OpenAI is no longer just a model company. They raised $4 billion to enter the consulting and services layer, with McKinsey and Bain among the backers. Anthropic is doing the same through a partner ecosystem. The question isn't whether this works technically; it's whether the lock-in holds when switching an API key is easier than switching a SAP implementation.

This week, Ramón Rodrigáñez and Andrea Marino also dig into Cerebras, the chip company targeting a $26 billion IPO that might be the most credible challenger to Nvidia yet, with an OpenAI compute deal of $20 billion already signed. And Gary Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, who builds personal AI until 2am every morning: thin harness, fat skills, fat data, and an open-source skill that turns any book into a personal reflection on your own life.

There's also a practical tip going viral inside Anthropic: stop asking for Markdown outputs, ask for HTML instead. The model takes slightly more tokens, but you absorb the output in a fraction of the time. A small change with a surprisingly large impact on how you interact with AI day to day.

And a harder question to close: is AI making us more productive or just busier? Employee disengagement is at a three-year low in 2026. Meta got caught installing tracking software on employee computers to train replacement models. And trust in AI in the US is now lower than trust in ICE. The edge users are having fun. Everyone else is worried.

The best connections in your career aren't a matter of chance. Nova is the merit-based professional network where you'll find the greatest talent. Want to be a part of it? Link here 👉 https://www.novatalent.com/top-talent?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=signal-ep07&utm_content=bio-link

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Everyone is watching Anthropic vs. OpenAI. Meanwhile, in the labs, robots are being built that will reshape the economy in ways that make the current AI debate look small.Matias, Nova 111 UK Supernova and Harvard PhD researcher, joined Ramón and Andrea to talk about the real frontier of AI — the physical world. From exoskeletons helping people with Parkinson's walk, to humanoid robots promising to replace entire industries, the conversation cuts through the hype to what actually matters: when robotics truly unlocks at scale, the blue collar shock will make today's white collar AI disruption look manageable. If a robot costs less than a human, there's no debate — companies will hire the robot. That's not pessimism. That's math.We also got into Europe vs. the US: why the continent's best engineering talent keeps ending up at Harvard, MIT, and ETH Zurich before crossing the Atlantic for good. The schools are world-class. The pay isn't. The ecosystem doesn't pull. And that's a structural problem Europe hasn't solved — and is running out of time to fix.On the news side: Google's Gemini quietly taking over classified Pentagon work, OpenAI removing its safety handover clause from its founding charter, China becoming the first government to legally protect workers from AI-driven layoffs, the Oscars banning AI actors and AI-written scripts, Sam Altman pitching OpenAI as the Stripe of intelligence, and Stripe launching wallets so agents can spend your money — while 47% of internet traffic is already bots.The best connections in your career aren't a matter of chance. Nova is the merit-based professional network where you'll find the greatest talent. Want to be a part of it? Link here 👉 https://www.novatalent.com/top-talent?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=signal-ep06&utm_content=bio-linkLooking to hire top talent? Nova Recruiter is the world's most advanced tool to find and engage qualified talent. Search in a +800M public profile database with merit-based filters, multi-channel sequencing and AI agents that automate your work E2E and save up to 98% of the sourcing time (~22h / process). Try it for free 👉https://www.novatalent.com/nova-recruiter?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=signal-ep06&utm_content=bio-link

Julia is the Supernova of the Year of the Nova 111 Student List in Spain. She studies physics and mathematics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and is doing her PhD in astronomy, cosmology and data science at Cambridge.In this episode of Signal she talks about something that is already happening inside the best universities in the world: PhD students who haven't written a single line of code on their own in six months. Not because they can't. Because they don't need to anymore.We also talk about what the next generation understands better about AI than senior professionals, why universities are redesigning their exams because of LLMs, and whether juniors entering the job market today are at a disadvantage or actually ahead.Plus the week's news: GPT 5.5 drops and challenges Claude on benchmarks, Tim Cook's era at Apple comes to an end, OpenAI and Microsoft quietly break up, Cursor hits $6B ARR, and Google doubles down on TPUs as the infrastructure race heats up.No scripts. No filters. Just a conversation worth having.New episode every Thursday. 🔔The best connections in your career aren't a matter of chance. Nova is the merit-based professional network where you'll find the greatest talent. Want to be a part of it? Link here 👉 https://www.novatalent.com/top-talent?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=signal-ep05&utm_content=bio-linkLooking to hire top talent? Nova Recruiter is the world's most advanced tool to find and engage qualified talent. Search in a +800M public profile database with merit-based filters, multi-channel sequencing and AI agents that automate your work E2E and save up to 98% of the sourcing time (~22h / process). Try it for free 👉https://www.novatalent.com/nova-recruiter?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=signal-ep05&utm_content=bio-link#SignalByNova #Nova #FutureOfWork #AI #Nova111 #Cambridge #GPT5 #Claude #Tech #Startups