Latent Space
Deep technical AI engineering content. The go-to podcast for AI builders.
189 episodes curated
Episodes
Marc Andreessen introspects on The Death of the Browser, Pi + OpenClaw, and Why "This Time Is Different"
Fresh off raising a monster $15B , Marc Andreessen has lived through multiple computing platform shifts firsthand, from Mosaic and Netscape to cofounding A16z. In this episode, Marc joins swyx and Alessio in a16z’s legendary Sand Hill Road office to argue that AI is not just another hype cycle, but the payoff of an “80-year overnight success”: from neural nets and expert systems to transformers, reasoning models, coding, agents, and recursive self-improvement. He lays out why he thinks this moment is different, why AI is finally escaping the old boom-bust pattern, and why the real bottleneck m
Moonlake: Causal World Models should be Multimodal, Interactive, and Efficient — with Chris Manning and Fan-yun Sun
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 with with Andrew White of Edison Scientific on our new Science pod, to writing up our own theses on Adversarial World Models . Meanwhile Nvidia , Waymo and Tesla have published their own approaches, Goog
Mistral: Voxtral TTS, Forge, Leanstral, & what's next for Mistral 4 — w/ Pavan Kumar Reddy & Guillaume Lample
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 launch : Mistral can’t directly say it, but the benchmarks do imply, that this is basically an open-weights ElevenLabs-level TTS model (Technically, it is a 4B Ministral based multilingual low-latency TTS
🔬Why There Is No "AlphaFold for Materials" — AI for Materials Discovery with Heather Kulik
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 Prof. Heather Kulik was one of the first material scientists to realize that there was alpha in combining computational tools with data driven modeling — she did AI for science before it was cool. She
Dreamer: the Personal Agent OS — David Singleton
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/agents . This month they emerged out as Dreamer , a consumer-first platform to discover, build, and use AI agents and agentic apps, centered on a personal “Sidekick” that helps users customize experiences
Why Anthropic Thinks AI Should Have Its Own Computer — Felix Rieseberg of Claude Cowork & Claude Code Desktop
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, the tool was ready after a brief week and a half. This isn’t Felix’s first rodeo with impactful and playful desktop apps. He’s helped ship the Slack desktop app and is a core maintainer of Electron
Retrieval After RAG: Hybrid Search, Agents, and Database Design — Simon Hørup Eskildsen of Turbopuffer
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 wanted to “build a search engine” which became Turbopuffer. We discuss: • Simon’s path: Denmark → Shopify infra for nearly a decade → “angel engineering” across startups like Readwise, Replicate, and
NVIDIA's AI Engineers: Agent Inference at Planetary Scale and "Speed of Light" — Nader Khalil (Brev), Kyle Kranen (Dynamo)
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 Kranen who gave a great inference keynote at the first World’s Fair and is one of the leading architects of NVIDIA Dynamo (a Datacenter scale inference framework supporting SGLang, TRT-LLM, vLLM), and N
Cursor's Third Era: Cloud Agents
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, people are officially using more agents than tab autocomplete (the first wave of AI coding): Cursor has launched cloud agents for a few months now, and this specific launch is around Computer Use, which
Every Agent Needs a Box — Aaron Levie, Box
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 both worlds of Silicon Valley and Wall Street/Main Street, by day helping 70% of the Fortune 500 with their Enterprise Advanced Suite, and yet by night is often found in the basements of early startup
METR’s Joel Becker on exponential Time Horizon Evals, Threat Models, and the Limits of AI Productivity
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 sophisticated enough to know that the details matter and that hype and hyperbole go hand in hand in AI social media, because the millions of impressions that got, by people who don’t understand or care about
[LIVE] Anthropic Distillation & How Models Cheat (SWE-Bench Dead) | Nathan Lambert & Sebastian Raschka
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
🔬Searching the Space of All Possible Materials — Prof. Max Welling, CuspAI
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 materials discovery (yes, there is one!!!). We begin with a provocative framing: experiments as computation . Welling describes the idea of a “ physics processing unit ”—a world in which digital models and
Claude Code for Finance + The Global Memory Shortage: Doug O'Laughlin, SemiAnalysis
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 first podcasts to invite Boris and Cat on in early May: As we discussed on the pod, all CC usage was API-based and therefore it was ridiculously expensive to do anything. This was then fixed by the team i
⚡️The End of SWE-Bench Verified — Mia Glaese & Olivia Watkins, OpenAI Frontier Evals & Human Data
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 coding progress. SWE-Bench Verified originated as a major OpenAI-led cleanup of the original Princeton SWE-Bench benchmark, including a large human review effort with nearly 100 software engineers an