Sabrina Halper Show

Sabrina Halper
  • 5.0 (13)
  • Technology
  • Updated Biweekly

The mind, the machine, and the meaning of it all.

  1. 6d ago

    How Micro1 Turned AI’s Data Problem Into $1B ARR in 2.5 Years | Ali Ansari

    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 SPONSORS Presented by micro1: https://micro1.ai They're building the infrastructure for advancing intelligence through expert human data, real-world training environments, and contextual evaluations. TIMESTAMPS 00:00 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 Data 43:56 America selling data to China 53:56 $1B in 2.5 years 56:53 Can the AI economy deliver?

  2. Oct 7

    Google’s $32B Bet on Cybersecurity in the AI vs. AI Era | Wiz Co-Founder Yinon Costica

    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/SabrinaHalper PRESENTING SPONSOR The 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 01:15 Yinon Costica, co-founder of Wiz 02:00 IDF's Unit 8200, and meeting his co-founders 06:30 Leaving Microsoft to start again 08:30 The customer conversations that created Wiz 11:30 From $1M to $100M ARR in 18 months 14:15 How to scale without breaking 17:15 Wiz Atlas: automating vulnerability research 22:45 Can AI give defenders the advantage? 25:15 Cybersecurity's AI twilight zone 27:30 Should you give AI agents your credit card? 32:00 Trust, Big Tech, and the software supply chain 34:45 Open-weight models and security 36:30 Vulnerabilities found at DeepSeek 38:30 Preparing for AI-powered attacks 43:30 What Google unlocks for Wiz 44:30 How Wiz made the shift to AI 47:15 Cybersecurity's biggest unsolved problem 50:00 Securing agents with access to sensitive data 52:15 What AI hacking agents can already do 54:00 An internet built for agents 56:15 The human role in cybersecurity 58:30 Is it too early to pick AI's winners? 59:45 Why the future could be more secure Subscribe for more conversations with the founders, scientists, and researchers shaping what comes next.#Wiz #AI #Cybersecurity

  3. Sep 29

    Alex Atallah (OpenRouter, OpenSea): Agents Will Drive Most of GDP Growth

    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

  4. Sep 15

    What the Data Reveals About How AI Will Change Work | David Holtz (Professor & AGI Economics Researcher)

    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 Halper X: 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 Intro 01:26 Is AI as significant to the economy as we hear? 04:05 ChatGPT as a general purpose technology shift 06:41 Inside OpenAI: The Shift From Chatbots to Agents 08:56 Why AI Could Make Us Work More, Not Less 10:56 Structuring Companies In a New Way 15:02 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 Human 33:03 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

  5. Sep 2

    Factory’s Matan Grinberg on Recursive Self-Improvement, Chinese Models & Lessons From String Theory

    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

  6. Aug 5

    Reed Jobs’ Fight Against Cancer

    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 Intro 00:36 Early Cancer Mission 03:41 Working at a Cancer Lab as a Teen 05:16 Immunotherapy Breakthrough 07:05 Emerson Collective 09:20 Founding Yosemite 10:17 Making Cancer Nonlethal12:28 Using Grants to De-Risk Biotech Investing 15:33 Academic vs. CEO Role 19:11 Biology Is a Miracle22:52 Next-Decade Tooling 25:22 His Dream of In Vivo CAR-T Cell Therapy 28:51 Cracking Solid Tumors 29:27 Same-Day Cell Editing 33:46 The AI Era of Biology 37:00 Cutting Clinical Trial Costs 41:43 Highest-ROI Philanthropy 45:10 Taylor Francis 47:28 Yosemite’s Long-Term Impact 50:29 San Francisco Today#CancerResearch #Biotech #AI #Medicine #ReedJobs

  7. Jul 10

    How He’s Leading the Race to Reverse Aging - New Limit's Cofounder Jacob Kimmel

    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 Turnover 01:14:57 Living Off Earth 01:16:55 AI And Biosecurity Risks #longevity #antiaging #biotech

  8. May 20

    Engineering Biology With AI: The Future of Medicine

    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 Intro 02:28 Inside Stripe When It Was Only 100 People 08:45 How Sam Altman Sparked Chai’s Origin Story 10:52 Why Chai Discovery Exists 16:20 The Chai-2 Antibody Breakthrough 19:24 Approaching Biology as Engineering 24:45 Using AI to treat ourselves26:52 Robotics in labs 27:22 Why Pharma Is Finally Moving on AI 29:49 Can AI Fix Clinical Trials? 32:53 Personalized biology models 36:24 Longevity, Peptides, and Trillion-Dollar Drugs 39:02 Does it matter that the government cuts exploratory science grants? 41:00 What Next-Gen Chai Models Will Do 42:08 Will Frontier AI Labs Build Biology Models? 43:26 Biology is hard

    Engineering Biology With AI: The Future of Medicine
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About

The mind, the machine, and the meaning of it all.

Information

  • Creator
    Sabrina Halper
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    33
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Sabrina Halper
  • Show Website
    Sabrina Halper Show

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