ACCESS

Even Google can’t get enough compute. I sit down with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai shortly after the wider release of Gemini 4 Argon to discuss its early reception, where he still wants the model to improve, and what it takes to keep Google at the frontier of AI. Pichai explains the recent leadership shakeup at Google DeepMind and why building frontier models has become an “all-consuming”...

Robinhood wants to put an AI hedge fund in your pocket. CEO Vlad Tenev tells me how Robinhood Agents brings AI trading into the app, and why he expects agents to generate a growing share of individual investors’ trading activity. We discuss how much control to give an AI that can trade your money, why Robinhood keeps agents in separate accounts, and where investors will find an edge when everyone...

AI could give people a reason to buy a new phone again. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon tells me why he expects a smartphone supercycle as AI agents start using our apps and acting on our behalf. His company makes the chips behind Android phones, Meta’s smart glasses, and coming devices from AI companies like OpenAI, giving it a stake in several competing visions for the next big AI device. We discuss...

Reflection is soon releasing Beam, its first open-weight AI model, in a bid to become the DeepSeek of the West. Trained from scratch, Beam is designed for coding, reasoning, and AI agents. Reflection's benchmarks put it alongside the strongest open models, with substantially more efficient token economics. To mark Beam’s debut, I'm joined by Reflection's co-founders: CEO Misha Laskin, who led rewa...

OpenAI’s next big bet is Dots, personal AI agents that can find ways to help you without waiting for a prompt. Alexander Embiricos, OpenAI’s Dots product lead, tells me why the company is moving beyond chatbots and what that means for the future of ChatGPT. We discuss why Dots have their own computers, how they share context across the places you talk to them, and why he thinks most people will on...

Matan Grinberg is the co-founder and CEO of Factory, a $5 billion AI coding startup building Droid agents to automate the engineering process. He tells me how AI is changing the job of a software engineer and why Factory is betting on a future with many competing models. We get into how it balances model performance with token costs and why he thinks companies should avoid depending on one AI prov...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella thinks AI agents will create a market “orders of magnitude” bigger than the cloud. I recently sat down with him in Seattle for the unveiling of the new Copilot. We discuss Autopilot, Microsoft's new OpenClaw-based agent that can work on your behalf, and why he thinks newer AI models are finally capable of delivering on more of Copilot’s promise. Nadella also has a blunt...

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and I discuss his framemogging at Dreamforce, the state of the SaaSpocalypse, and how Slack is more important than ever in the age of AI. We also discuss the resurgence of San Francisco, his role in the recent acquisition of Hugging Face, the wealth being created by the IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI, and what he thinks the industry can learn from the social media era. Th...

Tuhin Srivastava is the CEO and co-founder of Baseten, an AI cloud startup recently valued at $13 billion. He tells me why every company will want to own its AI and what’s driving the explosion in demand for inference. We discuss the rise of agents using browsers and virtual machines to get things done and Baseten’s acquisition of Blaxel to power that shift. We also talk about the data center back...

As Meta releases Muse, Mark Zuckerberg tells me why he thinks a personal AI agent that works for you around the clock will make you money. He explains how Meta plans to make that business work and why he thinks keeping the most powerful AI models in the hands of a few companies is dangerous. We also discuss the growing backlash against data centers, Meta’s recent youth safety settlement, and the p...

After an unreleased OpenAI model recently escaped its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face, Sam Altman tells me why the company is slowing down frontier research. We also discuss Astra, OpenAI’s next-generation family of models, which is coming soon. We talk about the growing backlash against AI. He explains why a faster path to recursively self-improving AI could push an OpenAI IPO further out. And he...

In the launch episode of the Sources Podcast, Alex Heath sits down with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to discuss the future of OpenAI, from its next-generation Astra models to the growing importance of AI safety, the AI backlash, robots, and hitting AGI.

Alex and Ellis sit down with Dan Shipper, CEO of Every, to talk about what it actually looks like to be the most AI-pilled company that isn't a frontier lab. They get into how Dan uses ChatGPT Voice to read Heidegger at 6am, why he accidentally spent 2 billion tokens overnight, and why he thinks OpenAI just pulled off something that almost never happens in tech. They also discuss what the new Siri...

Ellis sits down with Quinten Farmer, founder of Tolan, the AI companion doing over $20M in annual revenue by being a genuinely good friend, not a yes machine. They get into why Tolan's little aliens accidentally became beloved by moms 35 to 45, how Tolans stick up for themselves when users are mean to it, and why Quinten dropped "companion" as a word entirely. They also talk about why he went prem...

Alex and Ellis sit down with Jon Steinback, founder of Marker, the AI writing tool that refuses to write for you. They get into why Google Docs hasn't changed in 20 years, how most AI writing tools are quietly making you a worse thinker, and what Marker does differently: an editor that asks questions instead of generating answers. They also dig into Alex's own AI writing workflow and whether outso...

Ellis sits down with Jason Yuan, founder of Hivemind, an AI that lives in your iMessage and sources answers from the people you actually trust instead of scraping the internet. They get into how Hivemind set Jason up on a New Year's Eve date by secretly polling his friends, why the product has a "constitution" for what makes a good story, how it scooped the Wall Street Journal on the Manus acquisi...

Alex and Ellis sit down with Andy Konwinski, co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity, to talk about his new effort Laude, which is putting over $100 million behind AI researchers to keep their work in the open. They discuss why top researchers are turning down millions to stay in academia, what happens to open science if the closed labs win, and why Andy thinks the AI industry has a serious commun...

Alex and Ellis sit down with Ryan Jones, founder of Flighty and 13-year top indie developer, to talk about what it actually takes to build a beloved app in the age of AI. They talk about Apple's big WWDC announcements, the new Siri, and why every vibe coder who tries to clone Flighty eventually gives up. They also break a scoop about Flighty's upcoming AI launch, get into whether craft and design...

Alex and Ellis sit down with Jordan Taylor, founder of Vizcom, to talk about the AI design tool that lets anyone go from a rough sketch to a finished product. They discuss how Jordan built Vizcom out of a viral Reddit post during COVID, why a drawing is still a better creative input than a text prompt, and how hundreds of thousands of designers are already using it to design shoes, cars, and physi...

Some say he's making an AI slop factory. Others say he'll be the first one-man $1 billion startup. Ellis and Alex sit down with Ben Cera, founder of Polsia, a controversial AI startup that claims to build and run entire companies autonomously. They get into whether the product is vaporware or a genuine glimpse at the future of startups, what early users are creating with Polsia, and what a company...

Alex and Ellis sit down with Chris Best, CEO of Substack, for a live interview at the ACCESS launch party at Notion HQ in San Francisco. They get into Substack's growth, the future of media, and the ongoing debate around free speech and moderation. They also press him on the Substack creator exodus narrative, break news about the platform's upcoming AI features, and discuss what happens to indepen...

Alex sits down with Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and head of Anthropic Labs, to talk about what the team is working on after Claude Code and where AI is headed next. They discuss how Anthropic's skunkworks lab operates, why Mike stepped down as CPO to return to building, and what the competition with OpenAI's Codex looks like from the inside. They also get into the white spaces Mike is mo...

Alex and Ellis sit down with Anjney Midha, a venture capitalist, Stanford AI lecturer, and founder of AMP, to discuss why zero-sum thinking is holding the AI industry back. They discuss what it would look like if labs actually cooperated, why compute needs to work like electricity, and what his viral Stanford class on AI has revealed about the next generation of founders. They also get into the Ga...