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

More from No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

1. 

   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…

2. 

   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…

3. 

   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…

4. 

   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…

5. 

   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…

6. 

   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…

7. 

   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…

8. 

   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…

9. 

   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…

10. 

    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…

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