How the 1% Will Own Compute (and What It Means for You)
This Week in Startups
Jason Calacanis
4.2 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2026
⏱️ 68 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The future of AI isn't a smarter chatbot. It's a model that watches your screen, listens to the room, and acts on what it sees. We dug into Thinking Machines' new interaction model, what it means for compute, and the layoff wave that's already here.This week's roundtable: Anastasios Angelopoulos (CEO of Arena, formerly LMArena), Nick Harris (CEO of Lightmatter, photonic computing chips), and Philip Johnston (CEO of StarCloud, building megawatt data centers in space).
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Timestamps:
0:00 Cold open
1:21 Welcome to Episode 13
2:51 Is China closing the AI gap? Arena's data
5:16 Lightmatter and the photonic interconnect bottleneck
9:42 StarCloud 2, Nvidia Space Ruben 1, and orbital data centers
17:24 Thinking Machines' interaction model: what's actually new
28:22 Whisper Flow and the 3-pedal desk setup
33:48 Real-time desktop and camera awareness as the real unlock
40:25 Why this 100x's compute demand
42:43 The polarization of compute and $10M personal data centers
49:25 The layoff wave: Cloudflare, PayPal, Coinbase, Upwork
54:48 The 10x gap between AI-first and non-AI-first employees
59:52 Unlimited agency and the abundance future
1:00:46 Anthropic's Project Luna runs a retail store
1:03:45 Decoupling labor from value creation
1:05:03 P(doom) round
🔗 Guests:
Anastasios Angelopoulos, Arena: https://arena.ai | @ML_Angelopolous
Nick Harris, Lightmatter: https://lightmatter.co
Philip Johnston, StarCloud: https://starcloud.com | @philipjohnston
🔗 Referenced in this episode:
Thinking Machines, Introducing Interaction Models: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interaction-models/
LMArena leaderboard: https://lmarena.ai
Lightmatter: https://lightmatter.co
Starcloud: https://www.starcloud.com
TechCrunch, Cloudflare says AI made 1,100 jobs obsolete: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/08/cloudflare-says-ai-made-1100-jobs-obsolete-even-as-revenue-hit-a-record-high/
Fast Company, Tech layoffs this week due to AI (Cloudflare, PayPal, Coinbase, Upwork): https://www.fastcompany.com/91538995/tech-layoffs-due-to-ai-this-week-cloudflare-paypal-coinbase-upwork
Bloomberg, South Korea floats citizen dividend from AI profits: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-05-12/korea-s-massive-ai-boom-triggers-call-for-tech-tax-roiling-market
PYMNTS, Inside a retail store run entirely by AI (Andon Labs / Luna): https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2026/inside-a-retail-store-run-entirely-by-ai/
Wispr Flow (voice-to-text tool Jason uses): https://wisprflow.ai
Fermi Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
🔗 Subscribe and follow:
Newsletter and all platforms: https://thisweekinai.ai
#ThisWeekInAI #AI #ThinkingMachines #Lightmatter #StarCloud #Arena #Anthropic #ProjectLuna #AIcompute #AIlayoffs #Superintelligence
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. |
| 0:04.3 | We're dropping a sneak peek right here in your feed to show you what we've been building. |
| 0:07.8 | If you enjoy it, join the community at thisweekinA.i.com or find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. |
| 0:14.2 | We're discussing the models becoming super intelligent at the same time that the layoffs are happening, at the same time |
| 0:21.6 | social unrest is happening. Cloudflare cut 20% of its workforce, 1100 people, while reporting |
| 0:27.1 | the highest revenue in the history of the company. This is the trajectory that we're on. We're |
| 0:31.2 | trying to bring it with us everywhere we go, which will be enormously valuable and creepy and all |
| 0:36.2 | sorts of stuff. You're going to need a hundred times the energy, and that's exactly the bottom stuff. You're going to need 100 times the energy. |
| 0:38.6 | And that's exactly the bottom neck. |
| 0:39.9 | We're trying to sell forward with these base data sensors. |
| 0:42.2 | We are going to have the polarization of compute in our society. |
| 0:45.2 | The 1% aren't going to be able to just afford a G650. |
| 0:49.7 | They're going to be able to afford $10 million data center for themselves. |
| 0:54.1 | It's just going to be exhausting to go to a million data center for themselves. It's just going to be exhausting |
| 0:55.1 | to go to a company, have the company study your work, have AI reinforcement learned and automated, |
| 1:01.0 | and then get laid off again. The capitalist system is such because it incentivizes people to do |
| 1:06.9 | great labor. We don't create a system where AI just actually makes all the money and we don't know how to make a smooth transition. The core issue, just to highlight it, |
| 1:14.7 | is that we're decoupling labor from value creation. We are building towards a world that I |
| 1:19.7 | think in many ways we're unprepared for. Thanks to our friends at PayPal, the exclusive sponsor |
| 1:25.7 | for this week in AI. Try the payment and growth platform |
| 1:28.9 | that's trusted by millions of customers worldwide. PayPal Open. Start growing today at PayPalopoopen.com. |
| 1:35.6 | All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in AI. Episode 13. This is our roundtable where we |
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