VC at @FirstMarkCap. Host: MAD Podcast; Organizer: Data Driven NYC, Author: MAD Landscape.
New York
Joined February 2011
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Mistral is SO back: Inside Le Chonk, the West’s Biggest Open Model. My conversation with @PierreStock who runs the research organization at @MistralAI
0:00 Cold open
0:59 The Western open-weight comeback: Beam, Le Chonk, Muse, Nemotron
4:09 The US shutdown of Anthropic’s models - “AI is like electricity”
6:07 Why “Le Chonk”
7:56 “Mistral fell behind”: the comeback from the inside
10:29 Training on 3,800 GPUs in Mistral’s own datacenters
13:24 Meta keeps its best model closed, Mistral opens Chonk
15:40 Chonk vs Beam, Muse Spark Open and the Chinese models
18:44 Why Chinese labs are still at the frontier
21:08 Pierre’s story: FAIR, Yann LeCun, the “Mistral mafia”
25:14 From compressing networks to a trillion parameters
27:30 Mixture of experts explained: the hospital analogy
32:25 10-trillion-parameter models are coming
35:29 What Mistral borrowed from DeepSeek
36:46 One model, several reasoning modes
39:15 Native multimodality: satellites, manuals, computer use
41:56 Data, synthetic data and model collapse
46:32 Reinforcement learning as an exam
49:59 Where the efficiency comes from
52:18 Le Chonk is still training right now
53:39 What RL trains on: coding, cyber, finance, chips
58:13 Partial rewards and looping penalties
59:58 Did RL teach anything new?
1:03:16 The sandbox story: the model that pinged its trainer
1:07:44 Open weights vs cyber refusals
1:12:05 Timestral: time series on a CPU
1:14:18 AI doing AI research
1:16:22 Coming up: Mistral Large 5
Major moment for @SurrealDB
Building a database is an incredible grind - if you get that initial open-source pop, you then face years of unglamorous hard work to build a truly world class product
SurrealDB 4 is now that product. Multi-model (vector, graph, document), ACID compliant, w/ a rebuilt engine, native Postgres/MySQL support + massive scalability via @Cloudflare handling 10B+ peak rows/sec
The modern database for the agentic era.
SurrealDB 4 is here. The database and memory for every agent. And with it, SurrealDB Earth. Serverless SurrealDB, built on @Cloudflare, that scales to as many agents and users as you need, wherever they are.
Start free on Earth, no card needed. 👉 sdb.li/4sHnxYH
Matt Turck retweeted
Models will change. Enterprises need the freedom to adapt while maintaining control over their AI.
Proud to see Dataiku named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic AI Platforms 2026 Vendor Assessment.
dataiku.com/blog/idc-markets…
Hang it in the Louvre
We just crossed $100M in run rate.
Four quarters ago, we were at $1M. Then this year alone, we grew 37.5x.
Not long before that, we did a hard pivot- handed our old customers to competitors, rebuilt from scratch, and relaunched with a few months of runway left.
The bet was: models think on GPUs but work happens on CPUs.
So every agent that writes code, opens a browser, or runs an RL job needs a composable computer that's isolated, stateful, and ready in milliseconds.
$1M to $100M in about a year puts us in the same cohort as the likes of Anthropic and Cursor. It’s humbling to share that lane with companies we’ve learned so much from.
Matt Turck retweeted
We just crossed $100M in run rate.
Four quarters ago, we were at $1M. Then this year alone, we grew 37.5x.
Not long before that, we did a hard pivot- handed our old customers to competitors, rebuilt from scratch, and relaunched with a few months of runway left.
The bet was: models think on GPUs but work happens on CPUs.
So every agent that writes code, opens a browser, or runs an RL job needs a composable computer that's isolated, stateful, and ready in milliseconds.
$1M to $100M in about a year puts us in the same cohort as the likes of Anthropic and Cursor. It’s humbling to share that lane with companies we’ve learned so much from.
Matt Turck retweeted
Some fantastic companies have chosen Pigment lately, and I'm thrilled to welcome every one of them 🚀
Thank you for trusting us with how you plan. We'll work hard to make it the best decision you made all year!
Not to spoil the French jokes, but:
* This is NOT law
* This has zero chance of becoming law - will never survive the legistlative process
* This is a vote by 11 populist morons in the lower chamber which was nearly empty (35 out of 577 MPs present)
Yes still embarrassing
Matt Turck retweeted
Thank you for believing in us! We’re just getting started
@DavidWaltcher @amishjani
Congrats to @maximbarkogan, @gil_elbaz_, and the entire @Onyx_Security team for being named to the 2026-27 Fortune Cyber 60 🚀 Proud to be on the journey with you!
Matt Turck retweeted
We’re hiring, and while we’re an in-office company, we’re now also welcoming exceptional talent in remote!
We’re hiring across research, engineering, DevRel, sales, and marketing.
More details on open roles: gradium.link/careers
Matt Turck retweeted
What happens when you follow your interests in your career? What happens when you’re a recent Harvard Law School graduate at one of the preeminent white-shoe law firms in New York, with aspirations to be an M&A and capital markets lawyer, but at the same time you studied philosophy in undergrad and are watching the ICO boom take off in 2017? You may ask yourself, “Is the world orienting around a fundamentally new technology?” or, “Am I just crazy?”
If you do follow those interests, if you do follow that instinct, you may end up with a career a lot like my friend Rodrgio (@RSSH273 ) Rodrigo is a partner at Cooley and helps lead the firm’s focus on fintech and crypto.
Crypto is a fundamentally new technology paradigm that challenges existing societal, regulatory, and behavioral norms. As Rodrigo puts it eloquently, “Crypto enables new forms of human interaction in a way that challenges the premise of our existing regulatory regimes. It allows for the disintermediation of transactions where the vector of regulation was that intermediary.” To put it more simply, the bedrock of the crypto industry is using software (cryptography), rather than a trusted intermediary, to verify and settle bilateral agreements (I control this bitcoin, I send it to you, and no bank or clearinghouse sits in between).
As I continue to spend time in the crypto and digital asset ecosystem, I wanted to talk to Rodrigo because he is an expert on the regulatory environment and has clear perspectives on where the world is going. Unlike the traditional technology ecosystem, where moving fast and breaking things has been the norm for some 20+ years, moving fast and breaking things doesn’t apply when what you are moving is money. Money movement requires trust, certainty, and oversight, and it (inevitably) requires regulation.
Rodrigo and I had a wonderful conversation about his career and building a practice focused on digital assets, how he thinks about the current regulatory environment, interpreting the current SEC/CFTC regulatory postures, the legality and mechanics of bringing perps onshore, and much more. This is a fantastic conversation for founders looking to better understand the current regulatory environment, and for any legal professionals thinking about growing their career in a manner that matches their interests. Huge thanks to Rodrigo for coming on the show, and please stay tuned for more episodes of The Longest View where I interview expert practioners, Founders, Operators, and Investors about my current areas of interest, which today is all things Digital Assets!
State of AI 2026: The Biggest Stories of the Year (and AGI in 2027?) - my conversation with @nathanbenaich:
0:00 Cold open and intro
0:56 AGI in 2027?
2:28 AI building AI: Claude leads 26% of Anthropic’s research
4:00 Research taste: can AI pick the right problem? 8:34 Doomerism is back, but cyber risk beats extinction
10:13 Prediction: a frontier model’s weights get stolen
13:05 How OpenAI’s agents ended up attacking Hugging Face
15:29 Why only a Chinese open-weight model could investigate
17:33 What frontier-lab cyber defense could look like
19:08 Self-replicating agents and the risks of AI swarms
21:16 Can frontier labs agree to slow down?
24:03 Why communities are blocking $50B of data centers
24:44 Nuclear plant vs. data center: what Americans prefer
26:45 Europe’s AI bottleneck: 80,000 GPUs and electricity costs
28:23 Where Europe can still win in AI
29:31 Catching up to OpenAI costs $1 trillion
29:43 Die trying for the frontier, or serve inference
30:31 How inference chips could give countries AI leverage
33:34 Why NVIDIA GPUs don’t guarantee AI sovereignty
36:14 The UK’s problem: “but we have DeepMind”
37:07 Why European defense AI needs domestic suppliers
39:41 Why OpenAI, Anthropic and Google keep pulling ahead
41:17 Where independent AI labs can still compete
43:26 World models: from robotics training to game engines
45:39 Would cheaper AI undermine the compute boom?
46:43 Will better models absorb the agent harness
49:41 AI due diligence: 12 expert interviews in 2.5 days
53:35 The trust problem with personal AI agents
56:22 Why prompt engineering put people off AI
59:02 Does AI need its own Genius Bar?
1:00:25 Codex beyond coding: agents for knowledge work
1:02:49 Why enterprises want to own their AI, not rent it
1:05:17 Rapid fire: home robots, NVIDIA returns and Arm
This great conversation with @nathanbenaich is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and here on YouTube:
youtu.be/N4GpNBxBm-Q?si=fcUm…
This is why French founders are a special breed - to even start a company, they have to first face this kind of feedback from their families and friends lol 😂
