Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
The podcast by and for AI Engineers! In 2025, over 10 million readers and listeners came to Latent Space to hear about news, papers and interviews in Software 3.0. We cover Foundation Models changing every domain in Code Generation, Multimodality, AI Agents, GPU Infra and more, directly from the founders, builders, and thinkers involved in pushing the cutting edge. Striving to give you both the definitive take on the Current Thing down to the first introduction to the tech you'll be using in the next 3 months! We break news and exclusive interviews from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Meta (Soumith
All episodes(27)
- StandardSummaries onlyNotion’s Token Town: 5 Rebuilds, 100+ Tools, MCP vs CLIs and the Software Factory Future — Simon Last & Sarah Sachs of Notion
Published Apr 15, 2026
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 yea
- StandardSummaries onlyExtreme Harness Engineering for Token Billionaires: 1M LOC, 1B toks/day, 0% human code, 0% human review — Ryan Lopopolo, OpenAI Frontier & Symphony
Published Apr 7, 2026
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 team h
- StandardSummaries onlyMarc Andreessen introspects on The Death of the Browser, Pi + OpenClaw, and Why "This Time Is Different"
Published Apr 3, 2026
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 office to argue that AI is not just another hype cycle, but the payoff of an “80-year overnight success”: from neural nets and expert systems to transformers, reasoning models, coding, agents, and recursive self-improvement. He lays out why he thinks this momen
- StandardSummaries onlyMoonlake: Causal World Models should be Multimodal, Interactive, and Efficient — with Chris Manning and Fan-yun Sun
Published Apr 2, 2026
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 datasets with General Intuition’s Pim de Witte (who has now written down their approach to World Models with Not Boring), to discussing the Cosmos World Model with with Andrew White of Edison Scientific on our new Science pod, to writing up our own theses on Adver
- StandardSummaries onlyMistral: Voxtral TTS, Forge, Leanstral, & what's next for Mistral 4 — w/ Pavan Kumar Reddy & Guillaume Lample
Published Mar 30, 2026
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 to work with Sophia and Howard to catch up with Pavan (Voxtral lead) and Guillaume (Chief Scientist, Co-founder) on the occasion of this week’s Voxtral TTS launch:Mistral can’t directly say it, but the benchmarks do imply, that this is basically an open-weight
- StandardSummaries only🔬Why There Is No "AlphaFold for Materials" — AI for Materials Discovery with Heather Kulik
Published Mar 24, 2026
Heather KulikMaterials 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 decades. The glass screen, diodes, and chip substrate technology needed to read this blog post were only viable due to many teams of material scientists.Our guest Prof. Heather Kulik was one of the first material scientists to realize that there was alpha in combi
- StandardSummaries onlyDreamer: the Personal Agent OS — David Singleton
Published Mar 20, 2026
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 this a snapshot from just before the transition!In 2024, David Singleton left Stripe and joined forces with Hugo Barra for a buzzy stealth startup named /dev/agents. This month they emerged out as Dreamer, a consumer-first platform to discover, build, and use AI a
- StandardSummaries onlyWhy Anthropic Thinks AI Should Have Its Own Computer — Felix Rieseberg of Claude Cowork & Claude Code Desktop
Published Mar 17, 2026
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 use it for lots of non-technical work.Even more shocking, Claude cowork wrote itself. With a team of humans simply orchestrating multiple claude code instances, the tool was ready after a brief week and a half.This isn’t Felix’s first rodeo with impactful and pla
- StandardSummaries onlyRetrieval After RAG: Hybrid Search, Agents, and Database Design — Simon Hørup Eskildsen of Turbopuffer
Published Mar 12, 2026
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 database and vector search would cost ~$20k/month making the feature too expensive to ship. In 2023 after mulling over the problem from Readwise, Simon decided he wanted to “build a search engine” which became Turbopuffer.We discuss:• Simon’s path: Denmark → Shopi
- StandardSummaries onlyNVIDIA's AI Engineers: Agent Inference at Planetary Scale and "Speed of Light" — Nader Khalil (Brev), Kyle Kranen (Dynamo)
Published Mar 10, 2026
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 a $4.4 trillion megacorp… that is somehow still moving like a startup. We are blessed to have a unique relationship with our first ever NVIDIA guests: Kyle Kranen who gave a great inference keynote at the first World’s Fair and is one of the leading architects of
- StandardSummaries onlyCursor's Third Era: Cloud Agents
Published Mar 6, 2026
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 Valley is that “the IDE is Dead”. In November it was just a gut feeling, but now we actually have data: even at the canonical “VSCode Fork” company, people are officially using more agents than tab autocomplete (the first wave of AI coding):Cursor has launc
- StandardSummaries onlyEvery Agent Needs a Box — Aaron Levie, Box
Published Mar 5, 2026
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, clearing well over $1.1B in ARR for the first time with a 28% margin. As we comment on the pod, Aaron Levie is the rare public company CEO equally at home in both worlds of Silicon Valley and Wall Street/Main Street, by day helping 70% of the Fortune 500 with th
- StandardSummaries onlyMETR’s Joel Becker on exponential Time Horizon Evals, Threat Models, and the Limits of AI Productivity
Published Feb 27, 2026
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.latent.spaceAIE Europe CFP and AIE World’s Fair paper submissions for CAIS peer review are due TODAY - do not delay! Last call ever.We’re excited to welcome METR for their first LS Pod, hopefully the first of many:METR are keepers of currently the single most infamous chart in AI:But every Latent Space reader should be sophisticated enough to know that the details matter and that hype and hyperbole go hand in hand in AI social med
- StandardSummaries only[LIVE] Anthropic Distillation & How Models Cheat (SWE-Bench Dead) | Nathan Lambert & Sebastian Raschka
Published Feb 26, 2026
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: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latent.space/subscribe
- StandardSummaries only🔬Searching the Space of All Possible Materials — Prof. Max Welling, CuspAI
Published Feb 25, 2026
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 applications.In this episode, Max Welling traces the thread connecting quantum gravity, equivariant neural networks, diffusion models, and climate-focused materials discovery (yes, there is one!!!).We begin with a provocative framing: experiments as computation.
- StandardSummaries onlyClaude Code for Finance + The Global Memory Shortage: Doug O'Laughlin, SemiAnalysis
Published Feb 24, 2026
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.latent.spaceFirst speakers for AIE Europe and AIEi Miami have been announced. If you’re in Asia/Aus, come by Singapore and Melbourne. AI Engineering is going global!One year ago today, Anthropic launched Claude Code, to not much fanfare:The word of mouth was incredibly strong however, and so we were glad to be one of the first podcasts to invite Boris and Cat on in early May:As we discussed on the pod, all CC usage was API-based a
- StandardSummaries only⚡️The End of SWE-Bench Verified — Mia Glaese & Olivia Watkins, OpenAI Frontier Evals & Human Data
Published Feb 23, 2026
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 that SWE-Bench Verified—long treated as a key “North Star” coding benchmark—has become saturated and highly contaminated, making it less useful for measuring real coding progress. SWE-Bench Verified originated as a major OpenAI-led cleanup of the original Princeto
- StandardSummaries onlyBitter Lessons in Venture vs Growth: Anthropic vs OpenAI, Noam Shazeer, World Labs, Thinking Machines, Cursor, ASIC Economics — Martin Casado & Sarah Wang of a16z
Published Feb 19, 2026
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 the center of the capital, compute, and talent arms race reshaping the tech industry. As partners at a16z investing across infrastructure and growth, they’ve watched venture and growth blur, model labs turn dollars into capability at unprecedented speed, and start
- StandardSummaries onlyOwning the AI Pareto Frontier — Jeff Dean
Published Feb 12, 2026
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 Scientist at Google and a driving force behind Gemini, Jeff has lived through multiple scaling revolutions from CPUs and sharded indices to multimodal models that reason across text, video, and code.Jeff joins us to unpack what it really means to “own the Pareto fro
- StandardSummaries only🔬Beyond AlphaFold: How Boltz is Open-Sourcing the Future of Drug Discovery
Published Feb 12, 2026
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 Boltz-2. The central thesis is that while single-chain protein structure prediction is largely “solved” through evolutionary hints, the next frontier lies in modeling complex interactions (protein-ligand, protein-protein) and generative protein design, which Boltz a
- StandardSummaries onlyThe First Mechanistic Interpretability Frontier Lab — Myra Deng & Mark Bissell of Goodfire AI
Published Feb 6, 2026
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 a repeatable production workflow by shipping APIs, landing real enterprise deployments, and now scaling the bet with a recent $150M Series B funding round at a $1.25B valuation.In this episode, we go far beyond the usual “SAEs are cool” take. We talk about Goo
- StandardSummaries only🔬 Automating Science: World Models, Scientific Taste, Agent Loops — Andrew White
Published Jan 28, 2026
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 CTO at MiraOmics (https://miraomics.bio/), building AI models and services for single cell, spatial transcriptomics and pathology slide analysis. Brandon Anderson builds AI systems for RNA drug discovery at Atomic AI (https://atomic.ai). Anything said on this po
- StandardSummaries only⚡️ Prism: OpenAI's LaTeX "Cursor for Scientists" — Kevin Weil & Victor Powell, OpenAI for Science
Published Jan 27, 2026
From building Crixet in stealth (so stealthy Kevin had to hunt down Victor on Reddit to explore an acquisition) to launching Prism (https://openai.com/prism/) as OpenAI's free AI-native LaTeX editor, Kevin Weil (VP of OpenAI for Science) and Victor Powell (Product Lead on Prism) are embedding frontier reasoning models like GPT 5.2 directly into the scientific publishing workflow—turning weeks of LaTeX wrestling into minutes of natural language instruction, and accelerating the path from research
- StandardSummaries onlyCaptaining IMO Gold, Deep Think, On-Policy RL, Feeling the AGI in Singapore — Yi Tay
Published Jan 23, 2026
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 reasoning—watching his team go from a dozen researchers to 300+, training models that solve International Math Olympiad problems in a live competition, and building the infrastructure to scale deep thinking across every domain, and driving Gemini to the top of the leade
- StandardSummaries onlyBrex’s AI Hail Mary — With CTO James Reggio
Published Jan 17, 2026
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 sat down with Reggio to unpack Brex’s three-pillar AI strategy (corporate, operational, and product AI) [https://www.brex.com/journal/brex-ai-native-operations], how SOP-driven agents beat overengineered RL in ops, why Brex lets employees “build their own AI sta
- StandardSummaries onlyArtificial Analysis: The Independent LLM Analysis House — with George Cameron and Micah Hill-Smith
Published Jan 9, 2026
Artificial Analysisdon’t miss George’s AIE talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRpqPgKeXNk—-From launching a side project in a Sydney basement to becoming the independent gold standard for AI benchmarking—trusted by developers, enterprises, and every major lab to navigate the exploding landscape of models, providers, and capabilities—George Cameron and Micah Hill-Smith have spent two years building Artificial Analysis into the platform that answers the questions no one else will: Which model is actually best for
- StandardSummaries onlyArtificial Analysis: The Independent LLM Analysis House — with George Cameron and Micah-Hill Smith
Published Jan 8, 2026
Artificial Analysisdon’t miss George’s AIE talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRpqPgKeXNk—-From launching a side project in a Sydney basement to becoming the independent gold standard for AI benchmarking—trusted by developers, enterprises, and every major lab to navigate the exploding landscape of models, providers, and capabilities—George Cameron and Micah-Hill Smith have spent two years building Artificial Analysis into the platform that answers the questions no one else will: Which model is actually best for