Sabrina Halper Show

Sabrina Halper sits down with Ali Ansari, the 25-year-old solo founder and CEO of Micro1, which just passed $1B in ARR. But it all began when Ali moved from Iran to the U.S. at age nine, going from flipping textbooks to building a company that supplies the human expertise used to train AI models.We get into Micro1’s pivot from AI recruiting to training data, growing to $1B ARR in 2.5 years, whether experts are training their replacements, how to teach AI subjective judgment, why robotics is a data problem, the stakes of selling training data to China, and whether the AI economy can justify the infrastructure being built.Ali Ansari: https://x.com/aliansarinik Sabrina Halper: https://x.com/SabrinaHalper SPONSORSPresented by micro1: https://micro1.ai They're building the infrastructure for advancing intelligence through expert human data, real-world training environments, and contextual evaluations.TIMESTAMPS00:00 Intro 02:56 Growing up in Iran and moving to America 07:37 From eBay to textbook flipping 13:54 Building micro1 and the pivot to training data 19:39 Why internet data is the worst data 22:41 Are experts training their replacements? 29:27 Creativity, alignment, and subjective judgment 36:01 The robotics data bottleneck 45:11 Ordinary vs. Extraordinary Training Data43:56 America selling data to China53:56 $1B in 2.5 years56:53 Can the AI economy deliver?

Yinon Costica co-founded Wiz, which Google acquired for $32 billion in the largest acquisition in its history. I sat down with him at Wiz HQ in Tel Aviv to talk about the race to secure a world increasingly run by AI.Wiz on X: https://x.com/wiz_ioSabrina Halper on X: https://x.com/SabrinaHalperPRESENTING SPONSORThe 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/TIMESTAMPS00:00 Intro01:15 Yinon Costica, co-founder of Wiz02:00 IDF's Unit 8200, and meeting his co-founders06:30 Leaving Microsoft to start again08:30 The customer conversations that created Wiz11:30 From $1M to $100M ARR in 18 months14:15 How to scale without breaking17:15 Wiz Atlas: automating vulnerability research22:45 Can AI give defenders the advantage?25:15 Cybersecurity's AI twilight zone27:30 Should you give AI agents your credit card?32:00 Trust, Big Tech, and the software supply chain34:45 Open-weight models and security36:30 Vulnerabilities found at DeepSeek38:30 Preparing for AI-powered attacks43:30 What Google unlocks for Wiz44:30 How Wiz made the shift to AI47:15 Cybersecurity's biggest unsolved problem50:00 Securing agents with access to sensitive data52:15 What AI hacking agents can already do54:00 An internet built for agents56:15 The human role in cybersecurity58:30 Is it too early to pick AI's winners?59:45 Why the future could be more secureSubscribe for more conversations with the founders, scientists, and researchers shaping what comes next.#Wiz #AI #Cybersecurity

Alex Atallah co-founded OpenRouter in 2023 and recently signed an agreement to be acquired by Stripe for a reported ~$7B+. Before that, he co-founded OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace. Alex is a deep thinker and a one-of-a-kind company builder. I was honored to sit down with him again.We also talk about why OpenRouter and Stripe fit together, and their shared belief in an economy where value can come from many different models, businesses, and agents, rather than a handful of giant labs. We get into how Alex finds ideas before they seem obvious, what OpenRouter has taught him about how people actually use AI, why there won’t be one model that wins everything, and how agents will change the way we use software, spend money, and interact with the internet. More than anything, this is a conversation about how Alex thinks, builds companies, and sees the next few years of AI unfolding.Alex Atallah on X: https://x.com/alexatallahSabrina Halper on X: https://x.com/SabrinaHalper XPRESENTING SPONSORThe 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/ TIMESTAMPS00:00 Preview01:05 What is OpenRouter?04:17 Why ChatGPT ended his sabbatical07:30 Why Stripe is buying OpenRouter11:26 What happened on Jan 1, 2026?15:22 OpenRouter’s moat18:03 Homepage for all models19:30 Agent purchasing power24:01 Ox Alpha, Stealth models, & brand bias26:50 How AI models get priced & chosen29:29 Chinese open-weight models, evals & security32:39 An internet built for agents34:11 Stablecoins & the economics of AI agents37:25 What humans will still want to own39:21 Why engineers are becoming scientists41:47 What is the next "open" opportunity? 45:55 Our personal relationships with AI48:53 AI advice, accountability & safety51:24 Comparing AI model personalities53:29 Why Alex is optimistic about human creativity56:51 ClosingSubscribe for more conversations with the founders, scientists, and researchers shaping what comes next.#OpenRouter #AI #Stripe

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.If you enjoy this one, subscribe! It genuinely helps the show grow and improve every week.-Presented by micro1: ⁠micro1.ai LinkedIn: ⁠micro1-Sabrina HalperX: https://x.com/SabrinaHalper Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sabloves/?h... Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...-David HoltzX: ⁠https://x.com/daveholtz -TIMESTAMPS:00:00 Intro01:26 Is AI as significant to the economy as we hear?04:05 ChatGPT as a general purpose technology shift06:41 Inside OpenAI: The Shift From Chatbots to Agents08:56 Why AI Could Make Us Work More, Not Less10:56 Structuring Companies In a New Way15:02 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 Human33:03 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.-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/.-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 Intro00:36 Early Cancer Mission03:41 Working at a Cancer Lab as a Teen05:16 Immunotherapy Breakthrough07:05 Emerson Collective09:20 Founding Yosemite10:17 Making Cancer Nonlethal12:28 Using Grants to De-Risk Biotech Investing15:33 Academic vs. CEO Role19:11 Biology Is a Miracle22:52 Next-Decade Tooling25:22 His Dream of In Vivo CAR-T Cell Therapy28:51 Cracking Solid Tumors29:27 Same-Day Cell Editing33:46 The AI Era of Biology37:00 Cutting Clinical Trial Costs41:43 Highest-ROI Philanthropy45:10 Taylor Francis47:28 Yosemite’s Long-Term Impact50:29 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 Turnover01:14:57 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 Intro02:28 Inside Stripe When It Was Only 100 People08:45 How Sam Altman Sparked Chai’s Origin Story10:52 Why Chai Discovery Exists16:20 The Chai-2 Antibody Breakthrough19:24 Approaching Biology as Engineering24:45 Using AI to treat ourselves26:52 Robotics in labs27:22 Why Pharma Is Finally Moving on AI29:49 Can AI Fix Clinical Trials?32:53 Personalized biology models36:24 Longevity, Peptides, and Trillion-Dollar Drugs39:02 Does it matter that the government cuts exploratory science grants?41:00 What Next-Gen Chai Models Will Do42:08 Will Frontier AI Labs Build Biology Models?43:26 Biology is hard

Keri Findley, founder of Thiel-Backed fund Tacora Capital, shares a rare glimpse into her life and career: her path to Wall Street, eventually becoming one of the youngest partners at hedge fund Third Point while building its structured credit business from scratch, founding Tacora Capital with Peter Thiel anchoring the first fund as his biggest check ever.Along with wild success comes a target on your back and Keri reflects on difficult moments of litigation, divorce, and betrayal that ultimately informed her outlook on life. She pulls back the curtain on Wall Street: big wins, pressure, risk, and competition. We discuss venture credit, what contrarian investing actually looks like, the AI boom, today's tumultuous private credit markets, and what it means to be a high-ethics person in business.TIMESTAMPS:00:00 – From Columbia grad to Third Point partner: building a trading desk at 25 03:30 – Discovering Wall Street by accident and landing at Morgan Stanley 06:00 – The 2008 financial crisis and making her first high-stakes trades 10:00 – Hedge fund life: massive trades, pressure, and doubling money in mortgage bonds 14:00 – Wall Street rivalries and the fallout with Morgan Stanley 18:00 – The Bloomberg article 22:00 – Calling Alex Spiro and discovering the investigation might not exist 24:00 – Peter Thiel offering to fund the entire first fund and founding Tacora Capital 36:00 – Silicon Valley venture capital, AI hype, and herd mentality in investing 46:00 – The dark side of startups: unethical founder behavior and financial fraud 55:00 – Carrie’s advice to her 21-year-old self: resilience, integrity, and ignoring titles

Edward Saatchi (Saatchi & Saatchi family, former Head of Oculus Story Studio, Founder of Fable Studios) joins us to make the case that Hollywood is sleepwalking into the most radical disruption in the history of storytelling."Creativity is at a deep blue and Kasparov moment""AI isn't just a tool in the toolbox for filmmakers. It's a competitor"We talk about:★ Whether AI can be truly creative - Edward says yes★ Silicon Valley's quiet takeover of Hollywood★ Tech companies becoming media companies★ The rise of the one-person film★ Why AI will bring an aesthetic shift to cinema Then we go deeper into what this actually means for authorship, storytelling, and who gets to have a creative voice, when the cost of making a film collapses to near zero.TIMESTAMPS:00:00 Finding the New Medium of AI Art00:57 From Obama Campaign Tech to VR Storytelling at Oculus03:02 Why VR Didn’t Pan Out04:03 Fable Studios’ Vision04:20 Why “Cheaper VFX” Misses the Point of AI in Hollywood07:09 The Playable Star Wars Thought Experiment (and Studio Pushback)09:08 AI Media: Interactive, Remixable, Personal12:48 Simulation-First Story Worlds 14:51 AI Will Be Creative 16:43 World-Building vs. Prompt Engineering20:03 Hollywood’s Shifting Attitude 24:37 One-Person Films, YouTube Discovery, and AI-Generated Feeds29:21 Can AI Art Have a Point of View? 31:10 From Creativity to Consciousness: Why Simulations Matter32:13 ‘Exit Valley’: Using AI Satire Against Tech Power36:50 Silicon Valley vs. Hollywood40:52 Video Models, Robotics, and the ‘War on Cliché’44:45 Generated Media’s Role in Globalizing Content50:51 ‘AI Aesthetic’ in Film56:06 Saatchi & Saatchi: Edward’s Family Roots