This Week in AI

This Week In Startups is made possible by: PAYPAL Today’s show: China is weighing a ban on foreign access to its top AI models… the same low-cost open-weight systems on which half of the Valley’s startups are building. So we asked our two all-star panelists — Arena CEO/Co-Founder Anastasios Angelopoulos and Hippocratic AI CEO/Co-Founder Munjal Shah — what happens to US companies when their favorit...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: PAYPAL Today’s show: The US government won’t let you use the most powerful releases from US AI labs… but a Chinese lab is giving away their latest frontier model for free. This week, we’ve got three AI CEOs building in image generation (Victor Perez of Krea), mobile agents (Div Garg of The AGI Company), and enterprise governance (Andrew Berman of Runlayer...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Paypal Today’s show: *When we think of “Physical AI,” most of us conjure images of humanoid robots and self-driving cars. But there’s a lot more to the category than just breakdancing Chinese bots and Waymos, from excavators autonomously digging tomorrows worksites, to a robot the size of four pizza boxes deploying to the ISS. Guest host Alex Wilhelm sits...

SpaceX bought Cursor for $60 billion. Satya Nadella says companies need to stop relying on third party AI models and build their own “token capital.” The focus is shifting from LLMs to the application layer sitting on top of them. Here to unpack what that means are guest experts Ali Ansari (Micro1) and Ryan Daniels (Crosby).Plus we get a sneak peek at their new contract redlining benchmark, a cruc...

Apple just paid a rival a billion dollars a year because it could not build Siri itself, and that tells you where the AI platform war actually stands: the edge has moved up the stack, from the model to the agent layer sitting on top of it. This week's roundtable makes the case that whoever controls that layer controls the experience, and we brought in three founders building it from different...

The future of AI isn't about whether the model is smart enough. It's about whether we can afford to run it. We dug into the AI cost panic, the energy wall that's coming for compute, and why "developers are disappearing" gets the economics exactly backwards. This week's roundtable: Naveen Rao (CEO of Unconventional AI, building brain-inspired analog chips, formerly sold co...

The AI jobs panic is here. Meta cut 8,000. Intuit cut 3,000. CapEx went up. Nobody can agree if anyone has actually lost a job to AI, or just to the promise of it. We dug into the GPU squeeze, the new craft of "reward engineering," Pope Leo's call to disarm AI, and why Chinese open-source models just blew past American ones in token usage. This week's roundtable: Erik Bernhardsso...

The frontier labs are coming for the application layer, and they're going to steal your idea. We dug into Andrej Karpathy's move to Anthropic, the new rules of AI etiquette, and why graduates are booing AI at commencement speeches. This week's roundtable: Kanjun Qiu (CEO of Imbue, building open source agents), Jeremy Fraenkel (CEO of Fundamental, large tabular models for enterprise dat...

The future of AI isn't a smarter chatbot. It's a model that watches your screen, listens to the room, and acts on what it sees. We dug into Thinking Machines' new interaction model, what it means for compute, and the layoff wave that's already here. This week's roundtable: Anastasios Angelopoulos (CEO of Arena, formerly LMArena), Nick Harris (CEO of Lightmatter, photonic comput...

This week, JCal sits down with two builders working on opposite ends of the AI stack: Naveen Rao , co-founder and CEO of Unconventional AI (his $4.5B startup rethinking the computer from first principles), and Trey Holterman , co-founder and CEO of Tennr, the platform automating the messy paperwork that decides whether millions of patients ever get the care they need. They break down why AI alread...

This week Jason sits down with three founders at the frontier of AI infrastructure, software development, and vertical AI: Matan Grinberg, co-founder and CEO of Factory; Russ d'Sa, co-founder and CEO of LiveKit; and George Sivulka, founder and CEO of Hebbia. They break down why AI coding agents are more powerful than vibe coding, how voice became the default interface for AI, why LLMs are beco...

This week we sat down with Aravind Srinivas and Edwin Chen. Aravind is the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, whose revenue has grown from $100M to $500M on the back of Perplexity Computer. Edwin is the co-founder and CEO of Surge AI, the data training company teaching frontier models how to think, which quietly bootstrapped past $1B in revenue without ever raising a dollar. This Week In AI is made...

This week we sit down with Lin Qiao and Demi Guo on This Week in AI Episode 9. Lin is the co-founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, a frontier inference platform processing tens of trillions of tokens per day, built by seven ex-Meta engineers who created PyTorch. Demi is the co-founder and CEO of Pika, building humanized AI agents for creative work, agents you interact with like a person, not a prompt b...

This week on TWiAI, Jason sits down with three founders at the center of the AI stack: Kanjun Qiu (CEO of Imbue), Carina Hong (CEO of Axiom), and Jonathan Siddharth (CEO of Turing). They break down Anthropic's explosive $30B run rate, why it just overtook OpenAI in revenue, Meta's bizarre internal token-burning leaderboard, and what happens when every person on Earth has 100 AI agents runn...

This Week in AI, JCal sits down with three CEOs building the infrastructure, intelligence, and interfaces for the next era of AI: Jeremy Fraenkel (CEO, Fundamental), Victor Riparbelli (CEO, Synthesia), and Nick Harris (CEO, Lightmatter). We break down what's actually happening beneath the AI hype: the data modality LLMs completely missed, why copper is the real bottleneck in AI data centers, OpenA...

This week Jason sat down with Jake Loosararian and Chris Lattner on Episode 6 of This Week in AI. Jake is the CEO and co-founder of Gecko Robotics, a company deploying purpose-built robots and AI for mission-critical infrastructure inspection across energy, defense, and manufacturing. Chris is the CEO and co-founder of Modular, building a universal software layer that lets developers run AI models...

This week, JCal sat down with Shiv Rao at LAUNCH Fest 2026. Shiv is a cardiologist, CEO, and co-founder of Abridge , a $5B+ company that's raised close to $1B to build vertical large language models for healthcare. Shiv breaks down why the US healthcare system is broken, how AI is already outperforming doctors on average, and what it took to build a unicorn in one of the most regulated industr...

This week we sit down with three founders building at the frontier of AI in space, autonomous hardware, and software reliability: Philip Johnston (StarCloud), Boris Sofman (Bedrock Robotics), and Spiros Xanthos (Resolve AI). We dig into why data centers are heading to orbit, how AI is taking the wheel on construction sites, and whether the industry is moving too fast for its own good. We explore h...

This week we sit down with three founders building at the frontier of AI infrastructure, evaluation, and hardware: Chase Lochmiller (Crusoe), Naveen Rao (Unconventional AI), and Anastasios Angelopoulos (Arena). We dig into the real bottlenecks slowing down the AI buildout, how to standout in the job market as AI matures, and the explosive government standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon. We...

Jason Calacanis sits down with two founders building at the frontier of AI products and infrastructure: Tanay Kothari (Wispr Flow) and Richard Socher ( You.com & AIX Ventures). They dig into the Citrini "doom post" that rattled markets, the real economics of automation waves, and how AI-first teams are being rebuilt from the ground up. We explore how the agentic shift is reshaping co...

Jason Calacanis sits down with three CEOs building at the bleeding edge of the agentic revolution: Mitesh Agrawal (Positron AI), Alex Elias (Qloo), and Kash Ali (TaxGPT). They discuss the rapid rise of Open Claw, an open-source platform that is fundamentally changing work by allowing users to create autonomous agents. "Saving 30 minutes a day... that’s like getting three more weeks a year bac...

Welcome to the very first episode of This Week in AI! Host Oliver Korzen kicks things off with an exclusive interview featuring Aaron Walls (CEO) and Andrius Useckas (CTO), the founders of ZioSec. Together, they dive deep into the world of OpenClaw security—exposing the vulnerabilities they've discovered in the wild, breaking down real attack vectors, and revealing the essential steps you need...

Google released Gemini 3.0 this week, and I’ve been hands-on with it every day since launch. After diving into all the new capabilities, performance upgrades, and quality-of-life improvements, I’ve distilled the most important updates you should know. In this breakdown, I walk through the biggest feature changes, what they mean in real-world use, and how Gemini 3.0 stacks up against the other fron...