Open Source Wins, AGI Is Here, and Scorsese's AI Toolkit with CEOs of Cerebras & Black Forest Labs

Open Source Wins, AGI Is Here, and Scorsese's AI Toolkit with CEOs of Cerebras & Black Forest Labs

Andrew Feldman says AGI is already here by any definition we'd have used 20 years ago — we just haven't fully deployed it yet.

Jul 10, 2026 1:03:57 Difficulty: Intermediate Played

TL;DR

Andrew Feldman (Cerebras) and Robin Rombach (Black Forest Labs) join Jason Calacanis at what appears to be a Paris event to discuss the AI buildout, inference computing, open source sovereignty, and generative video. Feldman argues AGI has already arrived by any prior definition, explains how Cerebras is breaking Moore's Law with a new chip architecture, and makes the case that AI will enable a world where no child dies of cancer. Rombach reveals Black Forest Labs worked directly with Martin Scorsese to explore generative video as a creative tool. Key takeaway: reasoning + fast inference = exponential gains that are only beginning.

#AI inference hardware #wafer-scale chips #AGI debate #open source models #AI sovereignty #latent diffusion #generative video #AI in filmmaking #AI robotics #data center buildout #AI red teaming #token economics #recursive AI learning #AI education #Cerebras #Black Forest Labs #AI inference #open source AI #AGI #Moore's Law #reasoning models #Martin Scorsese #AI data centers #robotics #film production AI #wafer-scale chip

Andrew Feldman (Cerebras CEO) and Robin Rombach (Black Forest Labs CEO) discuss the AI buildout, inference computing, open source AI sovereignty, AGI, and generative video — including a partnership with Martin Scorsese.

Chapter list
  • The episode opens at what appears to be a Paris setting, with Jason Calacanis welcoming back Andrew Feldman, founder and CEO of Cerebras, whom he last saw at Davos and at a recent Liquidity event. Calacanis frames the conversation around two big themes: the unprecedented AI buildout and what it means for inference computing. Before the conversation begins in earnest, the AppLovin Ads sponsorship segment airs — spotlighting the platform's billion-user reach inside mobile games, its AI-driven ad optimization, and a case study in which a cookware brand scaled from $4M to a projected $80M in revenue using the platform.

  • Feldman describes a fundamental shift in human-AI interaction: early models did exactly what you told them — the classic 'computers are dumb, they do exactly what you say' formulation from a colleague two decades ago. But modern reasoning models like those in OpenAI's latest releases are beginning to infer intent: a user asks for a chart, and the model proactively offers both a line and a bar version. Calacanis illustrates this vividly with a live experiment — using an unrestricted model to build a real-time trend-scouting agent that debates with itself about where to look for emerging signals (Hacker News, Reddit, Instagram). He watches the model reason in real time, debating its own approach before collapsing into an answer. This is not ChatGPT summarizing a PDF — this is an agent doing strategic research, checking its own work, and asking the human what it missed.

  • Feldman takes the conversation into longer time horizons. The fundamental constraint on human knowledge is that paradigms shift at the speed of generations: Thomas Kuhn showed us that Freud, Skinner, and their disciples maintained intellectual dominance not because their ideas were right, but because they held positions of leadership until they died. New ideas have to wait for the old guard to exit. AI breaks this constraint. Feldman reaches for the geneticist's tool: fruit flies produce two generations per day, allowing researchers to observe thousands of generations of evolution in a single career. AI is now doing the equivalent for knowledge — compressing what previously took centuries of human intellectual turnover into near-instantaneous iterative cycles. He closes with the Palace of Versailles as metaphor: the builders who worked on century-long projects across multiple family generations were doing recursive, compounding learning. AI is that, but at the speed of compute.

  • Robin Rombach introduces himself and his company with a technical origin story that reframes the scope of what Black Forest Labs has built. He and his co-founders invented the latent diffusion algorithm as PhD students in Munich — a method that compresses natural data like images and video into efficient latent representations and trains a transformer model on that compressed space. The intuition is old (JPEG compression, MP3 audio encoding) but the application to generative AI was new. From that foundation came Stable Diffusion, and from Stable Diffusion came Black Forest Labs and Flux. Now, two years in and past 100 employees, the company is pushing into territory that goes far beyond images: multimodal models that simultaneously process images, video, and audio as both inputs and outputs — and can generate content in any of those modalities. The next frontier is action prediction: using the same model to predict physical robot actions, bridging generative AI and the real world.

  • Rombach steps back from the film discussion to articulate the deeper architectural insight: the model that makes a movie and the model that drives a robot are not two different technologies — they are the same model. Pre-training on video at scale gives a model implicit understanding of physics, causality, and spatial relationships — the foundations of intelligent physical action. From that base, only a few hours of task-specific fine-tuning data are needed to deploy the model on a specific robot in a factory setting. The long-term goal is to make even that fine-tuning unnecessary, enabling in-context robot instruction — just tell a robot in natural language what to do, the same way you prompt a language model. Rombach acknowledges this is still a research problem, but the trajectory is clear: world models, action models, and generative video models are all converging into the same underlying architecture.

Inference
The computational process of running a trained AI model to generate outputs; distinct from training. In the context of reasoning models, inference is extremely compute-intensive.
Moore's Law
The historical observation that transistor density on chips doubles roughly every 18 months, leading to proportional performance gains. Cerebras claims to have exceeded this curve with its new architecture.
Wafer-scale chip
A processor that uses an entire silicon wafer as a single chip rather than cutting it into many smaller chips; Cerebras' approach, enabling massively more on-chip memory and bandwidth.
Latent diffusion
An algorithm that compresses data (images, video, audio) into a compact latent representation and trains a generative model on that compressed space; the foundational method behind Stable Diffusion and most modern generative AI.
Reasoning model
An AI model that generates many intermediate 'thinking' tokens internally before producing a final answer, allowing it to tackle complex multi-step problems — at significantly higher compute cost than standard models.
Token
The basic unit of text processed by a language model (roughly a word or word-fragment). Token consumption is the primary measure of AI compute usage and cost.
Token maxing
Colloquial term for consuming AI tokens inefficiently or without strategic intent — like wandering every Costco aisle rather than going straight to what you need.
AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)
AI that matches or exceeds human-level performance across a broad range of tasks, not just narrow domains. The episode debates whether this threshold has already been crossed.
Prompt whisperer
Colloquial term for someone who has mastered the craft of writing precise prompts to elicit good outputs from AI models — a skill becoming less necessary as models learn to interpret intent.
Red teaming
A security practice in which a group attempts to find vulnerabilities or failure modes in a system before it is deployed publicly; in AI, it means stress-testing a model for dangerous capabilities.
Sovereignty (AI context)
The ability of a country, organization, or individual to control their own AI infrastructure and models rather than depending on foreign or third-party systems.
Multimodal model
An AI model that can process and generate multiple types of data — such as text, images, video, and audio — within a single unified architecture.
Action prediction
A capability in AI models that predicts the next physical action to take based on visual and contextual inputs; the bridge between generative video models and robotics.
P-doom
Short for 'probability of doom' — the estimated likelihood that advanced AI leads to catastrophic or existential outcomes. Used colloquially to describe AI pessimism or doomism.
Hyperscaler
A company that operates massive-scale cloud computing infrastructure — specifically AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — known for buying enormous quantities of chips and data center capacity.
MFU (Model FLOP Utilization)
A metric measuring how efficiently a training or inference run uses the theoretical peak compute of the hardware — higher MFU means less wasted processing power.
Loop maxing
Emerging term for the practice of chaining AI reasoning loops iteratively — each output feeding the next — to produce exponentially better results than a single-pass query.
Paradigm shift (Kuhn)
Thomas Kuhn's concept that scientific worldviews don't change gradually but through sudden revolutionary breaks, typically only after old guard thinkers die or retire.
Drosophila
The common fruit fly, used extensively in genetics research because it reproduces rapidly (two generations per day), allowing scientists to study many generations quickly. Used here as a metaphor for AI's accelerated learning cycles.
Flux
Black Forest Labs' flagship open source image generation model, widely adopted for its quality and flexibility across text-to-image and image-editing tasks.

Chapter 1 · 00:00

The AI Buildout: Datacenters Bigger Than Cities (Andrew Feldman)

The episode opens at what appears to be a Paris setting, with Jason Calacanis welcoming back Andrew Feldman, founder and CEO of Cerebras, whom he last saw at Davos and at a recent Liquidity event. Calacanis frames the conversation around two big themes: the unprecedented AI buildout and what it means for inference computing. Before the conversation begins in earnest, the AppLovin Ads sponsorship segment airs — spotlighting the platform's billion-user reach inside mobile games, its AI-driven ad optimization, and a case study in which a cookware brand scaled from $4M to a projected $80M in revenue using the platform.

Claims made here

A cookware brand using AppLovin's platform grew from $4 million to $16 million in revenue, turned profitable, and is on pace for $80 million in the current year.

Jason Calacanis no source cited

Chapter 2 · 01:50

Reasoning, Inference, and Breaking Moore's Law

Feldman describes a fundamental shift in human-AI interaction: early models did exactly what you told them — the classic 'computers are dumb, they do exactly what you say' formulation from a colleague two decades ago. But modern reasoning models like those in OpenAI's latest releases are beginning to infer intent: a user asks for a chart, and the model proactively offers both a line and a bar version. Calacanis illustrates this vividly with a live experiment — using an unrestricted model to build a real-time trend-scouting agent that debates with itself about where to look for emerging signals (Hacker News, Reddit, Instagram). He watches the model reason in real time, debating its own approach before collapsing into an answer. This is not ChatGPT summarizing a PDF — this is an agent doing strategic research, checking its own work, and asking the human what it missed.

Claims made here

Individual AI data center buildings are now drawing more power than mid-sized cities, and aggregate AI data center demand in the next several years will exceed the previous 50 years of global energy use.

Andrew Feldman no source cited

Cerebras has a $25 billion order backlog for its AI inference chips.

Andrew Feldman no source cited

Cerebras chips run inference approximately 15 times faster than competing hardware.

Andrew Feldman no source cited

Business
Data point $25B

Open Source Wins, AGI Is Here, and Scorsese's AI Toolkit wi… · Jul 10, 2026 Business

Cerebras is sitting on $25 billion in backlog, and every hyperscaler from OpenAI to AWS faces the same problem: demand is fully booked, and they're racing to keep customers from leaving — not chasing speculative future adoption.

Chapter 3 · 16:28

Open Source, AI Sovereignty, and the Road to AGI

Feldman takes the conversation into longer time horizons. The fundamental constraint on human knowledge is that paradigms shift at the speed of generations: Thomas Kuhn showed us that Freud, Skinner, and their disciples maintained intellectual dominance not because their ideas were right, but because they held positions of leadership until they died. New ideas have to wait for the old guard to exit. AI breaks this constraint. Feldman reaches for the geneticist's tool: fruit flies produce two generations per day, allowing researchers to observe thousands of generations of evolution in a single career. AI is now doing the equivalent for knowledge — compressing what previously took centuries of human intellectual turnover into near-instantaneous iterative cycles. He closes with the Palace of Versailles as metaphor: the builders who worked on century-long projects across multiple family generations were doing recursive, compounding learning. AI is that, but at the speed of compute.

Claims made here

OpenAI released an open source model called OSS 120B.

Andrew Feldman no source cited

Cerebras runs models from GLM, Kimi, Qwen, OpenAI's closed source models, GlaxoSmithKline's proprietary models, and models from G42 and MBZUAI in the UAE.

Andrew Feldman no source cited

Palo Alto Networks, after testing a frontier AI model against their own systems, found previously unknown critical bugs and had to halt operations to patch for six weeks.

Jason Calacanis Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks

Current AI systems have already surpassed any definition of AGI that would have been put forward 10, 20, or 50 years ago, including the Turing test.

Andrew Feldman no source cited

Nasdaq powers more than 135 marketplaces and regulators globally.

Jason Calacanis no source cited

Technology
AI Found Bugs at Palo Alto Networks in Hours — and Stopped Them for Six Weeks

Open Source Wins, AGI Is Here, and Scorsese's AI Toolkit wi… · Jul 10, 2026 Technology

Nikesh Arora of Palo Alto Networks told Jason Calacanis that testing a frontier AI model against their own systems was devastating — it found critical bugs in hours that their own team had missed. They halted everything for six weeks of emergency patching. That's the case for government red teaming in a single anecdote.

Science
AI Is Learning Faster Than Evolution: The Fruit Fly Comparison

Open Source Wins, AGI Is Here, and Scorsese's AI Toolkit wi… · Jul 10, 2026 Science

Human learning moves at generational speed — like elephants, one cycle per 15–20 years. Geneticists study fruit flies because they produce two generations a day, compressing evolution into observable timeframes. AI is doing the equivalent: compressing thousands of generations of learning into near real-time iteration.

Education
Adaptive AI Tutors: We've Known How to Teach Better for 2,000 Years

Open Source Wins, AGI Is Here, and Scorsese's AI Toolkit wi… · Jul 10, 2026 Education

Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great one-on-one. We've known for millennia that personalized adaptive teaching produces better outcomes. We chose factory-model classrooms anyway. AI agents that adapt to each child's learning style aren't a new idea — they're a 2,000-year-old idea we can finally afford to execute.

Chapter 4 · 40:54

The Innovation Behind Generative Video (Robin Rombach)

Robin Rombach introduces himself and his company with a technical origin story that reframes the scope of what Black Forest Labs has built. He and his co-founders invented the latent diffusion algorithm as PhD students in Munich — a method that compresses natural data like images and video into efficient latent representations and trains a transformer model on that compressed space. The intuition is old (JPEG compression, MP3 audio encoding) but the application to generative AI was new. From that foundation came Stable Diffusion, and from Stable Diffusion came Black Forest Labs and Flux. Now, two years in and past 100 employees, the company is pushing into territory that goes far beyond images: multimodal models that simultaneously process images, video, and audio as both inputs and outputs — and can generate content in any of those modalities. The next frontier is action prediction: using the same model to predict physical robot actions, bridging generative AI and the real world.

Claims made here

All generative AI models deployed for image generation, video generation, and physical AI are built on the latent diffusion algorithm invented by Robin Rombach and his co-founders.

Robin Rombach no source cited

Technology
Latent Diffusion: The Algorithm Behind All Generative AI

Open Source Wins, AGI Is Here, and Scorsese's AI Toolkit wi… · Jul 10, 2026 Technology

Every major generative AI model for images, video, and physical AI runs on latent diffusion — invented by Robin Rombach and his co-founders as PhD students in Munich. The insight: compress natural data like images and video into efficient representations, then train a transformer on that. JPEG and MP3 principles, applied to generative intelligence.

Chapter 5 · 47:31

Martin Scorsese, Robots, and the Future of Hollywood IP

Rombach steps back from the film discussion to articulate the deeper architectural insight: the model that makes a movie and the model that drives a robot are not two different technologies — they are the same model. Pre-training on video at scale gives a model implicit understanding of physics, causality, and spatial relationships — the foundations of intelligent physical action. From that base, only a few hours of task-specific fine-tuning data are needed to deploy the model on a specific robot in a factory setting. The long-term goal is to make even that fine-tuning unnecessary, enabling in-context robot instruction — just tell a robot in natural language what to do, the same way you prompt a language model. Rombach acknowledges this is still a research problem, but the trajectory is clear: world models, action models, and generative video models are all converging into the same underlying architecture.

Claims made here

A Bitcoin movie starring Gal Gadot was produced for $30 million using AI-generated scenery, compared to an estimated $150 million using traditional set construction.

Jason Calacanis no source cited

Black Forest Labs models require only a few hours of fine-tuning data to adapt a visually pre-trained model to a specific robotic hardware task.

Robin Rombach no source cited

AI-generated Star Wars fan films on YouTube, including a channel called 'Star Wars Stories Untold,' are already receiving millions of views per video.

Jason Calacanis no source cited

Black Forest Labs has recently crossed 100 employees and is hiring in both Freiburg, Germany and San Francisco.

Robin Rombach no source cited

TV & Film
Data point $30M vs $150M

Open Source Wins, AGI Is Here, and Scorsese's AI Toolkit wi… · Jul 10, 2026 TV & Film

A Bitcoin movie starring Gal Gadot was filmed entirely on a sound stage, with all scenery generated by AI in post. The result: a $30M production that would have cost $150M with traditional set builds. It never would have been greenlit at $150M — generative AI didn't just cut costs, it made the film possible.

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1 / 14 cited (7%)

Factual claims made this episode, and whether a source was named.

Cerebras has a $25 billion order backlog for its AI inference chips.

Andrew Feldman no source cited

Individual AI data center buildings are now drawing more power than mid-sized cities, and aggregate AI data center demand in the next several years will exceed the previous 50 years of global energy use.

Andrew Feldman no source cited

Cerebras chips run inference approximately 15 times faster than competing hardware.

Andrew Feldman no source cited

All generative AI models deployed for image generation, video generation, and physical AI are built on the latent diffusion algorithm invented by Robin Rombach and his co-founders.

Robin Rombach no source cited

Current AI systems have already surpassed any definition of AGI that would have been put forward 10, 20, or 50 years ago, including the Turing test.

Andrew Feldman no source cited

A Bitcoin movie starring Gal Gadot was produced for $30 million using AI-generated scenery, compared to an estimated $150 million using traditional set construction.

Jason Calacanis no source cited

Palo Alto Networks, after testing a frontier AI model against their own systems, found previously unknown critical bugs and had to halt operations to patch for six weeks.

Jason Calacanis Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks

OpenAI released an open source model called OSS 120B.

Andrew Feldman no source cited

Cerebras runs models from GLM, Kimi, Qwen, OpenAI's closed source models, GlaxoSmithKline's proprietary models, and models from G42 and MBZUAI in the UAE.

Andrew Feldman no source cited

Nasdaq powers more than 135 marketplaces and regulators globally.

Jason Calacanis no source cited

Black Forest Labs has recently crossed 100 employees and is hiring in both Freiburg, Germany and San Francisco.

Robin Rombach no source cited

Black Forest Labs models require only a few hours of fine-tuning data to adapt a visually pre-trained model to a specific robotic hardware task.

Robin Rombach no source cited

AI-generated Star Wars fan films on YouTube, including a channel called 'Star Wars Stories Untold,' are already receiving millions of views per video.

Jason Calacanis no source cited

A cookware brand using AppLovin's platform grew from $4 million to $16 million in revenue, turned profitable, and is on pace for $80 million in the current year.

Jason Calacanis no source cited