This Week in AI

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Today’s show:
China’s Alibaba just dropped a 2.4 trillion parameter open weight model that the company claims only trails Anthropic’s flagship among the major frontier rivals. Of course, this happened the very same week that the US government appears to have backed off from banning these models stateside entirely.
Are these models anywhere close to actually catching up to the latest and greatest releases from US labs like Anthropic and OpenAI? Really seems to depend on who you ask. (Even long time friends JCal and Elon Musk can’t see eye to eye on it.)
So on TWiAI Ep 25, we welcomed on Poolside AI CTO Eiso Kant, EXO Labs co-founder Alex Cheema, and Qloo founder Alex Elias to break down just how close Chinese labs are to catching up with the biggest and best models… and how long it will take US open weight builders to catch up.
PLUS we explore the cutting edge of AI-powered baby sleep monitors, consider Hank Green’s public AI apology, and dig into sci-fi author Ursula K. LeGuin’s “hand-mind” thesis.

Guests:

Eiso Kant on X: https://x.com/eisokant
Poolside: https://poolside.ai/
Alex Elias on X: https://x.com/ape
Qloo: https://www.qloo.com/
Alex Cheema on X: https://x.com/alexocheema
EXO Labs: https://exolabs.net/
Local AI benchmark platform: https://local.ai/
Relevant Links
Qwen3.8-Max launch announcement: https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.8
Bloomberg on Qwen3.8-Max launch: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-03/alibaba-drops-another-china-ai-model-with-breakthrough-performance
NYT: “White House Whipsaws Silicon Valley Over AI Rules”: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/technology/ai-washington-regulation-whiplash.html
Nvidia: “Open Weights and American AI Leadership”: https://images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-Weights-and-American-AI-Leadership.pdf
World Bank: World Development Report 2026: https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/1e4e52502104a331fb42cba0d4afa995-0050062026/original/WDR2026-Concept-Note.pdf
Hank Green apology on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/nerdfighters/comments/1vbmoj5/comment/p0vzmog/
Taylor Lorenz responds to Hank Green on X: https://x.com/TaylorLorenz/status/2083272682188206564
TechCrunch: Substack partners with Pangram: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/22/substacks-new-tool-tells-you-whos-been-writing-their-newsletters-with-ai/
Amazon: Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Always Coming Home” expanded edition: https://www.amazon.com/Ursula-K-Guin-Authors-Expanded/dp/1598536036

Timestamps:
0:00 Guest intros and open
10:03 Why Poolside thinks coding is the path to AGI
12:55 A first look at EXO's local.ai
16:24 The White House's open source pivot
20:21 Margins, compute, and "dirt to intelligence"
36:02 Jason's self-driving auction pitch
37:58 Hank Green's AI apology
38:45 Is AI addictive?
1:08:31 What does it mean for AI to be "privacy first"?
1:10:29 Enterprise AI sovereignty and "colonization"

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Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland
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Today’s show:
On a podcast this week, Sam Altman made a bold declaration: “We are now, like, in the singularity.” A bold claim which Alex puts bluntly to this week’s panel. Grant Lee of Gamma and Philip Johnston of Starcloud sound off… Is this actually the Singularity, and if so, why do things still feel so normal?
Plus the panel and guest host Alex Wilhelm discuss the infrastructure and economics that will make singularity-scale AI buildout possible… NVIDIA’s strongly worded letter about open-weight models… Moonshot’s new Kimi K3 twist on open-source licenses… Stripe’s reported $10B run at OpenRouter… and more.

Guests

Grant Lee on X: https://x.com/thisisgrantlee
Gamma: https://gamma.app/
Philip Johnston on X: https://x.com/PhilipJohnston
Starcloud: https://www.starcloud.com/

Relevant Links

TechCrunch: Gamma hits $110M ARR: https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/10/ai-powerpoint-killer-gamma-hits-2-1b-valuation-100m-arr-founder-says/
Nvidia: How Starcloud is Bringing Data Centers to Space: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/starcloud/
Open Weights and American AI Leadership letter: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/open-weight-models-letter-1.pdf
CNBC on Nvidia-OpenAI infrastructure plans: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/27/nvidia-and-openai-in-talks-for-up-to-250-billion-dollar-ai-backstop.html
Kimi K3: https://www.kimi.com/en
Crusoe announces strategic Starcloud partnership: https://www.crusoe.ai/resources/newsroom/crusoe-to-become-first-cloud-operator-in-space-through-partnership-with-starcloud
Andrej Karpathy on YouTube: “Let’s Build GPT”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY
Demis Hassabis Starcloud post on X: https://x.com/demishassabis/status/1999296127276126417
RAISE Summit: https://www.raisesummit.com/
Lilian Weng exits Thinking Machines post: https://x.com/lilianweng/status/2081816923088814421
Baseten: https://www.baseten.co/
Fireworks AI: https://fireworks.ai/
Legora: https://legora.com/
OpenEvidence: https://www.openevidence.com/
Yahoo: Stripe in talks to acquire OpenRouter: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/stripe-talks-acquire-openrouter-potential-215104525.html
Sam Altman on the Relentless podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv3CEAS_w34
TechCrunch: Cursor India-only pricing tier: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/27/cursor-makes-its-biggest-india-push-yet-ahead-of-spacex-acquisition-with-localized-pricing/
Gergely Orosz: The Pragmatic Engineer: https://www.pragmaticengineer.com/

Timestamps:
0:00 Guest intros: Grant Lee (Gamma) and Philip Johnston (Starcloud)
1:22 Nvidia's open weight letter
8:11 Starcloud's first H100 in space
19:47 Series A extension economics
20:39 How Gamma stayed lean and balanced work and fun
30:40 Betting on a compute-constrained world
35:48 Different approaches to pricing
44:59 Where does the AI moat really live?
57:41 Are we in the Singularity?
1:04:42 Starcloud's mission to Alpha Centauri

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Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/
Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland
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Today’s show:
This week, our panel of AI experts — Anand Kannappan (Patronus AI), Ori Goshen (AI21 Labs), and Alex Finn (Henry Intelligent Machines) — join special guest host Lon Harris to debate whether Washington will move to formally limit powerful foreign AI models like Moonshot’s Kimi K3 and Z.ai’s GLM-5.2.
What does “winning the AI race” actually mean on a practical level? Why is cybersecurity, not benchmarks, likely the actual battleground. And why did Hugging Face have to use GLM-5.2 to investigate their recent breach rather than a frontier US model like Fable 5?
PLUS why agents still fail so much on long horizon tasks, why proper model routing has such a HUGE impact on enterprise AI bills, and we take a look at Alex’s hacked digital typewriter he uses to code without distractions.

Guests:

Anand Kannappan on X: https://x.com/anandnk24
Patronus AI: https://www.patronus.ai/
Ori Goshen on X: https://x.com/origoshen
AI21: https://www.ai21.com/
Alex Finn on X: https://x.com/AlexFinn
Alex’s Vibe Coding Academy: https://www.skool.com/vibe-coding-academy/about

Relevant Links:

Axios: “The Secret Trump Administration Battle to Fight Chinese AI”: https://www.axios.com/2026/07/20/ai-us-china-open-source-kimi
Chamath post on US AI options: https://x.com/chamath/status/2079457219892871458?s=20
Brian Armstrong post on spend vs. token usage: https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/2070670644577280109
Hugging Face: Security incident disclosure: https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026
VentureBeat Hugging Face coverage: https://venturebeat.com/security/safety-guardrails-blocked-hugging-faces-defenders-not-the-attacker-when-an-ai-agent-breached-its-systems
David Sacks post on cyber guardrails: https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2078984980588531855
Databricks Unity AI Gateway: https://www.databricks.com/product/artificial-intelligence/unity-ai-gateway
Ramp’s Router: https://ramp.com/router/

Timestamps:

0:00 Will the US limit foreign open source models?
5:40 Are the American frontier AI labs in danger of bankruptcy?
7:15 The risks of over-regulating AI
10:20 What does it mean to win the AI race?
17:08 Is self-hosting agentic Chinese models safe?
20:08 Why agents still fail when models are so smart
25:28 Simulating the digital world for agents
36:51 Why picking the right model for the task is so hard
46:29 Alex is developing "ambient intelligence"
52:35 What we know about the Hugging Face breach
53:46 Are safety guardrails kneecapping our best models?

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Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland
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Today’s show:
The price of tokens keeps tumbling down, and it’s changing who controls AI.

Grok 4.5 and GLM-5.2 landed within two weeks of one another, offering powerful alternatives at a fraction of frontier prices. But are SpaceXAI’s latest offering and open weight models truly ready to replace Opus, GPT-5.5, and Fable? Are enterprises finally ready to stop renting and start owning their intelligence?

On TWiAI Episode 22, Jason and Lon welcome three top founders — Sara Hooker (Adaption Labs), Manu Sharma (Labelbox), and Spiros Xanthos (Resolve AI) — to break down the global AI price war, and what it means for the frontier labs and customers alike. Plus Denis Hassabis’ call for an AI Standards Body, Uber and Waymo duke it out over DC robotaxis, and is SpaceXAI really going to put data centers in orbit any time soon?

Guests:

Sara Hooker on X: https://x.com/sarahookr
Adaption Labs: https://adaptionlabs.ai/
Manu Sharma on X: https://x.com/manuaero
Labelbox: https://labelbox.com/
Spiros Xanthos on X: https://x.com/spirosx
Resolve AI: https://resolve.ai/
Relevant Links
Introducing Grok 4.5**:** https://x.ai/news/grok-4-5
GLM from Z.ai: https://z.ai
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index: https://artificialanalysis.ai/
Demis Hassabis: “A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age”: https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718
Cerebras: https://www.cerebras.ai/
Austin Allred post cited by Jason: https://x.com/Austen/status/2076745226387902925
TechCrunch coverage of DC autonomous driving bill: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/ubers-robotaxi-lobbying-effort-has-put-it-on-a-collision-course-with-waymo/
DoorDash: Meet Dot: https://about.doordash.com/en-us/dot
TechCrunch coverage of orbital data center debate: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/sam-altmans-space-data-center-trash-talk-is-what-most-experts-already-believe
Falcon 9 booster’s record 36th flight: https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/07/09/live-coverage-spacex-to-launch-falcon-9-rocket-on-record-breaking-36th-flight/
Timestamps:0:00 A new generation of lower-cost models
4:10 Enterprises want their own intelligence stack
6:10 Frontier vs. open source: where does the value go?
10:03 Is enterprises destined to go small?
30:04 Self-improvement as the real fix
31:52 Should the AI industry regulate itself?
47:14 Uber vs. Waymo in DC
1:03:53 Can AI data centers in space really work?
1:14:47 You get a plug! Everyone gets a plug!
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Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/
Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland
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Today’s show:

China is weighing a ban on foreign access to its top AI models… the same low-cost open-weight systems on which half of the Valley’s startups are building. So we asked our two all-star panelists — Arena CEO/Co-Founder Anastasios Angelopoulos and Hippocratic AI CEO/Co-Founder Munjal Shah — what happens to US companies when their favorite cheap, powerful models vaporize overnight.
PLUS why Hippocratic runs 31 models in parallel to ensure clinical-grade safety, the latency-vs-intelligence tradeoff no one is optimizing for, and why a company’s benchmarks might become their most valuable IP.

Guests:

Anastasios Angelopoulos on X: https://x.com/ml_angelopoulos
Arena AI: https://arena.ai/
Agent Arena: https://arena.ai/leaderboard/agent
Munjal Shah on X: https://x.com/munjalshah
Hippocratic AI: https://hippocraticai.com/

Relevant Links:

Reuters: “Beijing is looking at curbing overseas access…”: https://www.reuters.com/world/beijing-is-looking-curbing-overseas-access-chinas-top-ai-models-sources-say-2026-07-07/
Z.ai: https://z.ai/
Alibaba’s Qwen: https://qwen.ai/
Google’s Gemma: https://ai.google.dev/gemma
Reflection AI: https://reflection.ai/
Nvidia: “How Open Models are Driving Research”: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/open-models-icml-2026/
DoorDash: “How we learned to trust our AI code reviewer”: https://careersatdoordash.com/blog/how-we-learned-to-trust-our-ai-code-reviewer-at-doordash
Harvey AI: https://www.harvey.ai/
ElevenLabs: https://elevenlabs.io/
Anthropic: “A global workspace in language models”: https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace
CNN: “Trump rings opening bell to mark first day of trading for Trump Accounts”: https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/06/business/trump-accounts-launch
Brown University Health: https://www.brownhealth.org/

Timestamps:

0:00 Will US companies lose access to Chinese models?
1:42 Open source makes running 31 models viable
5:01 How deep is the West's open source bench?
13:20 Jagged Intelligence and why post-training matters
25:22 Benchmarks as living quality checks
32:49 Why models still struggle with drug names
42:58 Fine-tuning TV, cough, and sob detection
46:08 What is Arena actually selling?
1:08:29 Nationalization vs. buying stakes in AI companies
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X: https://x.com/lons
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LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm
Follow Jason:
X: https://twitter.com/Jason
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis
Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/
Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland
Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis
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