Chris Keevil is founder and CEO of Versos AI, a company helping AI labs find the needles-in-the-haystack data they need to train their models.

Chris works at the center of a new market. It’s where the frontier AI models are paying for video most of us would never think to value: 10,000 hours of hands tying shoes, ice melting,, micro-dramas from Asia and a coffee shop in China. AI wants it all.

We talk about why some AI training clips sell for 30 cents a minute while others go for a dollar per second… and why some AI companies are now doing “whole corpus deals” to buy entire content libraries in bulk.

Chris has a birds-eye view of this world being a partner to content companies such as CuriosityStream (which was profiled in Episode #1 "The CEO Quietly Licensing 2M+ Hours of Content to AI Giants"

Chris also explains why the demand for training data will “never run dry” as AI moves from understanding words to understanding the physical world — motion, gravity, culture, behavior, and eventually even industrial systems like oil refineries and hydroelectric dams.

We also discuss some goldmines of AI data such as security camera archives, niche media libraries, and even the videos sitting on your phone.

And finally, Chris shares why he’s a cautious optimist on AI, despite believing it could massively reshape jobs, business, and society.

Please enjoy my conversation with Chris Keevil.

Thx!
-Rob

There are only a handful of people truly shaping the AI race.

Sam Altman at OpenAI. Dario Amodei at Anthropic. Demis Hassabis at Google DeepMind. Elon Musk at xAI. And Mustafa Suleyman at Microsoft AI.

This episode is about Mustafa.

He co-founded DeepMind (with Demis Hassabis), where AlphaGo shocked the world by beating Lee Sedol in Seoul, then came back a year later in China and beat Ke Jie, the world’s top Go player.

He later co-founded Inflection, built Pi, and then moved to Microsoft after a roughly billion-dollar deal to bring Inflection’s team and technology into the Microsoft AI orbit.

What makes Mustafa especially interesting is not just the resume. It’s the lens. He grew up in London, with a Syrian father and an English mother who grew up in poverty.

Before AI, he worked on mental health, city policy, and conflict resolution.

So when Mustafa talks about AI, he does not just talk about models. He talks about China, jobs, biology, government, safety, and power.

His book, The Coming Wave, is one of the clearest ways to understand what the people building AI think is coming next.

Here’s my summary of The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI (MAI).

Thx!

-Rob

My guest today is Nic Baird, co-founder and CEO of Koah Labs.

Koah is building what Tom Tunguz of Theory Ventures calls the AdSense for AI.

Nic breaks down:

• AI token economics in plain English: why serving an AI user can cost 100 times more than serving a web user.That’s why he thinks most AI apps cannot reach global scale on subscriptions alone.

• Ads are coming to AI. The question is whether they’ll be useful—or terrible? Nic says the best AI ads won’t look like pop-ups, banners, or pre-rolls. They’ll be part of the answer.

• Where people will first see these ads: ChatGPT, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and the agents and apps outside the frontier models.

• Whether Claude can really stay ad-free forever?

• We get into privacy too. How do you use AI in ads without reading people’s most personal chats and creeping them out.

And Koah's fundraising story is wild. Tom Tunguz reached out before Koah even had a product And after passing on 150 adtech companies he made his Series A decision in 24 hours.

Nic is also an 8-time national sailing champion and his dad won the America’s Cup and is in the sailing hall of fame. We talk about Nic's scariest sailing moments and how he got to meet Larry Ellison on the world’s biggest private superyacht.

Special thanks to Tom at Theory Ventures for putting Koah on my radar.

Please enjoy my conversation with Nic Baird.

Thx!
Rob