Podcast/Weekly/Oscar & Matt

Human in the Loop

A weekly signal filter for the AI economy. Oscar and Matt sift the week's noise, debate real business ideas, and close with two hot takes you won't hear anywhere else.

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Now Playing/EP 20

A Mysterious AI Model Just Appeared. Nobody Knows Who Built It.

Aug 25, 2026·78 min·Available on YouTube, Spotify & Apple Podcasts

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A Mysterious AI Model Just Appeared. Nobody Knows Who Built It. — episode thumbnail

LatestEP 20

Human in the Loop

Aug 25, 202678 min

A Mysterious AI Model Just Appeared. Nobody Knows Who Built It.

A free million-token AI model appeared online, takes video, retains your prompts, and has no public developer. So who built Ox Alpha? Oscar and Matt test the claims around the anonymous model now running on OpenRouter — it's free during its preview, accepts text, images, and video, supports tool use, and can return up to 131,072 tokens. Early coding results look strong, but the sample is small, the comparisons are uneven, and no lab has claimed the model.

Aug 18, 202693 min

Opus-Class AI on Your Laptop?

Qwen released a 27-billion-parameter model that fits on a well-equipped laptop and beats Claude Opus 4.6 on selected coding benchmarks. Is local AI ready for real company work? Oscar and Matt separate the benchmark claim from the operating reality — Qwen3.8-27B leads Opus 4.6 Max on SWE-bench Pro and CoWorkBench but trails it on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and GPQA Diamond, and quantized builds run about 18 to 20 GB, which puts 32 GB laptops and desktops in the conversation.

Aug 11, 2026108 min

Meta Launches Muse Code: A 24-Hour Coding Agent

Meta launched Muse Code, a terminal coding agent designed to work across large repositories, coordinate background agents, recover after crashes, and keep going for hours. Is this a better coding system or simply more automation to review? Oscar and Matt look past the model benchmark and examine the operating system around Muse Code — persistent workers in isolated worktrees, a local event log of every model call and approval, and one kernel-optimization run that made more than 1,000 tool calls over as long as 24 hours.

Aug 4, 202663 min

AI Made Engineers Faster. Leadership Fell Behind

AI made engineers faster. It did not make companies faster at deciding what to build. Mike Lyons and Greg Pfister of KaiRise join Oscar and Matt, starting with a $4.3 million voter registration system that shipped on time, on budget, and on scope — and got rejected by its users anyway. When engineering is only 20% of delivery, the bottleneck moves to leadership, planning, and knowing when to stop.

Jul 28, 2026116 min

They Want to Ban Kimi K3

Kimi K3 got hot enough to trigger a U.S. ban debate. If Washington restricts a model you can download and run yourself, is that national security, closed-model protection, or both? Oscar and Matt make the Signal or Noise call on Kimi K3, an OpenAI agent breaching Hugging Face, Claude Opus 5, Meta AI's app actions, and the 50-company open-weights letter, then debate two AI business ideas.

Jul 21, 202669 min

Your CEO Says “We Need AI.” Now What?

Your CEO says, “We need AI.” Before you hire an AI engineer or buy another tool, find one painful process worth fixing. Episode 15 is our first Dear Human in the Loop, an advice episode where Oscar and Matt answer the practical AI questions founders, engineering leads, and developers are actually asking.

Jul 14, 202692 min

Apple Sues OpenAI and Meta Ships Muse Spark 1.1

Apple says OpenAI built its hardware program with stolen trade secrets. OpenAI denies any interest in Apple's secrets. We make the Signal or Noise call.

Jul 7, 202673 min

Meta Compute, OpenAI Equity, and AI Startup Bets

Meta spent so much on AI that it may have backed into becoming a cloud company. Smart move, or capex panic? We make the call. Welcome to Human In the Loop, a weekly podcast where two builders talk about what matters in AI. No hype. No doomerism. No recaps for the sake of recaps.

Jun 30, 2026106 min

The Frontier Just Got a Guest List

OpenAI just shipped its most powerful model to twenty companies the government picked. Not the best twenty. The approved twenty. A week after the US switched off Anthropic's best model, the frontier has a guest list, and you are not on it. We figure out what that does to anyone trying to build on the newest model.

Jun 23, 2026104 min

The World Cup Is Secretly Run by AI

Last week the US government gave Anthropic's best model a 72-hour public life, then switched it off for every foreign national on earth. This week, three Chinese labs shipped models that beat almost everything in the open, handed over the weights, and charged a tenth of the price. We figure out which of those two plays ends with the whole world building on your stack.

Jun 16, 202666 min

Anthropic's Best Model Got Banned in 72 Hours

Anthropic shipped the most powerful AI ever released to the public on June 9. By June 12 the US government made them pull it back from every foreign national on earth, including Anthropic's own engineers. The most capable model on the planet had a 72-hour public life. We unpack who actually won that week, because it was not the people who got the model.

Jun 9, 202699 min

The Government Gets Your AI 30 Days Early + The Token Bill

The White House just signed an order that lets the federal government test the most powerful AI models up to 30 days before you can touch them. The labs said yes. Real national security, or the backdoor frontier labs were begging for? We make the call.

Jun 2, 2026123 min

Anthropic's "Too Dangerous" Model Is Coming for Everyone

Six weeks ago Anthropic said a model was too dangerous to ship. This week they shipped Opus 4.8, called it near-Mythos, and said Mythos-class models reach every customer in the coming weeks. Was it ever that dangerous? We make the call.

May 26, 202698 min

Cursor's $0.50 Coding Model + Anthropic's $900B Round

Cursor just shipped a coding model that matches Claude Opus 4.7 at one tenth the price, built on an open Chinese base model. The same week, Anthropic is closing a $30B round at a $900B valuation. If frontier coding got commoditized in seven days, what is anyone paying premium for? Welcome to Human In the Loop, a weekly podcast where two builders cut through the AI hype cycle. No breathless hype. No doomerism. No surface-level recaps. Honest, opinionated conversations from people actually building with AI.

May 19, 202692 min

Anthropic Killed the AI-for-SMB Playbook + AI Agents 101

Three months ago on Episode 1, we asked if there was a real business in selling AI to small businesses. This week, Anthropic shipped it themselves. So we just watched the founder playbook get eaten by a frontier lab in 90 days. If you were six weeks into building that company, what do you do Monday?

May 12, 202676 min

Self-Hosted AI, Everything You Need to Know

Anthropic and OpenAI are burning billions and your token bill is climbing. Oscar and Matt sit down with the show's first guest — Jackson Oaks, founder of RecursionAI and the self-hosted platform Courier — who's running production AI workloads for SMBs on Mac Minis. No NVIDIA. No per-token billing. Bootstrapped and profitable today. They get into the 80/20 of open-source AI, the Apple M-series long bet, a Fortune client who paid Big Four six figures for a glorified GPT wrapper, and a 14B open-source model that beat GPT-4o on a real production task. Three hot takes close it out — one says Anthropic and OpenAI don't exist in their current form three years from now.

May 5, 202672 min

9 Seconds to Delete a Database

An AI agent deleted a company's entire production database in 9 seconds — backups included — then confessed. Oscar and Matt break down what actually happened, what every team shipping agents needs to fix today, and why Anthropic took funding offers at a $900B valuation five days later. Plus three real startup ideas pulled from YC's Summer 2026 RFS. Steelman. Pushback. Verdict. No fence-sitting.

Apr 28, 202661 min

GPT-5.5 Ships, Mythos Loses a Round

OpenAI shipped GPT-5.5, DeepSeek V4 went open-source on the cheap, and Google just bet $40B on Anthropic. Oscar and Matt walk through the developer tools they're actually using, then split on the takeaway: open-source won the cost war but lost credibility, or frontier releases are quietly turning into incremental software updates.

Apr 21, 202662 min

The Second Best Model You Can Actually Buy

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.7 — but the best model most people can actually touch still sits a tier below. Oscar and Matt unpack context engineering, agentic AI, and frontier model tiering in plain English, debate the business ideas hiding in the noise, and close with two hot takes.

Apr 14, 202647 min

The Model Anthropic Refused to Ship

Anthropic unveiled Claude Mythos Preview — then refused to release it. Responsible scaling, or enterprise GTM dressed up as safety PR? Oscar and Matt filter the week, debate three real business ideas, and close with two hot takes.

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