DiscoverNo Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
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No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

Author: Conviction

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At this moment of inflection in technology, co-hosts Elad Gil and Sarah Guo talk to the world's leading AI engineers, researchers and founders about the biggest questions: How far away is AGI? What markets are at risk for disruption? How will commerce, culture, and society change? What’s happening in state-of-the-art in research? “No Priors” is your guide to the AI revolution. Email feedback to [email protected].

Sarah Guo is a startup investor and the founder of Conviction, an investment firm purpose-built to serve intelligent software, or "Software 3.0" companies. She spent nearly a decade incubating and investing at venture firm Greylock Partners.

Elad Gil is a serial entrepreneur and a startup investor. He was co-founder of Color Health, Mixer Labs (which was acquired by Twitter). He has invested in over 40 companies now worth $1B or more each, and is also author of the High Growth Handbook.

186 Episodes
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What happens when you put code-generation agents in the hands of enterprise IT teams? With Serval, you get a system where it's easy for everyone to be a builder. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Serval co-founder and CEO Jake Stauch to analyze his company’s direct challenge to ServiceNow as the enterprise automation and service management system of record. Jake explains that by building an AI platform for enterprise IT departments with Serval, users can safely build while still safeguarding permissions by strict deterministic approvals and an audit trail. He also talks about ProServal, the company’s team that embeds automation engineers directly with customers in order to provide ongoing support and service. Jake also discusses how AI was the big unlock to taking on ServiceNow, why he’s betting on coding agents getting even better, why consumer is a window into what will happen next in enterprise and why the SaaS-pocalypse might look more like a consolidation, why background agents are still a moonshot in enterprise software, and the importance of hiring product-oriented engineers. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @jakeserval | @getserval Chapters: 00:47 – Jake Stauch Introduction and Serval’s Background  03:00 – Expanding Coding Agents Beyond Engineers 04:40 – Limitations with Personal Agents in Enterprise 06:29 – Deploying Serval Effectively in Large Orgs  07:55 – Day 1 Ambition and Attacking Enterprise Systems of Record 09:51 – Taking on ServiceNow with Workflow Automation Platform 11:01 – Betting on the Evolution of Coding Agents and Building Guardrails in Enterprise 13:48 – Big Risks, Big Rewards, and Big Predictions for Serval and Coding Agents 16:40 – Adopting Different Sets of Building Principles at an Enterprise Level 20:49 – Token Maxing, Long-Term Budget Impacts, and ROI 22:39 – The SaaS-pocalypse and SaaS vs. AI 24:39 – The Mental Model for Delivering Platform-Level Power to the IT User at Enterprise 26:43 – Building Automations with Catalyst and Raising Technical Competence 28:55 – The Next Wave: Background Agents and Autonomy in Enterprise 32:23 – Hiring Velocity and Unlimited Ambition at Serval 34:17 – Keeping Pace with Customers and Fundamental Shifts in Product Function 37:05 – Conclusion
In the transition to the agentic web, security has become an afterthought. Now, organizations are racing to figure out what AI security means, and how to keep their data safe. Live from Cloudflare Connect, Sarah Guo sits down with Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht to discuss the changing attacker landscape, and how his company is allocating its engineering resources to meet this emerging security challenge. Dane explains how enterprises that have moved away from castle-and-moat infrastructure to more of a zero trust infrastructure for security are in better positions than those who haven’t. He also discusses the challenges of patching 70 years of software and why the software development lifecycle will need to change for security for the agentic web, why he sees token spend in the next 18 months primarily going towards security rather than engineering, how the current web is in a ‘messy middle’ state where humans and agents are riding the same ‘rails’ on the internet, Cloudflare’s conference monetization gateway release as well as its Signals project with OpenAI, the rationale behind the release of Cloudflare OS, and the thinking behind a recent company restructuring. Plus, why Cloudflare hired one thousand interns, and why curiosity about AI is required to be successful at Cloudflare.  Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Cloudflare | @dok2001 Chapters: 00:00 – Trailer 00:55 – Cloudflare CTO Top Priorities 05:03 – Today’s Attacker Landscape 06:16 – State of Internet Infrastructure 07:31 – Shift Towards Security Spend 08:39 – Road to Better Software and Internet Security 09:50 – Building Secure Production Software 11:41 – Reducing Surface Area 12:54 – Near Future of the Web 17:27 – Monetization and Signals  19:13 – Success for Content Creators  20:07 – Workplace OS and Use Cases 24:07 – Restructuring for AI-First 27:11 – Token Budgeting 29:32 – Cloudflare’s Intern Strategy 33:39 – Importance of Curiosity 35:29 – Attacking the Legacy Software Security Problem 37:08 – Engineering Team Prioritization 38:25 – Open vs. Closed Models 39:43 – Democratizing Security for Everyone 41:29 – Conclusion
Adversaries are already running AI agents, and the fastest attacks now play out in seconds. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with CrowdStrike president and CEO George Kurtz on what AI-equipped attackers mean for enterprise security. George explains how agents are flattening the adversary pyramid by putting advanced tradecraft in the hands of low-skill attackers, and why CrowdStrike and Nvidia are building a frontier-style lab of their own to train security models. They also get into how open-weight and closed models compare on security, where CrowdStrike is directing its platform investment, lessons from the recent Hugging Face incident, and why George sees AI, like every platform shift before it, as a net creator of opportunity. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @CrowdStrike | @George_Kurtz Chapters: 00:00 – Trailer 00:59 – George Kurtz Introduction 01:24 – Agentic Landscape 02:45 – AI and Adversaries 04:51 – Open Weight Models and Adversarial Attacks 06:37 – Adversary Geography 08:34 – Attacker Capability in Context 11:24 – Hugging Face Takeaways 13:59 – CrowdStrike Frontier Security Models 16:32 – CrowdStrike Key Offerings 19:51 – What Differentiates CrowdStrike’s Models  23:57 – Near Term State of Security World 25:46 – State of Model Distillation 27:53 – Open Weight Model Importance and Cost 29:59 – Assessing Real Agent Threat 32:40 – Areas to Watch in AI 35:02 – Case for Defense Dominance 39:15 – Executive Advice 43:16 – Shifts Create Opportunity 45:27 – Conclusion
Technology has always been the fundamental driver of improvement for human quality of life. And with the recent rollout of advanced frontier models, like OpenAI’s GPT-6, humanity can now massively accelerate scientific discovery for its benefit. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil are joined by OpenAI President and co-founder Greg Brockman to discuss the company’s rapid progress across frontier models, cybersecurity, and scientific discovery. Greg shares how nearly 400 century-old math problems have been solved using its AI agents, and how the technology has the potential to transform other fields like biology in the realm of drug discovery. He also talks about how proactive, always-on AI agents like Dots impact modern productivity, why he believes the best UI is no UI at all, how cybersecurity is in a critical window of time to use peak intelligence to find and fix vulnerabilities in systems, and why OpenAI remains committed to keeping humans in the driver’s seat even as models surpass us in capability. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @gdb | @OpenAI Chapters: 00:42 – Trailer 00:59 – Greg Brockman Introduction 01:11 – AI and Advancements in Mathematics 05:55 – AI Communication and Oversight 07:45 – AI for Overcoming Biology Data Bottlenecks 11:28 – Revolutionizing Drug Discovery 14:18 – Changing Regulations to Accelerate Progress 16:51 – Dots the Proactive Agent 19:19 – Unifying Work and Consumer Agents 22:02 – How UI Will Evolve 26:08 – Cybersecurity in the AI Age 32:55 – Shift in Security Investment 35:49 – OpenAI’s Human-Centric Ethos 38:28 – Conclusion
Is the future of frontier AI open or closed? ReflectionAI co-founder and CEO Misha Laskin joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss the launch of Beam, the company’s 500 billion parameter open-weight reasoning model. Misha breaks down the pre-training and reinforcement learning required to produce Beam’s reasoning efficiency, the shift in enterprise compute from renting to owning intelligence, and how he believes that open models will capture the majority of global token demand. He also talks about the open model ecosystem in China and why competition with China’s models is a good thing, safety considerations around open models, and how frontier-level open models may accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.   Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @MishaLaskin | @reflection_ai Chapters: 00:42 – Misha Laskin Introduction 00:59 – Latest with ReflectionAI 02:07 – Challenges Building an Open Model 03:56 – ReflectionAI’s Agentic Shift 07:37 – Resources for Model Training 10:09 – Scaling Efficiency 12:18 – Training Beam 16:51 – Where Model Value Comes From 19:55 – Beam’s Reasoning Efficiency 22:35 – Monetizing Open Weight Models 25:03 – Future of Open Versus Closed Tokens 31:29 – Competition with Open Models 34:38 – Chinese Open Source Model Ecosystem 38:40 – Will Chinese Models Remain Open 44:44 – Safety and Open Models 53:02 – Debating Access to Powerful Tools 57:16 – AI and Scientific Progress 01:00:36 – Data Centers and Jobs 01:02:07 – Beam and Scientific Research 01:05:37 – Research Head Count to Compute Ratio 01:10:29 – Conclusion
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