~ cueing up the show ~
~ pulling every episode ~
Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast — Every episode — OmList
om
list
Swipe
Tournament
Lists
Friends
All
Movies
TV
Books
Games
Music
Podcasts
People
▾
Sign in
Every episode
Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
30 episodes
🔬The BioAI Phase Shift - Matthew McPartlon & Neil Patil, Chai Discovery
Aug 11, 2026 · 1 hr 35 min
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…
The Inference Engineering Masterclass — Philip Kiely & Ali Taha, Baseten
Aug 3, 2026 · 1 hr 41 min
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…
Codex from 0 to 10M Users: Building ChatGPT Work — Akshay Nathan, OpenAI
Jul 28, 2026 · 1 hr 9 min
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…
Inside the Model Factory — Eiso Kant, Poolside AI
Jul 23, 2026 · 1 hr 55 min
In recent months, the open vs closed, and US vs China discussions on model ownership and sovereign/local AI have heated up to a fever pitch. So it is very very good news that Poolside AI are finally emerging with new models, like Laguna S 2.1, that are beating Thinking Machines’ recent release nearly 10 times their size. Poolside’s recent tech report got a lot of praise due to their level of detail, and Vibhu first covered Laguna’s recent technical report on our paper club: From spending $12 mil…
🔬Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model for Drug Discovery (Bo Wang & Ci Chu, Chief Discovery Officer & Chief AI Scientist)
Jul 21, 2026 · 1 hr 30 min
Bet on information If test loss flatlines after 1.5B parameters while training loss continues to drop as you scale, that tells you that your model is limited by the amount of information in your data. Training on a single, smallish data set exposed an information gap: the 3.1B model falls off the scaling trend. Neither parameters nor compute will improve performance past this wall. For predicting changes to gene expression, you need more information rich data. This is what Chu and Bo’s teams hav…
🔬 The Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data Center — Andy Beam & Rafa Gómez-Bombarelli, Lila Sciences
Jul 16, 2026 · 1 hr 41 min
Imagine a dark warehouse. Racks and racks of devices with wires, tubes, and electronics sticking out. The next AI data center? No. This is Lila Sciences‘ dream for the future of science. A dark warehouse full of AI-guided robotics and lab equipment, cranking out new experiments 24/7, building toward a scientific superintelligence. Their automated lab is almost hypnotizing to watch. They have floating plates zipping around on Wall-E-esque tracks, used vision-language models to control Windows 95…
Why AI Infrastructure must evolve for Agent Experience — Akshat Bubna, Modal CTO
Jul 8, 2026 · 58 min
We’ve been running a bit of an Agent Cloud series surveying all the top inference/compute/cloud providers, from Databricks to Daytona to Railway and, even further back, E2B, but we’re excited to conclude this series returning to Modal, which has just raised a monster $355M Series C. The cloud was built for developers. But agents are now changing that. The old infra stack was designed for a human who could read docs, reason through YAML, and understand dashboards to figure out what they need when…
🔬 The Coolest Diffusion Research Isn't in LLMs — Evan Feinberg & Sergey Edunov, Genesis Molecular AI
Jul 1, 2026 · 1 hr 49 min
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…
Why the Frontier Ecosystem must be Open — Matei Zaharia and Reynold Xin, Databricks
Jun 24, 2026 · 1 hr 9 min
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 c…
Red-Teaming after Mythos — Zico Kolter & Matt Fredrikson, Gray Swan
Jun 22, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min
AI Engineer World’s Fair regular bird tix will sell out ~today! Join us next week ahead of the Late Bird price hike and get >$40,000 in sponsor credits for attending! Thanks to the US Government issuing an export control directive on Mythos and Fable, the risks of jailbreaks and (industry term) indirect prompt injection are suddenly the talk of the town, though we have been covering AI security for a few years now, from Hackaprompt to the enigmatic Pliny the Elder. Zico Kolter, member of OpenAI’…
The Professor of Outputmaxxing — Anjney Midha, AMP
Jun 18, 2026 · 59 min
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%…
🔬 The Self-Driving Lab — Joseph Krause, Radical AI
Jun 17, 2026 · 1 hr 17 min
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…
Reality: The Final Eval — Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund of Andon Labs
Jun 4, 2026 · 1 hr 16 min
The new AIEWF website is live! 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! Most industry benchmarks compress intelligence and reasoning ability into scores. SWE-Bench Pro, MMLU, Humanity’s Last Exam, etc. These metrics are useful, but don’t always represent the full extent of how a model performs in the real world. Some of the most interesting evals today look less like exams and more like operating busines…
🔬Scaling Past Informal AI - Carina Hong, Axiom Math
Jun 3, 2026 · 1 hr 33 min
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…
⚡️Satya Nadella: No Priors x Latent Space Crossover Special at Microsoft Build
Jun 3, 2026 · 39 min
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 —…
GitHub's plan for Agents — Kyle Daigle, GitHub
Jun 2, 2026 · 1 hr 23 min
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,…
Why Video Agent models are next — Ethan He, xAI Grok Imagine
Jun 1, 2026 · 1 hr 43 min
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 I…
The Age of Async Agents — Cognition's Walden Yan & OpenInspect's Cole Murray
May 28, 2026 · 1 hr 8 min
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 f…
🔬ESM: The Bitter Lesson is Coming for Proteins - Alex Rives, BioHub
May 27, 2026 · 1 hr 10 min
Editor’s note: In our first BioHub pod with Priscilla and Mark they discussed their acquisition of EvoScale, led by Alex Rives, who is now Head of Science at BioHub. With ESM-1 they trained language models on millions of protein sequences drawn from across life, with a simple “next token” objective: predict the amino acids that have been randomly masked out, based on the context of the rest of the sequence. But they soon found that these models also learned biological structure and function, inc…
Giving Agents Computers — Ivan Burazin, Daytona
May 21, 2026 · 1 hr 10 min
Take the 2026 AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and AIE WF tickets! On the product side, everyone is getting Computer - Perplexity, Manus, Cursor, and so on. Meanwhile on the research side, agentic evals like TerminalBench and GDPVal are also assuming computer (Harbor). On both ends, the consolidating LLM OS stack has become a standard toolkit, and Daytona is one of a small set of AI Infra companies that are booming because of it. “The end of localhost” has been Ivan Burazin’s obsess…
Railway: The Agent-Native Cloud — Jake Cooper
May 20, 2026 · 1 hr 29 min
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 pe…
The Autonomous Drone Tech Stack & Economics of Drones — Yaroslav Azhnyuk, The Fourth Law & Guest Host Noah Smith, Noahpinion
May 18, 2026 · 1 hr 59 min
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…
AI-Native Healthcare: 100M Doctor Visits, 10–20 Hours Saved, Prior Auth in Minutes — Janie Lee & Chai Asawa, Abridge
May 14, 2026 · 1 hr 5 min
Special discounts up for AIE Melbourne (LS discount) and AIE World’s Fair (group discounts up to 25% - CFPs still open for Autoresearch and Vertical AI) Cya there! Abridge did not start as an “GPT wrapper”. It was founded in 2018, years before the Cambrian explosion of AI application layer companies. OpenAI launched ChatGPT publicly on November 30, 2022 and by then, Abridge had already spent years doing the unglamorous work of building trust for one of the highest context, most important workflo…
🔬Doing Vibe Physics — Alex Lupsasca, OpenAI
May 5, 2026 · 1 hr 32 min
Some people are going crazy over GPT 5.5. Some people. This is the story of the Jagged Frontier. People who use AI to write emails or even code implementation work find the lift moderate whereas people pushing the limits of the model are figuring out that the limits just moved outwards. Alex Lupsaska has been tracking this limit for a year and a half now. “When GPT5 came out, it was able to reproduce one of my best papers (that took a very long time to come up with) in 30 minutes.” But Alex also…
Physical AI that Moves the World — Qasar Younis & Peter Ludwig, Applied Intuition
Apr 27, 2026 · 1 hr 12 min
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…
AIE Europe Debrief + Agent Labs Thesis: Unsupervised Learning x Latent Space Crossover Special (2026)
Apr 23, 2026 · 55 min
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 under…
Shopify’s AI Phase Transition: 2026 Usage Explosion, Unlimited Opus-4.6 Token Budget, Tangle, Tangent, SimGym — with Mikhail Parakhin, Shopify CTO
Apr 22, 2026 · 1 hr 12 min
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…
🔬 Training Transformers to solve 95% failure rate of Cancer Trials — Ron Alfa & Daniel Bear, Noetik
Apr 20, 2026 · 1 hr 25 min
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 Models Tolstoy famously wrote, ‘All healthy cells are alike; each canc…
Notion’s Token Town: 5 Rebuilds, 100+ Tools, MCP vs CLIs and the Software Factory Future — Simon Last & Sarah Sachs of Notion
Apr 15, 2026 · 1 hr 17 min
For all those who missed out on London, see you in Miami next week! Notion, the knowledge work decacorn, has been building AI tooling since before ChatGPT, with many hits from Q&A in 2023 and unified AI in 2024 and Meeting Notes in 2025. At the end of their last Make user conference, Ryan Nystrom teased Notion 3.0’s Custom Agents - and they are finally embracing the Agent Lab playbook! Sarah Sachs and Simon Last of Notion join us for a deep dive into how Notion built Custom Agents, why it took y…
Extreme Harness Engineering for Token Billionaires: 1M LOC, 1B toks/day, 0% human code, 0% human review — Ryan Lopopolo, OpenAI Frontier & Symphony
Apr 7, 2026 · 1 hr 13 min
We’re proud to release this ahead of Ryan’s keynote at AIE Europe. Hit the bell, get notified when it is live! Attendees: come prepped for Ryan’s AMA with Vibhu after. Move over, context engineering. Now it’s time for Harness engineering and the age of the token billionaires. Ryan Lopopolo of OpenAI is leading that charge, recently publishing a lengthy essay on Harness Eng that has become the talk of the town: In it, Ryan peeled back the curtains on how the recently announced OpenAI Frontier tea…
← Back to the show
