Sources

Sources features candid conversations with the leaders shaping what’s next in AI and the broader tech industry. Host Alex Heath has covered Silicon Valley as a journalist for more than a decade. He talks with founders, CEOs, and technologists about the news of the moment, the bets they’re making, and what they see coming next. Sources features candid conversations with the leaders shaping what’s next in AI and the broader tech industry.

Sources features candid conversations with the leaders shaping what’s next in AI and the broader tech industry. Host Alex Heath has covered Silicon Valley as a journalist for more than a decade. He talks with founders, CEOs, and technologists about the news of the moment, the bets they’re making, and what they see coming next. Sources features candid conversations with the leaders shaping what’s next in AI and the broader tech industry.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -55:30 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Ellis sits down with Quinten Farmer, founder of Tolan, the AI companion doing over $20M in annual revenue by being a genuinely good friend, not a yes machine. They get into why Tolan's little aliens accidentally became beloved by moms 35 to 45, how Tolans stick up for themselves when users are mean to it, and why Quinten dropped "companion" as a word entirely.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:05:58 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Alex and Ellis sit down with Jon Steinback, founder of Marker, the AI writing tool that refuses to write for you. They get into why Google Docs hasn't changed in 20 years, how most AI writing tools are quietly making you a worse thinker, and what Marker does differently: an editor that asks questions instead of generating answers.

Alex and Ellis sit down with Dan Shipper, CEO of Every, to talk about what it actually looks like to be the most AI-pilled company that isn't a frontier lab. They get into how Dan uses ChatGPT Voice to read Heidegger at 6am, why he accidentally spent 2 billion tokens overnight, and why he thinks OpenAI just pulled off something that almost never happens in tech.

Yesterday, TIME and I published a cover story called “Inside OpenAI’s Reboot.” I spent two weeks at OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters and spoke with more than 20 executives, investors, customers, and rivals. I went into the reporting process wanting to understand OpenAI’s last year, what allowed Anthropic to gain so much ground, and the internal mood a…

My social feeds have recently been dominated by buzz for two new AI products: Elon Musk’sGrok Bot and an invite-only, text-based AI assistant called Instinct. While the latter has yet to officially emerge from stealth, the rumor circulating is that Instinct’s small team, which includes an early Sierra researcher named Noah Shinn, is currently raising a Series A round of funding to buy more compute and open its waitlist.

There are several ways to interpret the implications of OpenAI’s moves this week for Anthropic. OpenAI’s largest frontier reinforcement-learning run remains on hold while the company studies what Sam Altmandescribed to me as “various degrees of misalignment.” OpenAI says its expanded monitoring adds roughly 20% to the inference compute being monitored. That isn’t 20% of all internal inference, but it is a substantial compute tax.

“I think it is a good time to slow down,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told me last week, describing the company’s decision to halt the development of its most powerful, unreleased models. The company announced Tuesday that it’s implementing new safeguards that will slow its future AI development.