The $100B Niches Hiding Inside Payments

Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie joins MTS hosts Theo Jaffee and Sofia Puccini to make the case for open-weight AI, unpack the economics of open versus closed models, and explain why he believes more openness could strengthen rather than undermine the U.S. AI ecosystem. Aaron argues that open models create more use cases, push closed labs to innovate faster, and don't fundamentally change where the economics of AI ultimately accrue. They debate model distillation, America's competition with China, why restricting access may simply accelerate competing AI ecosystems, and whether U.S. labs should begin releasing open-weight versions of previous-generation models. They also get into what the latest frontier models mean for knowledge work, how AI has changed software engineering at Box, and why Aaron believes companies cutting engineers may simply not be ambitious enough. Finally, they discuss why enterprises are unlikely to bet on a single model and why the layer that routes between mod

This week, we’re diving into two new reports about the OpenAI-Hugging Face hack. We discuss what’s new and how they fundamentally change our understanding of what happened. Then we’re joined by Ajeya Cotra, one of the investigators at METR, to discuss the rogue agents’ message board and chain-of-thought transcripts and how the world should respond. Guests: Ajeya Cotra, co-author of the METR and Redwood Research report on the OpenAI-Hugging Face hack. Additional Reading: Brief Independent Investigation of Agents’ Behavior, Reasoning and Collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face Hacking Incident The Hugging Face Attack Surprised Me The Hugging Face Incident and the Road Ahead Nvidia Buys Hugging Face in $12.9 Billion Deal We want to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-acce

World Labs co-founders Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, and Ben Mildenhall join a16z General Partner Martin Casado to discuss Atlas, their latest world model, and what it reveals about the pursuit of spatial intelligence. At the center of Atlas is what the team calls “new view prediction”: given images or views of a scene, the model predicts what that environment should look like from a different position in space and time. This brings generation and 3D reconstruction into the same model, and raises a broader question about whether predicting views could become a useful primitive for understanding the physical world. They discuss the technical bets behind the model, what it can and can’t yet capture, and the importance of dynamics, editability, and simulation as world models develop. The conversation also explores applications in creative work, architecture, and robotics, where Fei-Fei argues that one of today’s biggest constraints is access to real-world training data. Resources: Follow Fe

A boy who once woke up in his own sweat during blackouts grew up to build the machine ending them. In this episode we sit down with Johannes Amo Aye, founder of Minaji Energy, to talk about the Fusion Wind Turbine: a gearless, oil free hybrid system combining wind and solar in one unit, built to run 20 to 25 years with almost no maintenance. He shares the story of a night when midwives delivered a baby using two phone torches, why 90% of the system is manufactured in Ghana, and what it means to build Africa's energy future with African engineers. In this episode: A blackout tragedy in a maternity ward and the turnaround a year laterThe engineering behind a gearless, lubricant free wind turbineThe MTED program training local youth as techniciansShortlisted for the Royal Academy of Engineering Africa PrizeThe roadmap to scaling past 100 turbines Also, don’t forget to subscribe to IE+ for premium insights and exclusive content!