Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

Filtered episodes(25)

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  🔬 The Coolest Diffusion Research Isn't in LLMs — Evan Feinberg & Sergey Edunov, Genesis Molecular AI

  Published Jul 1, 2026

  This episode has a fun personal twist: There’s a counterfactual world where I was employee #1 at Genesis Molecular AI, the company behind today’s episode. A certain introduction happened a few weeks too late and I had already happily signed at Atomwise, another ML-for-drug-discovery startup. Same problem, different company. I was certain ML was going to transform small molecule drug discovery. Early results were underwhelming. Useful at times, but nowhere near revolutionary. In the last year I’v

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  Why the Frontier Ecosystem must be Open — Matei Zaharia and Reynold Xin, Databricks

  Published Jun 24, 2026

  We’re excited to have Databricks join us at AIEWF, among hundreds of the top companies in the AI Engineer ecosystem. LS subscribers can use their discount to get past the late bird pricing and access over $50k in sponsor offers! Everyone is still talking about Satya’s Frontier Ecosystems post, but few have actually built a (now $175 billion) frontier ecosystem and cloud like our guests today.From open-sourcing the layer above coding agents to rethinking databases for the agent era, Databricks co

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  The Professor of Outputmaxxing — Anjney Midha, AMP

  Published Jun 18, 2026

  Last 4 days before regular tickets sell out at AI Engineer World’s Fair - this is the single biggest gathering of AI Engineers, Founders, Leaders, and Researchers in the world. Attendees get >$5000 worth of sponsor credits and talk tracks are looking FANTASTIC. Join us!The AI scaling debate always focuses on the question of “how do we get more GPUs?” but the better question may be: how do we make the most of ones we already have.The fact that a frontier lab like xAI could be running at sub-10% M

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  🔬 The Self-Driving Lab — Joseph Krause, Radical AI

  Published Jun 17, 2026

  On the Science pod, we’ve been covering a lot of the ground on how AI is revolutionizing STEM, but one of our favorite off the record topics since our launch is which field is harder to accelerate: math, bio, or physics? Today we’re back in Materials Science land with Radical — Unlike biological molecules that can be represented (and predicted!) by token strings, the success of materials involve many more macro complex variables like supply chains, microstructures, and manufacturing processes. I

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  🔬Scaling Past Informal AI - Carina Hong, Axiom Math

  Published Jun 3, 2026

  In 2025, seven-month-old startup Axiom solved all 12 of the problems Putnam exam (scoring 8/12 in the time limit) a prestigious undergraduate math exam. The 12/12 score is better than the top undergraduates (110/120) and the closest AI system that reported a result (DeepSeek 103/120), although it is unclear what the people and other systems would have scored with more time. Nonetheless, the Putnam exam is legendary for its difficulty, with the median score typically being 0 or 1 points. Taken by

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  ⚡️Satya Nadella: No Priors x Latent Space Crossover Special at Microsoft Build

  Published Jun 3, 2026

  We’ve informally heard that Satya is a listener to LS for a couple years now, but it was still absolutely surreal to meet him and do a live pod at Build, together with our friends at No Priors, the leading VC AI Podcast that we also greatly admire!We covered the MAI model technical takeaways on yesterday’s AINews, so I will focus our recap of Satya’s main messages around three elements:* Satya’s adaptation of the Bill Gates Line for positioning Microsoft as the Frontier Intelligence Platform — c

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  GitHub's plan for Agents — Kyle Daigle, GitHub

  Published Jun 2, 2026

  I’m excited to work with Microsoft once again as the presenting sponsors of the AI Engineer World’s Fair! We’ll streaming live from MS Build today for a special crossover pod with our friends at No Priors and the one and only Satya Nadella. However we did not hold back with this interview - we asked all the burning questions about uptime and Copilot that we know you have in your minds. Lets go!For almost two decades, GitHub has been the home of software, where both open source and closed flow, t

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  Why Video Agent models are next — Ethan He, xAI Grok Imagine

  Published Jun 1, 2026

  We’re announcing AIEWF speakers this week! Take the AI Engineering Survey!Today’s guest Ethan first joined us for the LS Paper Club as the lead on NVIDIA Cosmos World Model, but then joined xAI and built Grok Imagine in 3 months:He comes back on Latent Space with some nuclear hot takes: that Video Models primarily get their intelligence from LLMs, not from training on video data, and that the next frontier for truly interactive, realtime, long-horizon world models is to work on LLMs (perhaps Int

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  The Age of Async Agents — Cognition's Walden Yan & OpenInspect's Cole Murray

  Published May 28, 2026

  The new AIEWF website is live! CFPs close in 2 days and we will run our first New Engineer Orientation this weekend, get your tickets booked ASAP as they -will- sell out. Take the AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and free AIE WF tickets!One of the central tensions in the agents industry is that even while there are major decacorn agent labs like Sierra, Decagon, Notion and Cursor being built up, it is also true that it has never been easier to DIY agents, with a plethora of agent fr

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  Railway: The Agent-Native Cloud — Jake Cooper

  Published May 20, 2026

  Take the 2026 AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and AIE WF tickets!This was recorded before Railway suffered a major GCP outage on May 19, despite being a multi-AZ, multi-zone mesh ring, with HA fiber interconnects between their Metal GCP AWS, because workload discoverability was unintentionally still tied to GCP. All has been resolved with a post-mortem.Railway did not start as an AI infrastructure company.It was founded in 2020 years before agents became the default way people thou

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  The Autonomous Drone Tech Stack & Economics of Drones — Yaroslav Azhnyuk, The Fourth Law & Guest Host Noah Smith, Noahpinion

  Published May 18, 2026

  The future of war has been evolving before our eyes in Ukraine, yet the west still plans to fight the last war. In this special episode, guest host Noah Smith (@noahpinion) and Brandon Anderson sit down with Yaroslav Azhnyuk (@YaroslavAzhnyuk), a serial tech founder who went from building PetCube to founding The Fourth Law, one of the world’s most advanced AI-guided drone companies. Over two hours we cover the technology, tactics, and geopolitics of drone warfare, and why the modern battlefield

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  The Next War Is Already Here. The West Isn't Ready. — Yaroslav Azhnyuk, The Fourth Law & Guest Host Noah Smith, Noahpinion

  Published May 18, 2026

  The future of war has been evolving before our eyes in Ukraine, yet the west still plans to fight the last war. In this special episode, guest host Noah Smith (@noahpinion) and Brandon Anderson sit down with Yaroslav Azhnyuk (@YaroslavAzhnyuk), a serial tech founder who went from building PetCube to founding The Fourth Law, one of the world’s most advanced AI-guided drone companies. Over two hours we cover the technology, tactics, and geopolitics of drone warfare, and why the modern battlefield

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  Physical AI that Moves the World — Qasar Younis & Peter Ludwig, Applied Intuition

  Published Apr 27, 2026

  From building Applied Intuition from YC-era autonomy tooling into a $15B physical AI company, Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig have spent the last decade living through the full arc of autonomy: from simulation and data infrastructure for robotaxi companies, to operating systems for safety-critical machines, to deploying AI onto cars, trucks, mining equipment, construction vehicles, agriculture, defense systems, and driverless L4 trucks running in Japan today. They join us to explain why “physical

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  AIE Europe Debrief + Agent Labs Thesis: Unsupervised Learning x Latent Space Crossover Special (2026)

  Published Apr 23, 2026

  Today, we check in a year after the first Unsupervised Learning x Latent Space Crossover special to discuss everything that has changed (there is a lot) in the world of AI. This episode was recorded just after AIE Europe, but before the Cursor-xAI deal.Unsupervised Learning is a podcast that interviews the sharpest minds in AI about what’s real today, what will be real in the future and what it means for businesses and the world - helping builders, researchers and founders deconstruct and unders

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  Shopify’s AI Phase Transition: 2026 Usage Explosion, Unlimited Opus-4.6 Token Budget, Tangle, Tangent, SimGym — with Mikhail Parakhin, Shopify CTO

  Published Apr 22, 2026

  Early bird discounts for the San Francisco World’s Fair, the biggest AIE gathering of the year, end today - prices will go up by ~$500 tonight so do please lock in ASAP!From near-universal AI tool adoption inside Shopify to internal systems for ML experimentation, auto-research, customer simulation, and ultra-low-latency search, Mikhail Parakhin joins us for a deep dive into what it actually looks like when a 20-year-old, $200B software company goes all-in on AI. We cover why Shopify has become

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  🔬 Training Transformers to solve 95% failure rate of Cancer Trials — Ron Alfa & Daniel Bear, Noetik

  Published Apr 20, 2026

  Today, we explain this piece of “clickbait” from our guest!TL;DR: 95% of cancer treatments fail to pass clinical trials, but it may be a matching problem — if we better understood what patients have which tumors which will respond to which treatments, success rates improve dramatically and millions of lives can be saved — with the treatments we ALREADY have.See our full episode dropping today:Why Big Pharma is licensing AI ModelsTolstoy famously wrote, ‘All healthy cells are alike; each cancer c

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  Marc Andreessen introspects on The Death of the Browser, Pi + OpenClaw, and Why "This Time Is Different"

  Published Apr 3, 2026

  Fresh off raising a monster $15B, Marc Andreessen has lived through multiple computing platform shifts firsthand, from Mosaic and Netscape to cofounding A16z. In this episode, Marc joins swyx and Alessio in a16z’s legendary Sand Hill Road office to argue that AI is not just another hype cycle, but the payoff of an “80-year overnight success”: from neural nets and expert systems to transformers, reasoning models, coding, agents, and recursive self-improvement. He lays out why he thinks this momen

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  🔬Why There Is No "AlphaFold for Materials" — AI for Materials Discovery with Heather Kulik

  Published Mar 24, 2026

  Heather Kulik

  Materials science is the unsung hero of the science world. Behind every physical product you interact was decades of research into getting the properties of materials just right. Your gym clothes contain synthetic fibers developed over decades. The glass screen, diodes, and chip substrate technology needed to read this blog post were only viable due to many teams of material scientists.Our guest Prof. Heather Kulik was one of the first material scientists to realize that there was alpha in combi

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  Dreamer: the Personal Agent OS — David Singleton

  Published Mar 20, 2026

  Mar 23 update for Latent Spacenauts: this episode was recorded before the Dreamer team announced they were joining Meta Superintelligence Labs, and it turned out to be the last interview they did before the news became public. Consider this a snapshot from just before the transition!In 2024, David Singleton left Stripe and joined forces with Hugo Barra for a buzzy stealth startup named /dev/agents. This month they emerged out as Dreamer, a consumer-first platform to discover, build, and use AI a

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  Cursor's Third Era: Cloud Agents

  Published Mar 6, 2026

  All speakers are announced at AIE EU, schedule coming soon. Join us there or in Miami with the renowned organizers of React Miami! Singapore CFP also open!We’ve called this out a few times over in AINews, but the overwhelming consensus in the Valley is that “the IDE is Dead”. In November it was just a gut feeling, but now we actually have data: even at the canonical “VSCode Fork” company, people are officially using more agents than tab autocomplete (the first wave of AI coding):Cursor has launc

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  Every Agent Needs a Box — Aaron Levie, Box

  Published Mar 5, 2026

  The reception to our recent post on Code Reviews has been strong. Catch up!Amid a maelstrom of discussion on whether or not AI is killing SaaS, one of the top publicly listed SaaS companies in the world has just reported record revenues, clearing well over $1.1B in ARR for the first time with a 28% margin. As we comment on the pod, Aaron Levie is the rare public company CEO equally at home in both worlds of Silicon Valley and Wall Street/Main Street, by day helping 70% of the Fortune 500 with th

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  🔬Searching the Space of All Possible Materials — Prof. Max Welling, CuspAI

  Published Feb 25, 2026

  Editor’s note: CuspAI raised a $100m Series A in September and is rumored to have reached a unicorn valuation. They have all-star advisors from Geoff Hinton to Yann Lecun and team of deep domain experts to tackle this next frontier in AI applications.In this episode, Max Welling traces the thread connecting quantum gravity, equivariant neural networks, diffusion models, and climate-focused materials discovery (yes, there is one!!!).We begin with a provocative framing: experiments as computation.

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  The First Mechanistic Interpretability Frontier Lab — Myra Deng & Mark Bissell of Goodfire AI

  Published Feb 6, 2026

  From Palantir and Two Sigma to building Goodfire into the poster-child for actionable mechanistic interpretability, Mark Bissell (Member of Technical Staff) and Myra Deng (Head of Product) are trying to turn “peeking inside the model” into a repeatable production workflow by shipping APIs, landing real enterprise deployments, and now scaling the bet with a recent $150M Series B funding round at a $1.25B valuation.In this episode, we go far beyond the usual “SAEs are cool” take. We talk about Goo

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  🔬 Automating Science: World Models, Scientific Taste, Agent Loops — Andrew White

  Published Jan 28, 2026

  Editor’s note: Welcome to our new AI for Science pod, with your new hosts RJ and Brandon! See the writeup on Latent.Space (https://Latent.Space) for more details on why we’re launching 2 new pods this year. RJ Honicky is a co-founder and CTO at MiraOmics (https://miraomics.bio/), building AI models and services for single cell, spatial transcriptomics and pathology slide analysis. Brandon Anderson builds AI systems for RNA drug discovery at Atomic AI (https://atomic.ai). Anything said on this po

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  Brex’s AI Hail Mary — With CTO James Reggio

  Published Jan 17, 2026

  From building internal AI labs to becoming CTO of Brex, James Reggio has helped lead one of the most disciplined AI transformations inside a real financial institution where compliance, auditability, and customer trust actually matter.We sat down with Reggio to unpack Brex’s three-pillar AI strategy (corporate, operational, and product AI) [https://www.brex.com/journal/brex-ai-native-operations], how SOP-driven agents beat overengineered RL in ops, why Brex lets employees “build their own AI sta

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