Glen Calvert

Most tech podcasts are so fucking boring. The host is either some person who couldn't hack it in a operating role (VC, engineer, founder, etc.) or some VC who is just doing it to get deal flow. No one cares what Bill Gurley thinks about AI, they want to hear about why he fucked over TK at Uber. No one cares what Chamath thinks about politics, they want to hear about what happened at Social Capital and why he closed the fund. No one cares what Keith Rabois has to say about Miami, they want to hear about what happened at OpenDoor. No one cares what Sam Altman thinks about AGI, they want to hear about why he was fired from YC and (initially) OpenAI. But instead we get these boring, sanitized conversations about why SaaS companies are or are not dead. Topics no one gives us a shit about.

Yep. Claude Opus 4.6, now in Notion.

We raised $500M at an $11B valuation to transform how people interact with technology.

Jonathan Ross, Founder and CEO of AI chip company Groq, offers a contrarian view: AI won't destroy jobs, it will create a labour shortage. He outlines three things that will happen because of AI: First, massive deflationary pressure. "This cup of coffee is going to cost less. Your housing is going to cost less. Everything is going to cost less." He explains this will happen through robots farming coffee more efficiently and better supply chain management, meaning people will need less money. Second, people will opt out of the economy. "They're going to work fewer hours. They're going to work fewer days a week, and they're going to work fewer years. They're going to retire earlier because they're going to be able to support their lifestyle working less." Third, entirely new jobs and industries will emerge. Jonathan points to history as evidence: "Think about 100 years ago. 98% of the workforce in the United States was in agriculture. When we were able to reduce that to 2%, we found things for those other 98% of the population to do." He continues: "The jobs that are going to exist 100 years from now, we can't even contemplate." Software developers didn't exist a century ago. In another century, they won't exist either, "because everyone's going to be vibe coding." The same applies to influencers, a career that would have been unthinkable 100 years ago but now earns people millions. His conclusion: deflationary pressure, workforce opt-outs, and new industries we can't yet imagine will combine to create one outcome... "We're not going to have enough people."

From Karpathy’s latest post: “LLM apps will organize, finetune and actually animate teams of them into deployed professionals in specific verticals by supplying private data, sensors and actuators and feedback loops.” This is exactly right. In a world of AI agents, there is a much thicker layer above the LLM than was initially perceived. The thin wrapper criticism somewhat worked in a world where people were repackaging tokens with a lightly customized interface or system prompt, which was largely all that was possible 2 years ago. But AI agents will combine tools, proprietary data, highly domain specific system prompts, specialized interfaces for the human-in-the-loop parts of the workflows, advanced context engineering to deal with context window limits, and more. The vast majority of these will perform better when tailored to a specific vertical, job function, or type of task. Further, to get real adoption in the enterprise, a heavy degree of system integration and change management is generally needed to drive the workflow changes and adoption. This is why companies (or at least products) focused on specific opportunities will often be required to actually power these workflows. Tons of opportunity here in the year to come.