1008: The AI-Native Startup Playbook

In Episode #1038, Jon Krohn unpacks the remarkable and remarkably contentious run of mathematical results AI has produced in recent weeks, led by OpenAI’s claim to have cracked part of a million-dollar Millennium Prize problem. He lays out what was actually proved, the three big caveats that temper it, the chaotic bulk release of 722 manuscripts that followed, and why 25 Fields medallists are alarmed. His throughline for anyone building with AI: when generation gets cheap, verification becomes the bottleneck.

In Episode #1037, Dr. Richard Socher (CEO and Co-Founder of Recursive) joins Jon Krohn to make the case for automating the scientific method itself. Richard’s startup came out of stealth this year with over half a billion dollars raised to build recursively self-improving superintelligence, and his new book, The Eureka Machine, is already a national bestseller. He also co-founded You.com and the venture firm AIX Ventures, was chief scientist at Salesforce, taught the first university course anywhere on neural networks for NLP, and helped build the ImageNet dataset. In this episode, he traces how AI keeps replacing hand-crafted expertise with scale, lays out the four pillars of his Eureka Machine, argues that hallucinations can be a feature for science, explains why recursive self-improvement within a year or two still rules out an overnight takeoff, and names the software and jobs he expects to endure.

In Episode #1036, Jon Krohn digs into the question parents and teachers keep asking: does AI stop children from learning? Drawing on a wave of new studies, he shows the answer turns entirely on how AI is used, as a shortcut that outsources the thinking, or as a tutor that explains and gives feedback. Along the way: a 30,000-student natural experiment in China, a striking tutoring result from Turkey, and three practical takeaways that apply just as much to adults using AI at work.

In Episode #1035, Carly Taylor (Founder of Rebel Data Science) returns to join Jon Krohn for a wide-ranging conversation about leading engineering teams when the ground keeps moving. Carly shipped nine Call of Duty titles in roughly five years at Activision, where she led game security, and has since been a director of engineering at Microsoft and Field CTO for gaming at Databricks. She is also one of the most entertaining people in data on LinkedIn, where more than 200,000 people follow posts she cheerfully calls unhinged. In this episode, she explains why obsessing over the future produces analysis paralysis, which fundamentals never change, how to tell AI slop from AI used well, what the Buddhist practice of inviting Mara to tea has to do with public speaking, and what the glass cliff means for women being promoted into leadership.

In ICYMI Episode #1034, Jon Krohn moves from what sits underneath AI systems to what it takes to live with them every day. Hear from Aishwarya Srinivasan, Luis Serrano, Katie Malone, Ish Shah and Dilani Kahawala, discussing why the bottleneck in shipping software has moved from execution to judgment, how a physicist recast attention in transformers as words bending space, why years of managing people may be the best preparation for managing AI agents, how one weekend side project burned through billions of tokens and which three problems are hardest to solve when a product has no user interface and never stops running.