Lightwork

Lightspeed
  • 5.0 (1)
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  • Updated Weekly

There's more AI news than anyone can possibly consume. Lightwork is the filter. Every Monday, Lightspeed's Claire Zau and Josh Machiz break down the one development that mattered most that week — a model release, a funding round, a company structural shift — and work through what changes because of it. They also bring in a guest working at the front of AI to sharpen the picture. By the end of each episode, you'll have a clearer view of where things are going and why it matters to you. New episodes every Monday morning. Have something you want to hear? Email us at lightwork@lsvp.com.

  1. 1d ago

    The Week AI Officially Became SI | Lightwork

    Claire Zau and Josh Machiz were both in DC this week, stuck in traffic for a White House lunch they didn't know was happening until they saw the seating chart. About twenty executives were in the room, and what came out was the White House Accord on Superintelligence, a one page document covering internal monitoring, verification teams, an independent auditor, and a board committee. Alongside it, an executive order renaming artificial intelligence to superintelligence across federal documents. Claire breaks down what the accord actually commits anyone to, and why a lunch is not a law.Then the government's own product launch. America.gov puts one chatbot in front of roughly 29,000 government sites, the ones about 40 million people visit daily, and Josh has been testing it. From there, OpenAI's DevDay and more than 20 launches, led by Dots, an always on agent with its own computer that you can voice call, plus GPT-6.1 Sol at a fifth of Astra's token price. Claire and Josh get into what Josh calls the Tamagotchification of tech, and whether anyone wants four of these assistants. Finally Starship, which reached orbit for the first time after 13 suborbital tests and deployed 26 V3 Starlink satellites, having lost an engine on the way up. Plus updates from ElevenLabs and Modus. Lightspeed joined ElevenLabs' Series D and led Modus' seed and Series A.Stay in touch: www.lsvp.comX: https://twitter.com/lightspeedvpLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspeed-venture-partners/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightspeedventurepartners/Chapters: 00:00 Welcome Back to Lightwork!01:15 Stuck in DC Traffic for a White House Lunch01:52 Who Was in the Room03:32 The White House Accord on Superintelligence04:48 Trump Renames AI to Superintelligence08:01 America.gov: One Chatbot for 29,000 Government Sites10:03 Josh Tests the Chatbot12:20 OpenAI DevDay: Introducing Dots15:05 The Tamagotchification of Tech19:37 Do You Really Want Four AI Assistants?19:47 GPT-6.1 Sol: Frontier Intelligence at a Fifth of the Cost24:20 Starship Reaches Orbit After 13 Suborbital Tests29:36 The First Commercial Starship Flight31:05 ElevenLabs V4 and Modus Audit BenchThe content here does not constitute tax, legal, business or investment advice or an offer to provide such advice, should not be construed as advocating the purchase or sale of any security or investment or a recommendation of any company, and is not an offer, or solicitation of an offer, for the purchase or sale of any security or investment product. The views expressed by our guests do not necessarily represent the views of Lightspeed. For more details please see lsvp.com/legal.

  2. 2d ago

    Why NVIDIA Open Sourced Its Agent Security Layer | Lightwork

    NVIDIA just open sourced the piece it says was missing from the agent stack. Claire Zau talks with Ali Golshan, Senior Director of AI Software at NVIDIA, about OpenShell and Sentry, and why a chip company is giving the runtime away under Apache 2.0 with more than a hundred partners already on board. His argument is that we have been trying to secure agents inside an environment never built for them, and the fix is not a better prompt or one more guardrail in the harness. He believes enforcement has to sit outside the agent's own process, where it cannot reason about it or route around it, while still leaving the agent room to work. He walks through what the recent agent breakouts actually had in common, and why none of them surprised him. He also explains what opened up once teams could trust fleets of agents on long running tasks, why he keeps coming back to SSL and the early web, and the gaps he wants founders building in, from agent-native identity to policy verification. Chapters: 0:00 OpenShell and Sentry Explained 2:42 Why Make OpenShell Open Source? 4:41 What Can AI Trust Unlock? 7:07 Why Companies Are Joining OpenShell 8:55 Rethinking Sandboxing for AI Agents 11:28 Rethinking AI Agent Safety 13:36 What Some People Are Missing in AI Security Stay in touch: www.lsvp.com X: https://twitter.com/lightspeedvp LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspeed-venture-partners/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightspeedventurepartners/ The content here does not constitute tax, legal, business or investment advice or an offer to provide such advice, should not be construed as advocating the purchase or sale of any security or investment or a recommendation of any company, and is not an offer, or solicitation of an offer, for the purchase or sale of any security or investment product. The views expressed by our guests do not necessarily represent the views of Lightspeed. For more details please see lsvp.com/legal.

  3. Sep 25

    Jev: The Model That Can't Talk, Amazon Blocks Meta's Muse & a Robot Teaches Itself Soccer | Lightwork

    Claire Zau and Josh Machiz open with the launch developers spent the week arguing about. TypeSafe AI came out of stealth with Jev, a model that never writes a word. You send it a state and typed questions and it sends back picks, scores and probabilities in a single pass, in 70 to 500 milliseconds, at $42 per billion input tokens. Claire explains why TypeSafe calls it a System One model, how it differs from the classifiers developers have used for years, and where she believes the real gain is: routing the small yes-or-no decisions inside an agent workflow away from a reasoning model that was never needed for them. Then the fight over who gets to let agents in. Amazon started blocking Meta's Muse agent from its site, arguing that agents shopping on a customer's behalf should identify themselves and ask permission, while Shopify opened every one of its stores to Muse through Shop Pay the same day. Claire and Josh get into what agentic shopping actually changes for retailers versus platforms, and which purchases people will hand over and which they won't. Skild AI also showed a humanoid robot that learned soccer by playing against recent versions of itself in simulation, roughly 140 years of it, picking up dribbling, tackling and recovering from falls without those behaviors being hand-coded. Skild AI is a Lightspeed portfolio company and Lightspeed co-led its Series A. Plus behind the scenes footage from Meta Connect.

  4. Sep 24

    Why 25,000+ New Yorkers Are Waiting for This Health Scan

    Hjalmar Nilsonne, CEO and co-founder of Neko Health, joins Lightwork to explain how a Twitter message from Spotify founder Daniel Ek ultimately led to a new approach to preventive healthcare. Hjalmar breaks down why Neko spent years building its own diagnostic technology, what happens during its $499, hour-long health scan, and why the company believes vertically integrating hardware, software, clinicians, and physical clinics can create a fundamentally different healthcare experience. They also discuss Neko’s expansion into the U.S., why New York was the first market, the challenges of scaling quality, and how AI and longitudinal health data could reshape personalized healthcare in the years ahead. 0:00 "The Most Important Hour You Can Spend On Your Health" 0:46 Growing Up In A Family Of Doctors And Daniel Ek's Direct Message 6:02 Five Years Building And The Vertically Integrated Approach 9:35 The Neko Scan Experience 11:24 Why Build Everything In-House And Neko As A Real Estate Company 17:47 Myth Busting Worried Well And Over-diagnosis 21:43 Do You Still Need A PCP And Why Pay Out Of Pocket 24:11 What Happens To Your Data And Why New York First 26:24 Adapting To The US Healthcare System And Landing On 499 Dollars 28:07 What Is Hardest To Scale And The Big Vision 30:58 The R&D Team And Why Longitudinal Data Matters 33:02 Thank You And Closing Stay in touch: www.lsvp.com X: https://twitter.com/lightspeedvp LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspeed-venture-partners/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightspeedventurepartners/ The content here does not constitute tax, legal, business or investment advice or an offer to provide such advice, should not be construed as advocating the purchase or sale of any security or investment or a recommendation of any company, and is not an offer, or solicitation of an offer, for the purchase or sale of any security or investment product. The views expressed by our guests do not necessarily represent the views of Lightspeed. For more details please see lsvp.com/legal.

  5. Sep 22

    The $250B Business Expense Nobody's Been Managing Until Now | Ande on Lightwork

    Corporate entertainment is a massive category, but booking client dinners, team events, sports outings, catering, and merchandise is still fragmented across countless systems and vendors. Ande CEO and co-founder Lohit Sarma joins Lightwork to explain how the company is building an operating system for corporate entertainment. He breaks down why Ande spent more than two years building its network before coming out of stealth, how the company works with hospitality providers and enterprise procurement teams, and why AI is embedded across both its product and internal operations. Sarma also discusses Ande’s network of more than 1,600 hospitality groups, its rollout across 60 large enterprises, the company’s goal of routing roughly $400 million through the platform by year-end, and what he believes it will take to scale that network 10x. Chapters: 0:00 Ande Comes Out Of Stealth 2:17 Why Corporate Entertainment Has Stayed Fragmented 4:51 Lohit Sarma's Background (Lifion by ADP) 9:51 What CFOs Revealed About Fraud And Offshore Teams 10:47 Building The Supply Side First 16:44 Ande's Enterprise Customers And Rollout Strategy 18:40 How AI Is Built Into Ande's Ethos 22:58 The Future Of Ande 26:11 Hiring A Team To Build A Category 29:38 What Can Break At Ten Times The Size 31:50 Celebrating The Launch And Where To Find Ande The content here does not constitute tax, legal, business or investment advice or an offer to provide such advice, should not be construed as advocating the purchase or sale of any security or investment or a recommendation of any company, and is not an offer, or solicitation of an offer, for the purchase or sale of any security or investment product. The views expressed by our guests do not necessarily represent the views of Lightspeed. For more details please see ⁠lsvp.com/legal⁠. The $250B Business Expense Nobody's Been Managing Until Now

  6. Sep 21

    Inside the Tech Powering 500K+ Audio Drama Creators | Pocket FM on Lightwork

    Pocket FM co-founder and CEO Rohan Nayak joins Claire Zau and Josh Machiz on Lightwork to explore how AI is changing the economics of entertainment and who gets to create it.Rohan breaks down Pocket FM’s approach to mobile-first audio dramas, why falling creation costs could unlock an entirely new generation of storytellers, and how Pocket’s AI fiction-writing tool, Sherpa, tackles some of the hardest problems in AI storytelling, including narrative memory, emotional prose, and long-form planning.They also discuss what makes a story compelling, how Pocket discovers breakout content, the creators building new careers on the platform, and Pocket Saga, the company’s expansion into AI-generated video microdramas. Rohan closes with his vision for a future of a billion creators producing a billion stories for a billion people.Chapters:0:00 Pocket FM’s $500M ARR milestone and massive creator vision1:13 What Pocket FM is and why audio dramas could work3:39 The shift from TV and streaming to AI entertainment8:30 Humans, AI and the creative spark behind hit stories10:20 How Pocket FM supports and trains creators12:12 How Sherpa turns an idea into a full series13:06 AI content creation explodes to 2.6M hours15:33 The $90M hit Hollywood might never have greenlit18:54 Why AI content quality and originality still matter20:34 How Pocket FM uses AI to find potential blockbusters23:42 Scaling the technology behind Pocket FM25:23 Why general purpose LLMs often struggle with long form fiction28:26 Training models with 5 billion hours of engagement data30:04 What can make a story addictive32:02 How Pocket FM has changed creators’ lives34:22 Global expansion, Sherpa and the launch of Pocket Saga38:11 Rohan’s competitive approach to building Pocket FM40:22 The vision for a billion creators and a billion storiesStay in touch: www.lsvp.comX: https://twitter.com/lightspeedvpLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspeed-venture-partners/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightspeedventurepartners/Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: generativenow.coThe content here does not constitute tax, legal, business or investment advice or an offer to provide such advice, should not be construed as advocating the purchase or sale of any security or investment or a recommendation of any company, and is not an offer, or solicitation of an offer, for the purchase or sale of any security or investment product. The views expressed by our guests do not necessarily represent the views of Lightspeed. For more details please see lsvp.com/legal.Inside the Tech Powering 500K+ Audio Drama Creators | Pocket FM on Lightworkhttps://youtu.be/9Z1lnlmVBN0

  7. Sep 18

    AI Labs Debate Safety, Suno V6 Arrives & Bending Spoons’ Miro Deal | Lightwork

    Claire and Josh break down the growing push to “pace the frontier” as Dario Amodei and other AI leaders debate how quickly AI should advance and what new safety guardrails could look like. They also unpack Suno V6’s new licensed approach to AI-generated music and what it could mean for artists, before diving into Bending Spoons’ agreement to acquire Miro and what the deal signals for the next generation of software companies. Chapters: 00:00 Welcome to Lightwork 0:58 AI Safety Goes Mainstream 04:47 What Does “Pacing the Frontier” Actually Mean? 05:32 Dario Amodei’s Call for a Coordinated AI Slowdown 07:59 Are AI Models Optimizing for Human Intent? 10:48 Microsoft’s Rules for Safer AI 12:30 Who Should Regulate Frontier AI? 16:02 Is AI Safety Just Fear-Mongering? 18:53 Suno Ships the Licensed Models 20:26 How Suno V6 Handles Copyright & Artist Rights 23:43 Bending Spoons Buys Miro 27:17 What Is Bending Spoons’ Bigger Strategy? 29:21 The Future of AI, Music & Software Stay in touch: www.lsvp.com X: https://twitter.com/lightspeedvp LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspeed-venture-partners/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightspeedventurepartners/ Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: generativenow.co The content here does not constitute tax, legal, business or investment advice or an offer to provide such advice, should not be construed as advocating the purchase or sale of any security or investment or a recommendation of any company, and is not an offer, or solicitation of an offer, for the purchase or sale of any security or investment product. The views expressed by our guests do not necessarily represent the views of Lightspeed. For more details please see lsvp.com/legal.

    AI Labs Debate Safety, Suno V6 Arrives & Bending Spoons’ Miro Deal | Lightwork

  8. Sep 15

    What Happens When AI Becomes Your Marketing Team? | Profound on Lightwork

    Profound co-founder and CEO, James Cadwallader, joins Lightspeed’s Claire Zau following the company’s $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation. They discuss how AI agents are changing the way consumers discover brands, Profound’s evolution from AI visibility analytics into an always-on AI marketing teammate, and why enterprise marketers need a unified context layer to create high-quality, on-brand work at scale. James also breaks down the emerging role of the marketing engineer, Profound’s work to build a comprehensive marketing benchmark, what the new funding could help the company build, and why he believes the future of marketing will be AI-driven and human-supervised. Timestamps: 0:00 What Does Profound Do and What Is AEO? 3:16 What Does Profound Unlock Today? 4:59 Where Does AI Marketing Still Need Human Judgment? 7:20 What Is a Marketing Engineer and How Will the Role Evolve? 9:27 How Do You Benchmark Marketing? 11:45 What Drove Profound to Raise Its Series D? 13:10 What Could Marketing Look Like in Five Years?

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About

There's more AI news than anyone can possibly consume. Lightwork is the filter. Every Monday, Lightspeed's Claire Zau and Josh Machiz break down the one development that mattered most that week — a model release, a funding round, a company structural shift — and work through what changes because of it. They also bring in a guest working at the front of AI to sharpen the picture. By the end of each episode, you'll have a clearer view of where things are going and why it matters to you. New episodes every Monday morning. Have something you want to hear? Email us at lightwork@lsvp.com.

Information

  • Creator
    Lightspeed
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    28
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Lightspeed
  • Show Website
    Lightwork

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