Research in AI, human-robot interaction, autonomous vehicles, and machine learning at MIT.

Lex Fridman

I stand with the people of Iran ❤️

I have a lot of Iranian friends, including my childhood best friend. Amazing people.

It's one of the great cultures and peoples in the history of the world.

Stay strong ❤️

Here's my conversation all about AI in 2026, including technical breakthroughs, scaling laws, closed & open LLMs, programming & dev tooling (Claude Code, Cursor, etc), China vs US competition, training pipeline details (pre-, mid-, post-training), rapid evolution of LLMs, work culture, diffusion, robotics, tool use, compute (GPUs, TPUs, clusters), continual learning, long context, AGI timelines (including how stuff might go wrong), advice for beginners, education, a LOT of discussion about the future, and other topics.

It's a great honor and pleasure for me to be able to do this kind of episode with two of my favorite people in the AI community: Sebastian Raschka and Nathan Lambert. They are both widely-respected machine learning researchers & engineers who also happen to be great communicators, educators, writers, and X posters.

This was a whirlwind conversation: everything from the super-technical to the super-fun.

https://lnkd.in/gViznQAt

Open video: State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #490 on youtube.com

State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #490

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde

Engineering Leader

Prashant Bhargava brings experience in building highly scalable systems, team building, and leadership. He has a knack for solving deep technical problems using cutting-edge technologies and building high-quality products.

Prashant Bhargava

Watching Blue Machines AI stand up to a 1-hour, unscripted primetime debate was a real milestone.

Not because of the stage.
But because of the journey behind it.

This started as a small group trying to solve very real problems — scale, concurrency, latency, and cost — in a way that actually works for India 🇮🇳

There were no playbooks.
No ready answers.
Just first-principles thinking, iteration, and uncomfortable problem-solving.

What went live wasn’t a demo.
It was months of customer obsession, detail, ownership, and execution holding steady under pressure.

Proud of this team and the way they’ve built.
This sets a higher bar for what voice AI from India can be. 🚀

Onward, with higher bars ahead.

Abhishek Ranjan Vivek Mandyam Chetan J Rao Ritayan Chakraborty Akash Sachithanandham Prakrhuti Aman Gupta Sarthak Birla SANDEEP MISHRA Yash Jha Tarun Baswa Saurav Ritayan Chakraborty Akash Sachithanandham Ayushi Korde Kishan Lal Bhayal Kundan Suryansh Rohan Chatterjee Siddhant Jain Vinay Kumar

We’ve put our system through many real-world runs, but taking it to primetime introduced a different kind of pressure. What stayed consistent was the way the Blue Machines AI team built and showed up — steady, thoughtful, and grounded in strong engineering fundamentals.

Nothing about this was staged. What went live was months of quiet work holding its shape under scrutiny.

Proud of the team. More to build, higher bars ahead.

Vivek M D Chetan J Rao Abhishek Ranjan Aman Gupta Saurav Utkarsh Sharma Siddhant Jain Ritayan Chakraborty SANDEEP MISHRA Sarthak Birla

Founder & CEO - Bluemachines.ai | Group CEO - Apna

My baby, Blue Machines AI you just set global benchmarks on national TV. What an intense debate. Still processing it.

First, thank you, Arnab for the fearless anchoring.  

Second, Blue Machines, what do I even say about you? You showed the hallmarks of enterprise-grade AI under real pressure:

- 60+ minutes. Unscripted. Single-take. You didn’t slow down. Honestly, you could’ve gone another two hours.
- Interruptions handled with grace: pause; listen; resume. Exactly how customer-obsessed Voice AI should behave.
- On sensitive topics and forced binaries, you said “no.” Calmly. Politely. Fully within guardrails.
- You made Arnab agree with you. A rare feat.
- Latency never spiked, even while being probed across philosophy, biology, foreign policy, AI ethics, independent judgment, politics and current affairs, rare earths, with rapid context shifts and retrieval across hundreds of knowledge bases.
- You showed different debate “muscles” unprompted, including: Three-layer defense [ the spectrum from rote clerk to Galileo spectrum 07:50],
 Reframe and Rebut [calculator pushback 21:20], PEEL Chain [rare earth strategy 40:38], Meta-Mirror [human primacy: Darwinian evolution vs human engineering 49:21]
- And yes, you made Arnab blush. Twice. This has never happened in a debate.

Lastly, my baby Blue Machines, I’m proud not just of your intelligence, but of your intent: an AI designed to be capable, responsible, and always in service of human primacy. That answer at [49:21] genuinely moved me. 

This made me the proudest.

🇮🇳 Indian engineering doesn’t need permission anymore.

We’re building global-scale systems under real-world pressure—not demos, not narratives.

This isn’t the exception.
 It’s the new baseline.  🚀

Abhishek Ranjan Nirmit Parikh Kshitij Jain

"You can’t compete with Silicon Valley without massive funding.”

We started  Blue Machines AI as an internal R&D project a few months ago. Small budget, small team. One belief: an Indian engineering team can build enterprise-grade voice AI that competes with the best in the world.

Most people’s pushback came in two parts:
- "You can’t compete with Silicon Valley without massive funding.”
- “Voice AI looks good in demos. It collapses in the real world.”

So we did what most teams avoid. We didn’t build in isolated labs. We built directly in production. We shipped into real enterprises, took real hits, fixed the edge cases, and earned confidence through repeatable performance. We didn’t talk about it publicly. No noise. Just execution.

Now we’re taking it to the hardest test possible: national primetime TV. On 12th Jan, BlueMachines will be aired on national TV in a long-form, unscripted, single-take debate. No retakes, no safety net. With Arnab Goswami. 

Not for hype. Not for PR. But for proof. 

Because the next time someone doubts what Indian engineers can build, I want one answer: 
Watch the tape and never doubt an Indian engineering team.

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