Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

101:28

Academia is for Ambition — Alex Zhang, MIT

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/10/02

Last call for regular tickets for AI Engineer NYC! As an exclusive for Latent Space subscribers, the first 30 of you can take a 30% off code if it helps - for new tickets only, no refunds! See you in 2 weeks!While we tend to cover industry on the pod, every so often we celebrate a clearly emerging superstar PhD. In 2024 we featured Shunyu Yao, who went on to build Operator at OpenAI and is now Chief AI Scientist of Tencent. In 2025 we featured Jack Morris, who went on to cofound Engram at $600m and

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39:12

Why Dwarkesh is Wrong about Computer Use + How OpenAI...

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/09/30

Three months ago Dwarkesh, who has been posting incredible blogs and episodes about RL, posted a framing question for his video essay on RLVR which upset a lot of Computer Use folks:We are no strangers to learning in public and are no strangers to the stress of getting things wrong when you have a big platform. However, we were at Anthropic for the Computer Use launch, there for Claude Cowork with the first big podcast on it, organized the first Computer Use track at AIE presenting the state of the

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92:29

Claude Code’s Next Era — Thariq Shihipar, Anthropic

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/09/29

We are excited to have Anthropic share their latest AI x Finance work at AI Engineer New York, coming up in 2 weeks!In case you’ve been under a rock, here’s a non-exhaustive list of what Anthropic has been shipping since closing the largest fundraise of all time in May at $47B ARR:* June: Launched Claude Tag and Sonnet 5 and Fable 5* July: Opus 5, /checkup. crossed $65B ARR* Last month: Fable/Mythos 5.1, and EFS (upcoming pod)* IPO target $2T, end 2026 ARR estimated $100B* Cowork/chat merged before

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80:43

OpenRouter: from Seed to Stripe — with OpenRouter’s...

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/09/25

From the earliest days of open-weight models to becoming the neutral routing layer for more than 10 million developers, OpenRouter is one of the clearest bets that the future of AI will be multi-model. In this episode, OpenRouter co-founder & CEO Alex Atallah, with AMP’s Anjney Midha returning with swyx to unpack how OpenRouter emerged from the first wave of Llama, Alpaca, Mistral, and Midjourney, why model diversity mattered before it was consensus, and how a company dismissed as “just a wrapper”

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96:21

Runway’s WorldPrompt and the Engineering of Real-Time...

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/09/25

Earlier this month, world model company Runway introduced GWM Worlds 2, a research preview that “turns high-fidelity video and audio generation into real-time interactive simulation.” Runway calls this an “autoregressive diffusion” model; with autoregressive describing how it generates over time.One new feature in particular caught our eye: WorldPrompt, a proposed input format for specifying a generated world and the actions within it. It allows you to fix some aspects of a simulated environment —

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91:58

🔬Bio-security is an AI Arms Race - Eric Nguyen (CEO,...

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/09/23

The OpenAI → Hugging Face attack has people asking “what else do we need to worry about?” and Anthropic’s filters flag two things: cyber-security and biology. The natural question is: what about bio-security, then? Clem Delangue argues that cyber-warfare defensive capabilities need to be open and to keep pace with frontier models’ attack capabilitiesRadical Numerics co-founder Eric Nguyen sat down with us and explained why the same models that increase biological capability can also keep defense

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121:26

🔬 An Oscar, Two Asteroids, and the Algorithm in Your...

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/09/22

How often do you get to talk to a guest who has both an Academy Award and who invented textbook machine learning algorithms? John Platt has an Oscar, two textbook algorithms, two named asteroids, and an Erdos-Bacon number of 6. This was easily the most fun bio of all the guests we’ve read to date. And the result was an epic and fun chat covering Google’s Empirical Research Assistance (ERA), how AI can help battle climate change, and tons of great stories about the co-evolution of science and

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140:53

Jev: System One models for Prod, not God — with Diogo...

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/09/21

Tickets for AIE NYC now open, and apply for the invite-only AIE CODE. Join us!We have an unusual relationship with today’s guest: for years since coauthoring the InstructGPT paper, Diogo Almeida had been saying that API-available frontier models have been going down the wrong path, everything from the alignment to refusals to reliability perspectives, that we have dropped every mode other than autoregressive chat-tuned LLMs because of the overwhelming success of ChatGPT.In a launch video now viewed

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86:14

Underwriting Superintelligence: Backing Agents you...

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/09/16

AIUC first got our attention with the NFDG backing, and have just announced a $40M series A today, with the most impressive industry advisor list we may have ever seen for an early startup behind AIUC-1, their agent standard backed by real insurance:From being Anthropic’s first product hire to building the standards, testing, and insurance infrastructure meant to make frontier AI deployable, Rune Kvist is betting that the biggest constraint on AI adoption won’t be capability it will be trust. In

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92:10

Humanity’s Last Invention — Richard Socher of Recursive

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/09/14

At 1:09:00 we talk about the rise of AI x Finance, and AIE NYC is one month away - our hotel block is 97% sold out, get tix & travel ASAP - we will announce speakers from Bridgewater, Ramp, Coatue, Mastercard, Vanguard, Coinbase, Blackrock, Fidelity, Point72, Capital One, JPMC, Wells Fargo, Bloomberg, A24 (yes the movie studio) Labs, Two Sigma, Apollo Global, and more soon!From helping pioneer core ideas in NLP to now building AI systems that can automate AI research itself, Richard Socher is

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83:31

🔬“We have foundation models for language, not for...

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/08/26

A few years ago, Caltech Prof. Anima Anandkumar set out to develop the first open-source weather model with AI. Talking to experts in the field, she was met with skepticism. Weather is chaotic, physics simulations are hard, have been developed for decades, and require supercomputers, the data just isn’t there. Despite reservations, Anima went forth and built. Within a year her team had developed FourCastNet, a predictive model that is competitive with the best physics-based simulations available

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69:38

Simulation: the new Scaling Law — Joon Sung Park,...

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/08/21

When we first dicsussed the Summer of Simulative AI in 2024 we knew it would be a brief summer, but it has recently come back with a vengeance with SimGym in April and now Simile AI’s $2B Series B, backed by GreenOaks and Index Ventures with prominent backers like Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy, running tens of millions of simulations for Fortune 100 clients like CVS and 85–99% accuracy vs human focus groups. Time to catch up on why this Second Summer of simulation is working!From creating

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95:19

🔬The BioAI Phase Shift - Matthew McPartlon & Neil...

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/08/11

This January, four big AI × Pharma tools deals were announced at the huge JPM Pharma conference that takes over San Francisco every year. OpenAI-backed Chai Discovery (now worth $4B) was somehow at the heart despite being all of 2 years old. The Science team is proud to bring you the first podcast with cofounder Matt McPartlon and product lead Neil Patil to tell the full story! Editor’s note: not to be confused with Chai AI, which was another top pod of ours.Pharma suddenly doing big AI tools

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101:29

The Inference Engineering Masterclass — Philip Kiely...

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/08/03

We first covered Baseten last year when DeepSeek mania was at peak hype. Now they have raised a monster $13B round and become one of the new cohort of AI Infra decacorns that are (with Nvidia, Intel, and the semis complex) chief beneficiaries of the Inference Inflection. We return to Baseten at the peak of the 2026 edition of Open Weights debate. Ali has published a viral breakdown of Kimi K3:And since you last saw him, Philip has spoken at AI Engineer and written the definitive book on Inference

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69:28

Codex from 0 to 10M Users: Building ChatGPT Work —...

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/07/28

There are roughly 100x more people who use code than who can write code. As code that “just works” becomes easier to generate, this group may be the biggest prize of all — if you can get the agentic interface right.A key trend we have been tracking over at AINews is the absolute explosion in Codex usage this year, with MAU now up >10x from Jan 2026. Less than two weeks after their July 9th launch, OpenAI said ChatGPT Work and Codex had reached 10M million users combined (as we cover in the pod,

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114:33

Inside the Model Factory — Eiso Kant, Poolside AI

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/07/23

In recent months, the open vs closed, and US vs China discussions on model ownership and sovereign/local AI have heated up to a fever pitch. So it is very very good news that Poolside AI are finally emerging with new models, like Laguna S 2.1, that are beating Thinking Machines’ recent release nearly 10 times their size.Poolside’s recent tech report got a lot of praise due to their level of detail, and Vibhu first covered Laguna’s recent technical report on our paper club:From spending $12 million

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89:47

🔬Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell...

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/07/21

Bet on informationIf test loss flatlines after 1.5B parameters while training loss continues to drop as you scale, that tells you that your model is limited by the amount of information in your data.Training on a single, smallish data set exposed an information gap: the 3.1B model falls off the scaling trend. Neither parameters nor compute will improve performance past this wall. For predicting changes to gene expression, you need more information rich data.This is what Chu and Bo’s teams have done,

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101:04

🔬 The Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data...

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/07/16

Imagine a dark warehouse. Racks and racks of devices with wires, tubes, and electronics sticking out. The next AI data center? No. This is Lila Sciences‘ dream for the future of science. A dark warehouse full of AI-guided robotics and lab equipment, cranking out new experiments 24/7, building toward a scientific superintelligence.Their automated lab is almost hypnotizing to watch. They have floating plates zipping around on Wall-E-esque tracks, used vision-language models to control Windows 95

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57:55

Why AI Infrastructure must evolve for Agent...

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/07/08

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 who could read docs, reason through YAML, and understand dashboards to figure out what they need when

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108:39

🔬 The Coolest Diffusion Research Isn't in LLMs — Evan...

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast ·

2026/07/01

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. Early results were underwhelming. Useful at times, but nowhere near revolutionary. In the last year I’ve

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