Editor’s note: CuspAI raised a $100m Series A in September and is rumored to have reached a unicorn valuation . They have all-star advisors from Geoff Hinton to Yann Lecun and team of deep domain experts to tackle this next frontier in AI applications. In this episode, Max Welling traces the thread connecting quantum gravity, equivariant neural networks, diffusion models, and climate-focused materials discovery (yes, there is one!!!). We begin with a provocative framing: experiments as computati...
Feb 25, 2026•34 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.latent.space First speakers for AIE Europe and AIEi Miami have been announced. If you’re in Asia/Aus, come by Singapore and Melbourne . AI Engineering is going global! One year ago today , Anthropic launched Claude Code , to not much fanfare : The word of mouth was incredibly strong however, and so we were glad to be one of the first podcasts to invite Boris and Cat on in early May: As we discussed on the pod, all CC usage was API...
Feb 24, 2026•2 hr 4 min
Olivia Watkins (Frontier Evals team) and Mia Glaese (VP of Research at OpenAI, leading the Codex, human data, and alignment teams) discuss a new blog post ( https://openai.com/index/why-we-no-longer-evaluate-swe-bench-verified/ ) arguing that SWE-Bench Verified—long treated as a key “North Star” coding benchmark—has become saturated and highly contaminated, making it less useful for measuring real coding progress. SWE-Bench Verified originated as a major OpenAI-led cleanup of the original Prince...
Feb 23, 2026•26 min
Tickets for AIEi Miami and AIE Europe are live, with first wave speakers announced ! From pioneering software-defined networking to backing many of the most aggressive AI model companies of this cycle, Martin Casado and Sarah Wang sit at the center of the capital, compute, and talent arms race reshaping the tech industry. As partners at a16z investing across infrastructure and growth, they’ve watched venture and growth blur, model labs turn dollars into capability at unprecedented speed, and sta...
Feb 19, 2026•55 min
From rewriting Google’s search stack in the early 2000s to reviving sparse trillion-parameter models and co-designing TPUs with frontier ML research , Jeff Dean has quietly shaped nearly every layer of the modern AI stack. As Chief AI Scientist at Google and a driving force behind Gemini , Jeff has lived through multiple scaling revolutions from CPUs and sharded indices to multimodal models that reason across text, video, and code. Jeff joins us to unpack what it really means to “own the Pareto ...
Feb 12, 2026•1 hr 24 min
This podcast features Gabriele Corso and Jeremy Wohlwend , co-founders of Boltz and authors of the Boltz Manifesto , discussing the rapid evolution of structural biology models from AlphaFold to their own open-source suite, Boltz-1 and Boltz-2 . The central thesis is that while single-chain protein structure prediction is largely “solved” through evolutionary hints, the next frontier lies in modeling complex interactions (protein-ligand, protein-protein) and generative protein design , which Bol...
Feb 12, 2026•1 hr 21 min
From Palantir and Two Sigma to building Goodfire into the poster-child for actionable mechanistic interpretability, Mark Bissell (Member of Technical Staff) and Myra Deng (Head of Product) are trying to turn “peeking inside the model” into a repeatable production workflow by shipping APIs, landing real enterprise deployments, and now scaling the bet with a recent $150M Series B funding round at a $1.25B valuation . In this episode, we go far beyond the usual “SAEs are cool” take. We talk about G...
Feb 06, 2026•1 hr 8 min
Editor’s note : Welcome to our new AI for Science pod, with your new hosts RJ and Brandon! See the writeup on Latent.Space (https://Latent.Space) for more details on why we’re launching 2 new pods this year. RJ Honicky is a co-founder and CTO at MiraOmics (https://miraomics.bio/) , building AI models and services for single cell, spatial transcriptomics and pathology slide analysis. Brandon Anderson builds AI systems for RNA drug discovery at Atomic AI ( https://atomic.ai ). Anything said on thi...
Jan 28, 2026•1 hr 14 min
From shipping Gemini Deep Think and IMO Gold to launching the Reasoning and AGI team in Singapore , Yi Tay has spent the last 18 months living through the full arc of Google DeepMind’s pivot from architecture research to RL-driven reasoning—watching his team go from a dozen researchers to 300+, training models that solve International Math Olympiad problems in a live competition, and building the infrastructure to scale deep thinking across every domain, and driving Gemini to the top of the lead...
Jan 23, 2026•1 hr 32 min
From building internal AI labs to becoming CTO of Brex, James Reggio has helped lead one of the most disciplined AI transformations inside a real financial institution where compliance, auditability, and customer trust actually matter. We sat down with Reggio to unpack Brex’s three-pillar AI strategy (corporate, operational, and product AI) [ https://www.brex.com/journal/brex-ai-native-operations ], how SOP-driven agents beat overengineered RL in ops, why Brex lets employees “build their own AI ...
Jan 17, 2026•1 hr 13 min
Happy New Year! You may have noticed that in 2025 we had moved toward YouTube as our primary podcasting platform. As we’ll explain in the next State of Latent Space post, we’ll be doubling down on Substack again and improving the experience for the over 100,000 of you who look out for our emails and website updates! We first mentioned Artificial Analysis in 2024, when it was still a side project in a Sydney basement. They then were one of the few Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross’ AIGrant companies ...
Jan 08, 2026•1 hr 18 min
We are reupping this episode after LMArena announced their fresh Series A ( https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-evaluation-startup-lmarena-valued-1-7-billion-new-funding-round?rc=luxwz4 ), raising $150m at a $1.7B valuation, with $30M annualized consumption revenue (aka $2.5m MRR) after their September evals product launch. —- From building LMArena in a Berkeley basement to raising $100M and becoming the de facto leaderboard for frontier AI , Anastasios Angelopoulos returns to Latent Spac...
Jan 06, 2026•24 min
From undergraduate research seminars at Princeton to winning Best Paper award at NeurIPS 2025 , Kevin Wang, Ishaan Javali, Michał Bortkiewicz, Tomasz Trzcinski, Benjamin Eysenbach defied conventional wisdom by scaling reinforcement learning networks to 1,000 layers deep —unlocking performance gains that the RL community thought impossible. We caught up with the team live at NeurIPS to dig into the story behind RL1000 : why deep networks have worked in language and vision but failed in RL for ove...
Jan 02, 2026•28 min
From creating SWE-bench in a Princeton basement to shipping CodeClash , SWE-bench Multimodal , and SWE-bench Multilingual , John Yang has spent the last year and a half watching his benchmark become the de facto standard for evaluating AI coding agents—trusted by Cognition (Devin), OpenAI, Anthropic, and every major lab racing to solve software engineering at scale. We caught up with John live at NeurIPS 2025 to dig into the state of code evals heading into 2026: why SWE-bench went from ignored ...
Dec 31, 2025•18 min
From pre-training data curation to shipping GPT-4o , o1 , o3 , and now GPT-5 thinking and the shopping model , Josh McGrath has lived through the full arc of OpenAI’s post-training evolution—from the PPO vs DPO debates of 2023 to today’s RLVR era, where the real innovation isn’t optimization methods but data quality, signal trust, and token efficiency . We sat down with Josh at NeurIPS 2025 to dig into the state of post-training heading into 2026: why RLHF and RLVR are both just policy gradient ...
Dec 31, 2025•28 min
From Berkeley robotics and OpenAI’s 2017 Dota-era internship to shipping RL breakthroughs on GPT-4o, o1, and o3, and now leading model development at Cursor , Ashvin Nair has done it all. We caught up with Ashvin at NeurIPS 2025 to dig into the inside story of OpenAI’s reasoning team (spoiler: it went from a dozen people to 300+), why IOI Gold felt reachable in 2022 but somehow didn’t change the world when o1 actually achieved it, how RL doesn’t generalize beyond the training distribution (and w...
Dec 30, 2025•45 min
From investing through the modern data stack era (DBT, Fivetran, and the analytics explosion) to now investing at the frontier of AI infrastructure and applications at Amplify Partners , Sarah Catanzaro has spent years at the intersection of data, compute, and intelligence—watching categories emerge, merge, and occasionally disappoint. We caught up with Sarah live at NeurIPS 2025 to dig into the state of AI startups heading into 2026: why $100M+ seed rounds with no near-term roadmap are now the ...
Dec 30, 2025•29 min
One year ago, Anthropic launched the Model Context Protocol (MCP) —a simple, open standard to connect AI applications to the data and tools they need. Today, MCP has exploded from a local-only experiment into the de facto protocol for agentic systems, adopted by OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Block, and hundreds of enterprises building internal agents at scale. And now, MCP is joining the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, alongside Block’s Goose coding agent, with...
Dec 27, 2025•1 hr 39 min
Note: Steve and Gene’s talk on Vibe Coding and the post IDE world was one of the top talks of AIE CODE: From building legendary platforms at Google and Amazon to authoring one of the most influential essays on AI-powered development ( Revenge of the Junior Developer , quoted by Dario Amodei himself), Steve Yegge has spent decades at the frontier of software engineering—and now he’s leading the charge into what he calls the “factory farming” era of code. After stints at SourceGraph and building B...
Dec 26, 2025•37 min
From the frontlines of OpenAI’s Codex and GPT-5 training teams, Bryan and Bill are building the future of AI-powered coding—where agents don’t just autocomplete, they architect, refactor, and ship entire features while you sleep. We caught up with them at AI Engineer Conference right after the launch of Codex Max , OpenAI’s newest long-running coding agent designed to work for 24+ hours straight, manage its own context, and spawn sub-agents to parallelize work across your entire codebase. We sat...
Dec 26, 2025•28 min
As with all demo-heavy and especially vision AI podcasts, we encourage watching along on our YouTube (and tossing us an upvote/subscribe if you like!) From SAM 1’s 11-million-image data engine to SAM 2’s memory-based video tracking, MSL’s Segment Anything project has redefined what’s possible in computer vision. Now SAM 3 takes the next leap: concept segmentation —prompting with natural language like “yellow school bus” or “tablecloth” to detect, segment, and track every instance across images a...
Dec 18, 2025•1 hr 15 min
Note: this is Pliny and John’s first major podcast. Voices have been changed for opsec. From jailbreaking every frontier model and turning down Anthropic’s Constitutional AI challenge to leading BT6 , a 28-operator white-hat hacker collective obsessed with radical transparency and open-source AI security, Pliny the Liberator and John V are redefining what AI red-teaming looks like when you refuse to lobotomize models in the name of “safety.” Pliny built his reputation crafting universal jailbrea...
Dec 16, 2025•41 min
Glean started as a Kleiner Perkins incubation and is now a $7B, $200m ARR Enterprise AI leader. Now KP has tapped its own podcaster to lead it’s next big swing. From building go-to-market the hard way in startups (and scaling Palo Alto Networks’ public cloud business) to joining Kleiner Perkins to help technical founders turn product edge into repeatable revenue, Joubin Mirzadegan has spent the last decade obsessing over one thing: distribution and how ideas actually spread, sell, and compound. ...
Dec 12, 2025•1 hr 10 min
From applied cryptography and offensive security in France’s defense industry to optimizing nuclear submarine workflows, then selling his e-signature startup to Docusign ( https://www.docusign.com/company/news-center/opentrust-joins-docusign-global-trust-network and now running AI as CTO of Superhuman Mail (Superhuman, recently acquired by Grammarly https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/01/grammarly-acquires-ai-email-client-superhuman/ ), Loïc Houssier has lived the full arc from deep infra and complia...
Dec 11, 2025•1 hr 11 min
From building Medal into a 12M-user game clipping platform with 3.8B highlight moments to turning down a reported $500M offer from OpenAI ( https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-offered-pay-500-million-startup-videogame-data ) and raising a $134M seed from Khosla ( https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/16/general-intuition-lands-134m-seed-to-teach-agents-spatial-reasoning-using-video-game-clips/ ) to spin out General Intuition , Pim is betting that world models trained on peak human gameplay a...
Dec 06, 2025•1 hr 4 min
Fei-Fei Li and Justin Johnson are cofounders of World Labs , who have recently launched Marble (https://marble.worldlabs.ai/), a new kind of generative “world model” that can create editable 3D environments from text, images, and other spatial inputs. Marble lets creators generate persistent 3D worlds, precisely control cameras, and interactively edit scenes, making it a powerful tool for games, film, VR, robotics simulation, and more. In this episode, Fei-Fei and Justin share how their journey ...
Nov 25, 2025•1 hr 1 min
Alex Lieberman and Arman Hezarkani , co-founders of Tenex, reveal how they’re revolutionizing software consulting by compensating AI engineers for output rather than hours—enabling some engineers to earn over $1 million annually while delivering 10x productivity gains. Their company represents a fundamental rethinking of knowledge work compensation in the age of AI agents, where traditional hourly billing models perversely incentivize slower work even as AI tools enable unprecedented speed. The ...
Nov 19, 2025•27 min
Deedy Das , Partner at Menlo Ventures , returns to Latent Space to discuss his journey from Glean to venture capital, the explosive rise of Anthropic, and how AI is reshaping enterprise software and coding. From investing in Anthropic early on when they had no revenue to managing the $100M Ontology Fund, Das shares insider perspectives on the fastest-growing software company in history and what’s next for AI infrastructure, research investing, and the future of engineering. We cover Glean’s rise...
Nov 14, 2025•1 hr 25 min
Jared Palmer , SVP at GitHub and VP of CoreAI at Microsoft , joins Latent Space for an in-depth look at the evolution of coding agents and modern developer tools. Recently joining after leading AI initiatives at Vercel, Palmer shares firsthand insights from behind the scenes at GitHub Universe , including the launch of Agent HQ which is a new collaboration hub for coding agents and developers. This episode traces Palmer’s journey from building Copilot inspired tools to pioneering the focused Nex...
Nov 10, 2025•36 min
Jed Borovik , Product Lead at Google Labs , joins Latent Space to unpack how Google is building the future of AI-powered software development with Jules. From his journey discovering GenAI through Stable Diffusion to leading one of the most ambitious coding agent projects in tech, Borovik shares behind-the-scenes insights into how Google Labs operates at the intersection of DeepMind’s model development and product innovation. We explore Jules ’ approach to autonomous coding agents and why they r...
Nov 10, 2025•44 min
