Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
The main Latent Space podcast: AI engineering, Forward Deployed Engineering, AI for science, and ⚡ Lightning episodes. Other feeds: Engineering and FDE: https://podcast.latent.space/eng.xml; Science: https://podcast.latent.space/science.xml; Misc (Lightning and other shows): https://podcast.latent.space/misc.xml; Firehose (all available shows): https://podcast.latent.space/firehose.xml. Feed directory: https://latent.space/pods
All episodes(27)
- StandardSummaries onlyWhy AI Compute Comes in Rectangles — Erik Bernhardsson, Modal CEO
Published Oct 22, 2026
Warm welcome to Basil Chatha, our newest cohost from the Forward Deployed side of the AI Engineering world! We’ll be ramping up a new show with him and couldn’t pass up an interview with Modal’s CEO Eric on the occasion of their monster Series D! Two years ago, we spoke with Erik Bernhardsson about his vision for truly serverless AI infrastructure: developers should be able to run code without provisioning clusters, predicting load, or paying for idle resources. CTO Akshat then joined us to talk
- StandardSummaries onlyThe Recommendation Engine for Commodity Traders — Anekha Sokhal, Moshi
Published Oct 22, 2026
Anekha Sokhal, CEO of Moshi, joins swyx to discuss building a recommendation engine for commodity traders, turning market data into useful signals, and designing AI that fits users’ workflows. Watch: YouTube · Moshi · Anekha 0:00 AI Engineer New York and “you are the team” 0:54 Meet Anekha 2:09 From mathematics to energy derivatives 3:46 Fulbright and becoming a founder 5:45 What Moshi does 6:10 Market data 9:03 Bloomberg and market workflows 10:03 Bloomberg, Claude and Netflix 12:03 From dashbo
- StandardSummaries onlyAI for the Fortune 2000: How Tenex Builds an AI-Native SDLC — Alex Lieberman & CJ Hess
Published Oct 21, 2026
Alex Lieberman and CJ Hess join swyx at AI Engineer New York to discuss Tenex’s approach to AI-native engineering, paying for outcomes, MetaHarness, enterprise AI adoption and rebuilding SaaS. Show notes: Tenex: https://www.tenex.co/ Building an AI-native SDLC: https://www.tenex.co/blog/building-an-ai-native-sdlc Earlier Tenex episode: https://www.latent.space/p/10x-ai-engineers-with-1m-salaries Kill My SaaS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlD-CkLVKtU Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
- StandardSummaries onlyThe Programmable Data Center — Evan Conrad, SF Compute
Published Oct 20, 2026
This was recorded on the sidelines of the new Compute Trading track at AIE NYC. Catch us next at AIE CODE, our last flagship for the top agentic engineers in the world. In the early days of cloud, former guest Martin Casado made something so disruptive that Cisco was threatened enough to pay $600m for it, and VMware outbid for $1.3B: That concept was software-defined networking, which virtualized the routing network by separating the control plane from the data plane. That revolution is now comi
- StandardSummaries only🔬 Lab-in-the-Loop at Compute Speed — Ian Quigley, Leash Bio
Published Oct 14, 2026
A few years ago I stumbled upon Leash Bio’s Substack, and was hooked. Be it their Kaggle competition that showed that no, we really haven’t solved protein-ligand binding, or their crazy discovery that knowing a molecule’s author is perhaps all you need to know to predict how good it is. Their substack — or at least Owl Posting’s deep dive on them — should be required reading for any scientist trying to do chemistry with AI. So I was super excited to finally be able to sit down with Ian Quigley f
- StandardSummaries onlyDyna-2: General Purpose Physical Agents with Hour-Long Autonomy — Jason Ma, Dyna Robotics
Published Oct 13, 2026
Watch along AIE NYC and join us at AIE CODE in SF next month! This episode includes a live demo of the Taku robot that is best enjoyed on YouTube. Last month, Dyna made waves by announcing Dyna-2, a world-action model pre-trained on one million hours of human video, claiming several new scaling laws on human data across four orders of magnitude. They have now followed up the model with a physical robot agent, Dyna-2.1, that has to be seen to be believed: In his talk at AIE this year, Jason talke
- StandardSummaries only🔬 Why AlphaFold Didn't Solve Protein Folding — Pushmeet Kohli, Google DeepMind & Sal Candido, Biohub
Published Oct 10, 2026
From the Bitter Lesson of AI scaling to the unsolved mysteries of protein folding, Google DeepMind’s Pushmeet Kohli and Biohub’s Sal Candido are rethinking what it takes to build AI that truly understands biology. In this special panel moderated by Brandon Anderson, they explore why AlphaFold’s breakthrough was only the beginning, why scaling compute and data alone won’t solve biology, and how the next generation of AI models could transform our understanding of proteins, cells, and human diseas
- StandardSummaries only🔬 Synthesis Superintelligence: from Semiconductors to Superconductors — Periodic Labs’ Liam Fedus and Ekin Dogus Cubuk
Published Oct 8, 2026
It’s hard to believe that Periodic was only launched last September: One year later, it is considered one of the pre-eminent AI scientist labs, with dizzying talent density and astonishing progress in the autonomous lab buildout: Most people are familiar with the standard credentials of Liam and Dogus, but we found an incredible “talent slope” while learning more about Periodic, where each successive employee seems more impressive than the last: From building AI systems that reason over noisy ph
- StandardSummaries only⚡️ Which GPU Clouds Are Actually Good? | ClusterMAX 3.0
Published Oct 2, 2026
Watch the full show on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWX36ZYnsm0Full show notes and links
- StandardSummaries onlyAcademia is for Ambition — Alex Zhang, MIT
Published Oct 2, 2026
Last call for regular tickets for AI Engineer NYC! As an exclusive for Latent Space subscribers, the first 30 of you can take a 30% off code if it helps - for new tickets only, no refunds! See you in 2 weeks! While we tend to cover industry on the pod, every so often we celebrate a clearly emerging superstar PhD. In 2024 we featured Shunyu Yao, who went on to build Operator at OpenAI and is now Chief AI Scientist of Tencent. In 2025 we featured Jack Morris, who went on to cofound Engram at $600m
- StandardSummaries onlyWhy Dwarkesh is Wrong about Computer Use + How OpenAI shipped its Jev competitor in 1 Week
Published Sep 30, 2026
Three months ago Dwarkesh, who has been posting incredible blogs and episodes about RL, posted a framing question for his video essay on RLVR which upset a lot of Computer Use folks: We are no strangers to learning in public and are no strangers to the stress of getting things wrong when you have a big platform. However, we were at Anthropic for the Computer Use launch, there for Claude Cowork with the first big podcast on it, organized the first Computer Use track at AIE presenting the state of
- StandardSummaries onlyClaude Code’s Next Era — Thariq Shihipar, Anthropic
Published Sep 29, 2026
We are excited to have Anthropic share their latest AI x Finance work at AI Engineer New York, coming up in 2 weeks! In case you’ve been under a rock, here’s a non-exhaustive list of what Anthropic has been shipping since closing the largest fundraise of all time in May at $47B ARR: * June: Launched Claude Tag and Sonnet 5 and Fable 5 * July: Opus 5, /checkup. crossed $65B ARR * Last month: Fable/Mythos 5.1, and EFS (upcoming pod) * IPO target $2T, end 2026 ARR estimated $100B * Cowork/chat merg
- StandardSummaries onlyOpenRouter: from Seed to Stripe — with OpenRouter’s Alex Atallah & AMP’s Anjney Midha
Published Sep 25, 2026
From the earliest days of open-weight models to becoming the neutral routing layer for more than 10 million developers, OpenRouter is one of the clearest bets that the future of AI will be multi-model. In this episode, OpenRouter co-founder & CEO Alex Atallah, with AMP’s Anjney Midha returning with swyx to unpack how OpenRouter emerged from the first wave of Llama, Alpaca, Mistral, and Midjourney, why model diversity mattered before it was consensus, and how a company dismissed as “just a wrappe
- StandardSummaries onlyRunway’s WorldPrompt and the Engineering of Real-Time Worlds
Published Sep 25, 2026
Earlier this month, world model company Runway introduced GWM Worlds 2, a research preview that “turns high-fidelity video and audio generation into real-time interactive simulation.” Runway calls this an “autoregressive diffusion” model; with autoregressive describing how it generates over time. One new feature in particular caught our eye: WorldPrompt, a proposed input format for specifying a generated world and the actions within it. It allows you to fix some aspects of a simulated environmen
- StandardSummaries only🔬 Bio-security is an AI Arms Race - Eric Nguyen (CEO, Radical Numerics)
Published Sep 23, 2026
The OpenAI → Hugging Face attack has people asking “what else do we need to worry about?” and Anthropic’s filters flag two things: cyber-security and biology. The natural question is: what about bio-security, then? Clem Delangue argues that cyber-warfare defensive capabilities need to be open and to keep pace with frontier models’ attack capabilities Radical Numerics co-founder Eric Nguyen sat down with us and explained why the same models that increase biological capability can also keep defens
- StandardSummaries only🔬 An Oscar, Two Asteroids, and the Algorithm in Your sklearn: John Platt on AI for Science
Published Sep 22, 2026
How often do you get to talk to a guest who has both an Academy Award and who invented textbook machine learning algorithms? John Platt has an Oscar, two textbook algorithms, two named asteroids, and an Erdos-Bacon number of 6. This was easily the most fun bio of all the guests we’ve read to date. And the result was an epic and fun chat covering Google’s Empirical Research Assistance (ERA), how AI can help battle climate change, and tons of great stories about the co-evolution of science and AI.
- StandardSummaries onlyJev: System One models for Prod, not God — with Diogo Almeida, CEO, TypeSafe AI
Published Sep 21, 2026
Tickets for AIE NYC now open, and apply for the invite-only AIE CODE. Join us! We have an unusual relationship with today’s guest: for years since coauthoring the InstructGPT paper, Diogo Almeida had been saying that API-available frontier models have been going down the wrong path, everything from the alignment to refusals to reliability perspectives, that we have dropped every mode other than autoregressive chat-tuned LLMs because of the overwhelming success of ChatGPT. In a launch video now v
- StandardSummaries only⚡️ A Worm With 302 Neurons Inspired Their Architecture — Ramin Hasani, Liquid AI
Published Sep 18, 2026
Watch the full show on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_9TCu_21SEFull show notes and links
- StandardSummaries onlyUnderwriting Superintelligence: Backing Agents you can Sue — Rune Kvist, AIUC
Published Sep 16, 2026
Underwriting SuperintelligenceAIUC first got our attention with the NFDG backing, and have just announced a $40M series A today, with the most impressive industry advisor list we may have ever seen for an early startup behind AIUC-1, their agent standard backed by real insurance: From being Anthropic’s first product hire to building the standards, testing, and insurance infrastructure meant to make frontier AI deployable, Rune Kvist is betting that the biggest constraint on AI adoption won’t be capability it will be trust. I
- StandardSummaries onlyHumanity’s Last Invention — Richard Socher of Recursive
Published Sep 14, 2026
At 1:09:00 we talk about the rise of AI x Finance, and AIE NYC is one month away - our hotel block is 97% sold out, get tix & travel ASAP - we will announce speakers from Bridgewater, Ramp, Coatue, Mastercard, Vanguard, Coinbase, Blackrock, Fidelity, Point72, Capital One, JPMC, Wells Fargo, Bloomberg, A24 (yes the movie studio) Labs, Two Sigma, Apollo Global, and more soon! From helping pioneer core ideas in NLP to now building AI systems that can automate AI research itself, Richard Socher is b
- StandardSummaries only🔬 “We have foundation models for language, not for physics” — Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing
Published Aug 26, 2026
A few years ago, Caltech Prof. and co-founder of Accelerated Understanding, Anima Anandkumar set out to develop the first open-source weather model with AI. Talking to experts in the field, she was met with skepticism. Weather is chaotic, physics simulations are hard, have been developed for decades, and require supercomputers, the data just isn’t there. Despite reservations, Anima went forth and built. Within a year her team had developed FourCastNet, a predictive model that is competitive with
- StandardSummaries only⏭️ Forward Deployed: Voice AI on what works in 2026
Published Aug 25, 2026
Watch the full show on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwNvowwcZOoFull show notes and links
- StandardSummaries onlySimulation: the new Scaling Law — Joon Sung Park, Simile AI
Published Aug 21, 2026
When we first dicsussed the Summer of Simulative AI in 2024 we knew it would be a brief summer, but it has recently come back with a vengeance with SimGym in April and now Simile AI’s $2B Series B, backed by GreenOaks and Index Ventures with prominent backers like Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy, running tens of millions of simulations for Fortune 100 clients like CVS and 85–99% accuracy vs human focus groups. Time to catch up on why this Second Summer of simulation is working! From creating Smal
- StandardSummaries only⚡️ Exo: Harnesses should see their own code and logs — Alex Krentsel, UC Berekeley / Google Research
Published Aug 15, 2026
Watch the full show on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lFD-34dhqEFull show notes and links
- StandardSummaries only🔬 The BioAI Phase Shift - Matthew McPartlon & Neil Patil, Chai Discovery
Published Aug 11, 2026
This January, four big AI × Pharma tools deals were announced at the huge JPM Pharma conference that takes over San Francisco every year. OpenAI-backed Chai Discovery (now worth $4B) was somehow at the heart despite being all of 2 years old. The Science team is proud to bring you the first podcast with cofounder Matt McPartlon and product lead Neil Patil to tell the full story! Editor’s note: not to be confused with Chai AI, which was another top pod of ours. Pharma suddenly doing big AI tools d
- StandardSummaries onlyThe Inference Engineering Masterclass — Philip Kiely & Ali Taha, Baseten
Published Aug 3, 2026
Watch the full episode on YouTube: We first covered Baseten last year when DeepSeek mania was at peak hype. Now they have raised a monster $13B round and become one of the new cohort of AI Infra decacorns that are (with Nvidia, Intel, and the semis complex) chief beneficiaries of the Inference Inflection. We return to Baseten at the peak of the 2026 edition of Open Weights debate. Ali has published a viral breakdown of Kimi K3: And since you last saw him, Philip has spoken at AI Engineer and wri
- StandardSummaries onlyCodex from 0 to 10M Users: Building ChatGPT Work — Akshay Nathan, OpenAI
Published Jul 28, 2026
There are roughly 100x more people who use code than who can write code. As code that “just works” becomes easier to generate, this group may be the biggest prize of all — if you can get the agentic interface right. A key trend we have been tracking over at AINews is the absolute explosion in Codex usage this year, with MAU now up >10x from Jan 2026. Less than two weeks after their July 9th launch, OpenAI said ChatGPT Work and Codex had reached 10M users combined (as we cover in the pod, Codex n