The reading room
Journalist Karen Hao argues that AI companies behave like empires. In her view, their warnings of catastrophe and promises of abundance work together to justify keeping AI under their control. She made the case in a replayed Diary of a CEO clip.
Journalist Karen Hao says OpenAI shut her out for years after her 2020 profile, then pulled out of her book. She now calls that lucky; host Steven Bartlett says an AI figure's team has dangled an interview for 18 months.
Journalist Karen Hao argues that AI companies shape public knowledge by funding most AI researchers. She points to Google's firing of its ethical AI leads and OpenAI's subpoena of a watchdog. Google and OpenAI's lawyer gave other reasons.
Erik Bernhardsson, CEO of AI infrastructure company Modal, says code review there is optional and backed by heavy automated testing, and that Modal doesn't hire product managers. He also lists the costs of roughly 4x growth in a year.
Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson says a hacked customer app, not Modal itself, was the launchpad in July's Hugging Face agent intrusion. He said Modal is exploring stricter defaults and now has agents try to escape its own sandboxes.
Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson says coding agents trained on old examples keep writing outdated Modal syntax, so it retires features more cautiously. Modal also tests whether agents recommend it and clarifies pricing content they misread.
Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson says the team once discussed shutting down sandboxes, its service for running AI-written code. They now bring in about a third of revenue. He expects agents to move toward brief, snapshotted environments.
Erik Bernhardsson, Modal's CEO, says the company keeps renting GPU capacity on three-year deals. He worries less about rising prices than about a collapse that would leave buyers having paid too much just as resale markets dry up.
Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson says GPUs are mostly sold as fixed multiyear blocks, while real demand rises and falls. After a $750 million raise, he argues that pooling thousands of customers lets Modal resell that capacity in flexible slices.
Moshi CEO Anekha Sokhal argues that when AI lets anyone build a tool, the hard part is getting others to use it, and that Spotify-style push may help. She described an engineer whose requested tool sits unclicked in colleagues' email.
Anekha Sokhal, Moshi's CEO and a former JPMorgan energy-derivatives trader, says her startup combines public market data with clients' private data and recommends what matters to each trader's portfolio.
Idealab founder Bill Gross opened a free site with more than 1.2 million AI-generated business ideas. On Moonshots, Chamath Palihapitiya called ideas "a dime a dozen"; other panelists saw a starting list and a step toward AI-run firms.
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