Podcast · Tech & Science

This Week in AI

by Jason Calacanis · English · Tech & Science

An experts-only AI podcast: Think the 'All In' podcast for AI. Jason + 3 CEO-level experts breaking down the news & trends.

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 1 hr 17 min
Latest: 1 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

1 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 21 min

Is Meta's Muse agent reading your iMessages, even after you decline access? | E33

This Week In Startups is made possible by:PayPal: https://paypal.com/businessToday’s show:OpenAI is delaying GPT-6.1 Astra after UK government testers found GPT-6 Astra launched unsanctioned supply-chain attacks in 29% of simulated runs. Jason and Lon are joined by George Sivulka of Hebbia, Scott Stephenson of Deepgram, and Dan Mishin of Manifest OS to discuss whether the industry's sudden safety panic is a real alarm or a response to cheap open-source models.Learn why Scott has let an internal tool called "Bodyman" record his screen, mic and speakers for eight months so it can whisper…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

E32 · 24 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 17 min

Why OpenAI Should Buy Off the World’s Top Mathematicians | E32

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 https://paypal.launch.co Today’s show: OpenAI is claiming to have solved more than 100 math problems on top of Navier-Stokes, and guest Richard Socher thinks it's absurd for mathematicians to push back on AI solving their problems too quickly. Jason and Lon are also joined by Guy Podjarny of Tessl and Jake Loosararian of Gecko Robotics to argue over who wins when AI agents start collaborating with, and potentially replacing, academics and scholars.…
E31 · 17 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 13 min

The biggest AI threat still comes from humans | E31

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…
E30 · 10 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 21 min

OpenAI's chief scientist wants to slow down | E30

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…
E29 · 3 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 30 min

The real danger is the gap BETWEEN two robots | E29

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…
E28 · 27 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 11 min

XBOW Founder: “Your Infrastructure is Not Safe” | EP 28

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…
E27 · 20 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 17 min

Anthropic is training to destroy your company | EP 27

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…
E26 · 13 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 28 min

Why Anthropic is watermarking every word Claude writes | E26

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:…
E25 · 6 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 20 min

Is open source AI really ahead of the frontier? 3 builders weigh in. | E25

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…
E24 · 30 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 7 min

Are we already in the Singularity? | E24

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…
E23 · 23 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 1 min

America already lost one AI race | TWiAI Ep 23

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…
E22 · 16 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 17 min

Grok 4.5 and GLM-5.2 kick off Token Price Wars | E22

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…
E21 · 9 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 21 min

What happens if China pulls the plug on open-source AI? | Ep 21

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…
E20 · 2 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 11 min

Mythos, Sonnet 5, GLM-5.2 Dominate the News Cycle | Episode 20

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…
E19 · 25 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 13 min

Are world models the unlock for Physical AI? | Episode 19

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…
E18 · 18 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 21 min

Why AI Models Aren’t the Product Any More | TWiAI Ep 18

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…
E17 · 10 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 29 min

Hermes Agent, NotebookLM & LiveKit Founders on the AI Agent Race | TWiAI 17

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…
E16 · 4 Jun 2026 · 54 min

AI Layoffs, Compute Costs & Agents | Naveen Rao & Alex Finn on This Week in AI Episode 16

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…
E15 · 27 May 2026 · 1 hr 7 min

"Nobody Lost Their Job to AI, Just the Promise of AI" - This Week in AI Ep 15

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…
E14 · 20 May 2026 · 1 hr 39 min

Grads boo AI, Reese Witherspoon gets dunked + Karpathy joins Anthropic | TWiAI E14

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:…
E13 · 13 May 2026 · 1 hr 8 min

How the 1% Will Own Compute (and What It Means for You)

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…
E12 · 6 May 2026 · 1 hr 17 min

Is Anthropic a Cult? AI Beats ER Doctors & Recursive Self-Improvement | This Week in AI E12

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…
E11 · 30 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 14 min

Cursor's $60B Deal, DeepSeek V4 & the Death of the AI Moat | This Week in AI E11

This week Jason sits down with three founders at the frontier of AI infrastructure, software development, and vertical AI: Matan Grinberg, co-founder and CEO of Factory; Russ d'Sa, co-founder and CEO of LiveKit; and George Sivulka, founder and CEO of Hebbia. They break down why AI coding agents are more powerful than vibe coding, how voice became the default interface for AI, why LLMs are becoming commoditized like RAM, and what it actually takes to build a moat in 2026. Mentioned in the show: Factory: https://factory.ai LiveKit: https://livekit.io Hebbia: https://hebbia.com Cursor:…
E10 · 23 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 20 min

Aravind Srinivas & Edwin Chen: The $1B Bootstrap, Apple's AI Edge, and Benchmarks | TWiAI E10

This week we sat down with Aravind Srinivas and Edwin Chen. Aravind is the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, whose revenue has grown from $100M to $500M on the back of Perplexity Computer. Edwin is the co-founder and CEO of Surge AI, the data training company teaching frontier models how to think, which quietly bootstrapped past $1B in revenue without ever raising a dollar. This Week In AI is made possible by: PayPal Open - One Platform for all Business: https://paypalopen.com/ Timestamps: 00:00 Cold open 01:00 Welcome & intro to Aravind Srinivas and Edwin Chen 02:40 Why Perplexity Comet and…
E9 · 15 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 14 min

The Future of AI: Personal Agents, Taste & Private Data | Lin Qiao & Demi Guo | E9

This week we sit down with Lin Qiao and Demi Guo on This Week in AI Episode 9. Lin is the co-founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, a frontier inference platform processing tens of trillions of tokens per day, built by seven ex-Meta engineers who created PyTorch. Demi is the co-founder and CEO of Pika, building humanized AI agents for creative work, agents you interact with like a person, not a prompt box. This Week In AI is made possible by: PayPalOpen - One Platform for all Business: https://paypalopen.com/ Timestamps: 00:00 Welcome & intro to Lin Qiao and Demi Guo 02:38 Lin's journey from Meta…
E8 · 8 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 27 min

What's Left for Humans When AI Builds Everything?

This week on TWiAI, Jason sits down with three founders at the center of the AI stack: Kanjun Qiu (CEO of Imbue), Carina Hong (CEO of Axiom), and Jonathan Siddharth (CEO of Turing). They break down Anthropic's explosive $30B run rate, why it just overtook OpenAI in revenue, Meta's bizarre internal token-burning leaderboard, and what happens when every person on Earth has 100 AI agents running for them. Anthropic's Revenue Explosion: Anthropic hit a $30B run rate, up from $9B just six months ago, and appears to have overtaken OpenAI in token sales. The panel breaks down where the money is…
E7 · 1 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 12 min

How Focus Killed Sora and Saved Anthropic | This Week in AI with Victor Riparbelli, Nick Harris & Jeremy Fraenkel

This Week in AI, JCal sits down with three CEOs building the infrastructure, intelligence, and interfaces for the next era of AI: Jeremy Fraenkel (CEO, Fundamental), Victor Riparbelli (CEO, Synthesia), and Nick Harris (CEO, Lightmatter). We break down what's actually happening beneath the AI hype: the data modality LLMs completely missed, why copper is the real bottleneck in AI data centers, OpenAI shutting down Sora, the build vs. buy debate for AI tools, and how close we really are to AGI. AI's Biggest Blind Spot, Tabular Data: LLMs transformed text, images, and code, but 70-80% of…
E6 · 25 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 15 min

$2.5B Chip Heist, The Future of American AI, and Purpose-Built Robots | This Week in AI Ep 6

This week Jason sat down with Jake Loosararian and Chris Lattner on Episode 6 of This Week in AI. Jake is the CEO and co-founder of Gecko Robotics, a company deploying purpose-built robots and AI for mission-critical infrastructure inspection across energy, defense, and manufacturing. Chris is the CEO and co-founder of Modular, building a universal software layer that lets developers run AI models across Nvidia, AMD, and Apple silicon without being locked into any single hardware vendor. We explore the GPU shortage, why China's chip smuggling reveals the stakes of the AI cold war, how…
E5 · 18 Mar 2026 · 36 min

How Abridge Built A $5B AI Healthcare Unicorn | Shiv Rao, CEO - This Week in AI Ep 5

This week, JCal sat down with Shiv Rao at LAUNCH Fest 2026. Shiv is a cardiologist, CEO, and co-founder of Abridge , a $5B+ company that's raised close to $1B to build vertical large language models for healthcare. Shiv breaks down why the US healthcare system is broken, how AI is already outperforming doctors on average, and what it took to build a unicorn in one of the most regulated industries on the planet. We explore how AI is transforming doctor-patient conversations, eliminating clinician burnout, and reshaping how care is delivered and paid for. Doctors Need 30 Hours a Day: An…
E4 · 11 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 10 min

Data Centers in Space, AI Excavators & Fixing AI Slop | Philip Johnston, Boris Sofman, Spiros Xanthos

This week we sit down with three founders building at the frontier of AI in space, autonomous hardware, and software reliability: Philip Johnston (StarCloud), Boris Sofman (Bedrock Robotics), and Spiros Xanthos (Resolve AI). We dig into why data centers are heading to orbit, how AI is taking the wheel on construction sites, and whether the industry is moving too fast for its own good. We explore how physical infrastructure, real-world autonomy, and AI trust are reshaping the industry from the ground up. Sam Altman vs. Space Data Centers: He said it won't matter "this decade." But Philip…

About This Week in AI

An experts-only AI podcast: Think the 'All In' podcast for AI. Jason + 3 CEO-level experts breaking down the news & trends.

This Week in AI is a English tech & science podcast from Jason Calacanis. 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: Jason Calacanis
Language: English
Category: Tech & Science
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 1 hr 17 min
Latest episode: 1 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1874648722
Rights: Jason Calacanis

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