Podcast · Tech & Science

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

by Conviction · English · Tech & Science

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 41 min
Latest: 2 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

2 Oct 2026 · 36 min

Frontier Chips for Frontier AI Labs, with Walter Goodwin, Founder/CEO of Fractile

Founder and CEO of full-stack AI chip company Fractile, Walter Goodwin, joins Sarah Guo to discuss the bets he’s made on the future of the chip market as other major players like Broadcom, NVIDIA, and AMD try to accelerate their workloads. They discuss the difference in Fractile’s newer approach on model architecture with a full-stack team in the current chip landscape and the technical bets they’re making in that direction. Walter also talks about compressing the gap between the chip design cycle and its payoff period, and making a generational leap in AI inference to realize the bet in…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

24 Sep 2026 · 43 min

Re-Founding Incumbents for the AI Era with Sequence Holdings Co-Founder and CEO Michael Lee

Can AI transform legacy incumbents rather than replacing them? Sequence Holdings co-founder and CEO Michael Lee joins Sarah Guo to discuss how holding company structures and engineering integrations are reshaping market leaders from the inside out. Michael details Sequence’s $7.7 billion take-private transaction of Baldwin alongside Dell Family Office (DFO), and shares his thesis on why traditional consulting models and software sales fall short for real enterprise AI transformations. They also talk about why permanent holding company structures are good for long-term compounding, real-world…
S1 · E178 · 18 Sep 2026 · 38 min

Why Diffusion Will Win AI Inference with Inception Co-Founder and CEO Stefano Ermon

As generative AI hits hardware and latency bottlenecks, Stanford professor, diffusion pioneer, and Inception co-founder and CEO Stefano Ermon is betting on a radical new architecture. Stefano joins Sarah Guo to talk about Inception, and how his team is applying diffusion architecture beyond images and video into discrete text and code generation. Stefano explains the limitations of autoregressive LLMs, as well as why parallel token generation in diffusion models offers superior inference scaling and hardware utilization on standard GPUs. He also shares details about Inception’s Mercury…
S1 · E177 · 10 Sep 2026 · 45 min

Coinbase’s Everything Exchange: Agentic Finance, Stablecoins, and Tokenization with CEO Brian Armstrong

From the tokenization of real-world assets to funding research on anti-aging therapeutics, Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong is focused on solving meta-problems for the benefit of society. Brian joins Elad Gil this episode to discuss the intersections of artificial intelligence, crypto rails, and biotechnology. He details Coinbase’s vision for agentic finance, as well as how Coinbase is becoming the ‘Everything Exchange’, which includes tokenized real-world stocks, stablecoin payment adoption, and prediction markets. Brian also introduces his new venture, New Limit, a company…
S1 · E176 · 3 Sep 2026 · 37 min

Redefining Chip Architecture with Arm CEO Rene Haas

From data center orchestrators to AGI and robotics, CPUs remain the heart of modern computing. Arm CEO Rene Haas joins Elad Gil and Sarah Guo to explore how Arm is positioned at the epicenter of AI-driven demands for compute. Rene explains Arm’s position in the chip supply chain, and how Arm transitioned from an IP licensing model to producing physical chips like the Arm AGI CPU for Meta. He also discusses bottlenecks in hardware supply chains, SoftBank’s ecosystem and capital strategy, why US semiconductor manufacturing independence is critical, the future of robotics, and why CPUs remain…
S1 · E175 · 27 Aug 2026 · 35 min

Rethinking Legacy Data Infrastructure with Eon Co-Founders Ofir Ehrlich and Gonen Stein

Google’s purchase of Spirit Airlines’ data out of bankruptcy signaled a shift in how the tech world values real-world datasets. Although compute and models get much of the attention, in this landscape, it’s data that is a company’s protective moat. Eon CEO / Co-Founder Ofir Ehrlich and President / Co-Founder Gonen Stein join Elad Gil to talk about how Eon is redefining cloud backup into a secure data foundation designed to power and protect enterprise AI. Ofir and Gonen discuss why historical enterprise data is in demand by AI labs, and how Eon facilitates access to scattered and locked data…
S1 · E174 · 20 Aug 2026 · 32 min

From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak

Max Hodak, co-founder and CEO of Science Corporation, joins Sarah Guo to discuss the future of vision, brain-computer interfaces, and the human experience. Max explains how Science’s PRIMA retinal implant could restore functional vision for people who have lost their sight, and why treating the brain as a computational system could unlock new approaches to medicine. They explore the broader potential of neural devices, from restoring lost capabilities to expanding human potential, as well as deeper questions around identity, consciousness, and whether the human experience can persist as our…
S1 · E173 · 13 Aug 2026 · 46 min

What Chess.com Teaches US About Superhuman Capabilities, with CEO Erik Allebest

In a world of infinite gaming and entertainment possibilities, how does a centuries-old game stay so popular? Chess.com co-founder and CEO Erik Allebest joins Sarah Guo to explain how the evolution of technology has kept people coming back to chess, even when machines can beat us at the game. Erik talks about how the desire to build a MySpace-like community for chess led to the purchase of a domain name from a bankruptcy sale back in 2005, and scaled into a community with 10 million daily active users and 250 million total registered members. He also discusses the growth of the cultural…
S1 · E172 · 6 Aug 2026 · 39 min

Chasing Trillion-Dollar Companies, Founder Ambition, Token Budgets, and Regulatory Capture with Sarah & Elad

Is the tech industry moving too quickly, or are founders letting fear of AI labs stunt their ambitions? Sarah and Elad explore the current landscape of artificial intelligence, venture capital, and startup dynamics. They discuss the realities of building multi-trillion-dollar companies, shifting market sizes and outcome-based pricing models, and how founders are reacting to the rise of major AI labs. They also talk about what the framework for startup exits should look like, the potential for researcher burnouts in the next eighteen months as ASI looms on the horizon, bottlenecks for…
S1 · E171 · 31 Jul 2026 · 34 min

Building an Autonomous Enterprise for Real-World Services with Netic Founder Melisa Tokmak

When your AC fails in a heatwave, you don’t want a busy signal; you need a solution. Netic founder and CEO Melisa Tokmak joins host Elad Gil to explain how Netic’s autonomous AI platform acts as an intermediary between companies and customers, deploying agents to instantly handle essential services, from emergency home repairs to hospitality to pet care. Melisa describes the complexity of these real-world workloads, which have traditionally relied on large human support teams, and how over 70% of Netic’s customers interact first with AI. She also talks about the reasoning behind building a…
S1 · E170 · 23 Jul 2026 · 49 min

Building an Autonomous Delivery Experience with DoorDash Co-Founders Andy Fang and Stanley Tang

DoorDash is not just a delivery company. From its inception, co-founders Andy Fang and Stanley Tang operated it as a robotics and autonomy company. Andy and Stanley join Sarah Guo to explain how autonomous tech and AI are reshaping consumer habits, commerce, and delivery. Andy and Stanley talk about the rollout of Ask DoorDash, a natural-language interface that’s driving both restaurant discovery and larger grocery orders. They also discuss Dot, their in-house autonomous delivery robot that has operated in Phoenix for over two years, and how it highlights the operational and hardware…
S1 · E169 · 9 Jul 2026 · 41 min

Travel Through the Lens of AI with with Booking.com CEO Glenn Fogel

When Glenn Fogel joined Priceline in 2000, the business was worth a few hundred million dollars. One week later, the Nasdaq peaked, eventually sending its stock down to a dollar a share. But over 25 years later, Booking Holdings has scaled over 1000x into an over $100 billion dollar global travel behemoth. Elad Gil is joined by Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel to discuss his career, from law school and Wall Street to working at Priceline through the dot-com crash, and to helping grow the business into a multifaceted, dynamic travel marketplace in the AI era. Glenn explains how leveraging AI…
S1 · E168 · 2 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 1 min

How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor

While the rest of the nuclear industry still relies on simulations and paper designs, Valar Atomics is busy splitting atoms. In fact, they just powered an NVIDIA Blackwell chip directly with a live nuclear reactor in order to power the world’s first nuclear powered website. Sarah Guo joins Valar Atomics founder and CEO Isaiah Taylor on-site at their reactor site in Utah to talk about how Valar is shifting nuclear energy from the theoretical to the practical by building and perfecting reactors via hardware iteration. Isaiah discusses why the US stopped building nuclear reactors in the 1970s,…
S1 · E167 · 26 Jun 2026 · 36 min

Really Big Test-Time Compute in AI Changes Benchmarks, Safety and Research with OpenAI Research Scientist Noam Brown

When a new AI model drops, it’s judged based on a static benchmark grid that doesn’t account for how long the model is allowed to think. How then should we measure a model’s true capability? OpenAI research scientist Noam Brown returns to talk with Sarah Guo about his latest essay on why the AI industry’s traditional benchmark grids are broken, and how large-scale test-time compute is fundamentally changing how models are evaluated. Noam explains how, if properly scaffolded, today’s models can reason for weeks or even months on complex tasks. He also discusses real-world implications of…
S1 · E166 · 18 Jun 2026 · 45 min

Re-engineering the Semiconductor Supply Chain with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan

At 66 years old, instead of heading towards retirement, former Cadence CEO and legendary investor Lip-Bu Tan decided to take on the hardest job in tech: turning Intel around. Elad Gil and Sarah Guo sit down with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to talk about why he took the job and what “saving” Intel actually looks like. Tan explains how his experience in startup culture informed his decisions to drive Intel’s culture towards faster decisions, focus on customer satisfaction, and engineer accountability. He also discusses his strategy to strengthen Intel’s balance sheet by welcoming investments from…
S1 · E165 · 10 Jun 2026 · 56 min

Biohub: The Future of Biology is Open-Source with Co-Founders Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, and Head of Science Alex Rives

Biohub started with an ambitious goal of curing, preventing, and managing all disease by the end of the century. A decade later, thanks to the convergence of frontier AI and biological data, that goal may have been too conservative. In this episode, Elad Gil and Sarah Guo sit down with Biohub co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, alongside Biohub Head of Science Alex Rives. Together, they discuss Biohub’s $500 million virtual biology initiative, which integrates frontier AI with wet-lab work to build predictive world models of cells, proteins, and systems. They also talk about…
S1 · E164 · 4 Jun 2026 · 42 min

We Need An Ecosystem in AI, And Every Company Can Win A Place In It

What does it mean for a business to truly operate at the AI frontier? In a special crossover episode at Microsoft Build, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil team up with Latent Space host “swyx” to talk with Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella about the future of AI platforms, software development, and the tech ecosystem. Satya reflects on the latest breakthroughs from Microsoft Build, the strategic shift toward multi-model harnesses, and why private evaluations (evals) are now a company’s most important intellectual property. They also discuss how autonomous AI agents are reshaping the role of…
S1 · E163 · 28 May 2026 · 41 min

Building an AI Guardian for Enterprise with Onyx Security CEO Maxim Bar Kogan

We are now closer than ever before to living in a world where AI agents are smart enough to run our power grids and manage water supplies. How do we keep them from going rogue? Sarah Guo sits down with Maxim Bar Kogan, founder and CEO of Onyx Securities, to explore the complexities of supervising and securing autonomous agents at the enterprise level. Maxim explains Onyx’s product as an AI control plane, which oversees the permissions and flexible contexts of agents while balancing latency, cost, and reliability. He also discusses how current controls have insufficient context to monitor…
S1 · E162 · 21 May 2026 · 31 min

The Story Behind Cerebras’ $63 Billion IPO with Founder and CEO Andrew Feldman

Companies in Silicon Valley from Nvidia to AMD are racing to fuel the AI revolution with postage stamp-sized AI chips. Meanwhile, a chip the size of a dinner plate just fueled a $63 billion IPO for Cerebras. Elad Gil and Sarah Guo sit down with Cerebras founder and CEO Andrew Feldman to discuss the company’s journey to making one of the largest tech go-publics in history. Andrew details the multi-year journey of pioneering wafer-scale AI computing, including surviving a brutal period of being ahead of market demand. He also explains the engineering breakthroughs that led to delivering…
S1 · E161 · 14 May 2026 · 38 min

Pax Silica: Inside the Trump Administration’s Tech Strategy with US Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg

Securing AI dominance requires more than just semiconductors; it demands a complete overhaul of how the West manages everything that goes into them, from rare earth minerals to actuators. Enter: Pax Silica. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with US Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg to discuss the launch and expansion of Pax Silica, a 14-country economic security coalition designed to secure the entire AI supply chain. Jacob talks about the creation of a forward-deployed industrial base in the Philippines, where 4,000 acres will be developed into an “economic security…
S1 · E160 · 11 May 2026 · 22 min

Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman

The world’s first AI-take-private just proved that AI can revolutionize the real economy. Long Lake Management co-founder and CEO Alexander Taubman joins Elad Gil to discuss his firm’s agreement to acquire the legacy platform American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) in a deal valued at $6.3 billion. Alexander explains the mechanics of AI-driven roll-ups, and why Long Lake chooses to acquire and transform businesses rather than simply selling them software. He also talks about how Long Lake’s horizontal AI platform, Nexus, automates workflows across diverse verticals, and how…
S1 · E156 · 1 May 2026 · 43 min

Baseten CEO Tuhin Srivastava on the AI Inference Crunch, Custom Models, and Building the Inference Cloud

Baseten CEO and co-founder Tuhin Srivastava sits down with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss the rapid growth of AI inference demand, Baseten’s 30x growth, and why inference is becoming the strategic “last market.” Tuhin Srivastava argues the application layer will persist because companies with unique user signals can encode value into workflows and post-train specialized models, citing examples like Abridge and support workflows. The conversation covers GPU capacity constraints, Baseten’s multi-cloud fabric across 18 clouds and 90 clusters, long-term contracting dynamics, the importance of…
S1 · E158 · 23 Apr 2026 · 46 min

SAP: Bringing the ‘Operating System’ of a Company into the AI Era with CTO Philipp Herzig

More than fifty years ago, the modern idea of the standard enterprise software was birthed at SAP. Now, after managing companies through technological shifts from the mainframe to mobile, SAP is at the forefront of closing the AI adoption gap for their customers. SAP Chief Technology Officer Philipp Herzig joins Sarah Guo to talk about how SAP has remained a durable end-to-end “operating system” for its more than 400,000 customers from finance to supply chain. Philipp argues that the AI transition in businesses should focus on customer outcomes, UI changes, business processes, and the data…
S1 · E157 · 17 Apr 2026 · 57 min

Scaling Global Organizations in the Age of AI with ServiceNow Chairman and CEO Bill McDermott

Few teens are business owners, but by age 16, Bill McDermott had purchased and was running a local deli. Now he runs leading global technology powerhouse ServiceNow, a company that is defining how the world’s largest organizations transform for the digital age. Sarah Guo sits down with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott to discuss his journey from child entrepreneur to CEO, and how he navigates his role as a leader in the age of AI. Bill argues that human connection is still a vital part of being a successful leader, and as such, AI must be used to serve people rather than substitute for…
S1 · E156 · 9 Apr 2026 · 44 min

The Agentic Economy: How AI Agents Will Transform the Financial System with Circle Co-Founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire

AI agents can already collaborate, but they lack a trustworthy medium in which to store value and execute contracts. Enter Circle’s Arc Blockchain, an economic “operating system” designed for a world where machines drive the real economy. Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire joins Elad Gil to dive into the future of programmable money and the agentic economy. Jeremy explains why traditional banking fails to support the needs of AI agents, and how stablecoins like USDC facilitate an internet-native economy. They also discuss the tokenization of real-world assets, the move toward…
3 Apr 2026 · 29 min

AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus

What happens when you apply the scaling laws of large language models to the physical work of atoms? Elad Gil sits down with Liam Fedus, co-founder at Periodic Labs, which is pioneering an AI foundation lab for atoms. Liam discusses how he pivoted from dark matter physics research to the front lines of artificial intelligence, including stints at Google Brain and working on ChatGPT at OpenAI. He talks about how Periodic is connecting massive language models to the physical world to overcome data bottlenecks in material science. Liam also shares how they use language models as an…
S1 · E154 · 20 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 7 min

Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AI

What happens when AI agents can design experiments, collect data, and improve — without a human in the loop? Andrej Karpathy joins Sarah Guo on the state of models, the future of engineering and education, thinking about impact on jobs, and his project AutoResearch: where agents close the loop on a piece of AI research (experimentation, training, and optimization, autonomously). 00:00 Andrej Karpathy Introduction 02:55 What Capability Limits Remain? 06:15 What Mastery of Coding Agents Looks Like 11:16 Second Order Effects of Natural Language Coding 15:51 Why AutoResearch 22:45 Relevant…
S1 · E153 · 12 Mar 2026 · 29 min

From Coder to Manager: Navigating the Shift to Agentic Engineering with Notion Co-Founder Simon Last

Notion isn’t designing AI agents that just use tools. Their agents can autonomously build their own integrations, as well as write the code needed to finish a task. Sarah Guo sits down with Notion Co-Founder Simon Last to explore Notion’s rapid evolution from a simple writing assistant to a sophisticated platform for custom AI agents. Simon discusses the technical hurdles of indexing disparate data from sources like Slack and Google Drive, as well as the internal shift toward using coding agents to build Notion itself. Plus, Simon elaborates on what he sees as a fundamental transition in…
S1 · E152 · 26 Feb 2026 · 36 min

How Capital is Powering the AI Infrastructure Buildout with Magnetar Capital Managing Director Neil Tiwari

By the end of 2026, AI capital expenditure is projected to hit nearly $700 billion. The question isn’t who has the best model, but who has the most creative financing to build out AI infrastructure and beyond. Sarah Guo is joined by Neil Tiwari, Managing Director at Magnetar Capital, a financial innovator helping the AI industry scale from billions to trillions of dollars in CapEx. Neil explains some of the debt structures used to finance massive GPU clusters, who is taking the risk, and how the industry is maturing. Sarah and Neil also discuss how power distribution, energy storage, and…
S1 · E151 · 19 Feb 2026 · 41 min

From SaaS to AI-First: How Companies Are Reshaping Innovation

In this episode of No Priors, Sarah and Elad dive into the evolving landscape of software, exploring how AI is transforming the traditional SaaS model. They discuss whether SaaS as we know it is coming to an end, what new business and sales strategies are emerging, and how AI is reshaping the way software is built, sold, and scaled. The conversation also examines whether or not these shifts are a good thing for both big and small companies, and how coders and software experts are reacting to abrupt AI transitions. They also dig into how AI is reshaping sales, automating workflows, and…

About No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

At this moment of inflection in technology, co-hosts Elad Gil and Sarah Guo talk to the world's leading AI engineers, researchers and founders about the biggest questions: How far away is AGI? What markets are at risk for disruption? How will commerce, culture, and society change? What’s happening in state-of-the-art in research? “No Priors” is your guide to the AI revolution. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com. Sarah Guo is a startup investor and the founder of Conviction, an investment firm purpose-built to serve intelligent software, or "Software 3.0" companies. She spent nearly a decade incubating and investing at venture firm Greylock Partners. Elad Gil is a serial entrepreneur and a startup investor. He was co-founder of Color Health, Mixer Labs (which was acquired by Twitter). He has invested in over 40 companies now worth $1B or more each, and is also author of the High Growth Handbook.

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups is a English tech & science podcast from Conviction. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Conviction
Language: English
Category: Tech & Science
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 41 min
Latest episode: 2 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1668002688

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