This Week In Startups is made possible by:Paypal OpenToday’s show:On a podcast this week, Sam Altman made a bold declaration: “We are now, like, in the singularity.” A bold claim which Alex puts bluntly to this week’s panel. Grant Lee of Gamma and Philip Johnston of Starcloud sound off… Is this actually the Singularity, and if so, why do things still feel so normal?Plus the panel and guest host Alex Wilhelm discuss the infrastructure and economics that will make singularity-scale AI buildout possible… NVIDIA’s st...
This Week In Startups is made possible by:
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Today’s show:
On a podcast this week, Sam Altman made a bold declaration: “We are now, like, in the singularity.” A bold claim which Alex puts bluntly to this week’s panel. Grant Lee of Gamma and Philip Johnston of Starcloud sound off… Is this actually the Singularity, and if so, why do things still feel so normal?
Plus the panel and guest host Alex Wilhelm discuss the infrastructure and economics that will make singularity-scale AI buildout possible… NVIDIA’s strongly worded letter about open-weight models… Moonshot’s new Kimi K3 twist on open-source licenses… Stripe’s reported $10B run at OpenRouter… and more.
Guests
Grant Lee on X: https://x.com/thisisgrantlee
Gamma: https://gamma.app/
Philip Johnston on X: https://x.com/PhilipJohnston
Starcloud: https://www.starcloud.com/
Relevant Links
TechCrunch: Gamma hits $110M ARR: https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/10/ai-powerpoint-killer-gamma-hits-2-1b-valuation-100m-arr-founder-says/
Nvidia: How Starcloud is Bringing Data Centers to Space: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/starcloud/
Open Weights and American AI Leadership letter: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/open-weight-models-letter-1.pdf
CNBC on Nvidia-OpenAI infrastructure plans: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/27/nvidia-and-openai-in-talks-for-up-to-250-billion-dollar-ai-backstop.html
Kimi K3: https://www.kimi.com/en
Crusoe announces strategic Starcloud partnership: https://www.crusoe.ai/resources/newsroom/crusoe-to-become-first-cloud-operator-in-space-through-partnership-with-starcloud
Andrej Karpathy on YouTube: “Let’s Build GPT”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY
Demis Hassabis Starcloud post on X: https://x.com/demishassabis/status/1999296127276126417
RAISE Summit: https://www.raisesummit.com/
Lilian Weng exits Thinking Machines post: https://x.com/lilianweng/status/2081816923088814421
Baseten: https://www.baseten.co/
Fireworks AI: https://fireworks.ai/
Legora: https://legora.com/
OpenEvidence: https://www.openevidence.com/
Yahoo: Stripe in talks to acquire OpenRouter: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/stripe-talks-acquire-openrouter-potential-215104525.html
Sam Altman on the Relentless podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv3CEAS_w34
TechCrunch: Cursor India-only pricing tier: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/27/cursor-makes-its-biggest-india-push-yet-ahead-of-spacex-acquisition-with-localized-pricing/
Gergely Orosz: The Pragmatic Engineer: https://www.pragmaticengineer.com/
Timestamps:
0:00 Guest intros: Grant Lee (Gamma) and Philip Johnston (Starcloud)
1:22 Nvidia's open weight letter
8:11 Starcloud's first H100 in space
19:47 Series A extension economics
20:39 How Gamma stayed lean and balanced work and fun
30:40 Betting on a compute-constrained world
35:48 Different approaches to pricing
44:59 Where does the AI moat really live?
57:41 Are we in the Singularity?
1:04:42 Starcloud's mission to Alpha Centauri
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