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It's been 5 weeks since we learned about the OpenAI/Hugging Face breach, which revealed an awkward reality: defenders have to ask models the same questions attackers do. In this conversation, Cotool CEO Max Pollard and Neo CEO Nick Warner sit down with a16z's Joel de la Garza at Black...

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a16z

92,161 views • 10 months ago

In this episode of the Lightcone Podcast, we sat down with Mukund Jha and Madhav Jha, the founders of Emergent - an AI platform that lets anyone build and ship production-ready software. In just eight months, users have created more than 7 million apps on Emergent, with the number doubling in just the last 45 days. We discuss how they built one of the most powerful AI coding agents, why they focused on non-technical users and what it's like building for a global audience from India. 00:00 - Intro 01:06 - What Is Emergent? 01:18 - Founder Backstory 02:09 - From AI Testing to General Coding Agents 02:52 - Getting Ahead of the Market 04:18 - The Pivot to Non-Technical Users 05:22 - Why Second Movers Can Win in AI 09:04 - Building for Production, Not Just Prototypes 18:21 - Live Demo: Building Apps with Emergent 24:40 - How Emergent Hires and Runs a Lean Team 29:04 - Is SaaS Dead? The Rise of Personalized Software 34:04 - The Future: Niche Apps, Solo Builders and AI Agency
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Y Combinator

107,800 views • 5 months ago

Deeply thoughtful conversation with Zico Kolter, board member at OpenAI and head of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University, about AI safety, AI security, agents and frontier AI 00:00 Intro 01:32 OpenAI board role and Safety & Security Committee 03:53 How OpenAI reviews major model releases 05:33 OpenAI’s preparedness framework explained 09:46 Are frontier AI models getting safer? 12:33 Why AI safety does not come from scale 15:23 The four categories of AI risk 19:38 Doomerism vs accelerationism in AI 24:11 The six-month AI pause debate 26:20 AI safety as a global effort 28:04 How Zico Kolter got into machine learning 31:05 OpenAI in the early days 34:14 Why Carnegie Mellon became an AI powerhouse 38:43 What Gray Swan does in AI security 40:44 AI safety vs AI security 43:15 The GCG jailbreak paper 49:19 How AI labs responded to jailbreak research 50:19 State-of-the-art AI defenses 52:32 State-of-the-art AI attacks 54:22 Why AI agents expand the attack surface 58:39 Are AI agents ready for production? 59:40 Mechanistic interpretability explained 1:02:31 Will AI be safer in two years? 1:03:46 Reinforcement learning and self-improving models 1:08:09 Do post-transformer architectures matter 1:09:29 Best research directions in AI now 1:11:00 Zico Kolter’s Intro to Modern AI course 1:14:53 Why modern AI is simpler than people think
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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
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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 • 5 months ago

"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
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

46,280 views • 6 months ago

Underneath all the hype around AGI timelines and bubble predictions, agents are continuing to improve – fast. We’re starting to see hints of reliable computer use, and soon we’ll have agents that can massively boost solo entrepreneurship and automate big chunks of knowledge work. Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo and Replit ⠕ CEO Amjad Masad sit down with Erik Torenberg to discuss the potential of AI progress over the next 5 years, the economic impacts of cheap AI labor, the societal impacts of broad solopreneurship, and whether there are glimmers of consciousness in today’s AIs. 00:00 Introduction 00:41 The bearishness paradox: "I don't know what people are talking about" 04:25 "Functional AGI" & brute forcing your way to automation 11:18 "We are in a human expertise regime" 15:31 The weird equilibrium: automating entry-level but not experts 17:22 The expert data paradox 24:44 The sovereign individual: a prediction framework for the AI era 28:51 "Vastly increased what a single person can do" 45:04 "It's gonna be the decade of agents" 49:01 Managing tens of agents in parallel 52:56 "I actually think vibecoding is unbelievably high potential" 58:47 Claude 4.5's strange new awareness Adam D'Angelo Amjad Masad Erik Torenberg
1:02:38

Underneath all the hype around AGI timelines and bubble predictions, agents are continuing to improve – fast. We’re starting to see hints of reliable computer use, and soon we’ll have agents that can massively boost solo entrepreneurship and automate big chunks of knowledge work. Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo and Replit ⠕ CEO Amjad Masad sit down with Erik Torenberg to discuss the potential of AI progress over the next 5 years, the economic impacts of cheap AI labor, the societal impacts of broad solopreneurship, and whether there are glimmers of consciousness in today’s AIs. 00:00 Introduction 00:41 The bearishness paradox: "I don't know what people are talking about" 04:25 "Functional AGI" & brute forcing your way to automation 11:18 "We are in a human expertise regime" 15:31 The weird equilibrium: automating entry-level but not experts 17:22 The expert data paradox 24:44 The sovereign individual: a prediction framework for the AI era 28:51 "Vastly increased what a single person can do" 45:04 "It's gonna be the decade of agents" 49:01 Managing tens of agents in parallel 52:56 "I actually think vibecoding is unbelievably high potential" 58:47 Claude 4.5's strange new awareness Adam D'Angelo Amjad Masad Erik Torenberg

a16z

173,620 views • 10 months ago