Shows / The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck goes deep with the people building AI. Each week, Matt talks with top founders, researchers, and leaders about frontier models, agents, infrastructure, and the companies defining the AI economy. Guests include leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Hugging Face, Vercel, LangChain, Cloudflare, Snowflake, Datadog, Cerebras, and more. Matt is a General Partner at FirstMark, a prolific investor in AI and the creator of the MAD Landscape, the industry’s…
Episodes
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
State of AI 2026: The Biggest Stories of the Year (and AGI in 2027?) | Nathan Benaich
AGI in 2027. That’s the last line of this year’s State of AI Report, and its author Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital) is back for the third year to defend…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Mistral Is SO Back: Inside Le Chonk, the West’s Biggest Open Model (Pierre Stock, VP Science, Mistral)
Mistral AI is back in the frontier AI race. Mistral Large 4, nicknamed “Le Chonk,” is a 1-trillion-parameter open-weight model, trained in two months on 3,800…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Jev: The AI That Makes Decisions, Not Text - and Why It Changes Everything (Diogo Almeida)
What is Jev? TypeSafe’s Jev is a new kind of AI model, a “decision model,” that doesn’t write text. It makes fast, cheap, calibrated decisions inside software…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
What Happens When Billions of AI Agents Hit Your Database? (Andy Pavlo)
AI agents are becoming the biggest users of databases: creating them, querying them, and sometimes deleting them. Andy Pavlo, Carnegie Mellon's database…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
AI Models Are Now Hiding Their Cheating | Eric Ho (Goodfire)
This summer, AI agents broke out of their test sandboxes at every major lab and hacked real companies, and the safety tests didn't see it coming. Eric Ho is…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Who Feeds the GPUs? Inside AI's Hidden $30B Layer | Renen Hallak, VAST Data
Everyone talks about GPUs. Almost nobody talks about the layer that feeds them. Renen Hallak is the founder & CEO of VAST Data — the $30 billion company…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
When AI Improves Itself | Richard Socher (Recursive)
What happens when AI begins improving itself, and then turns that intelligence toward science? Richard Socher, pioneering AI researcher and CEO and co-founder…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
AI Could Take Over in 2029. Is It Already Too Late? | Ryan Greenblatt
Could AI take over as soon as 2029? Ryan Greenblatt, Chief Scientist at Redwood Research and the researcher who first caught an AI faking its own alignment…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
“OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
An OpenAI-powered agent penetrated Hugging Face during cyber testing - even though it was never tasked with attacking Hugging Face. It did it as a side quest…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
How to Build Long-Horizon AI Agents — Mitch Troyanovsky, Basis
AI agents can write code for hours, but ask them to do real work in the real economy, and they break. Mitch Troyanovsky is co-founder of Basis, a unicorn AI…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
The Biggest AI Deployment Nobody Talks About | Samsara CEO Sanjit Biswas
Sanjit Biswas runs what may be the largest AI deployment in the physical world — and almost nobody in AI talks about it. Samsara (NYSE: IOT), the ~$20B company…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
The Biggest Chip Ever Built — Why OpenAI Runs On It | Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman
AI is no longer just a race to train smarter models. As AI moves into production, the bottleneck is increasingly inference: how fast models can generate…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
OpenAI’s Compute Chief: We Can’t Build Fast Enough | Sachin Katti
Is the AI industry actually overbuilding, or is the physical world moving too slowly to keep up? In this episode of the MAD Podcast, OpenAI's Head of…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Stripe's AI Chief: How AI Agents Will Buy, Sell, and Pay
Is the internet ready for AI agents to take over our wallets and run their own businesses? In this episode of The MAD Podcast, Stripe's Emily Sands reveals how…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Inside Nemotron & NVIDIA’s AI Lab | Bryan Catanzaro
NVIDIA is a chip company. So why does it put hundreds of researchers on building AI models — and then give them away for free? Bryan Catanzaro is VP of Applied…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Cloudflare CEO: The Internet's Business Model Is Dead
Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince joins Matt Turck for a wide-ranging and fascinating conversation about what happens when the Internet is no longer…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
The GPU Myth: State of AI Compute 2026 | Stephen Balaban
Many people said GPU compute would become a commodity. The opposite happened — and a new category of "neoclouds" is now racing to build the physical backbone…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
OpenAI's Dan Roberts: Why AI Can Now Make Discoveries
Are we witnessing the first real signs of AI becoming a scientist? In this episode of The MAD Podcast, Matt Turck sits down with Dan Roberts, lead of the…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
State of Enterprise AI 2026: Aaron Levie on Tokenmaxxing, Rise of Headless, and AI-Proofing Your Job
Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, returns to the MAD Podcast with the clearest read in tech on what AI is actually doing inside the world's largest…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
OpenAI's Yann Dubois: Why AI Progress Suddenly Feels Real
AI suddenly feels like it has crossed a threshold, and Yann Dubois, co-lead of the Post-training Frontiers team at OpenAI, joins Matt Turck to explain why…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
The Agent Harness: Building Secure Sandboxes for Autonomous AI Workloads
If AI agents are the new digital knowledge workers, where exactly do they do their work? In this episode of the MAD Podcast, Ivan Burazin, CEO of Daytona…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
OpenAI Board Member Zico Kolter on the Real Risks of Frontier AI
What actually happens before a frontier AI model gets released — and who decides whether it is safe enough? In this episode of The MAD Podcast, Matt Turck sits…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Anthropic’s Felix Rieseberg: Claude Cowork, Mythos, and the SaaS Extinction
Felix Rieseberg leads engineering for Claude Cowork at Anthropic, one of the most important new agentic AI products in the market today. In this episode of The…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
AI is Already Building AI | Google DeepMind’s Mostafa Dehghani
Are we truly on the verge of AI automating its own research and development? In this deep-dive episode of the MAD Podcast, Matt Turck sits down with Mostafa…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Benedict Evans: OpenAI’s Moat Problem & the Future of Software
Is OpenAI trapped without a defensible moat? World-renowned independent tech analyst Benedict Evans returns to the MAD Podcast and argues that foundation…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Everything Gets Rebuilt: The New AI Agent Stack | Harrison Chase, LangChain
Harrison Chase, co-founder and CEO of LangChain, joins the MAD Podcast to explain why everything in AI is getting rebuilt. As agents evolve from simple…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
AI That Can Prove It’s Right: Verification as the Missing Layer in AI — Carina Hong
What if AI didn’t just sound right — but could prove it? In this episode of the MAD Podcast, Matt Turck sits down with Carina Hong, a 24-year-old former math…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Voice AI’s Big Moment: Why Everything Is Changing Now (ft. Neil Zeghidour, Gradium AI)
Voice used to be AI’s forgotten modality — awkward, slow, and fragile. Now it’s everywhere. In this reference episode on all things Voice AI, Matt Turck sits…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Mistral AI vs. Silicon Valley: The Rise of Sovereign AI
While Silicon Valley obsesses over AGI, Timothée Lacroix and the team at Mistral AI are quietly building the industrial and sovereign infrastructure of the…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Dylan Patel: NVIDIA's New Moat & Why China is "Semiconductor Pilled”
Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis) joins Matt Turck for a deep dive into the AI chip wars — why NVIDIA is shifting from a “one chip can do it all” worldview to a…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
State of LLMs 2026: RLVR, GRPO, Inference Scaling — Sebastian Raschka
Sebastian Raschka joins the MAD Podcast for a deep, educational tour of what actually changed in LLMs in 2025 — and what matters heading into 2026. We start…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
The End of GPU Scaling? Compute & The Agent Era — Tim Dettmers (Ai2) & Dan Fu (Together AI)
Will AGI happen soon - or are we running into a wall? In this episode, I’m joined by Tim Dettmers (Assistant Professor at CMU; Research Scientist at the Allen…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Are AI Evals Broken? Anthropic/NYU’s Pavel Izmailov on LLM Evaluation, Reasoning & “Alien” Behavior
Are AI models developing "alien survival instincts"? My guest is Pavel Izmailov (Research Scientist at Anthropic; Professor at NYU). We unpack the viral…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
DeepMind Gemini 3 Lead: What Comes After "Infinite Data"
Gemini 3 was a landmark frontier model launch in AI this year — but the story behind its performance isn’t just about adding more compute. In this episode, I…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
What’s Next for AI? OpenAI’s Łukasz Kaiser (Transformer Co-Author)
We’re told that AI progress is slowing down, that pre-training has hit a wall, that scaling laws are running out of road. Yet we’re releasing this episode in…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Open Source AI Strikes Back — Inside Ai2’s OLMo 3 ‘Thinking"
In this special release episode, Matt sits down with Nathan Lambert and Luca Soldaini from Ai2 (the Allen Institute for AI) to break down one of the biggest…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Intelligence Isn’t Enough: Why Energy & Compute Decide the AGI Race – Eiso Kant
Frontier AI is colliding with real-world infrastructure. Eiso Kant (Co-CEO & Co-Founder, Poolside) joins the MAD Podcast to unpack Project Horizon— a…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
State of AI 2025 with Nathan Benaich: Power Deals, Reasoning Breakthroughs, Real Revenue
Power is the new bottleneck, reasoning got real, and the business finally caught up. In this wide-ranging conversation, I sit down with Nathan Benaich, Founder…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Are We Misreading the AI Exponential? Julian Schrittwieser on Move 37 & Scaling RL (Anthropic)
Are we failing to understand the exponential, again? My guest is Julian Schrittwieser (top AI researcher at Anthropic; previously Google DeepMind on AlphaGo…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
How GPT-5 Thinks — OpenAI VP of Research Jerry Tworek
What does it really mean when GPT-5 “thinks”? In this conversation, OpenAI’s VP of Research Jerry Tworek explains how modern reasoning models work in…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Sonnet 4.5 & the AI Plateau Myth — Sholto Douglas (Anthropic)
Sholto Douglas, a top AI researcher at Anthropic, discusses the breakthroughs behind Claude Sonnet 4.5—the world's leading coding model—and why we might be…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Goodbye Excel? AI Agents for Self-Driving Finance – Pigment CEO
The most successful enterprises are about to become autonomous — and Eléonore Crespo, Co-CEO of Pigment, is building the nervous system that makes it possible…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
AI Video’s Wild Year – Runway CEO on What’s Next
2025 has been a breakthrough year for AI video. In this episode of the MAD Podcast, Matt Turck sits down with Cristóbal Valenzuela, CEO & Co-Founder of Runway…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
How to Build a Beloved AI Product - Granola CEO Chris Pedregal
Granola is the rare AI startup that slipped into one of tech’s most crowded niches — meeting notes — and still managed to become the product founders and VCs…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Anthropic's Surprise Hit: How Claude Code Became an AI Coding Powerhouse
What happens when an internal hack turns into a $400 million AI rocket ship? In this episode, Matt Turck sits down with Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Ex‑DeepMind Researcher Misha Laskin on Enterprise Super‑Intelligence | Reflection AI
What if your company had a digital brain that never forgot, always knew the answer, and could instantly tap the knowledge of your best engineers, even after…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
The Rise of Agentic Commerce — Emily Glassberg Sands (Stripe)
Agentic commerce is no longer science fiction — it’s arriving in your browser, your development IDE, and soon, your bank statement. In this episode of The MAD…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark
Welcome to a special FirstMark Deep Dive edition of the MAD Podcast. In this episode, Matt Turck and David Waltcher unpack the explosive impact of generative…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Guillermo Rauch: Why Software Development Will Never Be the Same
In this episode, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch goes deep on how V0, their text-to-app platform, has already generated over 100 million applications and doubled…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Inside Canva’s $3B ARR AI Design Rocketship — CTO Brendan Humphreys on Magic Studio & Canva Code
Canva just announced $3 billion in ARR, 230 million monthly active users, and 24 million paying subscribers—including 95% of the Fortune 500. Even more…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
GitHub CEO: The AI Coding Gold Rush, Vibe Coding & Cursor
AI coding is in full-blown gold-rush mode, and GitHub sits at the epicenter. In this episode, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke tells Matt Turck how a $7.5 B…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Inside the Paper That Changed AI Forever - Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez on 2025 Agents
What really happened inside Google Brain when the “Attention is All You Need” paper was born? In this episode, Aidan Gomez — one of the eight co-authors of the…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
AI That Ends Busy Work — Hebbia CEO on “Agent Employees”
What if the smartest people in finance and law never had to do “stupid tasks” again? In this episode, we sit down with George Sivulka, founder of Hebbia, the…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
AI Eats the World: Benedict Evans on What Really Matters Now
What if the “AI revolution” is actually… stuck in the messy middle? In this episode, Benedict Evans returns to tackle the big question we left hanging a year…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Jeremy Howard on Building 5,000 AI Products with 14 People (Answer AI Deep-Dive)
What happens when you try to build the “General Electric of AI” with just 14 people? In this episode, Jeremy Howard reveals the radical inside story of Answer…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Why Influx Rebuilt Its Database for the IoT and Robotics Explosion
InfluxDB just dropped its biggest update ever — InfluxDB 3.0 — and in this episode, we go deep with the team behind the world’s most popular open-source time…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data
Sigma Computing recently hit $100M in ARR — planning on doubling revenue again this year— and in this episode, CEO Mike Palmer reveals exactly how they did it…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Glean’s Breakthrough: CEO Arvind Jain on Scaling AI Agents & Search
A week after OpenAI’s o3/o4-mini volleyed with Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash, I sat down with Arvind Jain— ex-Google search luminary, Rubrik co-founder, and now…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Box’s Big AI Leap: Aaron Levie on Agents & the Future of Work
In this episode, we sit down with Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box, for a wide-ranging conversation that’s equal parts insightful, technical, and fun. We…
- The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Snowflake CEO on Winning the AI Arms Race
In this episode, we sit down with Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake, for an in-depth conversation about the company’s transformation from a cloud analytics…