Limits: Physical Tasks vs. Benchmark Wins

This week we sit down with three founders building at the frontier of AI infrastructure, evaluation, and hardware: Chase Lochmiller (Crusoe), Naveen Rao (Unconventional AI), and Anastasios Angelopoulos (Arena). We dig into the real bottlenecks slowing down the AI buildout, how to standout in the job market as AI matures, and the explosive government standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon.

We explore how AI infrastructure, open source models, and policy are reshaping the industry from the ground up.

• The Anthropic-Pentagon Standoff: The U.S. government blacklisted a leading domestic AI company for the first time. Who sets the rules for AI in warfare?
• Jevons Paradox & AI: Every efficiency gain in intelligence-per-watt creates more demand, not less. AI infra is positioned to capture the largest market humanity has ever built.
• OpenClaw & Open Source Mania: The open-source AI agent that just became GitHub's most-starred project. It now runs locally on your phone.
• Should You Learn to Code?: Yes, but not as a trade skill. Bootcamp-style training is dead. Understanding how machines work is what separates leaders from everyone else.
• Rethinking the Computer from Scratch: Naveen's team is building chips that mimic biology, targeting 1,000x efficiency gains.
• The Coming Labor Crisis: Anastasios argues most valuable work is just training humans for repeatable tasks, and that work is disappearing. Chase counters that digital labor is a new variable in the GDP equation.

This Week In Startups is made possible by:

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Timestamps:

00:38 — Welcome to This Week in AI

01:21 — Show intro and guest introductions (Chase from Crusoe and Anastasius from Arena)

02:22 — Crusoe's Stargate partnership: 1.2GW campus for Oracle and OpenAI in Abilene, Texas

03:09 — Rethinking computing from first principles for 1,000x efficiency

06:53 — How Arena went from a Berkeley side project to half a billion conversations

09:28 — Quadratic - Bringing the productivity boost of AI into your spreadsheets. Visit https://www.quadratic.ai/twist to sign up and use the code TWIST to get one free month of their pro tier subscription.

12:01 — Open source AI explosion: On-device models, token costs, and adoption

15:31 — Defining AGI: Clay Math millennium problems, moving goalposts, and what AI still can't do

22:08 — Notion - Notion brings all your notes, docs, and projects into one connected space that just works with AI built right in. Try Notion, with Notion Agent, at https://www.notion.com/twist

23:07 — System 1 vs. System 2 thinking and where compute actually happens

26:31 — Crusoe Spark: Modular data centers that go where the power is

34:33 — Model compression is moving faster than anyone predicted

36:51 — Jevons Paradox, the employment question, and the coming labor crisis

45:53 — Abundance, advice for young people, and the importance of learning to code

64:41 — AI in warfare: Corporate responsibility, inevitability, and national obligations

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