How OpenAI Builds for 800 Million Weekly Active Users: Model...

Uploaded: 2025-12-01T19:05:32.000Z
Duration: PT3202.240S
Channel: a16z

4:45

A lot of people are calling Hermes Agent the end of OpenClaw. BRUH! It's not... Nous Research trains actual models and they built an agent around that expertise. The local model routing is solid, but the part that matters for your business is that your conversations become fine-tuning data. You can train a model on how you actually work. 00:00 The Problem with Local AI Models 00:25 Introduction to Nous Research 01:04 Cross-Platform Agent Capabilities 01:44 Deep Local Model Integration 02:30 Routing Tasks to Different Models 03:06 Conversations as Training Data 03:50 Hermes Agent vs. OpenClaw 04:15 Future Plans and Series Overview

Ray Fernando

42,398 views • 3 months ago

1:11:41

My conversation with OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman This is the most detailed first-person account of the 72 hours after Sam Altman was fired. We also go deep on what comes next: the global race to AGI, why ChatGPT stopped showing reasoning, how much of OpenAI's own code is now written by AI ("it's hard to know what percent is not"), and the untold story of how OpenAI actually started in 2015. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:49 Meeting Sam Altman and Starting OpenAI 00:02:40 Building the Founding Team 00:04:25 DeepMind's Lead Over OpenAI 00:04:54 Changing OpenAI to a For-Profit Model 00:06:05 Breakthrough Moments at OpenAI 00:08:22 What Dota 2 Meant for OpenAI 00:10:04 Reasoning Versus Prediction 00:11:59 Tensions Grow at OpenAI 00:15:44 Sam Altman's Firing 00:17:49 Greg Quits OpenAI 00:19:56 Sam Explores Deal with Microsoft's Satya 00:20:28 Petition for Altman's Return 00:23:43 Ilya Sutskever Leaves OpenAI 00:24:59 Lessons Learned after Sam Ousting 00:28:22 The Thing Ilya Said that Greg Can't Forget 00:32:22 Is AI Going Parabolic? 00:33:24 How Much of OpenAI's Code is Written by AI? 00:36:21 Do AI Chatbots Tell Us What We Want to Hear? 00:38:06 The Global AI Race to Reach AGI 00:38:40 What Happens if US Doesn't Reach AGI First? 00:39:49 Are Countries Stealing AI Advancements? 00:40:38 Why ChatGPT No Longer Shows Reasoning 00:41:47 The Finite Constraints of Compute 00:43:38 On Investing Early in Data Centers 00:46:31 The Future of Data Center Specialization 00:47:52 How to Decide Whose Queries to Serve 00:49:08 OpenAI on Consumer vs Enterprise Models 00:53:05 Data Centers in Space? 01:00:56 What Should AI Regulation Look Like? 01:04:33 The Future of AI-Powered Entrepreneurship 01:04:44 AI and Job Loss 01:07:15 The Skills Young People Should Invest In 01:11:30 What Does Success Look Like For You? Full episode on X below. Also find it on: • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple:

Shane Parrish

450,952 views • 2 months ago

19:45

.Poetiq is a new startup that recently achieved a major jump on the ARC-AGI benchmark by layering a recursive self-improvement system on top of existing models. In this episode of the Lightcone Podcast, Poetiq's Founder & CEO Ian Fischer joined us to discuss how small teams can build “reasoning harnesses” that outperform base models, what that means for startups and why automating prompt engineering may be one of the most powerful levers in AI today. 00:00 – Intro 00:40 – What Is Poetiq? 01:07 – Recursive Self-Improvement Explained 02:07 – The Fine-Tuning Trap 02:59 – “Stilts” for LLMs 03:14 – Recursive Self-Improvement vs. Fine-Tuning 05:05 – Taking the Top Spot on ARC-AGI 06:37 – Beating Claude on Humanity’s Last Exam 08:40 – How the Meta-System Works 10:26 – Beyond RL: A New S-Curve 11:32 – Automating Prompt Engineering 13:37 – From 5% to 95% Performance 14:50 – Early Access & Putting Your Agent on Stilts 16:17 – From YC Founder to DeepMind Researcher 18:29 – Advice for Engineers in the AI Era

Y Combinator

155,843 views • 4 months ago

1:02:30

"We are clearly entering a world where a product-minded engineer is now empowered to produce software without writing a line of code for it." In this conversation, Temporal CEO Samar Abbas joins a16z GPs Sarah Wang and Raghu Raghuram to cover: - Why agents are going from short-lived and interactive to long-running and async - Why the engineer of the future manages 15 parallel AI tasks at once - How OpenAI Codex runs millions of concurrent agent executions on Temporal - How real-time context engineering is exploding on Temporal - Why SaaS isn't dead, and value is migrating to APIs 00:00 Introduction 04:03 Temporal's origin story 11:14 Why agents raise the stakes 16:00 Specialized agents need durable RPC 25:20 Deep research agents 30:58 Execution histories as a superpower 39:04 Minimal viable long-running agent architecture 45:07 Context engineering at scale 52:40 Where value accrues: The "five-layer cake" and breakout AI applications Samar Abbas Sarah Wang Raghu Raghuram

a16z

45,496 views • 4 months ago

48:38

The Sam Altman Interview You know him as the CEO of OpenAI — but he's also an avid writer. We spoke not once but twice about how Sam captures ideas, clarifies his thinking, edits his writing, decides what to work on, and uses ChatGPT. Timestamps: 1:47 Will LLMs change how we write? 8:39 How does Sam use ChatGPT? 11:26 How Sam became less anxious 17:24 Sam once dreamed of being a novelist 18:37 Lessons from Peter Thiel 21:35 Lessons from Paul Graham 26:02 The book Sam Altman wants to write 28:37 Advice for startup founders 30:20 How Y Combinator shapes OpenAI 35:55 How Sam chose to work on AGI 37:35 Writing strategy memos at OpenAI 41:34 Why isn’t ChatGPT a better storyteller? 44:20 Sam's obsessive note-taking method 47:12 Will AI put writers out of work?

David Perell

239,660 views • 1 year ago

1:00:32

Benedict Evans on Why AI Feels Like the Internet in 1997 Benedict Evans joins Erik Torenberg for a conversation on the state of AI, including how coding agents hit product-market fit, why foundation models should be thought of as infrastructure, the value of vertical products, and more. 00:00 Intro 00:44 What's changed since last year 05:53 OpenAI vs Anthropic strategy 10:31 The pricing crunch & platform history 22:48 What comes after coding 38:18 AI & the future of enterprise software 48:43 The CapEx problem 55:07 Will models become commodities? Benedict Evans Erik Torenberg

a16z

102,776 views • 1 month ago

54:11

Google DeepMind Developers: How Nano Banana Was Made In this episode, we sat down with Google DeepMind’s Oliver Wang and Nicole Brichtova to discuss how Nano Banana was created, why it became so viral, and what’s in store for the future of image and video editing. 00:00 Intro 02:00 The origin of Nano Banana 06:20 Seeing yourself in AI 11:00 Control & character consistency 17:10 AI in education and visual learning 24:10 2D vs 3D: Debate over world models 31:10 The Japan phenomenon 35:00 From images to video 41:00 Working with artists 47:30 The next era of image models 53:50 Closing thoughts Oliver Wang Nicole Brichtova Guido Appenzeller Yoko

a16z

97,860 views • 8 months ago

1:20:03

Michael Bolin (Michael Bolin) is the tech lead of the Codex open source repository at OpenAI and formerly a distinguished eng (E9) at Meta. I asked him for all the details on his career story and how he uses Codex for max benefit. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:00:56 - Chickenfoot 00:02:45 - Working at Google 00:06:34 - Overhauling Facebook's build system 00:16:36 - Rewriting Facebook's IDE 00:26:01 - Struggles after Principal Eng (E8) promo 00:28:39 - Building a virtual filesystem for Facebook 00:35:47 - Delayed Distinguished promo (E9) and learnings 00:39:56 - Joining OpenAI 00:43:05 - Research-led vs engineering-led cultures 00:44:53 - The story behind Codex 00:51:00 - How he uses Codex 00:57:00 - Why Codex's harness is open source 00:59:50 - Top technical book recommendations 01:05:02 - Why deep technical skills are still valuable (for now) 01:11:07 - How to start projects well 01:14:27 - Advice on writing better and career planning 01:17:06 - Advice for his younger self 01:19:10 - Outro He was a dream guest of mine and I'm excited to share his story with you all! Other places to watch: • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple Podcasts: • Transcript:

Ryan Peterman

119,601 views • 4 months ago

43:20

In the future, you’ll be able to accomplish a goal by just giving Claude an outcome and a budget. That’s the direction Anthropic is building in with its new Managed Agents features, announced at this week’s Code with Claude developer event. The basic idea: Claude, wrapped in a computer in the cloud, that you can spin up, scale, and manage as needed. Anthropic is taking on the infrastructure that kills most agent products, and making sure that it scales to meet the needs of agents running 24/7. On this week’s AI & I from Every 📧, I talk with Angela Jiang (Angela Jiang), head of product for the Claude platform, and Katelyn Lesse (Katelyn Lesse), head of engineering for the Claude platform, about what Anthropic is building and what it takes to make agents reliable in production. We get into: - Why the "build a generic harness, hot-swap any model behind it" playbook is already outdated. Angela points to eval data on Memory where the same task across different harnesses performed drastically differently. - The infrastructure wall every team hits in production—and why Katelyn thinks “my sandbox died and took the agent with it” is the real reason internal agents don't ship. - Why Anthropic is so bullish on using file systems and skills within Claude, including Angela's argument that those early design choices can compound for years. This is a must-watch for anyone trying to take an agent past the demo and into production. Watch below! Timestamps: How the Claude platform evolved from API to agents: 00:01:48 The primitives that make up Claude Managed Agents: 00:04:09 Why the harness and the model are becoming a single unit: 00:10:37 The infrastructure wall that kills most agent projects in production: 00:18:49 Why team agents need a different shape than individual productivity tools: 00:24:49 How Anthropic's legal team uses an agent to review marketing copy: 00:26:36 Using multi-agent orchestration for advisor strategies, adversarial pairs, and swarms: 00:34:24 How to measure agent success with outcome and budget as the end state: 00:35:50 What the platform looks like a year from now, when Claude writes its own harness: 00:39:11

Dan Shipper 📧

66,339 views • 2 months ago

1:13:56

Why AI Progress Suddenly Feels Real - my conversation with Yann Dubois, who co-leads the Post-Training Frontiers team at OpenAI 00:00 - Intro 01:30 - Why recent AI progress feels like a step function 04:13 - Model reliability & the emotional rollercoaster of shipping GPT-5.5 07:33 - How OpenAI structures vertical and horizontal teams 09:49 - Improving model efficiency and test-time compute 12:32 - Yann's journey from Switzerland to OpenAI 15:37 - Reasoning in 2026: Real-world utility vs verifiable rewards 18:34 - GPT-5.5 Thinking vs Pro: Scaling test-time compute 20:09 - How reasoning models become more efficient 23:23 - Pre-training scaling and overcoming the data wall 27:03 - Multimodal data, synthetic data, and embodied AI 31:05 - Demystifying mid-training and post-training 37:21 - Does RL create new capabilities in AI? 38:53 - The challenges and frontier of scaling RL 43:09 - Is building AI models a craft or a strict science 48:21 - How AI models generalize across different domains 54:18 - How reinforcement learning cures AI hallucinations 56:04 - Negative generalization and conflicting instructions 58:05 - Can RL scale to law, medicine, and the broader economy? 1:00:19 - The evaluation bottleneck and Model as a Judge 1:04:21 - Continuous AI progress & continual learning 1:08:49 - Will foundation models eat the agent harness 1:11:23 - Why startups should focus on the last mile of AI

Matt Turck

100,493 views • 1 month ago

1:15:14

Agentic commerce is coming 🔥 — Emily GlassbergSands, Head of Information at Stripe unpacks how autonomous “buying bots” and MCP are reshaping the very mechanics of online transactions - and how Stripe’s AI models and rails are adapting for tokens, one-time virtual cards, and real-time risk management. 0:00 - Intro, latest Stripe stats 01:45 - Backgroud: The “Head of Information” role at Stripe, and Emily's journey from Harvard to Stripe 08:54 - Why Stripe Built Its Own Foundation Model 13:19 - Cracking the Code: How Stripe Handles Complex Payment Data 16:25 - Foundation Model vs. Traditional ML: What’s Winning, When? 20:09 - Inside Stripe’s Foundation Model: How It Was Built 24:35 - Transparency vs black box AI 28:38 - How to decide when to use AI and when not 34:10 - How Stripe’s AI Drives Revenue for Businesses 41:22 - Real-Time Fraud Detection: Stripe’s Secret Sauce 42:51 - The Future of Shopping: AI Agents & Agentic Commerce 46:20 - How Agentic Commerce Is Changing Stripe 49:36 - Stripe’s Vision for a World of AI-Powered Buyers 55:46 - What Is MCP? Stripe’s Take on Agent-to-Agent Protocols 59:31 - Stripe’s Data on AI Startups Monetizing 3× Faster 1:03:03 - How AI Companies Go Global — From Day One 1:07:48 - The New Rules: Billing & Pricing for AI Startups 1:10:57 - How Stripe Builds AI Literacy Across the Company 1:14:05 - Roadmap: Risk-as-a-Service, Order Intent, and Beyond

Matt Turck

17,720 views • 1 year ago

24:59

OpenAI DevDay Talk: Building AI for the Enterprise with Decagon and Clay I sat down with the founders of Decagon and Clay at OpenAI DevDay to chat about what it actually takes to build and sell AI to the enterprise. We discuss how to make product decisions against a rapidly evolving model landscape, ensure AI pilots are successful, break out in seemingly crowded markets, and more. 00:00 Intro 01:54 Decagon and Clay's founding stories 05:12 Building against an evolving model landscape 08:36 AI experimentation vs risk management 11:25 Ensuring AI pilots are successful 14:52 Breaking out in noisy markets 19:11 Going deep in verticals vs going broad 21:13 Where to invest time + money 23:17 Top advice for founders Decagon Clay Jesse Zhang Varun Anand OpenAI OpenAIDevs

Kimberly Tan

13,901 views • 9 months ago

57:43

BREAKING: Inside Thrive Capital w/ Partner Philip Clark Investing in OpenAI, Wiz, Cursor, Nudge, Physical Intelligence “Josh always had a line to me when I joined Thrive, which is that the people who win deals are the ones who want to win them most.” In this conversation, Philip breaks down how one of the most concentrated & influential firms (Thrive Capital) in tech evaluates founders, builds conviction, & partners with companies that reshape the world. We dive into: - Seeing an early demo of OpenAI’s GPT-4 before launch - Why Thrive flew into an active war zone to close the Wiz deal - Cursor’s explosive growth from a small pivot to a multi-hundred-million ARR product - How Nudge is engineering the human brain using ultrasound - Why hardware’s barriers are falling & why the biggest companies of the next decade may be physical Highlights (00:00) Who is Philip Clark? How he joined Thrive Capital (02:45) From physics to investing: becoming a technologist–optimist (04:00) How semiconductors led him to Thrive (06:00) Deep dive: Mesh Optical & the data center interconnect opportunity (07:45) Inside Cursor’s explosive growth and why AI is “speed chess” (09:15) How Philip first met Cursor’s founders during a pivot (11:30) Path to partner & Thrive’s “full-stack investor” model (13:45) The Wiz story: flying into an active war zone (17:15) Why Wiz closed six-figure deals in weeks — the rare “fast + big” enterprise combo (19:30) The rise of hardware: sensors, software, & SpaceX-trained talent (21:45) The rise of Nudge and engineering the human brain (26:30) Neuralink & Nudge: read to stimulate (31:15) Why Thrive concentrates instead of “spray and pray” (36:00) Inside OpenAI: seeing GPT-4 before launch (40:45) What comes after SaaS.. & the companies unlocked by AI

Molly O’Shea

362,011 views • 7 months ago

49:06

Why AI Can Now Make Discoveries - my conversation with Dan Roberts, Lead of the Foundations of Reinforcement Learning team at OpenAI 00:00 Intro: AI's wild week in mathematics 01:21 What OpenAI's Foundations of RL team does 03:08 Dan's journey: from black holes and quantum gravity to frontier AI 07:04 Are AI systems becoming useful for real science 08:21 The AI math moment: Erdős, OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic 08:52 Why the OpenAI result was an act of exploration 10:25 OpenAI vs. DeepMind: informal reasoning vs. formal proof 12:13 RL 101: learning by doing, not just watching 15:10 Why reinforcement learning works 15:58 How RL breaks: sparse feedback and long-horizon tasks 17:03 RLHF: how human feedback shaped early language models 18:48 Move 37, self-play, and the search for novel strategies 22:16 Explore vs. exploit in scientific discovery 24:49 Why RL may now be "the cake," not the cherry on top 25:46 Why RL started working with large language models 27:29 Is RL "sucking supervision through a straw"? 28:47 Why language may be the grounding layer for intelligence 31:46 A contrarian take on the Bitter Lesson 32:41 What test-time compute actually is 34:50 How RL gives models the ability to think 35:40 Verifiable rewards, math, coding, and the messy real world 38:00 What physics can teach us about AI 42:08 Is there a thermodynamics of AI? 43:08 From Erdős problems to Einstein-level AI 45:16 Is AI already doing original science? 45:51 How far are we from AI automating AI research 47:41 Why Dan is excited about the future of science

Matt Turck

64,952 views • 1 month ago

46:40

OpenAI’s hottest app isn’t ChatGPT—it’s Codex. In the last few weeks alone, the Codex team shipped a desktop app, GPT-5.3 Codex (a new flagship model), and Spark, the fastest coding model I’ve ever used. Usage has grown fivefold since January and over a million people now use Codex weekly. Codex was also the app that OpenAI chose to run an ad for in the Super Bowl. I talked to Thibault (Tibo), head of Codex, and Andrew (Andrew Ambrosino), a member of technical staff who built the Codex app, for Every 📧’s AI & I about what OpenAI is building and how they’re using it internally. We get into: - Why they built a GUI instead of a terminal. Terminals work for quick tasks, they say, but feel limiting when you’re running multiple agents in parallel. The IDE, meanwhile, overwhelms users—and the Codex team wants the AI to dynamically decide which tools to show you for a given task. - How they’re teaching the model to read between the lines. Codex is great at following instructions, but optimize too hard in that direction, and it starts taking you literally—like copying a typo directly into the code. The team obsesses over this tradeoff, and is also introducing “personalities,” modes users can toggle between that control how blunt or supportive the model feels. - How OpenAI uses its own coding agent. Codex lets you schedule prompts to run on a recurring basis, and the team has dozens of automations running at all times. For example, one scans for merge conflicts every couple of hours so code is always ready to ship, and another picks a random file from the codebase multiple times a day and hunts for bugs no one would've gone looking for. - Why speed is a dimension of intelligence. OpenAI’s newest model (Spark) is so fast that they actually slow it down so you can read the output. They see the speed enabling three things: staying super in the flow, replacing brittle developer tools with intelligent ones that can adapt on the fly, and redirecting the model mid-task— especially with voice—so coding starts to feel more and more like a conversation. - Code review is the next bottleneck. Models can generate code faster than ever, but someone still has to verify that it works. The team is exploring a future where the model proves its own fix works—retracing the click path a user would take, screenshotting the results, and attaching the evidence to a pull request. This is a must-watch for anyone who uses AI coding agents—and is curious about the future of programming. Watch below! Timestamps: Introduction: 00:01:27 OpenAI’s evolving bet on its coding agent: 00:05:27 The choice to invest in a GUI (over a terminal): 00:09:42 The AI workflows that the Codex team relies on to ship: 00:20:38 Teaching Codex how to read between the lines: 00:26:45 Building affordances for a lightening fast model: 00:28:45 Why speed is a dimension of intelligence: 00:33:15 Code review is the next bottleneck for coding agents: 00:36:30 How the Codex team positions against the competition: 00:41:24

Dan Shipper 📧

15,588 views • 4 months ago

1:38

"I ran a startup for 5 years. I thought we moved fast. Then I joined OpenAI—and realized I had no idea what fast actually meant." Head of Product for OpenAI's Codex Alexander Embiricos and I chat about: 🔸 How OpenAI built the Sora Android app (which hit #1) in just 18 days by using Codex 🔸 Codex growing 20x since August 🔸 How they're thinking about the dev bottleneck shifting from coding to reviewing AI-generated work 🔸 Why coding will be a core competency for every AI agent—because writing code is how agents use computers best 🔸 Why the bottleneck to AGI-level productivity isn’t model capability—it’s human typing speed 🔸 The vision of Codex, and how they plan to win Listen now 👇 • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple: Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 WorkOS — Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: 🏆 Fin — The #1 AI agent for customer service: 🏆 Atlassian Jira Product Discovery — Confidence to build the right thing:

Lenny Rachitsky

334,422 views • 7 months ago

27:16

Inside Block: How AI Changes Software Development Block's Owen Jennings sat down with a16z GP David Haber to discuss how AI is changing software businesses, including the end of handwritten code, why Block reduced its workforce by 40%, how small teams are doing more with agents, and more. 00:00 Introduction 09:08 The most meaningful difference in how Block is operating 12:57 AI infrastructure build across the org 17:09 The shape of the business: Square, Cash App, Afterpay 20:00 From static UI to generative UI 23:23 Defensibility in the AI era OBJ David Haber Block

a16z

93,210 views • 3 months ago

33:09

AI Winners, Token Economics, and Venture Strategy w/ David Clark and David George VenCap CIO David Clark joins a16z GP David George to discuss the AI supercycle and how it's changing the technology industry, including what bigger exits mean for venture capital, why we're not in a bubble, why we're still early in enterprise AI adoption, and more. 00:00 Intro 00:38 The scale shift: Anthropic & OpenAI adding more revenue than hyperscalers 04:20 Skeuomorphic vs native AI applications in the enterprise 06:24 How the best AI companies run themselves differently 08:14 Top 1% exits 10x'd in 24 months 11:17 The half-life problem: Why 40% of AI leaders drop off every year 13:11 Token economics, cost pressure, and who captures value 17:00 Loss ratios, risk, and how to think about early stage 22:51 Are we in an AI bubble? 29:50 The future of venture capital in an AI world David Clark David George

a16z

42,120 views • 1 month ago

54:47

I sat down with Jordi Visser to discuss the SpaceX IPO, orbital data centers, and the critical minerals powering the AI buildout. We also discuss the AI model wars, why Jordi thinks Sam Altman won't be running OpenAI within a year, and how the New York Knicks playoff run connects to the future of crypto and blockchain in a world of AI and deep fakes. YouTube: Spotify: Apple: TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro 1:00 - SpaceX IPO, Elon & orbital data centers 12:15 - Critical minerals & the AI supply chain 18:55 - American industrial sovereignty & critical chemicals 22:36 - AI model cost crisis & who wins the model war 37:10 - Knicks NBA Finals & the case for crypto in an AI world 47:48 - Jeff Bezos launches Prometheus 50:34 - AI use case of the week

Anthony Pompliano 🌪

133,301 views • 1 month ago

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