Technology

Sources with Alex Heath

Sources features candid conversations with the leaders shaping what’s next in AI and the broader tech industry. Host Alex Heath has covered Silicon Valley as a journalist for more than a decade. He talks with founders, CEOs, and technologists about the news of the moment, the bets they’re making, and what they see coming next.

Latest Episodes:

Sundar Pichai on Gemini 4 and the AI compute crunch Oct 21, 2026

Show notes

Even Google can’t get enough compute. I sit down with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai shortly after the wider release of Gemini 4 Argon to discuss its early reception, where he still wants the model to improve, and what it takes to keep Google at the frontier of AI.

Pichai explains the recent leadership shakeup at Google DeepMind and why building frontier models has become an “all-consuming” job. We also get into Google’s answer to the personal agent race, how he predicts Gemini will do more work on your behalf, and whether agents will finally bring Search, Gmail, and Gemini together.

I ask him about Google turning free cash flow negative, the risks in the AI infrastructure buildout, and how he plans for demand years before knowing what the models will be capable of. He explains the signals giving him confidence to keep spending and how he uses AI agents to follow model development and compute usage inside Google.

We also discuss Project Suncatcher, Google’s new effort to put AI data centers in space, and why he thinks it belongs alongside bets like Waymo. He shares what’s next for Waymo and Wing, and when he expects quantum computing to become a real business.

This episode's presenting sponsor is Hyperagent - https://www.hyperagent.com/ . Thanks to the show’s premiere sponsors: Atlassian, Granola, and Mercury.

Robinhood’s CEO on letting AI trade your money Oct 13, 2026

Show notes

Robinhood wants to put an AI hedge fund in your pocket.

CEO Vlad Tenev tells me how Robinhood Agents brings AI trading into the app, and why he expects agents to generate a growing share of individual investors’ trading activity.

We discuss how much control to give an AI that can trade your money, why Robinhood keeps agents in separate accounts, and where investors will find an edge when everyone has access to powerful models.

He also explains his push for every Robinhood employee to have agents working while they sleep. Tenev argues that the AI backlash is partly an ownership problem: most people can’t invest in the companies driving it. We get into Robinhood’s push to open private markets to everyday investors, the coming AI IPOs, and his response to criticism of tokenized stocks. We also discuss prediction markets and why he objects to AI labs keeping their most powerful tools to themselves.

Thanks to the show’s premier sponsors: Atlassian, Granola, and Mercury.

Qualcomm’s CEO on the coming AI phone supercycle Oct 08, 2026

Show notes

AI could give people a reason to buy a new phone again.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon tells me why he expects a smartphone supercycle as AI agents start using our apps and acting on our behalf. His company makes the chips behind Android phones, Meta’s smart glasses, and coming devices from AI companies like OpenAI, giving it a stake in several competing visions for the next big AI device.

We discuss why he thinks phones aren’t going away, how agents will use our personal context, and why he expects smart glasses to become the biggest category of AI wearables. We also cover differences in consumer AI adoption between China and the US, Qualcomm’s acquisition of Modular to offer developers an alternative to Nvidia’s software, and what 6G could change about the devices we use.

This conversation was recorded live at Qualcomm’s recent Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii

Thanks to the show’s premiere sponsors: Atlassian, Granola, and Mercury.

Reflection’s founders on building a DeepSeek of the West Oct 05, 2026

Show notes

Reflection is soon releasing Beam, its first open-weight AI model, in a bid to become the DeepSeek of the West. Trained from scratch, Beam is designed for coding, reasoning, and AI agents. Reflection's benchmarks put it alongside the strongest open models, with substantially more efficient token economics.

To mark Beam’s debut, I'm joined by Reflection's co-founders: CEO Misha Laskin, who led reward modeling for Google’s Gemini, and CTO Ioannis Antonoglou, who helped create AlphaGo and AlphaZero before leading Gemini’s RLHF effort. Reflection has raised $4.6 billion from investors that include Nvidia, Sequoia, and Lightspeed.

We discuss why Chinese labs pulled ahead in open AI models, how Reflection built Beam, and why the founders think companies and countries will increasingly want to control their own models. I ask how they plan to make money from open-weight AI, whether openness can make these systems safer, and what comes next for Reflection.

Thanks to the show’s premier sponsors: Atlassian, Granola, and Mercury.

OpenAI’s Dots lead on the future of ChatGPT Oct 01, 2026

Show notes

OpenAI’s next big bet is Dots, personal AI agents that can find ways to help you without waiting for a prompt.

Alexander Embiricos, OpenAI’s Dots product lead, tells me why the company is moving beyond chatbots and what that means for the future of ChatGPT. We discuss why Dots have their own computers, how they share context across the places you talk to them, and why he thinks most people will only need one personal agent.

I ask him how much control people should give these agents, how OpenAI approaches permissions and privacy, and why Dots ask before taking action by default. He also explains Space, a new workspace where people and agents can collaborate on documents, data, and projects.

We get into how OpenAI plans to price an always-available assistant, how these capabilities could eventually reach free ChatGPT users, and the story of an employee who woke up to discover his Dot had helped fix a bug.

This conversation was recorded in front of a live audience at OpenAI's 2026 DevDay conference.

Thanks to the show’s premiere sponsors: Atlassian, Granola, and Mercury.

Factory CEO on why AGI is already here Sep 29, 2026

Show notes

Matan Grinberg is the co-founder and CEO of Factory, a $5 billion AI coding startup building Droid agents to automate the engineering process. He tells me how AI is changing the job of a software engineer and why Factory is betting on a future with many competing models.

We get into how it balances model performance with token costs and why he thinks companies should avoid depending on one AI provider.We also discuss why he thinks AGI is already here, how Factory hires its own engineers, his view of the open-versus-closed AI debate, competition with companies like Cognition, and when companies should outsource to AI rather than build in-house.

Thanks to the show’s premiere sponsors: Atlassian, Granola, and Mercury.

Satya Nadella on Microsoft's agent bet and AI’s trust problem Sep 25, 2026

Show notes

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella thinks AI agents will create a market “orders of magnitude” bigger than the cloud.

I recently sat down with him in Seattle for the unveiling of the new Copilot.

We discuss Autopilot, Microsoft's new OpenClaw-based agent that can work on your behalf, and why he thinks newer AI models are finally capable of delivering on more of Copilot’s promise.

Nadella also has a blunt assessment of the AI industry: “We are way too self-obsessed.” I ask him why the industry has struggled to explain its benefits and what it will take to earn people’s trust. We get into his concerns about agents acting deceptively, when a safety problem should stop a release, and why he doesn’t want AI oversight to become a “cartel-like arrangement.”

We also discuss Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI, the models Microsoft is building itself, and why Nadella wants investors to think about its apps, agents, and infrastructure as one connected business. He explains how he uses AI to track Microsoft’s capital spending, shares his vision for “unmetered intelligence” on Windows, and gives an update on Xbox’s path back to growth.

Thanks to the show's premier sponsors: Mercury, Granola, and Atlassian.

Marc Benioff on the AI boom, SaaSpocalypse, and future of Slack Sep 22, 2026

Show notes

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and I discuss his framemogging at Dreamforce, the state of the SaaSpocalypse, and how Slack is more important than ever in the age of AI.

We also discuss the resurgence of San Francisco, his role in the recent acquisition of Hugging Face, the wealth being created by the IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI, and what he thinks the industry can learn from the social media era.

Thanks to the show's premier sponsors: Granola, Atlassian, and Mercury.

Baseten’s CEO on why every company will want to own its AI Sep 15, 2026

Show notes

Tuhin Srivastava is the CEO and co-founder of Baseten, an AI cloud startup recently valued at $13 billion. He tells me why every company will want to own its AI and what’s driving the explosion in demand for inference.

We discuss the rise of agents using browsers and virtual machines to get things done and Baseten’s acquisition of Blaxel to power that shift.

We also talk about the data center backlash, why companies are embracing Chinese open models, his plans for Baseten’s new research lab, and why he thinks inference becomes the only market left after AGI.

Thanks to the show's premier sponsors: Atlassian, Granola, and Mercury.

Mark Zuckerberg on Muse, Meta's biggest AI bet yet Sep 08, 2026

Show notes

As Meta releases Muse, Mark Zuckerberg tells me why he thinks a personal AI agent that works for you around the clock will make you money.

He explains how Meta plans to make that business work and why he thinks keeping the most powerful AI models in the hands of a few companies is dangerous.

We also discuss the growing backlash against data centers, Meta’s recent youth safety settlement, and the privacy scare over its smart glasses. And he shares what went wrong with Llama 4, how he rebuilt Meta’s AI lab, and what’s coming next.

Thanks to the show's premier sponsors: Granola, Atlassian, and Mercury.

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