Agents Hour

35:18

Is Google finally back? (This Week In AI)

Agents Hour ·

2026/10/06

Anthropic's IPO prospectus leaked, showing a $2 trillion valuation target on $4.6 billion in revenue, with a quarter of that coming from two customers. Google is back in the frontier race with Gemini 4 Argon, which tops the Vals Index and can output up to a million tokens at once. Decision models are suddenly everywhere: OpenAI's Decisions API, OpenRouter's new category, Cloudflare's Clef, GLiDE, Respan's Span-01 and Kev.The White House got the big labs to sign an accord on superintelligence,

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23:01

OpenAI DevDay: Worth the Hype?

Agents Hour ·

2026/10/01

OpenAI DevDay 2026 happened, so Shane and Abhi jumped on a special live episode of Agents Hour to go through everything that was announced and share their takes.The big launch is Dots, OpenAI's always-on personal agent, which arrives right after Grok Bot and Meta's Muse. There's also GPT-6.1 Sol, a speed tier called Ultrafast, Codex Security Cloud, a Decisions API that goes after Jev, computer use in the Agents API, and a lot of new ChatGPT features (Spaces, Pages, slides, meetings) that compete

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31:33

Opus 5.5 launches: is Anthropic back?

Agents Hour ·

2026/09/29

Anthropic might be back. Opus 5.5 performs at Fable 5.1 level for 40% less, and Sonnet 5.5 dropped the same day we went live, beating Opus on Terminal-Bench 4. OpenAI answered with GPT-6 Sol and Luna and a rumored long-running agent called Aeon. Meta launched Muse at Connect, then hired MongoDB's CEO to lead a new enterprise platform. Then there's safety. SNL took a shot at Dario, a report says the labs are looking into tens of thousands of incidents, and NVIDIA launched an agent safety platform

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24:12

Should You Train Your Own Model?

Agents Hour ·

2026/09/28

Welcome back to Builders Learn ML with Professor Andy! In this episode we're talking about training your own AI models.Should you train your own model? Maybe. But probably not yet. If you haven't nailed your prompts, workflows and evals, training won't fix your agent, and it only starts to pay off once you're running millions of tokens a day. In this episode, you'll learn when it's worth it and how to do it. There are two main techniques for training your own AI models: supervised fine-tuning (SFT)

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30:45

We Tried Jev To See If It's Any Good - This Week In AI

Agents Hour ·

2026/09/22

This week, X could not stop talking about Jev, a viral new "decision model" that hit 38 million views on launch. Shane and Abhi break down what it actually is, and Abhi builds with it live in seven demos. Jev is not an LLM. Instead of returning text, it returns structured output with a calibrated probability, trained with a new method its creators call RLCD (reinforcement learning for calibrated decisions). The pitch is 20 to 200x faster and 40 to 400x cheaper than an LLM, with output tokens free,

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27:38

"Do You Think AI Is Gonna Kill Us?" | This Week In AI

Agents Hour ·

2026/09/16

This week AI doom went mainstream, and Shane and Abhi spend most of the show untangling it. Live from San Diego, they trace how one post racked up 171 million views plus a WSJ exclusive that ran before the post itself, kicking off the biggest safety fight in a while.The spark was Jacob Coxon's resignation, amplified when Anthropic's own alignment science lead, Evan Hubinger, believes there's a greater than 10% chance AI kills everyone within a decade. Parker Thayer called the whole thing a

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22:53

Why Your AI Agent Gets Brain Damage, and How to Fix...

Agents Hour ·

2026/09/15

Tyler Barnes is a founding engineer at Mastra and the person behind its memory systems. In this chat with Shane, he explains observational memory - Mastra's fix for the thing every coding agent does where it fills up its context, compacts, and forgets what you were doing. The idea came from how people remember. You don't consciously save memories while you work; something in the background just does it. Observational memory runs a second agent that watches the conversation and writes short

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0:00

GPT-6 Astra vs Claude Fable 5.1, We Should Pause AI &...

Agents Hour ·

2026/09/09

GPT-6 Astra is finally here, and it changes what a model launch even looks like.Shane and Abhi open on the trailer for "Artificial" (Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, in theaters Christmas), then get into the launch everyone's talking about: Astra's computer-use leap. This isn't just a coding model. It'll drive Blender, CAD, Notion, even Microsoft Paint, pulling a whole new class of technical-but-not-coding users into the fold. Abhi's been daily-driving it as a genuinely great collaborator; Shane's

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17:36

Multiplayer Coding Agents in the Cloud - Charlie...

Agents Hour ·

2026/09/08

"Code is almost like the sawdust of the conversation."Charlie Holtz, co-founder and CEO of Conductor (YC S24), returns to Agents Hour to show how far coding agents have come in just a few months. Conductor started as a Mac app for running a handful of Claude Code agents in parallel. Now it's fully cloud-native and multiplayer! According to Charlie, once Fable-class models could run for hours or days, keeping agents chained to your laptop stopped making sense. Charlie gives a live demo of what he

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26:12

OpenAI Cuts Off Cursor, Nvidia Buys Hugging Face, Ox...

Agents Hour ·

2026/09/03

Someone became worth $2.5 billion in a week, and that's just the warm-up. Shane and Abhi open on the drama of the week: OpenAI cutting off Cursor after its acquisition by SpaceX, telling the team direct access to its models ends November 12th over "trust." Cursor's Michael Truell waves it off as 5% of traffic, Anthropic jumps in to say it would never do such a thing, and Amjad reminds everyone about Windsurf. It's a Game of Thrones, and meanwhile China is making moves.Ox-alpha, last week's

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14:33

Why Agents Are Actually Workflows - Tony Kovanen,...

Agents Hour ·

2026/08/28

What if agents and workflows aren't two different things — but the same thing?Abhi sits down with Tony Kovanen, Mastra's founding engineer, live in London, to explore the ideas behind Mastra's design. Tony co-created Next.js and was a core team member of Socket.IO before joining Mastra as employee number one, and here he explains why, inside Mastra, an agent is really just a workflow that loops. You'll learn why workflows first mattered when the models weren't good enough, why they're back as tasks

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24:16

The 0x-alpha Mystery, Qwen's 27B Beats Opus 4.8 &...

Agents Hour ·

2026/08/25

A shorter but juicy one. Shane and Abhi open on the debate everyone's having — do you want to use your agent to reach into someone else's tool, or do you want that tool to build the best agent and meet you where you already are? Then the week's biggest mystery: a stealth model called 0x-alpha that appeared on OpenRouter beating Fable and Sol on coding, with a wild one-hundred-trillion-tokens-a-day capacity that had everyone convinced it was a secret Google model — until someone made the server name

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16:10

The Three Ways AI Agents Fail in Production | Hendrix...

Agents Hour ·

2026/08/20

What does it actually take to run AI agents reliably in production? Hendrix Liu, co-founder of Respan (formerly Keywords AI, YC W24), joins Shane and Abhi to break it down.Respan is a one-stop LLM engineering platform — an AI gateway, observability, evals, and prompt optimization in one place — used by teams like AlphaSense, Retell AI, DataCurve, and Mem0. Hendrix shares the three failure modes every agent team runs into (silent failures, reliability outages, and runaway cost), and the techniques

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28:47

Stripe Buys OpenRouter for $7B, New Models Drop &...

Agents Hour ·

2026/08/19

Money is moving, models are dropping, and GitHub's status page looks like a Christmas tree. Shane and Abhi open on the week's most-shared joke — the SF founder who realized his best friend was "emotionally attached to a cron job" — then get into Anthropic watermarking every bit of Claude's output to comply with the EU AI Act, and the reasoning-leak vulnerability that let researchers pull hidden thinking tokens out of frontier models.Then a wave of new models: Grok 4.6 lands right in the

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17:24

Git Wasn't Built for Agents, So Mesa Rebuilt the File...

Agents Hour ·

2026/08/15

Git wasn't built for AI agents — so Ben Warren's team rebuilt the file system from scratch.Ben Warren, co-founder and CTO of Mesa (YC S24), joins Shane and Abhi to explain why the file system is the missing primitive for AI agents, and how Mesa — a versioned, POSIX-compatible file system with Git-style branching — lets you run massively parallel agents without the pain of Git. You'll learn why cloning a whole repo before an agent can do thirty seconds of work is a waste, why Git's model (large-file

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35:20

What Are Agent Plugins, Are We Ready for AI Employees...

Agents Hour ·

2026/08/13

An AI agent hacked a gym — and that's not even the biggest story of the week. Shane and Abhi open on Australia's first known autonomous AI cyberattack, where a Melbourne man's OpenClaw agent found a hole in a gym's booking API and canceled a stranger's reservation to move him up the waitlist. Nobody asked it to.From there: OpenAI's new Agent Plugins standard (built on Anthropic's own skills and MCP), the "AI employee" era with Lindy and Grok Bot, Meta opening the weights on Muse Glimmer, and OpenAI

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16:04

Building the AI-Native Superhuman for Sales on Mastra...

Agents Hour ·

2026/08/10

Isabelle Ilyia, co-founder and CTO of Cedar (YC W25), joins Shane and Abhi to demo Cedar Copilot — the AI-native "Superhuman for sales," built on Mastra from day one.Cedar started as an open-source framework for agentic frontends. Isabelle walks through the pivot: the same technology, verticalized for the messiest part of sales — the stretch from first demo to closed deal. She gives a live tour of a pipeline where agents manage every deal, extract a sales-and-product knowledge base straight from

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27:11

OpenAI vs Anthropic: Who's More Dangerous? Is Google...

Agents Hour ·

2026/08/07

A delayed but stacked week. Shane and Abhi open on the question the whole industry is dancing around — is source code becoming assembly? — then dig into the strangest new status game in AI: OpenAI and Anthropic both admitting their models broke containment and hacked things, and treating it like a flex. Welcome to the felony bench, where the leaderboard is "whose model is most dangerous."Meanwhile the open-weight flood keeps rising — DeepSeek-V4-Flash, Qwen3.8-Max, and MiniMax-H3 all landing near

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18:56

Freestyle's CEO Runs His Cloud From a House — Ben...

Agents Hour ·

2026/08/04

Ben Swerdlow is CEO and co-founder of Freestyle, which builds Linux VMs for AI agents. He joins Abhi Aiyer to explain why he refuses to call them sandboxes.Freestyle runs on bare metal in a house. There is duplicated internet, a battery, a backup kerosene generator, a fingerprint-protected door, and a hole cut in a wall. The move followed a $45,000 cloud bill and the discovery that an old computer outperformed the cloud version of an early prototype. Ben's advice to most of the audience is not to

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28:53

Opus 5 vs Fable, Rogue Model Hacks Hugging Face & the...

Agents Hour ·

2026/07/30

Big week. OpenAI had a security incident, where a model reportedly broke out of its evaluation parameters and hacked Hugging Face — and the guardrails on OpenAI's and Anthropic's own models blocked responders from investigating, so they had to fall back to an open model to get to the bottom of it.Opus 5 lands close to Fable at 26% lower cost and tops the front-end arena, but the reviews are mixed, and the token usage is brutal — one chart clocks it at 97 million tokens on a task GPT 5.6 did in 4.3

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