-03/alibaba-drops-another-china-ai-model-with-breakthrough-performance NYT: “White House Whipsaws Silicon Valley Over AI Rules”: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/technology/ai-washington-regulation-whiplash.html Nvidia: “Open Weights and American AI Leadership”: https://images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-Weights-and-American-AI-Leadership.pdf World Bank: World Development Report 2026: https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/1e4e52502104a331fb42cba0d4afa995-0050062026/original/WDR2026-Concept-Note.pdf Hank Green apology on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/nerdfighters/comments/1vbmoj5/comment/p0vzmog/ Taylor Lorenz responds to Hank Green on X: https://x.com/TaylorLorenz/status/2083272682188206564 TechCrunch: Substack partners with Pangram: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/22/substacks-new-tool-tells-you-whos-been-writing-their-newsletters-with-ai/ Amazon: Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Always Coming Home” expanded edition: https://www.amazon.com/Ursula-K-Guin-Authors-Expanded/dp/1598536036 Timestamps: 0:00 Guest intros and open 10:03 Why Poolside thinks coding is the path to AGI 12:55 A first look at EXO's local.ai 16:24 The White House's open source pivot 20:21 Margins, compute, and "dirt to intelligence" 36:02 Jason's self-driving auction pitch 37:58 Hank Green's AI apology 38:45 Is AI addictive? 1:08:31 What does it mean for AI to be "privacy first"? 1:10:29 Enterprise AI sovereignty and "colonization" Sign up for the TWiAI newsletter! Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe , Steve Huffman , Brian Chesky , Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie , Sophia Amoruso , Reid Hoffman , Frank Slootman , Billy McFarland Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Paypal Open Today’s show: On a podcast this week, Sam Altman made a bold declaration: “We are now, like, in the singularity.” A bold claim which Alex puts bluntly to this week’s panel. Grant Lee of Gamma and Philip Johnston of Starcloud sound off… Is this actually the Singularity, and if so, why do things still feel so normal? Plus the panel and guest host Alex Wilhelm discuss the infrastructure and economics that will make singularity-scale AI buildout possible… NVIDIA’s strongly worded letter about open-weight models… Moonshot’s new Kimi K3 twist on open-source licenses… Stripe’s reported $10B run at OpenRouter… and more. Guests Grant Lee on X: https://x.com/thisisgrantlee Gamma: https://gamma.app/ Philip Johnston on X: https://x.com/PhilipJohnston Starcloud: https://www.starcloud.com/ Relevant Links TechCrunch: Gamma hits $110M ARR: https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/10/ai-powerpoint-killer-gamma-hits-2-1b-valuation-100m-arr-founder-says/ Nvidia: How Starcloud is Bringing Data Centers to Space: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/starcloud/ Open Weights and American AI Leadership letter: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/open-weight-models-letter-1.pdf CNBC on Nvidia-OpenAI infrastructure plans: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/27/nvidia-and-openai-in-talks-for-up-to-250-billion-dollar-ai-backstop.html Kimi K3: https://www.kimi.com/en Crusoe announces strategic Starcloud partnership: https://www.crusoe.ai/resources/newsroom/crusoe-to-become-first-cloud-operator-in-space-through-partnership-with-starcloud Andrej Karpathy on YouTube: “Let’s Build GPT”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY Demis Hassabis Starcloud post on X: https://x.com/demishassabis/status/1999296127276126417 RAISE Summit: https://www.raisesummit.com/ Lilian Weng exits Thinking Machines post: https://x.com/lilianweng/status/2081816923088814421 Baseten: https://www.baseten.co/ Fireworks AI: https://fireworks.ai/ Legora: https://legora.com/ OpenEvidence: https://www.openevidence.com/ Yahoo: Stripe in talks to acquire OpenRouter: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/stripe-talks-acquire-openrouter-potential-215104525.html Sam Altman on the Relentless podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv3CEAS_w34 TechCrunch: Cursor India-only pricing tier: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/27/cursor-makes-its-biggest-india-push-yet-ahead-of-spacex-acquisition-with-localized-pricing/ Gergely Orosz: The Pragmatic Engineer: https://www.pragmaticengineer.com/ Timestamps: 0:00 Guest intros: Grant Lee (Gamma) and Philip Johnston (Starcloud) 1:22 Nvidia's open weight letter 8:11 Starcloud's first H100 in space 19:47 Series A extension economics 20:39 How Gamma stayed lean and balanced work and fun 30:40 Betting on a compute-constrained world 35:48 Different approaches to pricing 44:59 Where does the AI moat really live? 57:41 Are we in the Singularity? 1:04:42 Starcloud's mission to Alpha Centauri Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe , Steve Huffman , Brian Chesky , Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie , Sophia Amoruso , Reid Hoffman , Frank Slootman , Billy McFarland Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

This Week In Startups is made possible by: PAYPAL OPEN Today’s show: This week, our panel of AI experts — Anand Kannappan (Patronus AI), Ori Goshen (AI21 Labs), and Alex Finn (Henry Intelligent Machines) — join special guest host Lon Harris to debate whether Washington will move to formally limit powerful foreign AI models like Moonshot’s Kimi K3 and Z.ai ’s GLM-5.2. What does “winning the AI race” actually mean on a practical level? Why is cybersecurity, not benchmarks, likely the actual battleground. And why did Hugging Face have to use GLM-5.2 to investigate their recent breach rather than a frontier US model like Fable 5? PLUS why agents still fail so much on long horizon tasks, why proper model routing has such a HUGE impact on enterprise AI bills, and we take a look at Alex’s hacked digital typewriter he uses to code without distractions. Guests: Anand Kannappan on X: https://x.com/anandnk24 Patronus AI: https://www.patronus.ai/ Ori Goshen on X: https://x.com/origoshen AI21: https://www.ai21.com/ Alex Finn on X: https://x.com/AlexFinn Alex’s Vibe Coding Academy: https://www.skool.com/vibe-coding-academy/about Relevant Links: Axios: “The Secret Trump Administration Battle to Fight Chinese AI”: https://www.axios.com/2026/07/20/ai-us-china-open-source-kimi Chamath post on US AI options: https://x.com/chamath/status/2079457219892871458?s=20 Brian Armstrong post on spend vs. token usage: https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/2070670644577280109 Hugging Face: Security incident disclosure: https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026 VentureBeat Hugging Face coverage: https://venturebeat.com/security/safety-guardrails-blocked-hugging-faces-defenders-not-the-attacker-when-an-ai-agent-breached-its-systems David Sacks post on cyber guardrails: https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2078984980588531855 Databricks Unity AI Gateway: https://www.databricks.com/product/artificial-intelligence/unity-ai-gateway Ramp’s Router: https://ramp.com/router/ Timestamps: 0:00 Will the US limit foreign open source models? 5:40 Are the American frontier AI labs in danger of bankruptcy? 7:15 The risks of over-regulating AI 10:20 What does it mean to win the AI race? 17:08 Is self-hosting agentic Chinese models safe? 20:08 Why agents still fail when models are so smart 25:28 Simulating the digital world for agents 36:51 Why picking the right model for the task is so hard 46:29 Alex is developing "ambient intelligence" 52:35 What we know about the Hugging Face breach 53:46 Are safety guardrails kneecapping our best models? Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe , Steve Huffman , Brian Chesky , Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie , Sophia Amoruso , Reid Hoffman , Frank Slootman , Billy McFarland Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

This Week In Startups is made possible by: PAYPAL OPEN Today’s show: The price of tokens keeps tumbling down, and it’s changing who controls AI. Grok 4.5 and GLM-5.2 landed within two weeks of one another, offering powerful alternatives at a fraction of frontier prices. But are SpaceXAI’s latest offering and open weight models truly ready to replace Opus, GPT-5.5, and Fable? Are enterprises finally ready to stop renting and start owning their intelligence? On TWiAI Episode 22, Jason and Lon welcome three top founders — Sara Hooker (Adaption Labs), Manu Sharma (Labelbox), and Spiros Xanthos (Resolve AI) — to break down the global AI price war, and what it means for the frontier labs and customers alike. Plus Denis Hassabis’ call for an AI Standards Body, Uber and Waymo duke it out over DC robotaxis, and is SpaceXAI really going to put data centers in orbit any time soon? Guests: Sara Hooker on X: https://x.com/sarahookr Adaption Labs: https://adaptionlabs.ai/ Manu Sharma on X: https://x.com/manuaero Labelbox: https://labelbox.com/ Spiros Xanthos on X: https://x.com/spirosx Resolve AI: https://resolve.ai/ Relevant Links Introducing Grok 4.5**:** https://x.ai/news/grok-4-5 GLM from Z.ai : https://z.ai Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index: https://artificialanalysis.ai/ Demis Hassabis: “A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age”: https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718 Cerebras: https://www.cerebras.ai/ Austin Allred post cited by Jason: https://x.com/Austen/status/2076745226387902925 TechCrunch coverage of DC autonomous driving bill: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/ubers-robotaxi-lobbying-effort-has-put-it-on-a-collision-course-with-waymo/ DoorDash: Meet Dot: https://about.doordash.com/en-us/dot TechCrunch coverage of orbital data center debate: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/sam-altmans-space-data-center-trash-talk-is-what-most-experts-already-believe Falcon 9 booster’s record 36th flight: https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/07/09/live-coverage-spacex-to-launch-falcon-9-rocket-on-record-breaking-36th-flight/ Timestamps:0:00 A new generation of lower-cost models 4:10 Enterprises want their own intelligence stack 6:10 Frontier vs. open source: where does the value go? 10:03 Is enterprises destined to go small? 30:04 Self-improvement as the real fix 31:52 Should the AI industry regulate itself? 47:14 Uber vs. Waymo in DC 1:03:53 Can AI data centers in space really work? 1:14:47 You get a plug! Everyone gets a plug! Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe , Steve Huffman , Brian Chesky , Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie , Sophia Amoruso , Reid Hoffman , Frank Slootman , Billy McFarland Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

This Week In Startups is made possible by: PAYPAL Today’s show: China is weighing a ban on foreign access to its top AI models… the same low-cost open-weight systems on which half of the Valley’s startups are building. So we asked our two all-star panelists — Arena CEO/Co-Founder Anastasios Angelopoulos and Hippocratic AI CEO/Co-Founder Munjal Shah — what happens to US companies when their favorite cheap, powerful models vaporize overnight. PLUS why Hippocratic runs 31 models in parallel to ensure clinical-grade safety, the latency-vs-intelligence tradeoff no one is optimizing for, and why a company’s benchmarks might become their most valuable IP. Guests: Anastasios Angelopoulos on X: https://x.com/ml_angelopoulos Arena AI: https://arena.ai/ Agent Arena: https://arena.ai/leaderboard/agent Munjal Shah on X: https://x.com/munjalshah Hippocratic AI: https://hippocraticai.com/ Relevant Links: Reuters: “Beijing is looking at curbing overseas access…”: https://www.reuters.com/world/beijing-is-looking-curbing-overseas-access-chinas-top-ai-models-sources-say-2026-07-07/ Z.ai : https://z.ai/ Alibaba’s Qwen: https://qwen.ai/ Google’s Gemma: https://ai.google.dev/gemma Reflection AI: https://reflection.ai/ Nvidia: “How Open Models are Driving Research”: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/open-models-icml-2026/ DoorDash: “How we learned to trust our AI code reviewer”: https://careersatdoordash.com/blog/how-we-learned-to-trust-our-ai-code-reviewer-at-doordash Harvey AI: https://www.harvey.ai/ ElevenLabs: https://elevenlabs.io/ Anthropic: “A global workspace in language models”: https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace CNN: “Trump rings opening bell to mark first day of trading for Trump Accounts”: https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/06/business/trump-accounts-launch Brown University Health: https://www.brownhealth.org/ Timestamps: 0:00 Will US companies lose access to Chinese models? 1:42 Open source makes running 31 models viable 5:01 How deep is the West's open source bench? 13:20 Jagged Intelligence and why post-training matters 25:22 Benchmarks as living quality checks 32:49 Why models still struggle with drug names 42:58 Fine-tuning TV, cough, and sob detection 46:08 What is Arena actually selling? 1:08:29 Nationalization vs. buying stakes in AI companies Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe , Steve Huffman , Brian Chesky , Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie , Sophia Amoruso , Reid Hoffman , Frank Slootman , Billy McFarland Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

This Week In Startups is made possible by: PAYPAL Today’s show: The US government won’t let you use the most powerful releases from US AI labs… but a Chinese lab is giving away their latest frontier model for free. This week, we’ve got three AI CEOs building in image generation (Victor Perez of Krea), mobile agents (Div Garg of The AGI Company), and enterprise governance (Andrew Berman of Runlayer). Together, they’re breaking down what’s really happening underneath all this chaos, and why the industry’s more focused on “minimum viable intelligence” over breaking benchmarks. Guests Victor Perez on X: https://x.com/viccpoes Krea AI: https://www.krea.ai/ Krea 2 Raw and Turbo on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/krea/Krea-2-Raw Div Garg on X: https://x.com/divgarg The AGI Company: https://theagi.company/ Andrew Berman on X: https://x.com/berman66 Runlayer: https://www.runlayer.com/ Relevant Links Anthropic: “Introducing Claude Sonnet 5”: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-5 Z.ai : GLM-5.2: https://docs.z.ai/guides/llm/glm-5.2 Yuchen Jin X post: “GLM-5.2 is the open source Claude moment”: https://x.com/Yuchenj_UW/status/2071278256817574297 TechCrunch: GPT-5.6 restricted rollout coverage: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/26/openai-limits-gpt-5-6-rollout-after-government-request-says-restrictions-shouldnt-be-the-norm/ AndroidWorld benchmark on GitHub: https://github.com/google-research/android_world The Information Higgsfield valuation article: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-video-startup-talks-quadruple-valuation-5-billion Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF): https://aaif.io/ Tomasz Tunguz: “When AI Costs More Than The Engineer”: https://tomtunguz.com/ai-spend-breakeven-2029/ Fortune Runlayer raise coverage: https://fortune.com/2026/06/24/exclusive-vinod-khosla-felicis-runlayer-nanit-30-million-enterprise-ai/ Gusto: https://gusto.com/ Timestamps: 0:00 Making sense of US AI policy 5:09 Tiny Action Models vs. LLMs 7:02 Runlayer, AGI Inc, and computer-use agents 10:05 What does "trusted access" really mean? 12:37 Why Krea open sourced its image model 22:21 BREAKING: Claude Sonnet 5 is here 26:00 GLM-5.2 is the open source Claude moment 31:58 Personalization and corporate ontology 41:25 Can we trust Higgsfield's numbers? 50:39 Distillation: The threat is real 58:01 Agentic personhood and corporate rights 1:03:19 Everyone's AGI timeline and p(doom) score Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Thank you to our partners: Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe , Steve Huffman , Brian Chesky , Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie , Sophia Amoruso , Reid Hoffman , Frank Slootman , Billy McFarland Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Paypal Today’s show: *When we think of “Physical AI,” most of us conjure images of humanoid robots and self-driving cars. But there’s a lot more to the category than just breakdancing Chinese bots and Waymos, from excavators autonomously digging tomorrows worksites, to a robot the size of four pizza boxes deploying to the ISS. Guest host Alex Wilhelm sits down with three founders in the trenches of the Physical AI Space: Boris Sofman of Bedrock Robotics, which builds autonomous construction equipment Jeff Hawke of Odyssey, a frontier AI lab specializing in world models for robotics and video games Ethan Barajas of Icarus Robotics, designers of the free-flying Joy robot that will join the ISS crew in 2027 Guests: Boris Sofman on X: https://x.com/bsofman Bedrock Robotics: https://bedrockrobotics.com/ Jeff Hawke on X: https://x.com/jeffrey_hawke Odyssey: https://odyssey.ml/ Ethan Barajas on X: https://x.com/ethanbarajas11 Icarus Robotics: https://www.icarusrobotics.com/ Relevant Links Bedrock Excavators Remove 65,000 Cubic Yards of Dirt: https://www.enr.com/articles/61982-bedrock-robotics-excavators-remove-65-000-cubic-yards-of-dirt-on-southwest-project Odyssey $310M Series B article: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/world-model-maker-odyssey-nabs-1-45b-valuation-backed-by-amazon-and-other-big-names/ Icarus “Joyride” Mission announcement: https://thedebrief.org/icarus-is-building-the-robotic-labor-force-for-space-voyager-technologies-is-sending-a-next-generation-zero-gravity-robot-on-a-joyride-to-space/ PROWL: Prioritized Regret-Driven Optimization for World Model Learning: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18803 NVIDIA Cosmos 3 report: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3/technical-report.pdf ISS Columbus Laboratory Module: https://www.nasa.gov/international-space-station/columbus-laboratory-module/ NASA’s Astrobee flying robot: https://www.nasa.gov/astrobee/ Voyager Technologies: https://www.voyagerspace.com/ Vast Space: https://www.vastspace.com/ Blue Origin’s New Glenn: https://www.blueorigin.com/new-glenn “Red Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson: https://www.amazon.com/Red-Mars-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0553560735 “Rendezvous with Rama” by Arthur C. Clarke: https://www.amazon.com/Rendezvous-Rama-Arthur-Clarke/dp/0553287893 Theo Von “This Past Weekend” podcast: https://www.theovon.com/podcast Anthropic statement on Fable/Mythos suspension: https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access Timestamps: 0:00 The Year of Physical AI 1:28 Why everyone's bullish on world models 7:03 Physical AI is harder, but probably bigger 9:08 How to think about world models 16:00 When data becomes "adversarial" 25:00 How Bedrock powers autonomous excavators 30:48 Why teleoperation gets a bad rap 39:10 Meet Joy the space robot 41:33 Laser comms coming to next-gen stations 46:29 Why everyone hates data centers 57:33 When does Claude Fable come back? Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe , Steve Huffman , Brian Chesky , Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie , Sophia Amoruso , Reid Hoffman , Frank Slootman , Billy McFarland Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

SpaceX bought Cursor for $60 billion. Satya Nadella says companies need to stop relying on third party AI models and build their own “token capital.” The focus is shifting from LLMs to the application layer sitting on top of them. Here to unpack what that means are guest experts Ali Ansari (Micro1) and Ryan Daniels (Crosby).Plus we get a sneak peek at their new contract redlining benchmark, a crucial eval for how well LLMs don’t just answer questions about the law, but demonstrate actual legal reasoning.Timestamps:0:00 SpaceX acquires Cursor7:36 Distillation vs. building your own model19:43 Nadella's "Frontier Without an Ecosystem"30:21 AI in the courtroom32:15 Ando: the intriguing new workplace tool1:05:38 Inside Micro1 and Crosby's new benchmark1:07:14Guests:Ali Ansari: https://x.com/aliansarinikMicro1: https://www.micro1.ai/Ryan Daniels: https://x.com/ryanjdanielsCrosby: https://crosby.ai/Relevant Links:Bloomberg: “SpaceX acquires Cursor for $60B”: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-16/spacex-cements-60-billion-deal-to-take-over-ai-startup-cursorQuinn Thompson “brilliant corporate finance” post: https://x.com/qthomp/status/2066859672749977988Business Insider: “Inside Cursor’s Wild Rise”: https://www.businessinsider.com/cursor-ceo-michael-truell-spacex-elon-musk-anthropic-2026-6Satya Nadella: “A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable”: https://x.com/satyanadella/article/2066182223213293753Joshua Browder’s Do Not Pay: https://donotpay.com/Harvard Magazine: “AI Outperforms Doctors in Emergency Room Tasks”: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/ai/ai-outperforms-doctors-diagnosis-harvard-studyJoshua Kushner “Long Humans” post: https://x.com/JoshuaKushner/status/2065093542809092465Ando: https://ando.so/Nim Ravid on X: https://x.com/Nim_Ravid1Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisCheck out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.com

Apple just paid a rival a billion dollars a year because it could not build Siri itself, and that tells you where the AI platform war actually stands: the edge has moved up the stack, from the model to the agent layer sitting on top of it. This week's roundtable makes the case that whoever controls that layer controls the experience, and we brought in three founders building it from different angles: Hermes Agent, NotebookLM, and LiveKit. Their through-line is that the harness is temporary, the model keeps eating it, and the people building agents right now are designing for capabilities that do not exist yet. This week's roundtable: Jeffrey Quesnelle (Co-founder & CEO, Nous Research, the open source AI lab behind Hermes Agent) Steven B Johnson (Editorial Director of NotebookLM & Google Labs, co-creator of NotebookLM) Russ d'Sa (Co-founder & CEO, LiveKit, the open source real-time voice/video infrastructure behind ChatGPT voice mode) Thank you to our exclusive sponsor: PayPal Open, One Platform for All Business: https://paypalopen.com Timestamps: 0:00 Cold open 1:08 Welcome to Episode 17 1:40 Jeffrey Quesnelle on Hermes Agent and the open source agent race 5:03 Steven Johnson on NotebookLM, source-grounding, and going agentic 7:32 Why AI got booed at commencement: the first generation raised on ChatGPT 10:48 Russ d'Sa on LiveKit powering ChatGPT, Tesla, Grok, and Salesforce voice 27:50 Apple's $1B Gemini deal and the Siri UX problem 52:49 "Functional AGI, unevenly distributed": where the models actually are 57:24 The harness is temporary: why agent builders design for the next model Guests: Jeffrey Quesnelle, Nous Research: https://nousresearch.com | https://x.com/theemozilla Steven Johnson, NotebookLM (Google Labs): https://notebooklm.google.com | https://x.com/stevenbjohnson Russ d'Sa, LiveKit: https://livekit.io | https://x.com/dsa Referenced in this episode: Nous Research / Hermes Agent: https://nousresearch.com NotebookLM: https://notebooklm.google.com LiveKit: https://livekit.io OpenAI ChatGPT: https://openai.com Tesla: https://www.tesla.com Grok (xAI): https://x.ai Salesforce Agentforce: https://www.salesforce.com/agentforce SAP Joule: https://www.sap.com/products/artificial-intelligence/ai-assistant.html Apple Intelligence: https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence Google Gemini: https://gemini.google.com Anthropic Claude Code: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code OpenRouter: https://openrouter.ai Newsletter and all platforms: https://thisweekinai.ai Apple Podcasts: https://thisweekinai.ai/apple Spotify: https://thisweekinai.ai/spotify YouTube: https://youtube.com/@ThisWeekinAIPodcast Show X: https://x.com/ThisWeeknAI #ThisWeekInAI #AI #NousResearch #NotebookLM #LiveKit #OpenSourceAI #AIAgents #Siri #Gemini #VoiceAI

The future of AI isn't about whether the model is smart enough. It's about whether we can afford to run it. We dug into the AI cost panic, the energy wall that's coming for compute, and why "developers are disappearing" gets the economics exactly backwards.This week's roundtable: Naveen Rao (CEO of Unconventional AI, building brain-inspired analog chips, formerly sold companies to Intel and Databricks) and Alex Finn (founder of Henry Intelligent Machines and Creator Buddy).Thank you to our exclusive sponsor: PayPal Open, One Platform for All Business: http://paypalopen.com/ Timestamps: 0:00 Cold open 1:21 Welcome to Episode 16 2:44 Is the AI cost panic real, or just "token maxing"? 5:08 It's not the intelligence, it's how people use AI 9:40 Surgeons vs. shotguns: prompt discipline & matching models to tasks 13:10 Naveen's path from Intel and Databricks to Unconventional 15:08 Why developers aren't disappearing 18:37 How energy overtook CapEx in the cost of compute 21:34 The energy wall & getting to 3 orders of magnitude more efficient 25:52 AI's PR problem & the data center backlash 27:55 China's hunger vs. America's AI boogeyman 30:38 Data center taxes, equity stakes & the politics of AI upside 37:54 The Anthropic IPO & how these founders actually invest🔗 Guests:Naveen Rao, Unconventional AI: https://unconv.ai | https://x.com/AlexFinn Alex Finn, Henry Intelligent Machines: https://meethenry.ai | https://x.com/NaveenGRao 🔗 Host:Alex Wilhelm, This Week in Startups: https://x.com/alex 🔗 Referenced in this episode:Unconventional AI (analog chips for AI): https://unconv.ai MosaicML (acquired by Databricks): https://www.databricks.com/research/m... Nervana Systems (acquired by Intel)Creator Buddy: https://creatorbuddy.io Qwen (open-weight model Alex runs locally): https://qwenlm.ai NVIDIA DGX Spark: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/products... Anthropic (filed to go public): https://www.anthropic.com Henry Intelligent Machines: https://meethenry.ai/ 🔗 Subscribe and follow:Newsletter and all platforms: https://thisweekinai.ai #ThisWeekInAI #AI #UnconventionalAI #NaveenRao #AlexFinn #AnalogComputing #AIcompute #AIenergy #TokenMaxing #AIlayoffs #AnthropicIPO

The AI jobs panic is here. Meta cut 8,000. Intuit cut 3,000. CapEx went up. Nobody can agree if anyone has actually lost a job to AI, or just to the promise of it. We dug into the GPU squeeze, the new craft of "reward engineering," Pope Leo's call to disarm AI, and why Chinese open-source models just blew past American ones in token usage. This week's roundtable: Erik Bernhardsson (CEO of Modal Labs, the serverless GPU cloud), Tanay Kothari (CEO of Wispr Flow, the voice dictation app every VC in the valley uses), and Richard Socher (CEO of Recursive Superintelligence and You.com). Thank you to our exclusive sponsor: PayPal Open, One Platform for All Business: http://paypalopen.com/ Timestamps: 0:00 Cold open 0:53 Welcome to Episode 15 5:53 Recursive's plan to build a self-improving "Eureka machine" 8:10 Token spend now exceeds headcount at the frontier 9:56 GPU crunch, Hopper prices, and the Anthropic-Colossus shockwave 12:23 Wispr Flow's 90% gross margin playbook 14:30 Running $100M in marketing with two humans and a swarm of agents 18:29 Reward hacking, paperclips, and the rise of the "reward engineer" 24:39 Why CEOs put one person in charge: multi-objective AI 28:17 Meta's 8,000 layoffs, $145B CapEx, Goldman vs. Stanford 33:23 "Nobody lost their job to AI, just the promise of AI" 37:57 Jevons paradox: software demand is infinite, illustrations aren't 39:48 Meta's keystroke monitoring and the back-channel reaction 42:55 Equity, Trump accounts, and rooting for your old employer 44:06 The Bloomberg/Indeed dev jobs chart 47:34 Jason's pitch: hiring a 22-year-old AI-native "software valet" 50:29 Pope Leo: "AI needs to be disarmed" 57:41 Chris Olah on AI displacement and the global poor 1:00:46 Chinese models hit 9 trillion tokens, DeepSeek V4 Flash goes #1 1:03:04 Strange biases, Tiananmen Square, and the US open-source vacuum 1:05:07 Who they're hiring 🔗 Guests: Erik Bernhardsson, Modal Labs: https://modal.com | https://x.com/bernhardsson Tanay Kothari, Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai | https://x.com/tankots Richard Socher, Recursive Superintelligence / You.com: https://recursive.com | https://x.com/RichardSocher 🔗 Referenced in this episode: Modal Labs: https://modal.com Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai Recursive Superintelligence launch: https://recursive.com You.com: https://you.com Anthropic / SpaceX Colossus 1 compute deal: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-spacex TechCrunch on the $1.25B/month Anthropic-xAI compute deal: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-will-pay-xai-1-25-billion-per-month-for-compute/ Meta's 8,000 layoffs and 2026 AI CapEx of $145B: https://www.reuters.com Intuit cuts 3,000 jobs to fund AI integration: https://www.reuters.com Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon NYT op-ed on AI job loss: https://www.nytimes.com Stanford study on entry-level AI-exposed jobs (-16%): https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu Pope Leo XIV: "AI needs to be disarmed": https://www.vatican.va Chris Olah (Anthropic) on AI and the global poor: https://www.anthropic.com OpenRouter token usage leaderboard: https://openrouter.ai/rankings DeepSeek V4 Flash: https://www.deepseek.com Qwen 3 Max (Alibaba): https://qwenlm.ai 🔗 Subscribe and follow: Newsletter and all platforms: https://thisweekinai.ai #ThisWeekInAI #AI #ModalLabs #WisprFlow #Recursive #YouCom #DeepSeek #Qwen #MetaLayoffs #Anthropic #Colossus #PopeLeo #RewardHacking #AIJobs #OpenSource

The frontier labs are coming for the application layer, and they're going to steal your idea. We dug into Andrej Karpathy's move to Anthropic, the new rules of AI etiquette, and why graduates are booing AI at commencement speeches. This week's roundtable: Kanjun Qiu (CEO of Imbue, building open source agents), Jeremy Fraenkel (CEO of Fundamental, large tabular models for enterprise data), and Karri Saarinen (CEO of Linear, the product development system used by OpenAI, Coinbase, Cursor, Ramp, and Cash App). Thank you to our exclusive sponsor: PayPal Open , One Platform for All Business: http://paypalopen.com/ Timestamps: 0:00 Cold open 1:02 Welcome to Episode 14 of This Week in AI 1:45 Kanjun Qiu on Imbue's GPU cluster bet that funds the company 5:38 Jeremy Fraenkel on why LLMs choke on structured enterprise data 9:36 Karri Saarinen on Linear and product work for AI agents 12:50 Design in the age of AI: why early-stage product design is getting worse 21:18 Jason coins "AI etiquette": your output is your responsibility 33:30 Andre Karpathy joins Anthropic 40:00 The cult of each AI lab: SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI 47:00 Anthropic's pricing misstep and the "punk software" movement 50:00 The verticalization war coming for the application layer 55:00 "Claude knows more about me than my partner": power concentration in AI 58:30 Mac M5 clusters and confidential compute on AWS 1:07:30 Graduates boo AI at commencement: Schmidt, Borchetta, Cawfield 1:22:00 Four founders deliver their own commencement speeches 1:28:30 Reese Witherspoon vs the New York Times 1:33:00 Plugs and where to find the guests 🔗 Guests on X: Kanjun Qiu, Imbue: https://imbue.com | https://x.com/kanjun Jeremy Fraenkel, Fundamental: https://fundamental.tech | https://x.com/fraenkelj Karri Saarinen, Linear: https://linear.app | https://x.com/karrisaarinen 🔗 Referenced in this episode: Andre Karpathy joins Anthropic (announcement): https://x.com/karpathy/status/2056753169888334312?s=20 Imbue Blueprint (open source agent skill): https://imbue.com/blueprint ExoLabs (daisy-chained Mac clusters): https://exolabs.net Abacus (on-prem language models): https://goabacus.co Whisper Flow (voice-to-text): https://wisprflow.ai Perplexity Model Council: https://perplexity.ai NYT editorial on Reese Witherspoon and AI: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/15/opinion/reese-witherspoon-mel-robbins-girlboss-ai.html 🔗 Subscribe and follow: Newsletter and all platforms: https://thisweekinai.ai #ThisWeekInAI #AI #Imbue #Fundamental #Linear #Anthropic #OpenAI #Karpathy #AIEtiquette #VibeCoding #PunkSoftware #AICommencement #OpenSourceAI

The future of AI isn't a smarter chatbot. It's a model that watches your screen, listens to the room, and acts on what it sees. We dug into Thinking Machines' new interaction model, what it means for compute, and the layoff wave that's already here.This week's roundtable: Anastasios Angelopoulos (CEO of Arena, formerly LMArena), Nick Harris (CEO of Lightmatter, photonic computing chips), and Philip Johnston (CEO of StarCloud, building megawatt data centers in space). Thank you to our exclusive sponsor: PayPal Open, One Platform for All Business: http://paypalopen.com/ Timestamps: 0:00 Cold open 1:21 Welcome to Episode 13 2:51 Is China closing the AI gap? Arena's data 5:16 Lightmatter and the photonic interconnect bottleneck 9:42 StarCloud 2, Nvidia Space Ruben 1, and orbital data centers 17:24 Thinking Machines' interaction model: what's actually new 28:22 Whisper Flow and the 3-pedal desk setup 33:48 Real-time desktop and camera awareness as the real unlock 40:25 Why this 100x's compute demand 42:43 The polarization of compute and $10M personal data centers 49:25 The layoff wave: Cloudflare, PayPal, Coinbase, Upwork 54:48 The 10x gap between AI-first and non-AI-first employees 59:52 Unlimited agency and the abundance future 1:00:46 Anthropic's Project Luna runs a retail store 1:03:45 Decoupling labor from value creation 1:05:03 P(doom) round 🔗 Guests: Anastasios Angelopoulos, Arena: https://arena.ai | @ML_Angelopolous Nick Harris, Lightmatter: https://lightmatter.co Philip Johnston, StarCloud: https://starcloud.com | @philipjohnston 🔗 Referenced in this episode: Thinking Machines, Introducing Interaction Models: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interaction-models/ LMArena leaderboard: https://lmarena.ai Lightmatter: https://lightmatter.co Starcloud: https://www.starcloud.com TechCrunch, Cloudflare says AI made 1,100 jobs obsolete: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/08/cloudflare-says-ai-made-1100-jobs-obsolete-even-as-revenue-hit-a-record-high/ Fast Company, Tech layoffs this week due to AI (Cloudflare, PayPal, Coinbase, Upwork): https://www.fastcompany.com/91538995/tech-layoffs-due-to-ai-this-week-cloudflare-paypal-coinbase-upwork Bloomberg, South Korea floats citizen dividend from AI profits: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-05-12/korea-s-massive-ai-boom-triggers-call-for-tech-tax-roiling-market PYMNTS, Inside a retail store run entirely by AI (Andon Labs / Luna): https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2026/inside-a-retail-store-run-entirely-by-ai/ Wispr Flow (voice-to-text tool Jason uses): https://wisprflow.ai Fermi Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox 🔗 Subscribe and follow: Newsletter and all platforms: https://thisweekinai.ai #ThisWeekInAI #AI #ThinkingMachines #Lightmatter #StarCloud #Arena #Anthropic #ProjectLuna #AIcompute #AIlayoffs #Superintelligence

This week, JCal sits down with two builders working on opposite ends of the AI stack: Naveen Rao , co-founder and CEO of Unconventional AI (his $4.5B startup rethinking the computer from first principles), and Trey Holterman , co-founder and CEO of Tennr, the platform automating the messy paperwork that decides whether millions of patients ever get the care they need. They break down why AI already beats ER doctors at diagnosis, why Epic is the most hated company in healthcare, what it takes to disrupt healthcare's $5 trillion incumbents, and whether $1.1 trillion in hyperscaler CapEx will pay off before the energy runs out. Mentioned in the show: Unconventional AI: https://unconv.ai Tennr: https://tennr.com Abridge: https://abridge.com Ambience Healthcare: https://ambiencehealthcare.com Epic: https://epic.com Plaud (NotePin): https://plaud.ai Whoop: https://whoop.com Function Health: https://functionhealth.com Oura: https://ouraring.com Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com Perplexity: https://perplexity.ai Databricks: https://databricks.com Harvard / Beth Israel ER study: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/ai/ai-outperforms-doctors-diagnosis-harvard-study Jack Clark on recursive self-improvement: https://jack-clark.net This Week In AI is made possible by: PayPal Open - One Platform for all Business: https://paypalopen.com Timestamps: 00:00 Cold open 00:51 Welcome & intro to Naveen Rao (Unconventional AI) and Trey Holterman (Tennr) 05:43 Tennr's mission: fixing the U.S. healthcare "black hole" 06:23 Why primary care is changing in the AI era 09:09 The radiologist that wasn't replaced & what AI got right in 2015 15:31 Harvard study: AI beats ER doctors 67% to 55% 20:16 Plaud Pin & the always-on AI in the exam room 22:29 AI scribes, EMR privacy & how Abridge actually works 24:01 Whoop, Aura & when wearable data finally meets the clinic 25:20 Epic, FHIR & the 800-pound gorilla of healthcare 34:21 Disrupting Epic with an open-source EMR play 37:20 The Abridge vs Ambience scribe wars 42:06 Jack Clark's 60% odds on recursive self-improvement by 2028 53:41 Morgan Stanley's $1.1 trillion hyperscaler CapEx forecast 1:04:53 Anthropic's marketing machine & the AI religion thesis Subscribe to This Week in AI on Apple: https://thisweekinai.ai/spotify Subscribe to This Week in AI on Spotify: https://thisweekinai.ai/apple Thanks for watching! 🤖 If you want to stay ahead of the curve on all things AI, make sure to join our community across all platforms: 📩 Get the Weekly Newsletter: https://thisweekinai.ai/ 📺 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ThisWeekinAIPodcast 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinaipodcast 📱 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinaipodcast ✖️X: https://x.com/ThisWeeknAI Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Follow Oliver: https://x.com/oliverkorzen Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/