Sabrina Halper sits down with Ali Ansari, the 25-year-old solo founder and CEO of Micro1, which just passed $1B in ARR. But it all began when Ali moved from Iran to the U.S. at age nine, going from flipping textbooks to building a company that supplies the human expertise used to train AI models.

We get into Micro1’s pivot from AI recruiting to training data, growing to $1B ARR in 2.5 years, whether experts are training their replacements, how to teach AI subjective judgment, why robotics is a data problem, the stakes of selling training data to China, and whether the AI economy can justify the infrastructure being built.

Ali Ansari: https://x.com/aliansarinik

Sabrina Halper: https://x.com/SabrinaHalper

SPONSORS

Presented by micro1: https://micro1.ai They're building the infrastructure for advancing intelligence through expert human data, real-world training environments, and contextual evaluations.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Intro

02:56 Growing up in Iran and moving to America

07:37 From eBay to textbook flipping

13:54 Building micro1 and the pivot to training data

19:39 Why internet data is the worst data

22:41 Are experts training their replacements?

29:27 Creativity, alignment, and subjective judgment

36:01 The robotics data bottleneck

45:11 Ordinary vs. Extraordinary Training Data

43:56 America selling data to China

53:56 $1B in 2.5 years

56:53 Can the AI economy deliver?

Yinon Costica co-founded Wiz, which Google acquired for $32 billion in the largest acquisition in its history. I sat down with him at Wiz HQ in Tel Aviv to talk about the race to secure a world increasingly run by AI.Wiz on

X: https://x.com/wiz_ioSabrina Halper on X: https://x.com/SabrinaHalper

PRESENTING SPONSOR

The Sabrina Halper Show is presented by micro1.micro1 is building the infrastructure for advancing intelligence through expert human data, real-world training environments, and contextual evaluations.

Learn more: https://www.micro1.ai/

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Intro

01:15 Yinon Costica, co-founder of Wiz

02:00 IDF's Unit 8200, and meeting his co-founders

06:30 Leaving Microsoft to start again

08:30 The customer conversations that created Wiz

11:30 From $1M to $100M ARR in 18 months

14:15 How to scale without breaking

17:15 Wiz Atlas: automating vulnerability research

22:45 Can AI give defenders the advantage?

25:15 Cybersecurity's AI twilight zone

27:30 Should you give AI agents your credit card?

32:00 Trust, Big Tech, and the software supply chain

34:45 Open-weight models and security

36:30 Vulnerabilities found at DeepSeek

38:30 Preparing for AI-powered attacks

43:30 What Google unlocks for Wiz

44:30 How Wiz made the shift to AI

47:15 Cybersecurity's biggest unsolved problem

50:00 Securing agents with access to sensitive data

52:15 What AI hacking agents can already do

54:00 An internet built for agents

56:15 The human role in cybersecurity

58:30 Is it too early to pick AI's winners?

59:45 Why the future could be more secure

Subscribe for more conversations with the founders, scientists, and researchers shaping what comes next.#Wiz #AI #Cybersecurity

Most of what you hear about AI's impact is a projection. David Holtz has the data.

He’s behind some of the most rigorous studies of AI’s actual impact today. And the results are surprising. His work cuts through the noise around AI to a key question: what is AI actually doing to people, companies, and the economy today?

David is a professor at Columbia, currently on leave to lead AGI economics research at OpenAI. We recorded this before he started there.

If you enjoy this one, subscribe! It genuinely helps the show grow and improve every week.

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Presented by micro1: ⁠micro1.ai

LinkedIn: ⁠micro1

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Sabrina Halper

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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sabloves/?h...

Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...

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David HoltzX: ⁠https://x.com/daveholtz

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Intro

01:26 Is AI as significant to the economy as we hear?

04:05 ChatGPT as a general purpose technology shift

06:41 Inside OpenAI: The Shift From Chatbots to Agents

08:56 Why AI Could Make Us Work More, Not Less

10:56 Structuring Companies In a New Way

15:02 What Will the Agent Economy Look Like?22:03 What Becomes a Moat When Everyone Has the Same AI?

25:02 Model Improvement Study: 50% of AI’s Gains Come From the Human

33:03 What Should We Still Learn in the Age of AI?

36:58 The Kenya Experiment: Does AI Democratize Expertise?

45:11 Could AI Let Developing Economies Leapfrog the Internet?

49:50 One-Person Companies, Job Loss & the Future of Work

Matan Grinberg left a string theory PhD at Berkeley to start Factory, betting on full autonomous software engineering in 2023.

It started with a cold email to Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire and a three-hour walk that helped convince Matan to leave his PhD and build a company. Three years later, Factory is valued at $1.5B, with recent reports putting its newest valuation north of $3.5B.

We get into: what string theory teaches you about making decisions, the three phases every company goes through with AI adoption, how to measure ROI of AI spend, why he'd take Chinese open models over a closed-model monopoly, the sleeper-agent risk hiding in open weights, what he thinks about recent security incidents from large labs, and why he believes we're already living in a post-AGI world.

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Sabrina Halper Show is presented by Micro1. Micro1 is building the infrastructure for advancing intelligence through expert human data, real-world training environments, and contextual evaluations. Learn more: https://www.micro1.ai/.

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TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00) Intro

(02:00 Young Matan

(5:30) String Theory

(11:10) Leaving academia, the IMDb 250, and getting nerd-sniped by code generation

(16:53) Cold-emailing Shaun Maguire and founding Factory

(18:27) The desert years, and what finally 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 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

I sat down with Reed Jobs to discuss one of medicine’s hardest problems: why we’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting cancer, yet still don’t have a cure.

Reed explains why there may never be a cure for cancer and why that’s actually the wrong goal. Instead, the future is making cancer a disease that no one dies from.

He gives an inside look at Yosemite, the venture firm he founded to rethink how to bring breakthrough therapies to patients. We go deep on how AI is reshaping biology, why Yosemite combines grants with venture capital to fund ambitious science, how to de-risk breakthrough research, and the extraordinary biology that makes our bodies work.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Intro

00:36 Early Cancer Mission

03:41 Working at a Cancer Lab as a Teen

05:16 Immunotherapy Breakthrough

07:05 Emerson Collective

09:20 Founding Yosemite

10:17 Making Cancer Nonlethal12:28 Using Grants to De-Risk Biotech Investing

15:33 Academic vs. CEO Role

19:11 Biology Is a Miracle22:52 Next-Decade Tooling

25:22 His Dream of In Vivo CAR-T Cell Therapy

28:51 Cracking Solid Tumors

29:27 Same-Day Cell Editing

33:46 The AI Era of Biology

37:00 Cutting Clinical Trial Costs

41:43 Highest-ROI Philanthropy

45:10 Taylor Francis

47:28 Yosemite’s Long-Term Impact

50:29 San Francisco Today#CancerResearch #Biotech #AI #Medicine #ReedJobs

The secret to staying young may already be inside your cells. We just need to figure out how to unlock it.

NewLimit is one of the world's leading longevity companies, co-founded by Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong, investor Blake Byers, and stem cell biologist Jacob Kimmel. NewLimit has already shown it can take old human liver and immune cells and restore them to a younger, healthier-working state and it's now preparing its first medicine for human trials.The company has raised over $600M - including a $435M round in 2026 that valued it at $3.1B - from investors like Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Thrive Capital, and Khosla Ventures.

We hear the word "longevity" all the time. But what's actually real? And how do we meaningfully extend lifespan for our generation, our kids, and our grandkids?

Jacob Kimmel shares his world-leading expertise as we discuss everything from evolutionary tradeoffs to epigenetic reprogramming to AI biorisk.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Aging as Entropy

01:25 Why Evolution Limits Lifespan

03:13 Evolution Tradeoffs Explained

07:44 Why Women Live Longer

10:15 Lessons from Long Lived Species

16:20 Peak Intelligence and Aging

23:26 What Aging Really Is

26:23 Epigenetics and Reprogramming

27:59 Yamanaka Factors 101

32:18 New Limit's Approach

33:56 AI for Factor Discovery

37:28 Organ by Organ Longevity

40:28 Is Immortality Possible?

42:04 Lifespan Progress Curve

45:44 Testing Longevity Drugs

49:30 Placebo Mind Body Link

53:56 What longevity hacks are actually work?

57:25 Peptides And Stem Cells

01:00:34 Germline Gene Editing

01:05:10 Personalized Medicine Abundance

01:08:48 Longer Lifespans and Power Turnover

01:14:57 Living Off Earth

01:16:55 AI And Biosecurity Risks

#longevity #antiaging #biotech

Jack Dent, co-founder of Chai Discovery, gives us a look at how AI could change the way we discover drugs, understand biology, and treat disease. Jack went from cold-emailing Stripe and joining as a teenager to co-founding Chai Discovery, the AI drug design company Sam Altman asked him and Josh to start years before they did. Chai has since raised $225M from investors including OpenAI and Thrive Capital, and built a model that hit a drug-design breakthrough far faster than expected, with roughly 200x better antibody success rates.We talk about whether people could one day help cure their own diseases with AI, whether each of us might have a personalized biology model, and whether medicine shifts from treating sickness to preventing it before it starts. Jack also gets into whether frontier AI labs will build these biology models themselves, what AI can and can’t fix in our current healthcare system, why clinical trials are still such a bottleneck, and how much of science may become less random when AI can generate and test better hypotheses.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Intro

02:28 Inside Stripe When It Was Only 100 People

08:45 How Sam Altman Sparked Chai’s Origin Story

10:52 Why Chai Discovery Exists

16:20 The Chai-2 Antibody Breakthrough

19:24 Approaching Biology as Engineering

24:45 Using AI to treat ourselves26:52 Robotics in labs

27:22 Why Pharma Is Finally Moving on AI

29:49 Can AI Fix Clinical Trials?

32:53 Personalized biology models

36:24 Longevity, Peptides, and Trillion-Dollar Drugs

39:02 Does it matter that the government cuts exploratory science grants?

41:00 What Next-Gen Chai Models Will Do

42:08 Will Frontier AI Labs Build Biology Models?

43:26 Biology is hard