Ben Lorica talks with Evangelos Simoudis about three forces reshaping AI: why recent “rogue agent” incidents may be more about permissions, identity, and governance than runaway intelligence; how the belief that AGI is near is helping sustain enormous investment in AI models and data centers despite unanswered questions about margins and ROI; and whether Chinese robotaxi companies can challenge Waymo globally by following a playbook similar to China’s rise in solar and batteries.<br>Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/<br>Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS.<br><br>Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Can China Do to Robotaxis What It Did to Solar?

The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica

All right, so today we're back with my friend Evangelos Simoudis of Synapse Partners. This blog is at corporateinnovation.co. We are recording this on the morning of August 7, 2026. And go to the Data Exchange Media for the references that we'll cite. And also, if you're on YouTube, hit the subscribe button.

And if you're listening to this on a podcast, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. So topic number one is all these headlines about dangerous AI agents. Specifically, I think it was precipitated by an open AI agent ending up causing some havoc at hugging face.

And then subsequently, something similar happened with Anthropic. Another agent kind of went. I guess the word they use is rogue. And there's some implication that when you read the media narratives, the implication is that the models have gotten so powerful.

We got to be really careful about how these models are. But really, if you read between the fine lines, what seems to have happened is people have focused on the wrong source of risk, right? So it seems like what happened is you had agents that were given an objective. And agents will just burn through compute to try to meet these objectives.

And more importantly, I guess the permissions and network security were not set properly. So in other words, if you give someone a task and give them endless amount of compute to do that task, but you don't lock down the network and you give them permissions to do anything they want, they will cause havoc.

Can China Do to Robotaxis What It Did to Solar?

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

Can China Do to Robotaxis What It Did to Solar?

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.