About this episode
This week we sit down with three founders building at the frontier of AI infrastructure, evaluation, and hardware: Chase Lochmiller (Crusoe), Naveen Rao (Unconventional AI), and Anastasios Angelopoulos (Arena). We dig into the real bottlenecks slowing down the AI buildout, how to standout in the job market as AI matures, and the explosive government standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon.We explore how AI infrastructure, open source models, and policy are reshaping the industry from the ground up.The Anthropic-Pentagon Standoff: The U.S. government blacklisted a leading domestic AI company for the first time. Who sets the rules for AI in warfare?Jevons Paradox & AI: Every efficiency gain in intelligence-per-watt creates more demand, not less. AI infra is positioned to capture the largest market humanity has ever built.OpenClaw & Open Source Mania: The open-source AI agent that just became GitHub's most-starred project. It now runs locally on your phone.Should You Learn to Code?: Yes, but not as a trade skill. Bootcamp-style training is dead. Understanding how machines work is what separates leaders from everyone else.Rethinking the Computer from Scratch: Naveen's team is building chips that mimic biology, targeting 1,000x efficiency gains.The Coming Labor Crisis: Anastasios argues most valuable work is just training humans for repeatable tasks, and that work is disappearing. Chase counters that digital labor is a new variable in the GDP equation.This Week In Startups is made possible by:Notion - https://www.notion.com/twistQuadratic - https://www.Quadratic.ai/twistTimestamps:00:38 — Welcome to This Week in AI01:21 — Show intro and guest introductions (Chase from Crusoe and Anastasius from Arena)02:22 — Crusoe's Stargate partnership: 1.2GW campus for Oracle and OpenAI in Abilene, Texas03:09 — Rethinking computing from first principles for 1,000x efficiency06:53 — How Arena went from a Berkeley side project to half a billion conversations09:28 — Quadratic - Bringing the productivity boost of AI into your spreadsheets. Visit https://www.quadratic.ai/twist to sign up and use the code TWIST to get one free month of their pro tier subscription.12:01 — Open
