What if staking a token could keep an AI agent thinking? NEAR cofounder Illia Polosukhin joins David to explain NEAR’s new staking-powered inference model, where yield funds access to confidential and verifiable AI. They unpack how NEAR AI Cloud, IronClaw, Intents, and the NEAR token fit into one integrated economy for autonomous agents, why AI outputs may need cryptographic proof when money is at stake, and how GPU compute could become a liquid global market. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | US
Alex Atallah is the Founder and CEO @ OpenRouter, the unified interface for LLMs. The company has raised over $153M in funding, with the latest valuation pricing the company at $1.3BN. OpenRouter is reportedly in an acquisition process with Stripe for $10BN. AGENDA: 00:00 Is OpenRouter Selling to Stripe for $10 Billion? 04:05 What Did Alex Learn From Scaling OpenSea? 06:38 What Did OpenRouter's Founding Thesis Get Wrong? 14:47 Is AI Model Routing Already Being Commoditized? 19:12 Do Falling Toke
Niels Kaastrup-Larsen and Harry Moore explore the latest developments in trend following, the AI investment boom and why diversification matters most when markets come under pressure. They discuss CTA performance, market dispersion, portable alpha, cash efficient portfolio construction and the role of trend following during major market drawdowns. The conversation also examines how artificial intelligence is transforming quantitative research, the practical challenges of portfolio implementation
Paul Chai joins Alan Dunne to discuss what it takes to manage a perpetual investment portfolio designed to support future generations. As CIO of the Kansas State University Foundation, Paul explains how disciplined asset allocation, thoughtful manager selection and strong governance create resilient long-term results. The conversation explores endowment investing, private markets, hedge funds, portfolio construction and the importance of building a decision-making culture where diverse perspecti
Watch the full episode on YouTube: We first covered Baseten last year when DeepSeek mania was at peak hype. Now they have raised a monster $13B round and become one of the new cohort of AI Infra decacorns that are (with Nvidia, Intel, and the semis complex) chief beneficiaries of the Inference Inflection . We return to Baseten at the peak of the 2026 edition of Open Weights debate . Ali has published a viral breakdown of Kimi K3 : And since you last saw him, Philip has spoken at AI Engineer and
The future isn’t hidden. It hasn’t been written yet. That idea anchors this foundational conversation between Dave Dredge, Richard Brennan and Niels Kaastrup-Larsen, on what risk really means in markets. They challenge the mathematics behind modern portfolio construction, exposing how calm conditions can conceal leverage, how diversification can fail when it matters most, and why familiar measures such as volatility and Sharpe ratios often miss the forces that lead to permanent loss. From path d
Why do recessions happen? Tyler Goodspeed joins Kevin Coldiron to challenge some of the most deeply held beliefs in economics. Drawing on more than three centuries of data from the United States and the United Kingdom, he argues that recessions are rarely the inevitable consequence of excess or financial imbalances. Instead, they are often triggered by unexpected external shocks that are difficult to predict. The conversation explores why expansions do not simply die of old age, why recessions f
Gary Gallagher is a historian of the American Civil War. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep499-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/gary-gallagher-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback – give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA – submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring – join our team: https:/
Gary Gallagher is a historian of the American Civil War. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep499-sb See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/gary-gallagher-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfrid
There are roughly 100x more people who use code than who can write code. As code that “just works” becomes easier to generate, this group may be the biggest prize of all — if you can get the agentic interface right. A key trend we have been tracking over at AINews is the absolute explosion in Codex usage this year , with MAU now up >10x from Jan 2026 . Less than two weeks after their July 9th launch , OpenAI said ChatGPT Work and Codex had reached 10M users c ombined (as we cover in the pod, Cod
Niels Kaastrup-Larsen and Nick Baltas explore how artificial intelligence, thematic investing and narrative momentum are beginning to reshape systematic investing. Alongside a review of recent CTA performance, they discuss new research on expanding trend following universes, defensive portfolio construction and portable alpha before taking a deep dive into the growing role of AI and thematic risk models. The conversation examines whether future investment signals may come from more than price al
In recent months, the open vs closed, and US vs China discussions on model ownership and sovereign/local AI have heated up to a fever pitch. So it is very very good news that Poolside AI are finally emerging with new models, like Laguna S 2.1 , that are beating Thinking Machines’ recent release nearly 10 times their size . Poolside’s recent tech report got a lot of praise due to their level of detail, and Vibhu first covered Laguna’s recent technical report on our paper club: From spending $12 m
Charlie McGarraugh joins Moritz Seibert to discuss how systematic investing is evolving beyond traditional trend following. Drawing on experience from Goldman Sachs, crypto and machine learning, Charlie explains why adaptive portfolios, capital efficiency and smarter position sizing may become the defining advantages for the next generation of macro investors. They explore the rise of managed futures ETFs, China's growing futures markets, the trade off between diversification and simplicity, and
Bet on information If test loss flatlines after 1.5B parameters while training loss continues to drop as you scale, that tells you that your model is limited by the amount of information in your data. Training on a single, smallish data set exposed an information gap: the 3.1B model falls off the scaling trend. Neither parameters nor compute will improve performance past this wall. For predicting changes to gene expression, you need more information rich data . This is what Chu and Bo’s teams ha
Markets are evolving in ways that few investors fully appreciate. Niels Kaastrup-Larsen and Yoav Git explore how changing market structure, the rise of retail options trading and new financial products are reshaping trend following. They discuss why short term strategies have become more challenging, whether single stock futures could open new opportunities, and what recent research reveals about narratives, thematic investing and diversification. Along the way they examine commodities, equity m
Imagine a dark warehouse. Racks and racks of devices with wires, tubes, and electronics sticking out. The next AI data center? No. This is Lila Sciences ‘ dream for the future of science . A dark warehouse full of AI-guided robotics and lab equipment, cranking out new experiments 24/7, building toward a scientific superintelligence. Their automated lab is almost hypnotizing to watch. They have floating plates zipping around on Wall-E-esque tracks, used vision-language models to control Windows 9
More than a billion barrels of expected oil supply have been removed from the market. Yet prices suggest the danger has passed. Adam Rozencwajg joins Cem Karsan and Niels Kaastrup-Larsen to explain why that conclusion may be dangerously premature. The missing barrels have not disappeared from the equation. Their impact is still moving through tankers, refineries and inventories, hidden by reporting delays and China’s strategic response. From the limits of petroleum reserves to falling stockpiles
Markets continue to evolve, and so do the strategies designed to navigate them. Alan Dunne joins Niels Kaastrup-Larsen to explore why changes in market structure may have permanently altered short term trend following, and what that means for systematic investors. They discuss a fascinating new research paper on market microstructure, the changing role of liquidity, the rise of high frequency trading and why faster no longer necessarily means better. Along the way they examine the Federal Reserv
We’ve been running a bit of an Agent Cloud series surveying all the top inference/compute/cloud providers, from Databricks to Daytona to Railway and, even further back, E2B , but we’re excited to conclude this series returning to Modal, which has just raised a monster $355M Series C . The cloud was built for developers. But agents are now changing that. The old infra stack was designed for a human who could read docs, reason through YAML, and understand dashboards to figure out what they need wh
The US dollar has become so familiar that most investors rarely stop to ask how it became the world's dominant currency or why that dominance has endured. Brendan Greeley joins Alan Dunne to trace the dollar's remarkable journey from a silver coin in sixteenth century Europe to the foundation of modern global finance. Along the way they explore the hidden mechanics of money creation, the evolution of offshore dollars, the Federal Reserve's expanding role, and why the institutions supporting the