Vibes & Benchmarks
Outset Capital's weekly AI news podcast
Vibes & Benchmarks is Outset Capital's weekly AI news podcast, hosted by Ali Rohde and Josh Albrecht. Each week they break down the biggest AI news — model releases, funding, policy, and the business of AI — with the candor of practitioners who build and invest in AI.
Episodes
- July 2026
Vibes & Benchmarks Ep 09: Did an AI escape its sandbox, or was that just bad engineering?
Vibes & Benchmarks is Outset Capital's weekly AI news podcast. On episode 9, Ali Rohde and Josh Albrecht cover the OpenAI model that slipped its sandbox, Fireworks' $1.5B Series D and the open-weight market, whether fine-tuning on proprietary data is a real moat, Google's model-specific inference chip, Kimi K3, AMD's Helios, and why knowledge work is still unsolved.
- July 2026
Vibes & Benchmarks Ep 08: How do you learn engineering judgment when AI writes the code?
Vibes & Benchmarks is Outset Capital's weekly AI news podcast. On episode 8, Ali Rohde and Josh Albrecht cover why code is solved but software engineering isn't, the code-review lesson Josh gave an Imbue intern about not reinventing cron, whether Paul Graham's five-year bet on model progress can justify frontier-lab valuations, and what Anthropic's J-space interpretability work does and doesn't show.
- June 2026
Vibes & Benchmarks Ep 06: Does AI actually give anyone an edge?
Vibes & Benchmarks is Outset Capital's weekly AI news podcast. On episode 6, Ali Rohde and Josh Albrecht cover SpaceX's $2.6 trillion IPO and its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, why distillation makes Cursor's moat fragile, the case for owning the whole AI stack, the Pentagon pulling Anthropic's Fable access, and the core argument: AI is now mandatory but non-differentiating, and the value accrues to the model providers.
- June 2026
Vibes & Benchmarks Ep 05: Should the government own half of OpenAI?
Vibes & Benchmarks is Outset Capital's weekly AI news podcast. On episode 5, Ali Rohde and Josh Albrecht cover the wave of trillion-dollar IPOs, OpenAI's public-wealth-fund pitch, Anthropic's Fable and its recursive self-improvement paper, the SpaceX IPO, and why everyone suddenly wants to build loops.
- June 2026
Vibes & Benchmarks Ep 04: Is anyone actually working less because of AI?
Vibes & Benchmarks is Outset Capital's weekly AI news podcast. On episode 4, Ali Rohde and Josh Albrecht cover Bernie Sanders's AI ownership proposal, whether AI 'token shock' is product-market fit, enterprise budget discipline, and why no one is working less because of AI.
- May 2026
Vibes & Benchmarks Ep 03: Is SpaceX really worth $2 trillion?
On episode 3 of Vibes & Benchmarks, Ali Rohde and Josh Albrecht cover the SpaceX S-1, George Hotz on AI coding, the cost-optimization phase of AI, and the Pope's surprisingly good AI take.
- May 2026
Vibes & Benchmarks Ep 02: Will Google outlast Anthropic and OpenAI?
On episode 2 of Vibes & Benchmarks, Ali Rohde and Josh Albrecht cover the Codex-vs-Claude-Code switch, Google's long game, and Anthropic at a $1T valuation.