Podcast
No Priors
Sarah Guo and Elad Gil interview AI founders, researchers, and operators about the future of artificial intelligence.
Original source
Frontier Chips for Frontier AI Labs, with Walter Goodwin, Founder/CEO of Fractile
Walter Goodwin argues Fractile’s edge will come from full-stack AI inference chips optimized for frontier-model workloads, with memory bandwidth becoming as important as FLOPs. He also says AI can speed chip design, but physical foundry cycles, packaging, and silicon payback periods still limit how fast the market can move.
Re-Founding Incumbents for the AI Era with Sequence Holdings Co-Founder and CEO Michael Lee
Michael Lee argues Sequence Holdings is building a permanent holding company to refound incumbent businesses with AI, not a traditional fund that flips assets. The episode focuses on why regulated, centralized businesses like banks and insurance brokers are attractive targets, and on early operating results from Sequence’s banking pilot.
Why Diffusion Will Win AI Inference with Inception Co-Founder and CEO Stefano Ermon
Stefano Ermon argues diffusion models will win AI inference because they are more parallel, GPU-friendly, and economically efficient than autoregressive generation. He says Inception’s Mercury models are already serving customers in production, with speed as the initial wedge and broader control and data-efficiency benefits still emerging.
Coinbase’s Everything Exchange: Agentic Finance, Stablecoins, and Tokenization with CEO Brian Armstrong
Brian Armstrong lays out Coinbase’s plan to become an “Everything Exchange” spanning agentic finance, stablecoin payments, tokenized assets, and prediction markets. He also discusses New Limit, his longevity biotech startup using AI-guided epigenetic reprogramming to pursue anti-aging therapies.
Redefining Chip Architecture with Arm CEO Rene Haas
Arm CEO Rene Haas argues CPUs remain the orchestration layer for all AI systems, even as accelerators grow in importance. He also describes Arm’s shift from pure IP licensing into physical products, the supply-chain and manufacturing bottlenecks shaping AI infrastructure, and why robotics and U.S. semiconductor capacity are central to Arm’s future.
Rethinking Legacy Data Infrastructure with Eon Co-Founders Ofir Ehrlich and Gonen Stein
Eon’s founders argue that enterprise data, not models or compute, is the key moat in the AI era and that companies need better mapping, classification, and governance to safely use scattered data in AI workflows. They also warn that autonomous agents create a new security threat model, with legitimate permissions enabling fast, destructive actions that legacy controls were not built to handle.
From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak
Max Hodak argues that the brain should be treated as a computational system and that Science’s near-term focus is restoring and extending human capabilities through medical devices. The episode centers on Prima, Science’s retinal prosthesis, plus the company’s broader bets on neural interfaces, connectomics, and long-horizon biology platforms.
How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor
Valar Atomics founder Isaiah Taylor says the company is proving nuclear by physically building and running reactors, not by paper design, and claims its first advanced startup-built reactor has already made power. He argues nuclear’s bottleneck is execution and scale, then makes the case that cheap atomic energy will unlock AI, manufacturing, and eventually broad energy abundance.
What Chess.com Teaches US About Superhuman Capabilities, with CEO Erik Allebest
Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest explains how the company bootstrapped from a $56,000 domain purchase into a $200M+ business with 10M daily users. He also discusses chess’s cultural resurgence, AI’s role in product and cheating detection, and why the game remains durable in an age of infinite entertainment.
Chasing Trillion-Dollar Companies, Founder Ambition, Token Budgets, and Regulatory Capture with Sarah & Elad
Sarah Guo and Elad Gil debate how quickly AI can create trillion-dollar companies, arguing that market size alone is not enough and that the real constraint is speed to massive revenue. They also discuss compute scarcity, recursive self-improvement timelines, founder exit decisions, and why heavy-handed regulation could slow beneficial AI deployment.
Building an Autonomous Enterprise for Real-World Services with Netic Founder Melisa Tokmak
Melisa Tokmak explains how Netic is building an autonomous operating layer for essential services businesses, using AI agents to handle intake, scheduling, routing, and labor deployment. She argues the near-term opportunity is not robotics or frontier labs, but productized orchestration that delivers measurable ROI in slow, operationally complex industries.
Building an Autonomous Delivery Experience with DoorDash Co-Founders Andy Fang and Stanley Tang
DoorDash’s founders frame the company as both an agentic-commerce platform and a long-term robotics company, with Ask DoorDash changing discovery and basket size while Dot pushes autonomous delivery in Phoenix. The episode focuses on the hard parts of scaling physical-world autonomy: purpose-built hardware, operations, first/last-100-feet logistics, and a multimodal future with robots, drones, and more Dashers.
Travel Through the Lens of AI with with Booking.com CEO Glenn Fogel
Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel argues that travel has no lasting moat, so the winner is the company that keeps innovating on product, service, and operations. He discusses Priceline’s agentic AI assistant Penny, Booking’s AI/customer-service gains, heavy reinvestment, large-scale buybacks, and the labor risks and retraining challenges posed by AI.
Really Big Test-Time Compute in AI Changes Benchmarks, Safety and Research with OpenAI Research Scientist Noam Brown
Noam Brown argues that modern AI capability is increasingly determined by test-time compute, so static benchmark grids badly understate what models can do. He discusses cost-aware evaluation, safety-policy gaps, poker and math case studies, and why long-horizon reasoning matters more than one-shot scores.
Re-engineering the Semiconductor Supply Chain with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan lays out a turnaround centered on culture, faster decisions, and balance-sheet repair, while arguing that AI is making CPUs, advanced packaging, and full-stack systems more important. He also frames semiconductor investing as bottleneck hunting and says the industry’s capital intensity increasingly requires government, sovereign, and hyperscale backing.
Biohub: The Future of Biology is Open-Source with Co-Founders Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, and Head of Science Alex Rives
Biohub’s founders and science lead argue that the future of biology will be driven by open-source tools, frontier AI, and large-scale biological data generation. The episode centers on ESMFold2, Biohub’s protein world model, and its longer-term push toward virtual cells, personalized medicine, and hierarchical biological simulations.
We Need An Ecosystem in AI, And Every Company Can Win A Place In It
Satya Nadella argues Microsoft’s AI strategy is an ecosystem play built around models, tools, data, and eval loops rather than a single model. He also explains how agents, private evals, and new pricing and infrastructure patterns will reshape SaaS, engineering roles, and the social license for AI.