Gradient Dissent

→ WHAT IT COVERS Carina Hong, CEO of Axiom Math, explains how her company builds AI mathematicians that combine generation and verification using formal languages like Lean. Axiom scored nine out of twelve on the 2026 Putnam exam, surpassing last year's top human performer, demonstrating breakthrough capabilities in formal mathematical reasoning and proof verification.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Mike Cannon-Brookes, CEO of Atlassian ($42B valuation), explains how his company approaches AI implementation across developer and business teams. He reveals metrics on 3.5+ million monthly AI users, discusses measuring developer productivity versus developer joy, and shares why Atlassian uses 75+ AI models simultaneously while maintaining focus on sustainable long-term growth over rapid revenue maximization.

→ WHAT IT COVERS CoreWeave SVP Corey Sanders explains how the $41B AI cloud differentiates from AWS, Azure, and GCP through specialized infrastructure like liquid cooling, custom object storage, and laser focus on AI workloads rather than general-purpose computing. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Purpose-built storage architecture:** CoreWeave's LOTA cache and object storage system optimizes GPU utilization by maximizing data throughput directly to GPUs, making different design assumptions than public...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Nico West from Rerun.ai discusses building logging infrastructure for robotics and embodied AI, covering data visualization challenges, robotics breakthrough progress, and designing systems for multimodal physical world data. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Data Model Design:** Physical AI requires custom data formats supporting multimodal, multirate, episodic data that traditional tabular databases cannot handle, necessitating complete infrastructure redesigns from scratch using...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Runway CEO Chris Reiber explains how his startup achieved top video AI model ranking despite competing against tech giants. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Resource efficiency:** Small teams can outperform tech giants through creative optimization of training and inference processes, not just massive compute budgets. - **Video model architecture:** Training on observational video data rather than language alone enables models to grasp physical reality and spatial-temporal consistency better.

→ WHAT IT COVERS BaseTen CEO Tuhin Srivastava explains how his AI inference company pivoted from serving data scientists with small models to becoming fastest-growing inference provider for production applications. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Company pivoting:** Stay lean during market shifts - BaseTen remained 18 people from 2019-2023, enabling rapid pivots when ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion created new opportunities without organizational weight.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Edwin Chen built Surge into a billion-dollar human data collection business serving AGI labs, focusing on high-complexity tasks over commodity labeling. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Quality over scale:** Focus on sophisticated human intelligence tasks rather than commodity labeling like bounding boxes - hire for expertise, not volume of workers.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean, discusses building enterprise AI search using transformers since 2019, enterprise security models, and organizational transformation through AI agents. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Enterprise AI Architecture:** Build custom embedding models for semantic matching on company data, but use off-the-shelf GPT models for reasoning and generation to avoid reinventing existing capabilities.

→ WHAT IT COVERS DeepL CEO Jarek Kutylowski explains how his translation company competes against Google and OpenAI through specialized models, proprietary data, and enterprise workflows. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Model Architecture:** DeepL builds translation-specific architectures that balance accuracy with fluency, combining copying mechanisms with creative text generation for superior results over general-purpose models.

→ WHAT IT COVERS GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke discusses Copilot's development, AI coding productivity metrics, acquisition success factors, and how software development workflows evolve with autonomous agents. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Acquisition Success Framework:** GitHub's success stems from three principles: put developers first, focus on how Microsoft accelerates GitHub (not vice versa), then consider reverse acceleration later.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Martin Shkreli discusses his transition from pharmaceutical CEO to AI entrepreneur, defending his drug pricing decisions while critiquing AI applications in drug discovery and building financial trading software. → KEY INSIGHTS - **AI Drug Discovery Limitations:** The major bottleneck in drug discovery is target identification, not chemistry or molecular design.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Cursor co-founder Sualeh Asif explains building the popular AI coding editor, scaling to 100 million daily requests, infrastructure challenges, and the future of AI-assisted programming. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Model Selection:** Cursor uses DeepSeek models for their tab completion feature, processing hundreds of millions of requests daily due to superior pre-training and cost efficiency for coding tasks.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Christopher Ahlberg discusses how Recorded Future uses AI to analyze dark web criminal marketplaces, providing threat intelligence that helped Ukraine defend against cyberattacks before Mastercard's $2.65B acquisition. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Dark Web Intelligence:** Criminal marketplaces operate like specialized businesses with sellers offering server access, ransomware software, and money laundering services across forums requiring multi-layer social engineering to penetrate...