No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups cover art
Podcast · 169 episodes

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

by Conviction · English

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 show@no-priors.com. 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.

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Re-Founding Incumbents for the AI Era with Sequence Holdings Co-Founder and CEO Michael LeeSequence Holdings’ “re-found incumbents for the AI era” thesis, explaining why a permanent holding company can reorganize enterprises around AI rather than just deploying AI agents.24 Sep 2026 · 43 min · 18 chapters
Why Diffusion Will Win AI Inference with Inception Co-Founder and CEO Stefano ErmonStefano Ermon argues diffusion-based models will “win” AI inference because they scale better at serving time than autoregressive models, which generate tokens sequentially and are memory-bound.18 Sep 2026 · 38 min · 17 chapters
Coinbase’s Everything Exchange: Agentic Finance, Stablecoins, and Tokenization with CEO Brian ArmstrongCoinbase’s “Everything Exchange” (on-chain trading across asset classes), stablecoin payments, and “agentic finance” (AI agents with accounts and self-custody).10 Sep 2026 · 45 min · 25 chapters
Redefining Chip Architecture with Arm CEO Rene HaasArm’s role in the chip supply chain; why Arm is moving from licensing IP to shipping physical chips (Arm AGI CPU); how AI tooling is changing chip design (especially verification); and how supply…3 Sep 2026 · 37 min · 18 chapters
Rethinking Legacy Data Infrastructure with Eon Co-Founders Ofir Ehrlich and Gonen SteinHow Eon’s cloud disaster recovery–centric data foundation helps enterprises map, classify, ingest, secure, and reuse legacy data for AI/LLM training and agent workflows, amid rising “non-human”…27 Aug 2026 · 35 min · 14 chapters
From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max HodakMax Hodak (Science/formerly Neuralink) discusses brain-as-computer framing, Prima, Science’s retinal prosthesis for restoring vision, its Europe regulatory marketing approval, and broader…20 Aug 2026 · 32 min · 16 chapters
What Chess.com Teaches US About Superhuman Capabilities, with CEO Erik AllebestErik Allebest (Chess.com CEO) explains how Chess.com grew from buying the chess.com domain in 2005 to a $200M+ bootstrapped chess empire, why chess’s popularity surged again in 2023, how Chess.com…13 Aug 2026 · 46 min · 18 chapters
Chasing Trillion-Dollar Companies, Founder Ambition, Token Budgets, and Regulatory Capture with Sarah & EladRisk management in AI and startups; how many trillion-dollar companies are realistic in the next 3–5 years; founder exit timing; recursive self-improvement (RSI) timelines; “token budgets”/compute…6 Aug 2026 · 39 min · 22 chapters
Building an Autonomous Enterprise for Real-World Services with Netic Founder Melisa TokmakNetEq (Melisa Tokmak) builds AI agents that run “essential services” enterprises end-to-end—handling customer interactions, operational reasoning, scheduling, and dispatch—so companies can become…31 Jul 2026 · 34 min · 22 chapters
Building an Autonomous Delivery Experience with DoorDash Co-Founders Andy Fang and Stanley TangDoorDash’s “Ask DoorDash” agentic commerce (natural-language ordering for restaurants and groceries), plus its long-running robotics/autonomy program culminating in DOT, an in-house autonomous…23 Jul 2026 · 49 min · 20 chapters
Travel Through the Lens of AI with with Booking.com CEO Glenn FogelGlenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings (ex-Priceline), discusses how AI should be applied to travel: as a tool to improve services for travelers and partners, not to replace the whole marketplace.9 Jul 2026 · 41 min · 17 chapters
How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah TaylorValar Atomics’ effort to restart U.S. nuclear power via fast hardware iteration and inherently safer reactor physics, aiming to cut energy costs (claimed 10x cheaper) and unlock “energy abundance”…2 Jul 2026 · 1 h 1 min · 23 chapters
Really Big Test-Time Compute in AI Changes Benchmarks, Safety and Research with OpenAI Research Scientist Noam BrownThe episode argues that modern AI evaluation is broken because benchmarks usually report a single score without controlling for test-time compute (tokens/cost/time).26 Jun 2026 · 36 min · 17 chapters
Re-engineering the Semiconductor Supply Chain with Intel CEO Lip-Bu TanIntel CEO Lip Bu Tan (Lipu Tan) discusses transforming Intel and re-engineering the semiconductor supply chain for AI-driven demand. Guests: Lipu Tan, CEO of Intel; Alad (host/co-interviewer).18 Jun 2026 · 45 min · 17 chapters
Biohub: The Future of Biology is Open-Source with Co-Founders Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, and Head of Science Alex RivesBiohub’s open-source “virtual biology” effort to accelerate understanding of how biology works and enable individualized, mechanism-based treatments.10 Jun 2026 · 56 min · 26 chapters
We Need An Ecosystem in AI, And Every Company Can Win A Place In ItSatya Nadella discusses the “full-stack builder” and “hyper-leveraged generalist” era of AI, arguing Microsoft’s strategy is an ecosystem of agentic systems, private evaluation, and reusable…4 Jun 2026 · 42 min · 21 chapters
Building an AI Guardian for Enterprise with Onyx Security CEO Maxim Bar KoganBuilding an “AI guardian” for enterprises to oversee autonomous AI agents and reduce illegitimate or incorrect actions as agent adoption grows.28 May 2026 · 41 min · 19 chapters
The Story Behind Cerebras’ $63 Billion IPO with Founder and CEO Andrew FeldmanCerebras’ path to a ~$63B IPO and why “fast inference” became the breakthrough for AI adoption, including its wafer-scale architecture, customer ramp, and deals with OpenAI and AWS.21 May 2026 · 31 min · 16 chapters
Pax Silica: Inside the Trump Administration’s Tech Strategy with US Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob HelbergPax Silica (Pax Silica/Paxilica) is a Trump administration economic security coalition to secure the AI supply chain for the U.S.14 May 2026 · 38 min · 13 chapters
Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander TaubmanLong Lake Management CEO Alexander Taubman discusses Long Lake’s plan to acquire American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) for $6.3B, framing it as an “AI take private,” and how Long Lake…11 May 2026 · 22 min · 11 chapters
Baseten CEO Tuhin Srivastava on the AI Inference Crunch, Custom Models, and Building the Inference CloudBase10 CEO Tuhin Srivastava explains why AI inference is the “last market,” how workloads are shifting toward custom/post-trained models, and how Base10’s “inference cloud” tackles capacity…1 May 2026 · 43 min · 20 chapters
SAP: Bringing the ‘Operating System’ of a Company into the AI Era with CTO Philipp HerzigSAP’s AI strategy and enterprise transformation—moving from “software as an operating system” to agent-driven, outcome-focused AI; why LLMs aren’t enough for predictive analytics; and how SAP…23 Apr 2026 · 46 min · 18 chapters
Scaling Global Organizations in the Age of AI with ServiceNow Chairman and CEO Bill McDermottLeadership and enterprise transformation in the age of AI, arguing that workflow platforms like ServiceNow are the “control tower” for agentic business reinvention.17 Apr 2026 · 57 min · 25 chapters
The Agentic Economy: How AI Agents Will Transform the Financial System with Circle Co-Founder and CEO Jeremy AllaireJeremy Allaire argues that AI agents will drive a new “agentic economy” requiring financial infrastructure that is global, programmable, micro-transaction capable, and provably trustworthy.9 Apr 2026 · 44 min · 16 chapters