On this episode of No Priors, Sarah and Elad sit down with Brendan Foody, CEO and cofounder of Mercor, to discuss the company’s rapid growth and their vision for the future of the labor market. They dive into how AI is reshaping the workforce in real, tangible ways and what skills are worth investing in today. Brendan shares insights on evaluating talent in an AI-driven world, including how models might identify outlier or 10x candidates and even assess “taste.” The conversation also touches on ...
Apr 10, 2025•42 min•Season 1Ep. 110
In this episode of No Priors, Sarah and Elad examine the current state of AI. They break down the recent dip in public markets, how tariffs could impact the tech industry, and where opportunities remain in large language models. They highlight the opportunities in more specialized models, new approaches to model development, and how the market is beginning to standardize with integrations like the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The episode ends with a look at early consumer AI applications and wh...
Apr 03, 2025•28 min
In this episode of No Priors, Elad and Sarah chat with Shiv Rao, MD, founder and CEO of Abridge. They dive into how Abridge is reshaping healthcare by creating AI tools that enhance clinical documentation and improve doctor-patient interactions. Shiv shares his thoughts on building trust with established healthcare systems, giving agency and time back to clinicians, and what makes the healthcare AI opportunity different today. They also discuss Abridge’s approach to developing and launching AI p...
Mar 27, 2025•39 min
This week on No Priors, Elad speaks with Chelsea Finn, cofounder of Physical Intelligence and currently Associate Professor at Stanford, leading the Intelligence through Learning and Interaction Lab. They dive into how robots learn, the challenges of training AI models for the physical world, and the importance of diverse data in reaching generalizable intelligence. Chelsea explains the evolving landscape of open-source vs. closed-source robotics and where AI models are likely to have the bigges...
Mar 20, 2025•35 min
This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad talk with GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke about the rise of AI-powered software development and the success of Copilot. They discuss how Copilot is reshaping the developer workflow, GitHub’s new Agent Mode, and competition in the developer tooling market. They also explore how AI-driven coding impacts software pricing, the future of open source vs. proprietary APIs, and what Copilot’s success means for Microsoft. Plus, Thomas shares insights from his journey growi...
Mar 13, 2025•51 min•Season 1Ep. 106
This week on No Priors, Sarah is joined by Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center of AI Safety. Dan serves as an advisor to xAI and Scale AI. He is a longtime AI researcher, publisher of interesting AI evals such as "Humanity's Last Exam," and co-author of a new paper on National Security "Superintelligence Strategy" along with Scale founder-CEO Alex Wang and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. They explore AI safety, geopolitical implications, the potential weaponization of AI, along with policy rec...
Mar 05, 2025•36 min•Season 1Ep. 105
This week on No Priors, Sarah sits down with Noubar Afeyan, Co-founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, the biotech firm behind groundbreaking companies like Moderna. They explore how Flagship creates the conditions for scientific breakthroughs, tackles regulatory uncertainty, and pushes the boundaries of discovery. Noubar shares insights on AI’s role in healthcare, the challenges of bringing new therapies to market, and lessons learned from past pandemics. He also discusses Flagship’s platform a...
Feb 27, 2025•41 min•Season 1Ep. 104
On this week’s episode of No Priors, Sarah Guo is joined by leading members of the teams at Vevo Therapeutics and the Arc Institute – Nima Alidoust, CEO/Co-Founder at Vevo Therapeutics; Johnny Yu, CSO/Co-Founder at Vevo Therapeutics; Patrick Hsu, CEO/Co-Founder at Arc Institute; Dave Burke, CTO at Arc Institute; and Hani Goodarzi, Core Investigator at Arc Institute. Predicting protein structure (AlphaFold 3, Chai-1, Evo 2) was a big AI/biology breakthrough. The next big leap is modeling entire h...
Feb 25, 2025•58 min•Season 1Ep. 103
Kyle Vogt joins Sarah and Elad on this week’s episode of No Priors. A serial entrepreneur, Kyle co-founded Twitch, transforming live streaming, and later Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company acquired by GM for $1 billion. Now he’s taking on AI-powered home robotics with The Bot Company. In this episode, Kyle shares his journey building transformative tech companies, the challenges of scaling autonomous systems, and why he believes home robots are the next frontier. They also discuss the parall...
Feb 20, 2025•38 min•Season 1Ep. 102
This week on No Priors, Sarah sits down with Harvey cofounder and CEO Winston Weinberg. Harvey is one of the leading application layer AI companies, building domain-specific AI for law firms, professional service providers, and the Fortune 500. They are already working with companies like Bridgewater, KKR, PWC, and O’Melveny with over $500M in funding from OpenAI, Sequoia, Kleiner, GV and Elad and Sarah. In this episode, Sarah and Winston cover AI product strategy, the future of professional ser...
Feb 14, 2025•50 min•Season 1Ep. 101
This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad celebrate the 100th episode! They dive into the biggest AI stories of 2025, breaking down DeepSeek—truth vs. hype, the rapid consumer adoption, and the real cost of training the models. They debate model commoditization and the value of being a frontier model provider vs. building on existing work. Plus, they unpack OpenAI’s new Deep Research release and the latest on Stargate. Finally, they share bold predictions for 2025, covering robots, autonomous vehic...
Feb 07, 2025•23 min•Season 1Ep. 100
This week on No Priors, Elad sits down with Rick Caruso, LA real estate developer and runner-up in the 2022 mayoral race. With experience serving under three LA mayors, as well as on the police commission and the board of water and power, Rick offers a unique perspective on the systemic failures that contributed to the devastation of the January 2025 wildfires in communities like the Palisades and Altadena. He discusses the steps he took to build more resilient infrastructure in his properties a...
Jan 30, 2025•27 min•Season 1Ep. 99
This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad sit down with Bill Clerico, founder of Convective Capital, an early stage venture fund focused on technology-driven solutions for wildfire mitigation and climate resilience. The wildfires in Los Angeles have caused unprecedented property damage and immense hardship for countless individuals and families. This episode is devoted to diving into understanding what happened and what we can do in the future. Bill shares his insights into the increasing severity ...
Jan 23, 2025•38 min•Season 1Ep. 98
Today on No Priors, co-founder and CEO of Decagon, Jesse Zhang, joins Elad to discuss the future of agentic customer support. Decagon provides AI-powered customer interactions for companies like Rippling, Notion, Duolingo, Classpass, Substack, Vanta, Eventbrite, and more. Jesse shares the thesis behind starting Decagon, why he sees customer support as the ideal entry point for agentic technology, and what areas of AI excite him most. They also discuss voice-based interfaces, issues with latency ...
Jan 16, 2025•30 min•Season 1Ep. 97
Today on No Priors, Elad chats with Erik Bernhardsson, founder and CEO of Modal Labs, a platform simplifying ML workflows by providing a serverless infrastructure designed to streamline deployment, scaling, and development for AI engineers. Erik talks about his early work on Spotify’s ML algorithms, what Modal offers today, and his vision for building an end-to-end solution for AI engineers. They dive into GPU trends, cloud vs on-premise setups, and when to train custom models vs use off-the-she...
Jan 09, 2025•24 min•Season 1Ep. 96
2024 has been a year of transformative technological progress, marked by conversations that have reshaped our understanding of AI's evolution and what lies ahead. Throughout the year, Sarah and Elad have had the privilege of speaking with some of the brightest minds in the field. As we look back on the past months, we’re excited to share highlights from some of our favorite No Priors podcast episodes. Featured guests include Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Andrej Karpathy (OpenAI, Tesla), Bret Taylor (Si...
Dec 26, 2024•27 min•Season 1Ep. 95
Today on No Priors, Sarah sits down with Elias Torres, CEO and founder of Agency, an AI agent for customer success teams. Elias shares his journey from growing up in Nicaragua to founding several companies, leading engineering at HubSpot, and selling Drift for $1B. He also discusses his work consulting with OpenAI in 2022, which deepened his understanding of the business opportunity LLMs presented and inspired him to start Agency. In this episode, Elias offers a unique perspective on the future ...
Dec 19, 2024•31 min•Season 1Ep. 94
In this episode of No Priors, Sarah sits down with Felix Ejeckam and Ty Mitchell, founders of Akash Systems, a company pioneering diamond-based cooling technology for semiconductors used in space applications and large-scale AI data centers. Felix and Ty discuss how their backgrounds in materials science led them to tackle one of the most pressing challenges in tech today: thermal efficiency and heat management at scale. They explore how Akash is overcoming the limitations of traditional semicon...
Dec 12, 2024•42 min•Season 1Ep. 93
In this episode of No Priors, Sarah talks with Eric Simons, co-founder and CEO of StackBlitz. The company has experienced explosive growth since the launch 2 months ago of Bolt.new, an AI application that lets users prompt, run, edit, and deploy full-stack applications directly in the browser. Eric talks about the years-long journey that led to overnight success, why so many non-technical users are forming a community around Bolt, and the democratization of coding. Sign up for new podcasts every...
Dec 05, 2024•38 min•Season 1Ep. 92
In this episode of No Priors, Sarah is joined by Aidan Gomez, cofounder and CEO of Cohere. Aidan reflects on his journey to co-authoring the groundbreaking 2017 paper, “Attention is All You Need,” during his internship, and shares his motivations for building Cohere, which delivers AI-powered language models and solutions for businesses. The discussion explores the current state of enterprise AI adoption and Aidan’s advice for companies navigating the build vs. buy decision for AI tools. They al...
Nov 21, 2024•44 min•Season 1Ep. 91
In this week’s episode of No Priors, Sarah and Elad sit down with the Google DeepMind team behind AlphaProof, Laurent Sartran, Rishi Mehta, and Thomas Hubert. AlphaProof is a new reinforcement learning-based system for formal math reasoning that recently reached a silver-medal standard in solving International Mathematical Olympiad problems. They dive deep into AI and its role in solving complex mathematical problems, featuring insights into AlphaProof and its capabilities. They cover its functi...
Nov 14, 2024•39 min•Season 1Ep. 87
In this week’s episode of No Priors, Sarah and Elad sit down with Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, for the second time to reflect on the company’s extraordinary growth over the past year. Jensen discusses AI’s takeover of datacenters and NVIDIA’s rapid development of x.AI’s supercluster. The conversation also covers Nvidia’s decade-long infrastructure bets, software longevity, and innovations like NVLink. Jensen shares his views on the future of embodied AI, digital employees, and how AI is transfor...
Nov 07, 2024•37 min•Season 1Ep. 86
In this week’s episode of No Priors, Sarah sits down with Tarek Mansour, CEO of Kalshi—the first CFTC-regulated prediction market exchange in the U.S. They dive into Kalshi’s recent victory to legalize election betting, explore ethical questions around trading on elections, and discuss whether prediction markets can offer more accuracy than traditional polls. Tarek shares insights on the history of futures markets, the line between gambling and financial trading, and the psychology behind bettin...
Oct 31, 2024•36 min•Season 1Ep. 85
In this episode of No Priors, Dmitri Dolgov, Co-CEO of Waymo, joins Sarah and Elad to explore the evolution and advancements of Waymo's self-driving technology from its inception at Google to its current real-world deployment. Dmitri also shares insights into the technological breakthroughs and complexities of achieving full autonomy, the design innovations of Waymo’s sixth generation driverless cars, and the broader applications of Waymo’s advanced technology. They also discuss Waymo's strategi...
Oct 24, 2024•45 min•Season 1Ep. 87
In this episode of No Priors, Sarah and Elad explore how AI is transforming consumer apps and entertainment, with a focus on potential integrations in gaming and dating that could shift traditional societal incentives. They reflect on AI researchers winning Nobel Prizes in Science and Chemistry for the first time, discussing what this trend means for scientific discovery. The episode also covers recent AI releases, including their thoughts on OpenAI’s O1 model and Google’s NotebookLM, and examin...
Oct 17, 2024•29 min•Season 3Ep. 86
Today on No Priors, Elad is joined by Ankur Goyal, founder and CEO of Braintrust. Braintrust enables companies like Notion, Airtable, Instacart, Zapier, and Vercel to deploy AI solutions at scale by efficiently evaluating and managing complex, non-deterministic AI applications. Ankur shares his insights into emerging trends in the use of AI tooling and coding languages, the rise of open-source, and the future of data infrastructure. Ankur also reflects on building resilient AI products, his phil...
Oct 08, 2024•38 min•Season 1Ep. 85
Lina Khan’s FTC has been the most active in decades, notably challenging tech giants and adopting a more hands-on approach to regulating the digital age. On today’s episode of No Priors, Lina Khan joins Elad and Sarah to discuss her regulatory philosophy for tech markets and what the industry can expect for future M&A deals. She shares her approach to overseeing emerging technology sectors, including AI at the model layer, and her work to ban non-competes on a federal level. Khan also offers ins...
Oct 03, 2024•26 min•Season 1Ep. 79
In this episode of No Priors, Sarah and Elad sit down with Matt MacInnis, COO of Rippling, to discuss the company’s unique product strategy and the advantages of being a compound startup. Matt introduces Talent Signal, Rippling’s AI-powered employee performance tool, and explains how early adopters are using it to gain a competitive edge. They explore Rippling’s approach to choosing which AI products to build and how they plan to leverage their rich data sources. The conversation also delves int...
Sep 25, 2024•31 min•Season 1Ep. 83
Bret Taylor, Cofounder of Sierra, Chairman of the board at OpenAI, and former co-CEO of Salesforce and CTO of Facebook, joins Sarah and Elad in this week’s episode of No Priors. Bret discusses building company-branded AI agents with unique personalities, goals, and guardrails at Sierra, and their potential to revolutionize customer engagement while cutting costs. The conversation explores the next sectors for enterprise AI adoption, building resilient AI products, and the parallels between today...
Sep 19, 2024•49 min•Season 1Ep. 82
In this episode of No Priors, Sarah and Elad go deep into what's on everyone’s mind. They break down new partnerships and consolidation in the LLM market, specialization of AI models, and AMD’s strategic moves. Plus, Elad is looking for a humanoid robot. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil Show Notes: (0:00) Introduction (0:24) LLM market consolidation (2:18) Competition and decreasing API costs (3...
Sep 12, 2024•26 min•Season 1Ep. 81
