Sabrina Halper Show

Most of what you hear about AI's impact is a projection. David Holtz has the data.
He’s behind some of the most rigorous studies of AI’s actual impact today. And the results are surprising. His work cuts through the noise around AI to a key question: what is AI actually doing to people, companies, and the economy today?
David is a professor at Columbia, currently on leave to lead AGI economics research at OpenAI. We recorded this before he started there.
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Presented by micro1: ⁠micro1.ai
LinkedIn: ⁠micro1
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Sabrina Halper
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David HoltzX: ⁠https://x.com/daveholtz
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Intro
01:26 Is AI as significant to the economy as we hear?
04:05 ChatGPT as a general purpose technology shift
06:41 Inside OpenAI: The Shift From Chatbots to Agents
08:56 Why AI Could Make Us Work More, Not Less
10:56 Structuring Companies In a New Way
15:02 What Will the Agent Economy Look Like?22:03 What Becomes a Moat When Everyone Has the Same AI?
25:02 Model Improvement Study: 50% of AI’s Gains Come From the Human
33:03 What Should We Still Learn in the Age of AI?
36:58 The Kenya Experiment: Does AI Democratize Expertise?
45:11 Could AI Let Developing Economies Leapfrog the Internet?
49:50 One-Person Companies, Job Loss & the Future of Work

Matan Grinberg left a string theory PhD at Berkeley to start Factory, betting on full autonomous software engineering in 2023.
It started with a cold email to Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire and a three-hour walk that helped convince Matan to leave his PhD and build a company. Three years later, Factory is valued at $1.5B, with recent reports putting its newest valuation north of $3.5B.
We get into: what string theory teaches you about making decisions, the three phases every company goes through with AI adoption, how to measure ROI of AI spend, why he'd take Chinese open models over a closed-model monopoly, the sleeper-agent risk hiding in open weights, what he thinks about recent security incidents from large labs, and why he believes we're already living in a post-AGI world.
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Sabrina Halper Show is presented by Micro1. Micro1 is building the infrastructure for advancing intelligence through expert human data, real-world training environments, and contextual evaluations. Learn more: https://www.micro1.ai/.
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TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00) Intro
(02:00 Young Matan
(5:30) String Theory
(11:10) Leaving academia, the IMDb 250, and getting nerd-sniped by code generation
(16:53) Cold-emailing Shaun Maguire and founding Factory
(18:27) The desert years, and what finally made autonomous engineering work
(20:55) The new bottleneck is deciding what to do
(23:30) The three phases of enterprise AI adoption, and the end of token maxing
(28:18) Chinese open models, and the monopoly to end all monopolies
(30:30) Sleeper agents, poisoned code, and the labs cybersecurity incidents
(34:30) The White House open-weights policy and the distillation problem
(37:30) The coming billion-dollar agent incident
(42:30) "We're already post-AGI" and AI taking on math
(49:30) Building your own software
(52:20) Reflections & best advisors

I sat down with Reed Jobs to discuss one of medicine’s hardest problems: why we’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting cancer, yet still don’t have a cure.
Reed explains why there may never be a cure for cancer and why that’s actually the wrong goal. Instead, the future is making cancer a disease that no one dies from.
He gives an inside look at Yosemite, the venture firm he founded to rethink how to bring breakthrough therapies to patients. We go deep on how AI is reshaping biology, why Yosemite combines grants with venture capital to fund ambitious science, how to de-risk breakthrough research, and the extraordinary biology that makes our bodies work.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Intro
00:36 Early Cancer Mission
03:41 Working at a Cancer Lab as a Teen
05:16 Immunotherapy Breakthrough
07:05 Emerson Collective
09:20 Founding Yosemite
10:17 Making Cancer Nonlethal12:28 Using Grants to De-Risk Biotech Investing
15:33 Academic vs. CEO Role
19:11 Biology Is a Miracle22:52 Next-Decade Tooling
25:22 His Dream of In Vivo CAR-T Cell Therapy
28:51 Cracking Solid Tumors
29:27 Same-Day Cell Editing
33:46 The AI Era of Biology
37:00 Cutting Clinical Trial Costs
41:43 Highest-ROI Philanthropy
45:10 Taylor Francis
47:28 Yosemite’s Long-Term Impact
50:29 San Francisco Today#CancerResearch #Biotech #AI #Medicine #ReedJobs

The secret to staying young may already be inside your cells. We just need to figure out how to unlock it.
NewLimit is one of the world's leading longevity companies, co-founded by Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong, investor Blake Byers, and stem cell biologist Jacob Kimmel. NewLimit has already shown it can take old human liver and immune cells and restore them to a younger, healthier-working state and it's now preparing its first medicine for human trials.The company has raised over $600M - including a $435M round in 2026 that valued it at $3.1B - from investors like Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Thrive Capital, and Khosla Ventures.
We hear the word "longevity" all the time. But what's actually real? And how do we meaningfully extend lifespan for our generation, our kids, and our grandkids?
Jacob Kimmel shares his world-leading expertise as we discuss everything from evolutionary tradeoffs to epigenetic reprogramming to AI biorisk.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Aging as Entropy
01:25 Why Evolution Limits Lifespan
03:13 Evolution Tradeoffs Explained
07:44 Why Women Live Longer
10:15 Lessons from Long Lived Species
16:20 Peak Intelligence and Aging
23:26 What Aging Really Is
26:23 Epigenetics and Reprogramming
27:59 Yamanaka Factors 101
32:18 New Limit's Approach
33:56 AI for Factor Discovery
37:28 Organ by Organ Longevity
40:28 Is Immortality Possible?
42:04 Lifespan Progress Curve
45:44 Testing Longevity Drugs
49:30 Placebo Mind Body Link
53:56 What longevity hacks are actually work?
57:25 Peptides And Stem Cells
01:00:34 Germline Gene Editing
01:05:10 Personalized Medicine Abundance
01:08:48 Longer Lifespans and Power Turnover
01:14:57 Living Off Earth
01:16:55 AI And Biosecurity Risks

#longevity #antiaging #biotech

Jack Dent, co-founder of Chai Discovery, gives us a look at how AI could change the way we discover drugs, understand biology, and treat disease. Jack went from cold-emailing Stripe and joining as a teenager to co-founding Chai Discovery, the AI drug design company Sam Altman asked him and Josh to start years before they did. Chai has since raised $225M from investors including OpenAI and Thrive Capital, and built a model that hit a drug-design breakthrough far faster than expected, with roughly 200x better antibody success rates.We talk about whether people could one day help cure their own diseases with AI, whether each of us might have a personalized biology model, and whether medicine shifts from treating sickness to preventing it before it starts. Jack also gets into whether frontier AI labs will build these biology models themselves, what AI can and can’t fix in our current healthcare system, why clinical trials are still such a bottleneck, and how much of science may become less random when AI can generate and test better hypotheses.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Intro
02:28 Inside Stripe When It Was Only 100 People
08:45 How Sam Altman Sparked Chai’s Origin Story
10:52 Why Chai Discovery Exists
16:20 The Chai-2 Antibody Breakthrough
19:24 Approaching Biology as Engineering
24:45 Using AI to treat ourselves26:52 Robotics in labs
27:22 Why Pharma Is Finally Moving on AI
29:49 Can AI Fix Clinical Trials?
32:53 Personalized biology models
36:24 Longevity, Peptides, and Trillion-Dollar Drugs
39:02 Does it matter that the government cuts exploratory science grants?
41:00 What Next-Gen Chai Models Will Do
42:08 Will Frontier AI Labs Build Biology Models?
43:26 Biology is hard