New episode with Matan Grinberg (@matanSF), CEO & co-founder of @FactoryAI !! We get into so many good topics: Studying physics for a decade, how to measure ROI of AI spend, who to hire in a world where we don't code, policy, the risk of Chinese open models vs. closed-model monopoly, what he thinks about recent security incidents from large labs, and why he believes we’re already living in a post-AGI world. ------ TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Intro (02:00) Young Matan (5:30) String Theory (11:10) Leaving academia, becoming cultured, and getting nerd-sniped by code generation (16:53) Cold-emailing @shaunmmaguire and founding Factory (18:27) The desert years, and what made autonomous engineering work (20:55) The new bottleneck is deciding what to do (23:30) The three phases of enterprise AI adoption, and the end of token maxing (28:18) Chinese open models, and the monopoly to end all monopolies (30:30) Sleeper agents, poisoned code, and the labs cybersecurity incidents (34:30) The White House open-weights policy, @mkratsios47, and the distillation problem (37:30) The coming billion-dollar agent incident (42:30) "We're already post-AGI" and AI taking on math (49:30) Building your own software (52:20) Reflections & best advisors