AI in Warfare, OpenClaw & The Stargate Mega-Campus | This Week in AI E3

46 snips

Mar 4, 2026

Guest

Anastasios Angelopoulos

Guest

Naveen Rao

Anastasios Angelopoulos, creator of LM Arena (Berkeley-born model evaluation platform). Naveen Rao, founder of Unconventional AI (hardware visionary rethinking compute for huge efficiency gains). They unpack on-device open-source agents, rethinking chip and datacenter design for scale and efficiency, the surge in token and compute demand, and how AI reshapes labor and infrastructure.

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ANECDOTE

Arena Grew From Berkeley Voting Experiments

LM Arena began as a Berkeley side project to evaluate chat models by pitting two responses and letting users vote.
It grew from campus gift-card incentives to tens of millions of users and half a billion conversations, then spun into a company.

INSIGHT

Small Models Are Reaching Big Model Quality

Open-source and model distillation are rapidly enabling on-device inference, shrinking models while preserving quality.
Examples include Qwen variants and Quinn 3.5 running on iPhone-class devices and smaller distilled models serving inference needs.

INSIGHT

Why AGI Benchmarks Keep Moving

AGI definitions shift because models solve hard benchmarks yet fail trivial human tasks, so benchmarks quickly overfit.
Anastasios suggests unsolved math (Clay Millennium) problems as robust tests because solutions can't be pre-learned.

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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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