The Future of AI: Personal Agents, Taste & Private Data | Lin Qiao & Demi Guo | E9

This week we sit down with Lin Qiao and Demi Guo on This Week in AI Episode 9. Lin is the co-founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, a frontier inference platform processing tens of trillions of tokens per day, built by seven ex-Meta engineers who created PyTorch. Demi is the co-founder and CEO of Pica, building humanized AI agents for creative work, agents you interact with like a person, not a prompt box. - Private Data Is the Frontier: 95% of the world's data is locked inside enterprises — activating it is the next intelligence breakthrough. - Open-Source Is Converging: On par for everyday tasks, ~6 months behind on complex work. - Agents as Children, Not Tools: Demi says the right model is raising an agent with feedback and your unique taste — not one-click automation. - Humanized Agents over Prompts: Pica found the best interface is an agent you video call and screen share with. - Gen Z Doesn't Buy It: Lin's daughter says her generation finds AI inauthentic — they'd rather hand-draw than use generated images. - Startups in Days, Not Quarters: Prototyping collapsed from months to days, unlocking a Cambrian explosion of new companies. - Meta Goes Closed-Source: Lin reacts to Meta's Muse model — makes sense for consumer products, but disappoints the open-source community. This Week In AI is made possible by: PayPalOpen - One Platform for all Business: http://paypalopen.com/ Timestamps: 00:00 Welcome & intro to Lin Qiao and Demi Guo 02:38 Lin's journey from Meta to Fireworks AI 05:13 Building PyTorch and bootstrapping AI infrastructure 06:58 Who Fireworks competes with and why enterprises need it 08:43 Activating the 95% of private data locked in enterprises 11:31 Demi's journey building Pica and the pivot to humanized agents 16:03 The best interface for creation is a human-like agent 16:42 The AI layoff trap — a prisoner's dilemma for firms 19:00 Cambrian explosion of startups and the hobbyist-to-inventor pipeline 22:07 Flattening organizations and the death of middle management 28:03 Taste, judgment, and why "slop" is the real risk 31:22 Why agents drift and the case for constant iteration 33:40 Rethinking agents: not tools, but children you raise 39:36 How close are open-source models to frontier? 43:20 Token usage and the economics of running agents 46:15 Toys becoming tools — the hobbyist signal 48:59 Public perception of AI: America vs. China vs. Silicon Valley 53:04 Agents as self-expression and identity creation 57:06 The expert vs. public perception gap on AI's impact 63:17 Meta's Muse model and the open-source debate 68:26 Data drought, synthetic data, and the next architecture leap 72:06 Hiring at Fireworks AI and Pica Subscribe to This Week in AI on Apple: https://thisweekinai.ai/spotify Subscribe to This Week in AI on Spotify: https://thisweekinai.ai/apple Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Follow Oliver: https://x.com/oliverkorzen Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Links Mentioned on the Show: Fireworks AI: https://fireworks.ai/ Pika (formerly Pika): https://pika.art/ PyTorch: https://pytorch.org/ "The AI Layoff Trap" paper (UPenn & Boston University): https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20617 Fortune: CFOs say AI cuts will be 9x bigger than reported: https://fortune.com/2026/03/24/cfo-survey-ai-job-cuts-productivity-paradox-2026/ HBR: Companies firing based on AI potential, not performance: https://hbr.org/2026/01/companies-are-laying-off-workers-because-of-ais-potential-not-its-performance New Yorker profile on Sam Altman (Ronan Farrow): https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/11/sam-altman-responds-to-incendiary-new-yorker-article-after-attack-on-his-home/ Sam Altman home attack: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/10/sam-altman-house-hit-with-molotov-cocktail-openai-office-threatened.html Block layoffs — Jack Dorsey cites AI: https://fortune.com/2026/02/27/block-jack-dorsey-ceo-xyz-stock-square-4000-ai-layoffs/ Pew Research — AI experts vs. public perception: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-public-and-ai-experts-view-artificial-intelligence/ Meta Muse Spark announcement: https://ai.meta.com/blog/introducing-muse-spark-msl/ DeepSeek V3: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3 Bubble Pal AI toy (Shenzhen): https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hugging-every-fun-thought-haivivi-unveils-the-worlds-first-aigc-toy-bubblepal-302209714.html Cursor (Composer): https://cursor.sh/ NVIDIA Nemotron: https://developer.nvidia.com/nemotron Qwen (Alibaba): https://qwenlm.github.io/ Mistral AI: https://mistral.ai/