Russ d'Sa, CEO of LiveKit, recounts the company's unexpected journey from a pandemic-era open-source WebRTC project to becoming a crucial infrastructure provider for AI voice interfaces, most notably for OpenAI's ChatGPT. He details the serendipitous moments that led to this pivot and shares his vision for LiveKit as the nervous system for a multimodal AI future.
Martin Casado, General Partner at a16z, discusses the evolution of venture capital in the age of AI, covering the firm's shift to specialization, the critical value of AI infrastructure, the fierce competition for talent, and the strategic importance of media and open source.
Will Bryk, co-founder and CEO of Exa, discusses the journey and technology behind building a search engine from scratch, specifically designed for AI systems. He explains why traditional search engines fail in an AI-first world and how Exa's full-stack, compute-heavy approach aims to solve the world's "information blocker" problems.
Tom Brown, co-founder of Anthropic, shares his journey from a YC founder to a key figure behind AI's scaling breakthroughs. He discusses the discovery of scaling laws that underpinned GPT-3, the mission-driven founding of Anthropic, the surprising success of Claude for coding, and his perspective on what he calls "humanity's largest infrastructure buildout ever."
Casey Handmer explains why the massive energy demand from AI will be met not by the grid or natural gas, but by vast, off-grid solar farms, and what this energy singularity means for the future of civilization.
SemiAnalysis CEO Dylan Patel discusses the shifting AI landscape, covering OpenAI's strategic open-source release, the fierce competition to challenge Nvidia's dominance, the consolidation of neoclouds, and the geopolitical implications of the global AI infrastructure buildout.