Purpose-Driven Innovation at Palantir

Anna Goldie, CEO and Co-Founder of Ricursive Intelligence, joins Radical Partner Rob Toews to unpack what it takes to build a frontier AI lab for chip design. At Google Brain, Anna co-founded the ML for Systems team and, with longtime collaborator Azalia Mirhoseini, created AlphaChip, an AI system Google has used to design multiple generations of its TPUs. She was also an early researcher at Anthropic. Now, Anna leads Ricursive Intelligence, which raised $335M within four months of launch to build AI that designs chips, and chips that power AI. Anna and Rob discuss why Anna chose to build independently rather than inside a hyperscaler, why chips are the fuel for AI progress, and why LLMs alone won’t crack chip design. From choosing investors like a long-term partnership, to deliberately tackling the hardest part of the problem first, this episode offers a candid look at building research-led companies at the frontier.

Mantic co-founders Toby Shevlane and Ben Day recently joined Radical partners Aaron Rosenberg and Rich Kotite to discuss what it takes to build an AI system that forecasts world events better than the best human forecasters.

Tantum Collins, Co-Founder & CEO of Inherent, joins Radical Partners Molly Welch and Aaron Rosenberg to dig into recursive self-improvement (RSI), using AI to build better AI, and why Inherent is betting on RSI at the organizational level, not just the model level. Drawing on his time leading DeepMind's meta-research team and shaping AI policy in the Biden White House, Tantum brings a unique lens to the conversation. He discusses Faraday, Inherent's AI agent, the company's "living within the experiment" culture, and why Inherent is structured as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).

Aaron Rosenberg and Rich Kotite, Partners at Radical Ventures, join Molly Welch to discuss "The Rise of NeoLabs," their report mapping the researcher-led AI startups raising massive capital. Drawing on Radical's track record backing companies like World Labs and Inherent, they dig into the research paradigms attracting top talent, how investors evaluate these early-stage teams, and what it takes to build a category-defining lab.

Yvonne Likomanova, Senior Director of Talent at Radical Ventures, digs into what's really driving the AI talent flows. Drawing on a career that spans Stripe, Cruise, Applied Intuition, Yvonne shares where the world's best researchers and engineers are setting their sights. The conversation covers why elite talent is leaving frontier labs for a new class of research-first institutions, what candidates are really optimizing for beyond compensation, and what founders need to get right today to compete for the people who will define their company's trajectory.