No Priors
No Priors is a podcast hosted by Elad Gil and Sarah Guo featuring conversations with engineers, researchers, and founders about AI, machine learning, startups, AGI, markets, research, and technology’s effects on commerce, culture, and society.
Arm Moves From Chip IP Licensing to Physical Products
Arm chief executive Rene Haas argues that AI’s demand for accelerators has not diminished the CPU’s role as the system that schedules and coordinates computation. As Arm moves from licensing chip IP toward supplying more integrated systems and selected physical products, Haas says the company must compete not only on design but on access to wafers, memory, packaging, capital and deployment capacity. He also makes the case that US semiconductor manufacturing and data-center construction are strategic industrial assets, despite growing public resistance to their expansion.
Restoring Sensory Pathways Is the Central Goal of Neural Interfaces
Science.xyz co-founder and CEO Max Hodak argues that neural interfaces should be judged less by the BCI label than by whether they can restore the sensory and motor pathways through which the brain receives and acts on the world. He presents Science’s PRIMA retinal implant, which has European marketing approval, as an early proof: it bypasses damaged photoreceptors to give some blind patients form vision rather than ordinary sight. Hodak’s broader case is that treating the brain as a computational system could lead to devices that repair lost capabilities while offering a new way to study intelligence.
Nuclear’s Bottleneck Is Hardware Execution, Not Reactor Design
Valar Atomics founder Isaiah Taylor argues that nuclear power will become cheap and abundant not through a more elaborate reactor design, but through rapid hardware iteration and factory-style production. He says the company is using DOE testing authority to operate experimental reactors, generate the data that simulations cannot provide, and learn how to build simpler, passively safe systems at scale. Taylor’s wager is that vertical integration and equity-funded early deployments can turn nuclear from a bespoke construction business into repeatable industrial equipment.
Founders Must Separate Trillion-Dollar Ambition From Revenue Reality
Elad Gil argues that AI’s unusually fast creation of trillion-dollar valuations is distorting both investor expectations and founder behavior: most large markets cannot produce the revenue, margins, and speed needed for that outcome, while some strong founders are avoiding opportunities out of fear that frontier labs will absorb them. Sarah Guo agrees that founders should not let lab competition substitute for strategy, but argues that AI can expand markets beyond conventional seat-based spending and that financing conditions can still constrain companies with sound long-term theses. Their tension is that AI may change both the scale and pace of opportunity, but neither inflated valuation expectations nor fear of the labs replaces a realistic assessment of market capture, competitive advantage, and the capital required to pursue a thesis.
Private Evals Are Becoming the Core IP of Enterprise AI
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella argues that the AI frontier is shifting from single models to company-specific systems built from private evals, traces, tools, data and multi-model harnesses. In a Microsoft Build conversation with Sarah Guo, Elad Gil and Shawn Wang, Nadella says those private evaluation loops may become a company’s most important intellectual property, allowing enterprises to build their own specialist intelligence rather than merely consume frontier models. He also frames the broader test for AI as legitimacy: whether customers, workers and communities see measurable gains from the technology and the infrastructure behind it.
Enterprise AI Security Is Moving From Chat Monitoring to Action Control
Maxim Bar Kogan, founder and CEO of Onyx Security, argues that enterprise AI security is shifting from policing chatbot data leaks to controlling autonomous agents that can use credentials, call APIs, edit code and alter production systems. In a conversation with Sarah Guo, he makes the case for an independent AI control plane that can judge whether an agent’s actions match its assigned intent, rather than relying on traditional permissions, proxies or the model vendors themselves. Kogan says the hard problem is doing that supervision cheaply and quickly enough for enterprise deployment.
Cerebras’ Wafer-Scale AI Bet Fuels a $63 Billion IPO
Cerebras founder and CEO Andrew Feldman argues that the company’s roughly $63 billion public-market debut is the result of a decade-long wager on wafer-scale computing: a dinner-plate-sized chip architecture built for AI rather than a modified GPU. In a discussion with Elad Gil and Sarah Guo, Feldman says Cerebras survived years when the technology worked before the market cared, and that demand arrived only once AI became daily work and fast inference became commercially decisive.
Pax Silica Aims to Secure the Full AI Supply Chain
U.S. Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg argues that AI dominance depends on securing the full industrial supply chain behind compute, not just advanced semiconductors. In an interview with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil, Helberg presents Pax Silica as a 14-country economic-security coalition meant to build commercially viable allied supply-chain platforms, starting with a 4,000-acre industrial zone in the Philippines. He frames the strategy as a private-sector-led alternative to China’s Belt and Road model, combining domestic reindustrialization with partner-country specialization in critical inputs such as minerals, robotics components, and processing capacity.
Long Lake’s $6.3 Billion Amex GBT Deal Tests AI-Led Buyouts
Long Lake Management co-founder and CEO Alexander Taubman argues that AI can change the economics of services businesses when the buyer owns the workflow, not just the software layer. In a conversation with Elad Gil about Long Lake’s announced $6.3bn take-private of American Express Global Business Travel, Taubman presents the firm’s model as acquiring trusted services companies, embedding its Nexus AI platform into day-to-day operations, and using productivity gains to drive growth, customer service and employee retention rather than short-term cost cuts.