Skip to content
Sign in
Artwork for Human In the Loop
Technology

Human In the Loop

VallySeed

A human-first AI podcast. Real talk. Unpopular opinions. No hype.

Two builders — Oscar Gallo and Matt Wozniak — cut through the AI hype cycle every week. Signal or Noise filters the headlines. Rotating segments debate real ideas. New episodes weekly.

Play
Open in
  • 26 episodes
  • weekly
  • Avg 1 hr 24 min
  • English

Episodes 26

NewestOldestLongest
All6Unplayed6In progress0Played0
Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.
  • S1 · E6
    May 19 · 1 hr 32 min

    Ep 6: Anthropic Killed the AI-for-SMB Playbook

    Three months ago we asked if there was a real business in selling AI to small businesses. This week Anthropic shipped it themselves. We watched the playbook get eaten by a frontier lab in 90 days. Human In the Loop is a weekly podcast where two builders cut through the AI hype cycle. No hype. No doomerism. No surface-level recaps. SIGNAL OR NOISE The week's biggest AI headlines, called: - Anthropic ships Claude for Small Business (15 workflows + QuickBooks/HubSpot/Microsoft 365 connectors + 10-city US tour) - Thinking Machines previews Interaction Models (276B MoE, 0.4s full-duplex response) - Sierra raises $950M at $15B+ ($150M ARR in 8 quarters, 40% of Fortune 50) - Trump admin reverses on AI oversight (national-security fears post-Mythos) - Cloudflare cuts 1,100 jobs (~20%) and blames AI — same day it posts record Q1 revenue NO JARGON REQUIRED The three AI concepts every exec and operator keeps hearing this quarter, in plain English: 1. "AI Agent" — the word every vendor abuses (real agents vs chatbots in costume) 2. Connectors and MCP — what "AI plugged into your tools" actually requires 3. Full-Duplex Voice (Interaction Models) — what to ask when a vendor pitches a voice agent For each: plain-English explanation, plus a decision framework. Invest, wait, build, buy, or ignore. HOT TAKES Oscar: Anthropic just turned every AI consultant into a reseller. The workflow layer is going to the model providers. Matt: Every vendor calling their thing an "AI agent" in 2026 is going to look like every vendor that called their thing "cloud-native" in 2015. Key links: - Claude for Small Business: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-small-business - Sierra $950M raise: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/04/sierra-raises-950m-as-the-race-to-own-enterprise-ai-gets-serious/ - Model Context Protocol: https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol - Thinking Machines Interaction Models: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/11/thinking-machines-wants-to-build-an-ai-that-actually-listens-while-it-talks/ Do you want to know more? https://podcast.vallyseed.com/Wanna be part of that of the podcast? podcast@vallyseed.com Hosts: Oscar Gallo (AI Engineer & Entrepreneur) and Matt Wozniak (Builder, Operator). New episodes every week.

  • S1 · E5
    May 12 · 1 hr 16 min

    Ep 5: Self-Hosted AI — Jackson Oaks on Killing Tokens

    Your token bill is going up 4–8x in the next two years. Meanwhile, there's a profitable AI company running production workloads for SMBs on Mac Minis — eliminating token costs entirely and serving 600–800K API calls a month on a single machine. This is a guest deep-dive — every 5th episode we drop the segments and go one topic, one expert. This week: Jackson Oaks, founder of Recursion AI and the self-hosted AI platform Courier. Courier: https://getcourier.ai Jackson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackson-oaks/ THE CONVERSATION - The 80/20 of open-source AI — why 80% of businesses have 80% of use cases that don't need frontier models - Why Apple M-series is the most underrated AI hardware story of the decade (1/10th the cost of NVIDIA, 30–40x more power efficient) - Real production numbers: 600–800K API calls/month per Mac Studio, flat-rate pricing, the math behind killing token spend - A Fortune company paid Deloitte $400K for a "GPT wrapper with a RAG database" - Why MIT found 95% of business AI pilots couldn't measure ROI - War stories: the infinite hallucination loop that ate 10K requests in a week, and how they built hallucination detection from scratch - Fine-tuning a 14B model that outperformed GPT-4o on a structured extraction task HOT TAKES Matt: Anthropic and OpenAI consolidate within three years — or open-source overtakes both and they shrink dramatically. Oscar: Every home will run a better Alexa on a Mac Mini powered by open-source models. Jackson: Better systems with smaller models beat throwing frontier models at unstructured problems. Hosts: Oscar Gallo (AI Engineer & Entrepreneur) and Matt Wozniak (Builder & Operator). Guest: Jackson Oaks, Recursion AI / Courier. New episodes every week. Every 5th episode is a guest deep-dive.

  • S1 · E4
    May 5 · 1 hr 12 min

    Ep 4: 9 Seconds to Delete a Database

    On April 24th, an AI coding agent deleted a production database in 9 seconds, then confessed: "I violated every principle I was given." Five days later, the lab behind that model took funding offers at a $900 billion valuation. We call every story. Human In the Loop is a weekly podcast where two builders cut through the AI hype cycle. No hype, no doomerism, no surface-level recaps. SIGNAL OR NOISE We run through the week's biggest AI headlines and call each one: - Anthropic eyes a $900B valuation in a $50B raise - AI agent deletes PocketOS production database in 9 seconds - China blocks Meta's $2B Manus deal, Meta buys Assured Robot Intelligence days later - Cloudflare and Stripe ship the agent provisioning protocol - Chinese court rules an AI-replacement layoff was illegal (NPR, May 1) SHIP IT OR SKIP IT Three real ideas pulled directly from Y Combinator's Summer 2026 RFS. Steelman, pushback, verdict. No fence-sitting. 1. AI-Native Service Companies (RFS by Gustaf Alströmer) 2. Company Brain (RFS by Tom Blomfield) 3. Counter-Swarm Defense (RFS by Tyler Bosmeny) HOT TAKES Oscar: Anthropic at $900B is sovereign wealth fund pricing. Treat your model spend like an interest rate. Matt: Every AI agent in production is one bad scope away from being PocketOS. The fix is permissions and audit logs, not better models. Key links: - Anthropic $900B: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-29/anthropic-considering-funding-offers-at-over-900-billion-value - AI deletes database: https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/27/cursoropus_agent_snuffs_out_pocketos/ - Cloudflare agent protocol: https://blog.cloudflare.com/agents-stripe-projects/ - NPR, Chinese court rules AI-replacement layoff illegal: https://www.npr.org/2026/05/01/nx-s1-5807131/tech-worker-china-ai Hosts: Oscar Gallo (AI Engineer and Entrepreneur) and Matt Wozniak (Builder, Operator). New episodes every week.

  • S1 · E3
    April 28 · 1 hr 1 min

    Ep 3: GPT-5.5 Ships, Mythos Loses a Round

    Two weeks ago we called GPT-5.5 noise. It shipped Thursday. It beat Claude Mythos on Terminal-Bench. Google bet forty billion on Anthropic the same day. The race got weirder. Human In the Loop is a weekly podcast where two builders cut through the AI hype cycle. No hype, no doomerism, no surface-level recaps. SIGNAL OR NOISE We run through the week's biggest AI headlines and call each one: - GPT-5.5 (Spud) ships and beats Claude Mythos on Terminal-Bench 2.0 - DeepSeek V4 ships open source on Huawei chips, 1M context, one-sixth the cost - Google invests up to $40B in Anthropic - Cognition (Devin) in talks at $25B valuation - Grok 4.3 Beta at $300 per month, still no cross-session memory STACK CHECK Four tools we actually use right now. What stuck, what didn't, and whether we'd keep paying next month. 1. Vercel Labs Agent Browser 2. WorkOS (FGA + AuthKit for agents) 3. AI SDK (ai-sdk.dev) 4. Claude Code /remote-control HOT TAKES Oscar: Open-source AI just won the cost war and lost the trust war the same week. Matt: The "big release" era is over. From now on, model launches are software updates. Key links: - Introducing GPT-5.5: https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-5/ - DeepSeek V4: https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/24/deepseek-previews-new-ai-model-that-closes-the-gap-with-frontier-models/ - Google + Anthropic $40B: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/24/google-to-invest-up-to-40-billion-in-anthropic-as-search-giant-spreads-its-ai-bets.html - AI SDK: https://ai-sdk.dev/docs/introduction - Claude Code Remote Control: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/remote-control Hosts: Oscar Gallo (AI Engineer and Entrepreneur) and Matt Wozniak (Builder, Operator). New episodes every week.

  • S1 · E2
    April 21 · 1 hr 2 min

    Ep 2: Second-Best Model, No Jargon Required

    Anthropic shipped their best public model this week. In the same breath, they said it's their second best. The best one is gated to 50 enterprises. Human In the Loop is a weekly podcast where two builders cut through the AI hype cycle. No hype, no doomerism, no surface-level recaps. SIGNAL OR NOISE The week's AI headlines, filtered: - Claude Opus 4.7 ships with a 1M context window at standard pricing - OpenAI's updated Agents SDK (sandboxed agents, Python first) - AI on the desktop (Google's Gemini Mac app + Perplexity Personal Computer) - Stanford's 2026 AI Index: 10% of Americans are more excited than concerned vs. 56% of experts - Allbirds pivots from sneakers to AI, stock up 582% then crashing NO JARGON REQUIRED Three AI concepts decision-makers need to make real calls on this quarter. Plain English, then a decision framework. 1. Context Engineering. The successor to prompt engineering. 2. Agentic AI. What it actually is, and why Gartner says 40% of projects will be canceled by 2027. 3. Frontier Model Tiering. Why the best model is one you probably cannot buy. HOT TAKES Oscar: Context engineering is "write good internal documentation" rebranded so consultants can charge for it. Matt: Every executive asking "what's our agentic AI strategy" is two years from being replaced by one who already shipped something. Key links: - Opus 4.7 release: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/models/whats-new-claude-4-7 - OpenAI Agents SDK: https://openai.com/index/the-next-evolution-of-the-agents-sdk/ - Stanford AI Index: https://spectrum.ieee.org/state-of-ai-index-2026 - Gartner forecast: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-06-25-gartner-predicts-over-40-percent-of-agentic-ai-projects-will-be-canceled-by-end-of-2027 Hosts: Oscar Gallo (AI Engineer & Entrepreneur) and Matt Wozniak (Builder, Operator). New episodes every week.

  • S1 · E1
    April 15 · 45 min

    Ep 1: The Model Anthropic Refused to Ship

    Anthropic built a model so dangerous they refused to ship it. Safety call — or 2026's best marketing stunt? We make the call. Human In the Loop is a weekly podcast where two builders cut through the AI hype cycle. No hype, no doomerism, no surface-level recaps. SIGNAL OR NOISE We run through the week's biggest AI headlines and call each one: - Claude Mythos Preview + Project Glasswing - Meta's Muse Spark debut (Llama-4 quality at 1/10 the compute) - OpenAI's "Spud" / GPT-5.5 — noise until it ships - The OpenAI + Anthropic + Google anti-distillation pact - Anthropic's $400M Coefficient Bio acquisition SHIP IT OR SKIP IT Three business ideas pulled from podcasts this month. One host pitches. The other pushes back. No fence-sitting. 1. "Bring AI to small businesses" (via My First Million Ep 811) 2. A vertical AI agent for insurance claims processing 3. "Lovable-for-X" — the $200M ARR playbook, but for regulated verticals HOT TAKES Oscar: Anthropic withholding Mythos is the new frontier-lab moat. Safety-as-marketing is about to become the dominant playbook. Matt: The "AI for SMBs" gold rush is 90% consultants in trench coats. The real money is picks-and-shovels to the consultants. Key links: - Claude Mythos: https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/ - Project Glasswing: https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing - Vertical AI agents (GeekWire): https://www.geekwire.com/2026/the-rise-of-vertical-ai-agents-and-the-startups-racing-to-build-them/ - Lenny's on Lovable: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-new-ai-growth-playbook-for-2026-elena-verna Hosts: Oscar Gallo (AI Engineer & Entrepreneur) and Matt Wozniak (Builder, Operator). New episodes every week.

Showing 21–26 of 26 episodes