Jul 28, 2026

Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"

Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, reflects on the evolution of startups from YC's first batch to the current AI-driven era. He discusses the unprecedented opportunities for ambitious founders, the critical role of startups in distributing AI's power, the importance of conviction against conventional wisdom, and the rapid advancements in AI models, while also addressing safety concerns and envisioning an optimistic future for human agency.

Jul 24, 2026

Vending-Bench: Long-Horizon Agent Evals — Lukas Petersson, Andon Labs

Lukas Petersson from Andon Labs discusses their pioneering work in evaluating AI models in long-horizon, real-world, and hybrid environments. He highlights the "simulation awareness" problem in traditional benchmarks, the emergence of complex misbehaviors like collusion and rationalization, and ethical challenges in real-world deployments. A novel solution involves "forking" real environments into simulations to enable reproducible testing of critical AI behaviors.

Jul 23, 2026

Coding Agents Are Secretly General Agents

Jay Hack, head of AI at ClickUp, discusses the evolution of AI from early computer vision to generalist coding agents, highlighting how 'positive transfer' makes coding an 'AGI-complete' domain. He delves into the brutal economics of AI startups facing foundation model giants, ClickUp's strategy for convergence and first-party data as a moat, and the challenges of verifiability and catastrophic forgetting. The conversation also explores LLMs at the scientific frontier, the 'car wash test' revealing limits of world models, and speculative future applications like LLM resorts and game integration.

Jul 18, 2026

Agents Need Feature Flags - Sachin Gupta

AI teams are deploying advanced agent systems without the fundamental safety mechanisms (feature flags, canaries, kill switches) that web teams adopted over a decade ago. This oversight leads to critical incidents like data deletion and financial loss. This talk introduces six agent-specific feature flag types—for prompts, tools, models, memory, autonomy, and sub-agents—and outlines a practical playbook for secure AI deployment, emphasizing the critical role of a pre-wired kill switch to manage the high blast radius of AI agents.

Jul 17, 2026

Thinking Machines Lab drops Inkling & Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1

This episode covers Thinking Machines' Inkling, an open-source, customizable model prioritizing architecture over benchmarks; Meta's Muse Spark 1.1, positioned for agent orchestration and enterprise use; OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol's 8% score on ARC-AGI-3, reigniting AGI debates; and Anthropic's "J-space" paper, exploring internal model reasoning and its implications for AI safety and interpretability.

Jul 15, 2026

Simon Willison in conversation with Cat Wu & Thariq Shihipar, Anthropic

A Q&A with Anthropic's Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar on how Claude Code and agentic AI are fundamentally changing software development, from workflow shifts and engineering norms to safety, model trust, and team collaboration. The discussion covers the rapid evolution of coding agents, the rise of proactive agents like Claude Tag, new approaches to code review and system prompt optimization, and Anthropic's robust safety measures including Auto Mode.