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

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1. 

   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…

2. 

   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:…

3. 

   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…

4. 

   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:…

5. 

   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…

6. 

   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…

7. 

   8 Oct 2026 · 45 minNew

   Data Centers Aren't Killing the Grid. They Could SAVE It.

   Thanks to our partner, @Paypal! Pay zero processing fees on your first $100K in eligible PayPal payment volume. Learn more at https://paypal.launch.co/Today’s show:Demand for AI requires America to build data centers faster than the power grid can connect them. Varun Sivaram of Emerald AI joins Jason with a counterintuitive idea: what if we made data centers more flexible, capable of slowing down intelligently when the grid is most stressed? (That only happens a few hundred hours each year.)PLUS, Vibhav Viswanathan of Pascal AI demos his product, which gives AI agents working for hedge funds…

8. 

   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…

9. 

   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.…

10. 

    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…

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