Arthur Mensch is the CEO and co-founder of Mistral. Arthur Mensch joins the Big Technology Podcast to discuss what the AI business looks like if all leading models perform the same. Tune in to hear how the commoditization of foundational models is changing the balance of power in the industry, what business models will be profitable, and why the focus is shifting from building better models to building applications. We also cover the open source movement versus closed source models, the geopolitics of AI, and practical industrial applications of the technology.
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Niko Papademetriou lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and son. He has had an interesting background professionally. He got into finance, and experienced all the downside that 2008 had to offer. Post all of that, he started a restaurant at the age of 26 with some folks, and quickly realized how difficult it was. After 4 years, he met some guys and wanted to start a new thing. Outside of tech, he and his wife spends a lot of time watching his son play hockey, and engaging with the team at the hockey rink.
Niko has observed the restaurant business change, moving towards many different ordering methods - mobile, web, in person, etc. At the end of whatever method, the order needed to land inside the black box of the POS system. He wanted to create the plumbing, better yet the ultimate system to connect it all.
Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.
Paul Rosolie is a naturalist, explorer, author of a new book titled Junglekeeper, and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the Amazon rainforest.
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See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc.
Dylan Ratcliffe lives in San Francisco (for less than a year), but grew up on a farm in the bush in Australia, riding motorbikes and playing video games. He fondly remembers the days whenever you could get a free version of Age of Empires from a cereal box. He was always into computers, and earned a scholarship to head into Melbourne for University. He left his first job as an auditor with KPMG to join a startup called Puppet. Outside of tech, he still rides motorbikes, and has a super small one now (it's actually meant for kids). He loves all food, but prefers Asian and Indian cuisine.
Dylan was deploying Puppet at a financial services company, and was pushing to get a win. When a late Friday afternoon deployment went haywire, he decided to leave his company and set out to build something to automatically discover dependencies on a network, to prevent deployment outages.
Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.
Your cloud SSD is sitting there, bored, and it would like a job. Today we’re putting it to work with DiskCache, a simple, practical cache built on SQLite that can speed things up without spinning up Redis or extra services. Once you start to see what it can do, a universe of possibilities opens up. We're joined by Vincent Warmerdam to dive into DiskCache.
Ryan welcomes back the mighty Scott Hanselman, VP of Developer Community at Microsoft, for a crossover episode about all things vibe coding. They cover the ways it can really improve the software development lifecycle, the importance of keeping human judgement in software so developers can truly understand their code, and how AI can be leveraged as a learning tool…like when Scott vibe coded a simple app over lunch.
Episode notes:
Scott last sat down with us in 2017 to discuss his journey into tech and his advice for supporting the next generation of developers.
You can learn more about Scott’s work at his website. If you love the sound of his voice, you can also check out his podcasts Hanselminutes,Azure Friday, and his show with Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich: Scott & Mark Learn To. You can also check out the app he vibe coded over lunch on his GitHub.
M.G. Siegler of Spyglass is back for our monthly tech news discussion. Today we discuss whether AI needs a Steve Jobs, whether the technology lends itself to that type of leader, and who it might be of the current crop. We also discuss which Big Tech companies are actually winning in the AI race and why so few have a standout AI product. Then we look at the year ahead and get some of Siegler's boldest predictions. Tune in for a fun, deep discussion on the current state of AI and what's missing.
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Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. This week, we do our 2026 predictions in an abbreviated holiday-time episode. Here's what we cover: 1) Claude Code's ability to run autonomously and complete tasks 2) Claude's ability to use tools 3) Is this a big deal? 4) Can Claude Code style tools be used for more knowledge work? 5) Gmail adds AI 6) Another explanation for Meta's Manus purchase 7) OpenAI gets into healthcare (officially) 8) Future of the doctor-patient interaction 9) Are rigged prediction markets a good thing? 10) Do we still want to do busywork in the age of AI?
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Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice.
Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. This week, we do our 2026 predictions in an abbreviated holiday-time episode. Here's what we cover: 1) Claude Code's ability to run autonomously and complete tasks 2) Claude's ability to use tools 3) Is this a big deal? 4) Can Claude Code style tools be used for more knowledge work? 5) Gmail adds AI 6) Another explanation for Meta's Manus purchase 7) OpenAI gets into healthcare (officially) 8) Future of the doctor-patient interaction 9) Are rigged prediction markets a good thing? 10) Do we still want to do busywork in the age of AI?
---
Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice.
Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b
