Zero Shot (Private)

Welcome back to Zero Shot, where Praveen, Brady, and Rohin discuss the biggest moves in artificial intelligence.

This week, Brady mulls over the possibility of running a one-human unicorn—an idea whose most vocal proponent is Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO. He references the second season of Shell Game, a podcast where the host is experimenting with building a startup involving AI agent co-founders and colleagues. This brings about larger ethical and philosophical questions, such as whether humans always need to maintain a sense of community and companionship when they’re tackling big goals.

Rohin points to Suno’s $250 million fundraise and the platform’s strategy to create, engage, and monetise in the long run. Besides, when it comes to music that is generated from prompts, ownership and intellectual property remain a concern. Suno is positioned as a platform where users can visit and discover new music, which brings to mind Sora, OpenAI’s app for generating short videos. The question is whether users will see Suno as a trusted place that hosts engaging, unique music.

Finally, Praveen visits Ilya Sutskever’s appearance on Dwarkesh Podcast. Sutskever was the chief scientist and a co-founder of OpenAI, and makes the point that there is enough compute to prove out almost any idea involving artificial intelligence. This type of work doesn’t require the largest amount of compute, so “we are no longer in the age of scaling; we’re back in the age of research.”

Zero Shot’s cover art is generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans.

If you have suggestions, critiques, or fresh ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Write to us at zeroshot@the-ken.com, or just drop us a note to say hi.


Additional Reading

Tega Brain’s Slop Evader
https://tegabrain.com/Slop-Evader 

Low-background steel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel 

The Plasticene era: Current uncertainties in estimates of the hazards posed by tiny plastic particles on soils and terrestrial invertebrates
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969724023957 

OpenAI takes stake in Thrive Holdings in latest circular deal
https://www.ft.com/content/53e2003e-c5c0-42a1-937a-eaea77ac4d41 

Accenture dubs 800,000 staff ‘reinventors’ amid shift to AI
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/01/accenture-rebrands-staff-reinventors-ai-artificial-intelligence 

‘Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of my whole drive’
https://old.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1p82or6/google_antigravity_just_deleted_the_contents_of/ 

Shell Game, Season 2
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shell-game/id1753117762 

James Watson and Edward O. Wilson: An Intellectual Entente
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2009/09/james-watson-edward-o-wilson-intellectual-entente 

A.F. Steadman reads the prologue of Skandar and the Unicorn Thief
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmzH_IcYWQY 

Suno creates an entire Spotify catalog’s worth of music every two weeks, says investor pitch deck for $250M fundraise
https://www.billboard.com/pro/suno-creates-spotify-catalog-music-two-weeks-pitch-deck/ 

Silicon Valley has more companies than ideas – Illya Sutskever
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNq0PWHIgOw 

Jack Dorsey funds diVine, a Vine reboot that includes Vine's video archive | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/12/jack-dorsey-funds-divine-a-vine-reboot-that-includes-vines-video-archive/ 


What is Zero Shot (Private)?

Join Brady Ng, Praveen Gopal Krishnan, and Rohin Dharmakumar of The Ken as they discuss the big ideas in artificial intelligence. You’ll get the macro view, explore their experiments in practical applications, go deeper than the news coverage you’ve seen, and hear about the implications of the latest developments. Nothing is off the table.