Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

We’ve been running a bit of an Agent Cloud series surveying all the top inference/compute/cloud providers, from Databricks to Daytona to Railway and, even further back, E2B , but we’re excited to conclude this series returning to Modal, which has just raised a monster $355M Series C . The cloud was built for developers. But agents are now changing that. The old infra stack was designed for a human...

This episode has a fun personal twist: There’s a counterfactual world where I was employee #1 at Genesis Molecular AI , the company behind today’s episode. A certain introduction happened a few weeks too late and I had already happily signed at Atomwise, another ML-for-drug-discovery startup. Same problem, different company. I was certain ML was going to transform small molecule drug discovery. Ea...

We’re excited to have Databricks join us at AIEWF , among hundreds of the top companies in the AI Engineer ecosystem. LS subscribers can use their discount to get past the late bird pricing and access over $50k in sponsor offers ! Everyone is still talking about Satya’s Frontier Ecosystems post , but few have actually built a ( now $175 billion ) frontier ecosystem and cloud like our guests today....

AI Engineer World’s Fair regular bird tix will sell out ~today! Join us next week ahead of the Late Bird price hike and get >$40,000 in sponsor credits for attending ! Thanks to the US Government issuing an export control directive on Mythos and Fable , the risks of jailbreaks and (industry term) indirect prompt injection are suddenly the talk of the town, though we have been covering AI security...

Last 4 days before regular tickets sell out at AI Engineer World’s Fair - this is the single biggest gathering of AI Engineers, Founders, Leaders, and Researchers in the world. Attendees get >$5000 worth of sponsor credits and talk tracks are looking FANTASTIC. Join us! The AI scaling debate always focuses on the question of “how do we get more GPUs?” but the better question may be: how do we make...

On the Science pod, we’ve been covering a lot of the ground on how AI is revolutionizing STEM, but one of our favorite off the record topics since our launch is which field is harder to accelerate: math , bio , or physics ? Today we’re back in Materials Science land with Radical — Unlike biological molecules that can be represented (and predicted!) by token strings, the success of materials involv...

The new AIEWF website is live! Get your tickets booked ASAP as they -will- sell out. Take the AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and free AIE WF tickets ! Most industry benchmarks compress intelligence and reasoning ability into scores. SWE-Bench Pro , MMLU , Humanity’s Last Exam , etc. These metrics are useful, but don’t always represent the full extent of how a model performs in the r...

In 2025, seven-month-old startup Axiom solved all 12 of the problems Putnam exam (scoring 8/12 in the time limit) a prestigious undergraduate math exam. The 12/12 score is better than the top undergraduates (110/120) and the closest AI system that reported a result (DeepSeek 103/120), although it is unclear what the people and other systems would have scored with more time. Nonetheless, the Putnam...

We’ve informally heard that Satya is a listener to LS for a couple years now, but it was still absolutely surreal to meet him and do a live pod at Build, together with our friends at No Priors , the leading VC AI Podcast that we also greatly admire! We covered the MAI model technical takeaways on yesterday’s AINews , so I will focus our recap of Satya’s main messages around three elements: * Satya...

I’m excited to work with Microsoft once again as the presenting sponsors of the AI Engineer World’s Fair ! We’ll streaming live from MS Build today for a special crossover pod with our friends at No Priors and the one and only Satya Nadella . However we did not hold back with this interview - we asked all the burning questions about uptime and Copilot that we know you have in your minds. Lets go!...

We’re announcing AIEWF speakers this week! Take the AI Engineering Survey ! Today’s guest Ethan first joined us for the LS Paper Club as the lead on NVIDIA Cosmos World Model , but then joined xAI and built Grok Imagine in 3 months: He comes back on Latent Space with some nuclear hot takes: that Video Models primarily get their intelligence from LLMs , not from training on video data, and that the...

The new AIEWF website is live! CFPs close in 2 days and we will run our first New Engineer Orientation this weekend, get your tickets booked ASAP as they -will- sell out. Take the AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and free AIE WF tickets ! One of the central tensions in the agents industry is that even while there are major decacorn agent labs like Sierra, Decagon, Notion and Cursor be...

Editor’s note: In our first BioHub pod with Priscilla and Mark they discussed their acquisition of EvoScale , led by Alex Rives , who is now Head of Science at BioHub. With ESM-1 they trained language models on millions of protein sequences drawn from across life, with a simple “next token” objective: predict the amino acids that have been randomly masked out, based on the context of the rest of t...

Take the 2026 AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and AIE WF tickets ! On the product side, everyone is getting Computer - Perplexity , Manus , Cursor , and so on. Meanwhile on the research side, agentic evals like TerminalBench and GDPVal are also assuming computer ( Harbor ). On both ends, the consolidating LLM OS stack has become a standard toolkit, and Daytona is one of a small set o...

Take the 2026 AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and AIE WF tickets ! This was recorded before Railway suffered a major GCP outage on May 19, despite being a multi-AZ, multi-zone mesh ring, with HA fiber interconnects between their Metal GCP AWS, because workload discoverability was unintentionally still tied to GCP. All has been resolved with a post-mortem . Railway did not start as an...

The future of war has been evolving before our eyes in Ukraine, yet the west still plans to fight the last war. In this special episode, guest host Noah Smith ( @noahpinion ) and Brandon Anderson sit down with Yaroslav Azhnyuk ( @YaroslavAzhnyuk ) , a serial tech founder who went from building PetCube to founding The Fourth Law , one of the world’s most advanced AI-guided drone companies. Over two...

Special discounts up for AIE Melbourne ( LS discount ) and AIE World’s Fair (group discounts up to 25% - CFPs still open for Autoresearch and Vertical AI ) Cya there! Abridge did not start as an “GPT wrapper”. It was founded in 2018, years before the Cambrian explosion of AI application layer companies. OpenAI launched ChatGPT publicly on November 30, 2022 and by then, Abridge had already spent ye...

Some people are going crazy over GPT 5.5. Some people. This is the story of the Jagged Frontier . People who use AI to write emails or even code implementation work find the lift moderate whereas people pushing the limits of the model are figuring out that the limits just moved outwards . Alex Lupsaska has been tracking this limit for a year and a half now. “When GPT5 came out, it was able to repr...

From building Applied Intuition from YC-era autonomy tooling into a $15B physical AI company , Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig have spent the last decade living through the full arc of autonomy: from simulation and data infrastructure for robotaxi companies, to operating systems for safety-critical machines, to deploying AI onto cars, trucks, mining equipment, construction vehicles, agriculture, def...

Today, we check in a year after the first Unsupervised Learning x Latent Space Crossover special to discuss everything that has changed (there is a lot) in the world of AI. This episode was recorded just after AIE Europe , but before the Cursor-xAI deal . Unsupervised Learning is a podcast that interviews the sharpest minds in AI about what’s real today, what will be real in the future and what it...

Early bird discounts for the San Francisco World’s Fair , the biggest AIE gathering of the year, end today - prices will go up by ~$500 tonight so do please lock in ASAP! From near-universal AI tool adoption inside Shopify to internal systems for ML experimentation, auto-research, customer simulation, and ultra-low-latency search, Mikhail Parakhin joins us for a deep dive into what it actually loo...

Today, we explain this piece of “clickbait” from our guest! TL;DR: 95% of cancer treatments fail to pass clinical trials , but it may be a matching problem — if we better understood what patients have which tumors which will respond to which treatments, success rates improve dramatically and millions of lives can be saved — with the treatments we ALREADY have. See our full episode dropping today:...

For all those who missed out on London, see you in Miami next week! Notion, the knowledge work decacorn , has been building AI tooling since before ChatGPT , with many hits from Q&A in 2023 and unified AI in 2024 and Meeting Notes in 2025 . At the end of their last Make user conference, Ryan Nystrom teased Notion 3.0’s Custom Agents - and they are finally embracing the Agent Lab playbook ! Sarah S...

We’re proud to release this ahead of Ryan’s keynote at AIE Europe . Hit the bell, get notified when it is live! Attendees: come prepped for Ryan’s AMA with Vibhu after . Move over, context engineering . Now it’s time for Harness engineering and the age of the token billionaires . Ryan Lopopolo of OpenAI is leading that charge, recently publishing a lengthy essay on Harness Eng that has become the...

Fresh off raising a monster $15B , Marc Andreessen has lived through multiple computing platform shifts firsthand, from Mosaic and Netscape to cofounding A16z. In this episode, Marc joins swyx and Alessio in a16z’s legendary Sand Hill Road office to argue that AI is not just another hype cycle, but the payoff of an “80-year overnight success”: from neural nets and expert systems to transformers, r...