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…
Mistral has been on an absolute tear - with frequent successful model launches it is easy to forget that they raised the largest European AI round in history last year. We were long overdue for a Mistral episode, and we were very fortunate…
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.latent.space
Swyx joined SAIL! Thank you SAIL Media, Prof. Tom Yeh, 8Lee, Hamid Bagheri, c9n, and many others for tuning into SAIL Live #6 with Nathan Lambert and Sebastian Raschka, PhD. Sharing here for the LS paid subscribers. We covered:
Editor’s note: Welcome to our new AI for Science pod, with your new hosts RJ and Brandon! See the writeup on Latent.Space (https://Latent.Space) for more details on why we’re launching 2 new pods this year. RJ Honicky is a co-founder and…
From creating SWE-bench in a Princeton basement to shipping CodeClash, SWE-bench Multimodal, and SWE-bench Multilingual, John Yang has spent the last year and a half watching his benchmark become the de facto standard for evaluating AI…
Fei-Fei Li and Justin Johnson are cofounders of World Labs, who have recently launched Marble (https://marble.worldlabs.ai/), a new kind of generative “world model” that can create editable 3D environments from text, images, and other…
In this conversation with Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel (http://x.com/cramforce), we explore how the company is pioneering the infrastructure for AI-powered development through their comprehensive suite of tools including workflows, AI SDK, and…
Quinn Slack (CEO) and Thorsten Ball (Amp Dictator) from SourceGraph join the show to talk about Amp Code, how they ship 15x/day with no code reviews, and why subagents and prompt optimizers aren’t a promising direction for coding agents.…
Our chat with Ari shows that data curation is the most impactful and underinvested area in AI. He argues that the prevailing focus on model architecture and compute scaling overlooks the “bitter lesson” that “models are what they eat.”…
We first had Nathan on to give us his RLHF deep dive when he was joining AI2, and now he’s back to help us catch up on the evolution to RLVR (Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards), first proposed in his Tulu 3 paper. While RLHF…
Solving Poker and Diplomacy, Debating RL+Reasoning with Ilya, what’s *wrong* with the System 1/2 analogy, and where Test-Time Compute hits a wall Full Video Episode
One of the new tracks at next week’s AI Engineer conference in SF is a new focus on LLMs + Robotics, ft. household names like Waymo and Physical Intelligence. However there are many other companies applying LLMs and VLMs in the real world!…
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…
Materials science is the unsung hero of the science world. Behind every physical product you interact was decades of research into getting the properties of materials just right. Your gym clothes contain synthetic fibers developed over…
Mar 23 update for Latent Spacenauts: this episode was recorded before the Dreamer team announced they were joining Meta Superintelligence Labs, and it turned out to be the last interview they did before the news became public. Consider…
Claude Cowork came out of an accident. Felix and the Anthropic team noticed something interesting with Claude Code: many users were using it primarily for all kinds of messy knowledge work instead of coding. Even technical builders would…
Turbopuffer came out of a reading app. In 2022, Simon was helping his friends at Readwise scale their infra for a highly requested feature: article recommendations and semantic search. Readwise was paying ~$5k/month for their relational…
Join Kyle, Nader, Vibhu, and swyx live at NVIDIA GTC next week! Now that AIE Europe tix are ~sold out, our attention turns to Miami and World’s Fair! The definitive AI Accelerator chip company has more than 10xed this AI Summer: And is now…
All speakers are announced at AIE EU, schedule coming soon. Join us there or in Miami with the renowned organizers of React Miami! Singapore CFP also open! We’ve called this out a few times over in AINews, but the overwhelming consensus in…
The reception to our recent post on Code Reviews has been strong. Catch up! Amid a maelstrom of discussion on whether or not AI is killing SaaS, one of the top publicly listed SaaS companies in the world has just reported record revenues…
Editor’s note: CuspAI raised a $100m Series A in September and is rumored to have reached a unicorn valuation. They have all-star advisors from Geoff Hinton to Yann Lecun and team of deep domain experts to tackle this next frontier in AI…
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.latent.space
Olivia Watkins (Frontier Evals team) and Mia Glaese (VP of Research at OpenAI, leading the Codex, human data, and alignment teams) discuss a new blog post (https://openai.com/index/why-we-no-longer-evaluate-swe-bench-verified/) arguing…
Tickets for AIEi Miami and AIE Europe are live, with first wave speakers announced! From pioneering software-defined networking to backing many of the most aggressive AI model companies of this cycle, Martin Casado and Sarah Wang sit at…
From rewriting Google’s search stack in the early 2000s to reviving sparse trillion-parameter models and co-designing TPUs with frontier ML research, Jeff Dean has quietly shaped nearly every layer of the modern AI stack. As Chief AI…
This podcast features Gabriele Corso and Jeremy Wohlwend, co-founders of Boltz and authors of the Boltz Manifesto, discussing the rapid evolution of structural biology models from AlphaFold to their own open-source suite, Boltz-1 and…
From Palantir and Two Sigma to building Goodfire into the poster-child for actionable mechanistic interpretability, Mark Bissell (Member of Technical Staff) and Myra Deng (Head of Product) are trying to turn “peeking inside the model” into…
From shipping Gemini Deep Think and IMO Gold to launching the Reasoning and AGI team in Singapore, Yi Tay has spent the last 18 months living through the full arc of Google DeepMind’s pivot from architecture research to RL-driven…
From building internal AI labs to becoming CTO of Brex, James Reggio has helped lead one of the most disciplined AI transformations inside a real financial institution where compliance, auditability, and customer trust actually matter. We…
Happy New Year! You may have noticed that in 2025 we had moved toward YouTube as our primary podcasting platform. As we’ll explain in the next State of Latent Space post, we’ll be doubling down on Substack again and improving the…
We are reupping this episode after LMArena announced their fresh Series A (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-evaluation-startup-lmarena-valued-1-7-billion-new-funding-round?rc=luxwz4), raising $150m at a $1.7B valuation, with $30M…
From undergraduate research seminars at Princeton to winning Best Paper award at NeurIPS 2025, Kevin Wang, Ishaan Javali, Michał Bortkiewicz, Tomasz Trzcinski, Benjamin Eysenbach defied conventional wisdom by scaling reinforcement learning…
From pre-training data curation to shipping GPT-4o, o1, o3, and now GPT-5 thinking and the shopping model, Josh McGrath has lived through the full arc of OpenAI’s post-training evolution—from the PPO vs DPO debates of 2023 to today’s RLVR…
From Berkeley robotics and OpenAI’s 2017 Dota-era internship to shipping RL breakthroughs on GPT-4o, o1, and o3, and now leading model development at Cursor, Ashvin Nair has done it all. We caught up with Ashvin at NeurIPS 2025 to dig into…
From investing through the modern data stack era (DBT, Fivetran, and the analytics explosion) to now investing at the frontier of AI infrastructure and applications at Amplify Partners, Sarah Catanzaro has spent years at the intersection…
One year ago, Anthropic launched the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—a simple, open standard to connect AI applications to the data and tools they need. Today, MCP has exploded from a local-only experiment into the de facto protocol for…
Note: Steve and Gene’s talk on Vibe Coding and the post IDE world was one of the top talks of AIE CODE: From building legendary platforms at Google and Amazon to authoring one of the most influential essays on AI-powered development…
From the frontlines of OpenAI’s Codex and GPT-5 training teams, Bryan and Bill are building the future of AI-powered coding—where agents don’t just autocomplete, they architect, refactor, and ship entire features while you sleep. We caught…
As with all demo-heavy and especially vision AI podcasts, we encourage watching along on our YouTube (and tossing us an upvote/subscribe if you like!) From SAM 1’s 11-million-image data engine to SAM 2’s memory-based video tracking, MSL’s…
Note: this is Pliny and John’s first major podcast. Voices have been changed for opsec. From jailbreaking every frontier model and turning down Anthropic’s Constitutional AI challenge to leading BT6, a 28-operator white-hat hacker…
Glean started as a Kleiner Perkins incubation and is now a $7B, $200m ARR Enterprise AI leader. Now KP has tapped its own podcaster to lead it’s next big swing. From building go-to-market the hard way in startups (and scaling Palo Alto…
From applied cryptography and offensive security in France’s defense industry to optimizing nuclear submarine workflows, then selling his e-signature startup to Docusign…
From building Medal into a 12M-user game clipping platform with 3.8B highlight moments to turning down a reported $500M offer from OpenAI (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-offered-pay-500-million-startup-videogame-data) and…
Alex Lieberman and Arman Hezarkani, co-founders of Tenex, reveal how they’re revolutionizing software consulting by compensating AI engineers for output rather than hours—enabling some engineers to earn over $1 million annually while…
Deedy Das, Partner at Menlo Ventures, returns to Latent Space to discuss his journey from Glean to venture capital, the explosive rise of Anthropic, and how AI is reshaping enterprise software and coding. From investing in Anthropic early…
Jared Palmer, SVP at GitHub and VP of CoreAI at Microsoft, joins Latent Space for an in-depth look at the evolution of coding agents and modern developer tools. Recently joining after leading AI initiatives at Vercel, Palmer shares…
Jed Borovik, Product Lead at Google Labs, joins Latent Space to unpack how Google is building the future of AI-powered software development with Jules. From his journey discovering GenAI through Stable Diffusion to leading one of the most…
In this deep dive with Kyle Corbitt, co-founder and CEO of OpenPipe (recently acquired by CoreWeave), we explore the evolution of fine-tuning in the age of AI agents and the critical shift from supervised fine-tuning to reinforcement…
At OpenAI DevDay, we sit down with Sherwin Wu and Christina Huang from the OpenAI Platform Team to discuss the launch of AgentKit - a comprehensive suite of tools for building, deploying, and optimizing AI agents. Christina walks us…
Dylan Field (CEO Figma) on how they are letting designers build with Figma Make, how Figma can be the context repository for aesthetic in the age of vibe coding, and why design is your only differentiator now. Full show notes…
Lance: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lance-martin-64a33b5/ How Context Fails: https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/06/22/how-contexts-fail-and-how-to-fix-them.htmlHow New Buzzwords Get Created…
ChatGPT handles 2.5B prompts/day and is on track to match Google’s daily searches by end of 2026. AI agents don’t browse like us—they crave queryable, chunkable data for tools like ChatGPT & Perplexity. A new industry is being born, some…
Saoud Rizwan and Pash from Cline joined us to talk about why fast apply models got bitter lesson’d, how they pioneered the plan + act paradigm for coding, and why non-technical people use IDEs to do marketing and generate slides. Full…
Speak (https://speak.com) may not be very well known to native English speakers, but they have come from a slow start in 2016 to emerge as one of the favorite partners of OpenAI, with their Startup Fund leading and joining their Series B…
When the first video diffusion models started emerging, they were little more than just “moving pictures” - still frames extended a few seconds in either direction in time. There was a ton of excitement about OpenAI’s Sora on release…
Our last AI PhD grad student feature was Shunyu Yao, who happened to focus on Language Agents for his thesis and immediately went to work on them for OpenAI. Our pick this year is Jack Morris, who bucks the “hot” trends by -not- working on…
Emmanuel Amiesen is lead author of “Circuit Tracing: Revealing Computational Graphs in Language Models” (https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/methods.html ), which is part of a duo of MechInterp papers that Anthropic…
Solomon most famously created Docker and now runs Dagger… which has something special to share with you on Thursday. Catch Dagger at:
As part of our AI Engineer World’s Fair preview, we’re releasing a special cross podcast recorded with Sam Charrington of TWiML AI at last week’s Google I/O! TUESDAY: Shrestha and Kwindla’s workshop…
We are joined by Eno Reyes and Matan Grinberg, the co-founders of Factory.ai. They are building droids for autonomous software engineering, handling everything from code generation to incident response for production outages. After raising…
In an otherwise heavy week packed with Microsoft Build, Google I/O, and OpenAI io, the worst kept secret in biglab land was the launch of Claude 4, particularly the triumphant return of Opus, which many had been clamoring for. We will…
Note from your hosts: we were off this week for ICLR and RSA! This week we’re bringing you one of the top episodes from our lightning podcast series, the shorter format, Youtube-only side podcast we do for breaking news and faster…
