The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck goes deep with the people building AI. Each week, Matt talks with top founders, researchers, and leaders about frontier models, agents, infrastructure, and the companies defining the AI economy. Guests include leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Hugging Face, Vercel, LangChain, Cloudflare, Snowflake, Datadog, Cerebras, and more. Matt is a General Partner at FirstMark, a prolific investor in AI and the creator of the MAD Landscape, the industry’s reference map of the AI ecosystem. New episodes weekly. Transcripts and more at mattturck.com/podcast.
The podcast explores the concept of recursive self-improvement (RSI) in AI, where AI autonomously builds the next generation of AI. Mostafa Dehghani, a top AI researcher at Google DeepMind, explains that this process is already underway in many labs, with new models being built using previous generations. A key challen...
The podcast explores the strategic challenges facing OpenAI and the broader implications of AI for software development and business models. It questions whether foundation models can achieve winner-takes-all status due to the ease of replication and the high costs involved, unlike traditional software with network eff...
Harrison Chase, co-founder and CEO of LangChain, discusses the evolution of AI agents, highlighting the shift from early models to today's more sophisticated systems. He emphasizes the importance of the "harness," which dictates how a model interacts with its environment, including tools for file editing and code execu...
The conversation centers on the evolving landscape of AI hardware, geopolitical implications, and the future of AI model development. Semianalysis' Dylan Patel provides insights into NVIDIA's acquisition of Grok, interpreting it as a strategic move to cover diverse AI model architectures amidst increasing specializatio...
The debate over AGI centers on the tension between physical computational limits and the potential for massive scaling. Tim Dettmers contends that hardware is hitting diminishing returns, constrained by the von Neumann bottleneck and the physical limits of memory movement and precision. Conversely, Dan Fu posits that m...
In this episode of The MAD Podcast, Matt Turck interviews Sebastian Bourgeaud, pre-training lead on Gemini 3 at Google DeepMind, about the architecture and capabilities of Gemini 3, the shift from a data-unlimited to a data-limited regime, and the organization of research teams at DeepMind. Bourgeaud discusses the incr...
In The MAD Podcast, Matt Turck interviews Lukasz Kaiser, a key figure in modern AI and one of the inventors of the transformer architecture. They discuss the exponential progress of AI, the shift towards reasoning models, and the misconception that AI development is slowing down. Lukasz explains that while pre-training...
The release of the OLMo 3 model family marks a significant effort by the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) to provide a fully transparent, open-source alternative to proprietary models. This release includes base, instruction-tuned, and reasoning models, accompanied by the complete training data, recipes, and intermediate c...
In this episode of The MAD Podcast, Matt Turck interviews Julian Schrittwieser, a prominent AI researcher from Anthropic, about the exponential progress of AI. They discuss the common misunderstanding of AI's trajectory, comparing it to the early stages of COVID, and Julian's predictions for AI capabilities in 2026 and...
In this episode of The MAD Podcast, Matt Turck interviews Jerry Tworek, VP of Research at OpenAI, about the evolution of AI reasoning models. They discuss the concept of reasoning in AI, particularly the "chain of thought" process, and how models decide how long to "think" to balance result quality and user experience....
In this episode of The MAD Podcast, Matt Turck interviews Sholto Douglas, a leading AI researcher at Anthropic, about the release of Claude Sonnet 4.5, now considered the best coding model. They discuss the rapid pace of AI releases, the differences between Anthropic's Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku models, and Sholto's journ...
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