Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

We’ve been on a bit of a mini World Models series over the last quarter: from introducing the topic with Yi Tay , to exploring Marble with World Labs’ Fei-Fei Li and Justin Johnson , to previewing World Models learned from massive gaming datasets with General Intuition’s Pim de Witte (who has now written down their approach to World Models with Not Boring), to discussing the Cosmos World Model wit...

Mistral has been on an absolute tear - with frequent successful model launches it is easy to forget that they raised the largest European AI round in history last year. We were long overdue for a Mistral episode, and we were very fortunate to work with Sophia and Howard to catch up with Pavan (Voxtral lead) and Guillaume (Chief Scientist, Co-founder) on the occasion of this week’s Voxtral TTS laun...

Materials science is the unsung hero of the science world. Behind every physical product you interact was decades of research into getting the properties of materials just right. Your gym clothes contain synthetic fibers developed over decades. The glass screen, diodes, and chip substrate technology needed to read this blog post were only viable due to many teams of material scientists. Our guest...

Mar 23 update for Latent Spacenauts: this episode was recorded before the Dreamer team announced they were joining Meta Superintelligence Labs , and it turned out to be the last interview they did before the news became public. Consider this a snapshot from just before the transition! In 2024, David Singleton left Stripe and joined forces with Hugo Barra for a buzzy stealth startup named /dev/agen...

Claude Cowork came out of an accident. Felix and the Anthropic team noticed something interesting with Claude Code : many users were using it primarily for all kinds of messy knowledge work instead of coding. Even technical builders would use it for lots of non-technical work. Even more shocking, Claude cowork wrote itself . With a team of humans simply orchestrating multiple claude code instances...

Turbopuffer came out of a reading app. In 2022 , Simon was helping his friends at Readwise scale their infra for a highly requested feature: article recommendations and semantic search. Readwise was paying ~$5k/month for their relational database and vector search would cost ~$20k/month making the feature too expensive to ship. In 2023 after mulling over the problem from Readwise, Simon decided he...

Join Kyle, Nader, Vibhu, and swyx live at NVIDIA GTC next week ! Now that AIE Europe tix are ~sold out, our attention turns to Miami and World’s Fair ! The definitive AI Accelerator chip company has more than 10xed this AI Summer: And is now a $4.4 trillion megacorp… that is somehow still moving like a startup. We are blessed to have a unique relationship with our first ever NVIDIA guests: Kyle Kr...

All speakers are announced at AIE EU , schedule coming soon. Join us there or in Miami with the renowned organizers of React Miami! Singapore CFP also open! We’ve called this out a few times over in AINews , but the overwhelming consensus in the Valley is that “ the IDE is Dead ”. In November it was just a gut feeling, but now we actually have data : even at the canonical “VSCode Fork” company, pe...

The reception to our recent post on Code Reviews has been strong . Catch up! Amid a maelstrom of discussion on whether or not AI is killing SaaS , one of the top publicly listed SaaS companies in the world has just reported record revenues, clearing well over $1.1B in ARR for the first time with a 28% margin . As we comment on the pod, Aaron Levie is the rare public company CEO equally at home in...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.latent.space AIE Europe CFP and AIE World’s Fair paper submissions for CAIS peer review are due TODAY - do not delay! Last call ever. We’re excited to welcome METR for their first LS Pod, hopefully the first of many: METR are keepers of currently the single most infamous chart in AI : But every Latent Space reader should be sophisti...

Swyx joined SAIL ! Thank you SAIL Media , Prof. Tom Yeh , 8Lee , Hamid Bagheri , c9n , and many others for tuning into SAIL Live #6 with Nathan Lambert and Sebastian Raschka, PhD . Sharing here for the LS paid subscribers. We covered: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latent.space/subscribe

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 mater...

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 firs...

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...

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 watc...

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 r...

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 model...

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...

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 Ande...

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...

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...

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 i...

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 an...

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...

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...