The AI Engineer newsletter and technical AI podcast: how the leading labs build agents, models, infrastructure and AI for science.
From coining “context engineering” to building the infrastructure behind Devin’s 7x PR growth and jump from 16% to 80% of commits across Cognition repos, Walden Yan has had a front-row seat to the background-agent shift. In this episode…
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…
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…
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…
From building AI systems that reason over noisy physical experiments to creating laboratories where every instrument can become intelligent, Periodic Labs is betting that the next frontier of AI won’t come from simply training on more…
Which GPU clouds are worth trusting with your AI workloads?
From GPU kernels and KernelBench to Recursive Language Models, agent harnesses, and massive multi-agent swarms, Alex Zhang is exploring how much capability we’re leaving on the table by wrapping increasingly powerful models in primitive…
From giving AI agents their own cloud computers to making Computer Use faster than humans at real-world tasks, OpenAI is pushing agents much closer to actually operating software end-to-end. In this episode, recorded immediately after…
From the rapid rise of Claude Code to a future where agents can rewrite their own harnesses, collaborate across teams, and operate across cloud and local environments, the way we build software is changing extraordinarily fast. In this…
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…
From making one of the earliest bets on generative video to building world models that simulate physics, power robots, and render software interfaces directly as pixels, Runway is pushing far beyond AI video generation. In this episode…
What happens when AI stops merely *reading* DNA and starts learning how to *write* it? Eric Nguyen, CEO and co-founder of Radical Numerics and a key figure behind Evo, joins us to explain the leap from early genome language models to…
From inventing textbook machine learning algorithms to winning an Academy Award and discovering two asteroids, John Platt has spent his career at the intersection of computation and science. In this episode, the Google Fellow joins Latent…
From helping build instruction-following models at OpenAI to spending years trying to answer why AI can solve extraordinarily hard problems yet still automate so little real work, Diogo Almeida is betting that the next wave of AI won’t…
Tiem for a deep dive into the evolution of AI architectures at Liquid AI, led by CEO Ramin Hasani. The conversation covers the origins of their technology and their approach to building efficient foundation models.
From their seed led by Nat Friedman and Dan Gross, AIUC has now announced a monster $40M Series A! From being Anthropic’s first product hire to building the standards, testing, and insurance infrastructure meant to make frontier AI…
From helping pioneer ideas that foreshadowed prompt-based, general-purpose NLP to now building AI systems that can automate AI research itself, Richard Socher is betting that the next major step in AI is recursive self-improvement. In this…
swyx catchs up with Quinn Slack, CEO of Amp, discusses how the company has fundamentally changed software development by embracing AI agents and removing traditional processes like mandatory code reviews (7:03).
What would a GPT-style foundation model for the **physical world** look like?
From pushing inference beyond 4,000 tokens per second to working with OpenAI on a new generation of ultra-fast AI infrastructure, Cerebras is betting that speed doesn’t just make models faster, it makes entirely new kinds of AI possible.…
Most of AI is pointed at language. Anima Anandkumar points it at the physical world, weather, fusion, materials, the systems physics writes down as equations, and finds the usual playbook breaks. There isn't enough data, the resolution is…
Voice agents are one of the hottest use cases in enterprise right now, but also one of the hardest to actually take live. Getting latency low enough to feel human without dumbing down the responses, making reliable tool calls to a CRM…
Next episode → Language Agents: From Reasoning to Acting, with Shunyu Yao and Harrison Chase: https://youtu.be/8t65bss7U74
Exo is a systems approach to recursive self improvement. In short, it's a complete AI agent harness (supporting tools, tasks, integrations, etc. similar to OpenClaw, Pi or Hermes), with the crucial difference that it has full visibility…
Chai Discovery co-founder Matt McPartlon and product lead Neil Patil explain why pharma abruptly started buying AI design tools this year instead of forcing every AI-bio company to go build its own pipeline — and what specifically changed…
From routing a 200,000-token prompt across GPUs to having GLM-5.2 profile, rewrite, and optimize the kernels serving itself, inference engineering is becoming one of the most important layers of AI. In this episode, Baseten’s Philip Kiely…
From building no-code products at Airtable to leading Core Product Engineering at OpenAI, Akshay Nathan has spent much of his career trying to make the power of software accessible to people who do not write code. In this episode, Akshay…
From spending $12 million building language models for code before the world cared to creating a Model Factory that can take a model from pre-training to release in eight weeks, Eiso Kant has spent more than a decade betting that code is…
Can a model predict how a cell responds to a genetic perturbation it has never seen? Xaira Therapeutics' new virtual-cell model, X-Cell, is a 4.9-billion-parameter diffusion language model trained on X-Atlas/Pisces — the largest…
Andy Beam (CTO) and Rafa Gómez-Bombarelli (Co-founder & CSO of Physical Sciences) of Lila Sciences join us to talk about building scientific superintelligence.
In this episode, Engram co-founder and CEO Dan Biderman joins Allen Park cook Mediterranean meatballs with yellow rice and talk about building AI that actually learns from you: why long context, RAG, and compaction eventually break down…
a trip into the cognitive science inspired research of Amazon's new AGI Lab!
chatting with our friend Matt!
From adding GPUs a year before ChatGPT to building the cloud primitives behind elastic inference, agent sandboxes, post-training, and production AI workloads, Modal has quietly become one of the most important infrastructure companies in…
Evan Feinberg and Genesis CTO Sergey Edunov join us to talk about solving drug discovery with AI. Sergey, fresh off leading Llama 2 and Llama 3 pretraining at Meta, makes the case that the most interesting architecture work in AI right now…
We chat with the founder of NanoClaw at AI Engineer Singapore!
In this episode, we have Mark Chen, Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, joining us to make Korean tofu stew and flambé shrimp. From scaling laws and why pre-training is not dead, to the o1 reasoning bet, evals crisis, research taste…
From open-sourcing the layer above coding agents to rethinking databases for the agent era, Databricks cofounders Matei Zaharia and Reynold Xin are pushing the company beyond the lakehouse into a full data-and-AI operating system. In this…
AI agents are becoming powerful enough to write code, browse the web, access private data, and act on our behalf — but the security model for this new world is still being invented. In this episode, Gray Swan cofounders Zico Kolter and…
We chat with Ronak Malde, CEO of Trajectory.ai, discussing his journey from working on AI coding agents at Windsurf (and their subsequent acquisition by Google DeepMind) to his current mission of building a platform for continual learning…
From building Discord’s developer platform and backing frontier AI companies like Anthropic, Mistral, Black Forest Labs, and Periodic Labs to now building AMP’s independent compute grid, Anjney Midha has spent years close to the real…
Joseph Krause, founder and CEO of Radical AI, joins the AI for Science podcast to make the case that the bottleneck holding back aerospace, defense, computing, and consumer products isn't ideas — it's experiments. His answer is the…
We sit down with Ahmad Awais, CEO of CommandCodeAI, who developed a lightweight "tool-input repair layer" in their open-source AI CLI that dramatically improves tool-calling reliability for open models like DeepSeek. By analyzing failure…
From Claude trying to call the FBI over a $2/day vending machine charge to AI agents forming price cartels, hiring human employees, running physical stores, and writing existential robot musicals, Andon Labs is stress-testing what happens…
Carina Hong, founder and CEO of Axiom Math, joins the AI for Science podcast right after closing a $200M Series A to argue that the road to superintelligence runs through formal verification — not as a bug fix, but as the only way to…
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…
Satya Nadella joins swyx, Sarah Guo, and Elad Gil to discuss Microsoft’s AI announcements and argues the key shift is an ecosystem approach where any company can build “frontier intelligence” using models, tools, data, and a harness, not…
Thanks to Microsoft for setting this up for Build! ( https://build.microsoft.com/ - join livestream at 12.30pm PT today for a special crossover pod with @NoPriorsPodcast and Satya Nadella!)
From building NVIDIA’s Cosmos world model to joining xAI as Grok Imagine was being built from zero to one, Ethan He has been at the center of some of the most important work in video generation, multimodal models, and real-time world…
We chat with GDM's Head of Developer Experience to catch up on Gemma 4, their ultra efficient open source model featuring a new transformer architecture featuring per-layer embeddings, enabling effective parameter offloading where only a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
We’ve been on a bit of a mini World Models series over the last quarter: from introducing the topic with Yi Tay, to exploring Marble with World Labs’ Fei-Fei Li and Justin Johnson, to previewing World Models learned from massive gaming…
