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This Week in Startups

Orchestrating Smarter AI Systems with AI21 Labs’ Yoav Shoham | AI Basics with Google Cloud

This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis

Technology

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2025

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode of AI Basics, Jason sits down with Yoav Shoham — Stanford professor emeritus and co-founder of AI21 Labs, creators of Jurassic-2, Wordtune, and the new orchestration system Maestro.

They unpack:

  • Why enterprise AI struggles with reliability
  • What orchestration really means (and why LLMs alone aren't enough)
  • The pitfalls of “agent-washing”
  • Small vs large models, agent-to-agent protocols, and where real opportunities lie


This one is for founders building with AI — if you're navigating hallucinations, chasing automation, or exploring multi-agent workflows, this episode is a must.

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Timestamps:

(0:00) Yoav Shoham joins Jason to discuss AI Basics.

(1:05) What AI21 Labs is building — from Jurassic-2 to Maestro

(5:49) The overuse and confusion of the seductive term “agent”

(8:22) Small models vs large models: what's best for enterprise?

(10:53) The verticalization of AI: legal, accounting, and beyond

(12:17) The challenge of agent-to-agent communication and shared semantics

(17:08) What’s overhyped vs underhyped in AI — Yoav’s advice for founders

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Uncover more valuable insights from AI leaders in Google Cloud's 'Future of AI: Perspectives for Startups' report.

https://goo.gle/futureofai

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Explore Further

Google Cloud’s Report: The Future of AI

Get insights from 23 leading experts on how startups can leverage AI for real business impact.

👉 Read the full report

More AI Basics Episodes

Founders, operators, and builders — catch up on our full Startup Basics series (Legal, Finance, Growth & AI):

👉 thisweekinstartups.com/basics

Links from episde:

  • Google Cloud — Build smarter with AI tools built for startups
  • AI21 Labs — Makers of Wordtune, Jurassic-2, and Maestro
  • Maestro — Orchestrate AI agents and tools across workflows
  • Jamba — AI21’s hybrid language model with breakthrough efficiency


Learn About Google’s A2A (Agent-to-Agent) Protocol

The next evolution in agent interoperability and coordination:

  • *

    • Follow Yoav:

    X: https://x.com/yshoham

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoavshoham/

    *

    Follow Jason:

    X: https://twitter.com/Jason

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis

    *

    Follow TWiST:

    Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups

    YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups

    TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups

    Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

    Transcript

    Click on a timestamp to play from that location

    0:00.0

    All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. It's time again for our AI

    0:08.4

    basic series. What is this? Man, founders ask us all the time, the same questions over and over

    0:14.5

    again. So we have done basics for legal. We've done it for marketing and growth tactics,

    0:20.3

    obviously accounting.

    0:21.9

    And here we are in the age of AI.

    0:24.2

    People need to understand the best practices.

    0:26.9

    And, hey, it's moving pretty quickly.

    0:29.6

    If you want to get caught up on your AI basics, go ahead and download this fantastic

    0:34.9

    report by our partner, Google Cloud.

    0:37.4

    It's called The Future of AI Perspectives for Startups featuring insights from 23 top AI experts.

    0:43.6

    And today, one of them is with us.

    0:45.5

    Yoav Shaham is here.

    0:47.2

    He's a Stanford professor, emeritus, as you know, and he is the co-founder of AI21 Labs, the team behind Jurassic 2 and Word

    0:57.0

    Tune, building large language models and tools for collaborative reasoning.

    1:01.3

    Welcome to the show.

    1:02.7

    You are fun to be here.

    1:04.5

    Thanks for having me.

    1:05.4

    Let's talk a little bit about what we mean by reasoning, you know, here in 2025. Are these machines actually reasoning?

    1:14.3

    And how do you get the best out of them? Right now, so many experiments going on in corporate

    1:20.2

    America, so many people are testing and starting to deploy AI technology from large language

    1:26.4

    models or with the basis of large language models.

    1:29.6

    But there is some concern about the reasoning. Are these making the best decisions, hallucinations,

    ...

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