Fresh From the Labs

Welcome to the first-ever Freshies! In this special mid-year awards episode of Fresh From the Labs, Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared celebrate (and debate) the most impactful developments in AI so far this year.

The team hands out awards across several exciting categories, including "Best New Model," the year's biggest "Buzzword," and their go-to "Favorite AI Tool." They reflect on the most surprising story...

This week on Fresh From the Labs, Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared unpack a whirlwind of major AI developments. The conversation kicks off with OpenAI's significant price drop and the release of O3 Pro, exploring how increased accessibility could reshape the market and what this means for startups. We then shift to Meta's substantial investment in Scale AI, dissecting the potential competitive implications and what this signals abo...

This week on Fresh From the Labs, Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared dive into the swirling drama and strategic plays shaping the AI landscape. First up, the Windsurf and Anthropic saga: with rumors of an OpenAI acquisition of Windsurf, Anthropic has reportedly given Windsurf just five days to remove all Anthropic models. We unpack the implications of this aggressive move, from competitive intelligence concerns (is OpenAI training on Anthrop...

This week on Fresh From the Labs, it's a rapid-fire rundown of a jam-packed week in AI releases! Shilpa, Jared, and Kevin share their candid first impressions on a slew of new models and tools.

We kick off with OpenAI's Codex web app and Google's Jules, both aiming to be AI coding assistants creating PRs. The consensus? Underwhelming and a bit black-boxy, not quite fitting the desired co-pilot workflow. Then, the convers...

This week on Fresh from the Labs, Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared dive into three headline-grabbing stories, and what they mean for builders right now:

• Klarna’s customer-support U-turn. The team dissects the "replace 700 agents with AI" experiment, why a two-humans-per-bot fallback isn’t a failure, and what sustainable AI adoption in ops should look like.

• OpenAI’s new Healthbench. Thousands of curated physician conversations power a fre...

This week on Fresh From the Labs, Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared are joined by a special guest: Brian Fioca, a former PSL team member now working as a Solutions Architect at OpenAI! Brian shares his insights from the trenches, helping startups leverage OpenAI's APIs for "intelligence as a service."

The conversation kicks off with Brian addressing the evergreen startup question: where are the real opportunities when building on a powerful ...

This week on Fresh From the Labs, we're looking past the leaderboards and hype to explore the real-world challenges and limitations of today's AI.

Can AI actually run a company? We dive into recent CMU research that put AI agents to the test, revealing significant struggles with common sense tasks and complex automation like using a web browser effectively.

The conversation unpacks the performance of specific models like o3,...

Welcome back to Fresh From the Labs! Shilpa, Jared, and Kevin dive into another week of AI exploration at Pioneer Square Labs.

The conversation kicks off with a deep dive into OpenAI's newly released o3 model. Kevin shares his initial impressions after putting it through its paces, highlighting its impressive intelligence, speed, and surprisingly adept web search capabilities. Jared discusses using o3 for complex planning and re...

Dive deep into the latest advancements shaking up the AI landscape! In this episode, we unpack the significant release of Meta's Llama 4, exploring its capabilities and the internal dynamics at Meta that drive such innovation.

Join the conversation as we tackle the persistent challenges of evaluating AI model performance and discuss industry trends. We then shift focus to the exciting potential of AI agents integrated directly into ...

Welcome back to "Fresh from the Labs," where the Pioneer Square Labs team (Shilpa, Jared, Kevin) is joined by special guest Brian Fioca (formerly PSL, now heading to OpenAI) to discuss their latest AI experiments and observations.

Following up on their previous discussion about "vibe coding," the team shares insights from a recent internal hackathon where non-engineers used tools like Lovable to build application...

In this first episode of Fresh From the Labs, we (Shilpa, Jared, and Kevin from the product team at Pioneer Square Labs) kick things off by sharing why we’re starting this podcast: to give you a window into the AI experiments we're running day to day, and to think out loud with fellow builders.

We dive into what’s impressed us lately — especially the leap in image generation from ChatGPT-4o. Jared shares how a friend used it to ...