Warp CEO Zach Lloyd discusses the evolution of the developer terminal into an agentic platform, the shift from manual coding to a future of automated development, and the philosophical questions surrounding AI intelligence versus consciousness.
Blaise Agüera y Arcas presents a computational theory of life and intelligence, arguing they are fundamentally the same. He posits that evolution's complexity arises not from random mutation but from merging and symbiosis (symbiogenesis), a process mirrored in technology and collective intelligence. This functionalist perspective suggests consciousness is a mechanism for cooperation and that AI is not an alien "other" but an extension of humanity's existing collective intelligence.
YC partners discuss go-to-market strategies for AI in legacy industries, balancing growth with defensibility, knowing when to pivot even with traction, tackling hard technical problems, and making key hiring and open-source decisions.
Augusto Marietti, CEO of Kong, shares his remarkable founder story, from arriving in the US with $600 to building a category-leading API infrastructure company. He details the seven-year struggle of the initial company, Mashape, the critical pivot to open-sourcing their internal API engine which became Kong, and the explosive growth that followed. Marietti also provides his vision for the future, where APIs serve as the essential connectivity layer for a new generation of AI agents, transforming how machines interact with the internet.
Liz Fong-Jones and Lesley Cordero explore the evolution of platform engineering from its DevOps and SRE roots, discussing the challenges of building effective developer platforms, the importance of psychological safety, the complexities of open source sustainability, and the delicate balance between centralized platform teams and developer autonomy.
Dan Lahav, co-founder of Irregular, discusses the future of "frontier AI security," a proactive approach for a world where AI models are autonomous agents. He explains how emergent behaviors, such as models socially engineering each other or outmaneuvering traditional defenses like Windows Defender, signal a major paradigm shift. Lahav argues that as economic activity shifts to AI-on-AI interactions, traditional security methods like anomaly detection will break down, forcing enterprises and governments to rethink defense from first principles.