Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

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...

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 w...

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 s...

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...

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 cha...

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,...

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 l...

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...

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 la...

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-acqu...

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/...

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, f...

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...

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...

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. Thi...

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 develo...

In this conversation with Malte Ubl , CTO of Vercel ( http://x.com/cramforce ), we explore how the company is pioneering the infrastructure for AI-powered development through their comprehensive suite of tools including workflows, AI SDK, and the newly announced agent ecosystem. Malte shares insights into Vercel’s philosophy of “dogfooding” - never shipping abstractions they haven’t battle-tested...

In this deep dive with Kyle Corbitt , co-founder and CEO of OpenPipe (recently acquired by CoreWeave), we explore the evolution of fine-tuning in the age of AI agents and the critical shift from supervised fine-tuning to reinforcement learning. Kyle shares his journey from leading YC’s Startup School to building OpenPipe, initially focused on distilling expensive GPT-4 workflows into smaller, chea...

At OpenAI DevDay , we sit down with Sherwin Wu and Christina Huang from the OpenAI Platform Team to discuss the launch of AgentKit - a comprehensive suite of tools for building, deploying, and optimizing AI agents. Christina walks us through the live demo she performed on stage, building a customer support agent in just 8 minutes using the visual Agent Builder , while Sherwin shares insights on ho...

Dylan Field (CEO Figma) on how they are letting designers build with Figma Make, how Figma can be the context repository for aesthetic in the age of vibe coding, and why design is your only differentiator now. Full show notes: https://www.latent.space/p/figma 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/subsc...

Quinn Slack (CEO) and Thorsten Ball (Amp Dictator) from SourceGraph join the show to talk about Amp Code, how they ship 15x/day with no code reviews, and why subagents and prompt optimizers aren’t a promising direction for coding agents. Amp Code: https://ampcode.com/ Latent Space: https://latent.space/ Full Video Episode Timestamps 00:00 Introduction00:41 Transition from Cody to Amp03:18 The Impo...

Lance: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lance-martin-64a33b5/ How Context Fails: https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/06/22/how-contexts-fail-and-how-to-fix-them.html How New Buzzwords Get Created: https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/07/24/why-the-term-context-engineering-matters.html Content Engineering: https://rlancemartin.github.io/2025/06/23/context_engineering/ https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16aaXLu40...

Our chat with Ari shows that data curation is the most impactful and underinvested area in AI . He argues that the prevailing focus on model architecture and compute scaling overlooks the “bitter lesson” that “models are what they eat.” Effective data curation—a sophisticated process involving filtering, rebalancing, sequencing (curriculum), and synthetic data generation—allows for training models...

We first had Nathan on to give us his RLHF deep dive when he was joining AI2 , and now he’s back to help us catch up on the evolution to RLVR (Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards), first proposed in his Tulu 3 paper. While RLHF remains foundational, RLVR has emerged as a powerful approach for training models on tasks with clear success criteria and using verifiable, objective functions...

ChatGPT handles 2.5B prompts/day and is on track to match Google’s daily searches by end of 2026. AI agents don’t browse like us—they crave queryable, chunkable data for tools like ChatGPT & Perplexity. A new industry is being born, some are calling it AI SEO, others GEO, but what is clear is that it drives amazing results. Businesses are seeing 2-4x higher conversion from visitors coming from AI...