How the 1% Will Own Compute (and What It Means for You)

How the 1% Will Own Compute (and What It Means for You)

From This Week in AI by Jason Calacanis

May 13, 2026 · 1h 8m · Episode 13

About this episode

The episode discusses the future of AI interaction models and the implications for compute demand and the tech industry.

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). Thank you to our exclusive sponsor: PayPal Open, One Platform for All Business: http://paypalopen.com/ 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…

People in this episode

Host: Jason Calacanis

Guests: Anastasios Angelopoulos, Nick Harris, Philip Johnston

Topics covered

  • AI interaction models
  • compute demand
  • photonic computing
  • data centers
  • layoffs in tech
  • personal data centers

Keywords

  • AI
  • compute
  • layoffs
  • photonic chips
  • data centers
  • interaction model
  • personal data centers

Sponsors

PayPal Open

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Arena, Lightmatter, StarCloud, Cloudflare, PayPal, Coinbase, Upwork

Products: Whisper Flow

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