No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
Podcast

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

Conviction

183 episodes

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.

What this show covers

AI infrastructuresemiconductorsenterprise AIBiotechdrug discoverycybersecurityAI agentsAI researchuser interfacesBeamopen modelsChina AIAI safetyinferencemarket structure

What listeners will find here

Greg Brockman on AI’s next leap: math breakthroughs, drug discovery, and cyber defense
This episode explores how advanced AI models could speed up scientific discovery, strengthen cybersecurity, and reshape software interfaces. Greg Brockman discusses math breakthroughs, biology data bottlenecks, proactive agents like Dots, and why OpenAI says humans should stay in control as models grow more capable.
Can an open 500B-parameter model beat the closed-model future?
Beam is ReflectionAI’s 500 billion parameter open-weight reasoning model, and Misha Laskin joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to explain why he thinks open models can win. The conversation spans training efficiency, enterprise compute economics, China’s open-model ecosystem, safety, and AI’s role in scientific discovery.
Fractile’s bet on AI chips: full-stack design, faster cycles, and inference at scale
AI chip strategy is the focus here, as Fractile CEO Walter Goodwin joins Sarah Guo to explain how his company is approaching a market dominated by NVIDIA, AMD, and Broadcom. The conversation centers on full-stack design, model architecture shifts, and the technical bets behind faster payoff from chip development.
Can AI upgrade incumbents from the inside instead of disrupting them?
Enterprise AI is the focus here, through Michael Lee’s argument that legacy market leaders can be re-founded rather than replaced. He walks through Sequence Holdings’ Baldwin deal, its holding-company model, and what applied engineering looked like at BankSouth.
Can diffusion models beat LLMs on speed, cost, and scale? Stefano Ermon makes the case
Generative AI is running into hardware and latency limits, and Stefano Ermon argues diffusion models can outperform autoregressive LLMs for inference. He explains parallel token generation, Mercury models, voice agent use cases, and why efficiency may define the next phase of AI competition.

Episodes

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