The Loop Is the Product — Roland Gavrilescu, Introspection

Roland Gavrilescu, co-founder and CEO of Introspection and formerly at xAI, presents a blueprint for autoresearch in 2026 built on three ideas: the loop is the product, system distillation is the moat, and valued work per watt is the score to optimize. He illustrates these with the OpenClaw car-haggling loop, the concept of portable agent recipes, and a talent-sourcing agent example that shows how to spot patterns in traces, calibrate judges with humans, and A/B test taste in production.