$2.5B Chip Heist, The Future of American AI, and Purpose-Built Robots | This Week in AI Ep 6

This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis

Technology

4.2 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2026

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This Week in AI sneak peak! If you enjoy the episode find us on Spotify, Apple podcasts and YouTube by looking up "This Week in AI" or by going to thisweekinai.ai

This week Jason sat down with Jake Loosararian and Chris Lattner on Episode 6 of This Week in AI. Jake is the CEO and co-founder of Gecko Robotics, a company deploying purpose-built robots and AI for mission-critical infrastructure inspection across energy, defense, and manufacturing. Chris is the CEO and co-founder of Modular, building a universal software layer that lets developers run AI models across Nvidia, AMD, and Apple silicon without being locked into any single hardware vendor.

We explore the GPU shortage, why China's chip smuggling reveals the stakes of the AI cold war, how purpose-built robotics are beating humanoids on ROI, the case for American reindustrialization, and why the next decade could be the best ever for private equity in capital-intensive industries.

Purpose-Built Robots vs. Humanoids: Jake has been building mission-critical robots for 13 years. He explains why general-purpose humanoids still have too little ROI for industrial use, and why specialized robots that find and fix problems are winning in the field.
The GPU Shortage Is Real: Chris breaks down why you can't just go buy 100 Blackwell chips today, why Nvidia's Cuda creates massive lock-in, and how Modular is building a unified software layer across all major chip architectures.
Google TPUs Are the Sleeper: Chris ranks Google as the number one threat to Nvidia's dominance, ahead of Amazon's Trainium and AMD.
China's Chip Smuggling & the AI Cold War: A Supermicro co-founder allegedly smuggled $2.5B in Nvidia chips to China using fake serial numbers and a hairdryer.
The Best Decade for Private Equity: Jake makes the case that capital-intensive, commoditized infrastructure assets: waste-to-energy, water treatment, old power plants will all generate incredible returns.
Self-Driving State of Play: Chris, a former Tesla Autopilot lead, gives his read on Waymo's lead, Tesla's small Austin pilot, and why the real signal is when Tesla starts filing for fully autonomous permits in California.

Learn more about Gecko Robotics: https://www.geckorobotics.com

Learn more about Modular: https://www.modular.com/

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*Timestamps:*

00:00 Welcome & intro to Jake Lu (Gecko Robotics) and Chris Lattner (Modular)

01:34 Gecko's 13-year journey & the Cantilever platform

05:15 Chris Lattner on Modular: replacing Cuda & unifying AI hardware

11:10 Nvidia lock-in, AMD's Rock & why the software stack is broken

19:49 The GPU shortage: how real is it?

22:13 Who challenges Nvidia? Google TPUs, Amazon Trainium & AMD ranked

28:17 China chip smuggling: $2.5B in Nvidia GPUs & the AI cold war

37:43 Self-driving update: Waymo, Tesla's Austin pilot & Chris's Tesla history

42:20 Figure's humanoid package sorting — real or demo magic?

43:47 The best decade for private equity in capital-intensive assets

51:04 Reindustrialization, the trades boom & making manufacturing cool

58:39 Building tech companies outside Silicon Valley

1:06:46 Breaking news: Brett Adcock launches Hark from Figure

1:10:15 Closing thoughts: grit over hype, customers over valuations

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Oliver from This Weekin AI, the brand new podcast from the team at Twist. We're dropping a sneak peek right here in your feed to show you what we've been building. If you enjoy it, join the community at thisweekinA.i. Or find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. AI, I think we'll transform and we'll continue to push the world forward, and it will affect a lot of jobs and people upskill. The question is, what are they upskilling into? Being a CPA and an accountant or a lawyer was considered
0:25.3	professional services, not commodity. And here we are in 2006 and we're like the bottom 50%
0:32.1	of those jobs are chores that machines can do easily. When you see technology companies saying they're taking on manufacturing
0:39.5	in the kind of ways that you see,
0:41.1	you have to understand these sectors have not changed for the most part
0:44.5	in the past 40, 50, 60 years.
0:46.6	Get robots everywhere.
0:47.8	Get AI everywhere.
0:48.9	Thanks to our friends at PayPal, the exclusive sponsor for this week in AI.
0:53.2	Try the payment and growth platform that's trusted
0:55.6	by millions of customers worldwide. PayPal Open. Start growing today at PayPalopoopen.com.
1:01.5	All right, everybody, welcome back. It's episode six of This Week in AI. We decided to start a dedicated
1:07.2	show just for AI. It's how I meet the smartest people in the world.
1:19.6	You can subscribe to this podcast at this week in AI.a.i. This week in AI. There's a substack as the number one AI podcast in the world. We've got two all stars here this week. Jake Lucerarian, we've had on the
1:26.0	program before. He's a friend of this week in
1:27.9	startups and all in. He's the CEO and co-founder of Gecko robotics. They deploy robots for
1:33.9	very specific mission critical infrastructure products. They're not humanoid robotics, which have
1:40.7	become very in vogue all of a sudden, Jake. No, you've been working on purpose-built AI robots for, is it seven or eight years now? If you count the college years, it's been 13 years. But gecko robotics is more of a seven, eight-year story, if I'm remembering correct? Yeah, that's about right. And so what's the state of the art now? Give people an example, or maybe my team can pull up a video from your YouTube channel
2:02.5	of how these robots work.
2:05.6	People can visually see them here and what they're doing.
2:09.0	So here we see Cantilever.
2:11.7	That's your B2B product.
	...

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