Oct 1, 2026 · 1 hr 4 min · 19 segments
What do you risk when you build your business on top of the world’s frontier AI models? **Youssef Rizk** says, “Look at Google’s graveyard.” **Youssef** is the **CEO of Windfall** and **co-founder…
With AI, you could have looked at anything, and you looked at, "Okay, how do we turn text-based ideas into videos, into audio?" Why that and not medicine? Why that and not, you know, some other aspect of technology?
I think the thing that really motivated us was this idea that AI would be an enabler of expression rather than something to automate it, and so from the get-go, we were always pretty focused on making sure that you are in the driver's seat, uh, which if you really think about it from today's lens, everything has veered agentic rather than-
Yeah
Mm-hmm
Coding tool
It really started as their main wedge was they had a really good autocomplete, so you type and autocomplete, but that wasn't novel.
But they also integrated all these models into, into the same thing, and it could make some edits, but fundamentally, the edits were quite small, and you were still in control.
Very localized, yeah.
And I don't think, at least I didn't realize how quickly the evolution would happen to that becoming agentic, um, which seems to be what people are still, are interested in now.
Now, for, for listeners who don't under- don't understand agentic, can you define that for us?
If you ask ChatGPT, "What is the weather today?" That's not something that is in its training set, so it can't necessarily, doesn't have that knowledge codified in its weights, and so what it needs to do is instead call a tool, let's call it the get weather tool, and specify the location, and that returns it.
The reason this is so important is because it scales out what an LLM can achieve by incorporating it with different tools and integrations.
And so that's why agenticness is quite useful in that it's this loop that just keeps running, where the agent decides, "I need to call this tool," and based on the result of that, I can call this tool or do a variety of different things.
It is the brain, but this gives it the actuators that can interact with the real world.
There's only something that happened only in the last eight or so months where they suddenly became a real contributing factor of the economy, and that wasn't really the case before, uh, and you can attribute that to a variety of different things.
But I think just sticking to the question at hand, one thing that really motivated us was this idea that in a creative world-
Mm-hmm
With AI, you could have looked at anything, and you looked at, "Okay, how do we turn text-based ideas into videos, into audio?" Why that and not medicine? Why that and not, you know, some other aspect of technology?
I think the thing that really motivated us was this idea that AI would be an enabler of expression rather than something to automate it, and so from the get-go, we were always pretty focused on making sure that you are in the driver's seat, uh, which if you really think about it from today's lens, everything has veered agentic rather than-
Yeah
Mm-hmm
Coding tool
It really started as their main wedge was they had a really good autocomplete, so you type and autocomplete, but that wasn't novel.
But they also integrated all these models into, into the same thing, and it could make some edits, but fundamentally, the edits were quite small, and you were still in control.
Very localized, yeah.
And I don't think, at least I didn't realize how quickly the evolution would happen to that becoming agentic, um, which seems to be what people are still, are interested in now.
Now, for, for listeners who don't under- don't understand agentic, can you define that for us?
If you ask ChatGPT, "What is the weather today?" That's not something that is in its training set, so it can't necessarily, doesn't have that knowledge codified in its weights, and so what it needs to do is instead call a tool, let's call it the get weather tool, and specify the location, and that returns it.
The reason this is so important is because it scales out what an LLM can achieve by incorporating it with different tools and integrations.
And so that's why agenticness is quite useful in that it's this loop that just keeps running, where the agent decides, "I need to call this tool," and based on the result of that, I can call this tool or do a variety of different things.
It is the brain, but this gives it the actuators that can interact with the real world.
There's only something that happened only in the last eight or so months where they suddenly became a real contributing factor of the economy, and that wasn't really the case before, uh, and you can attribute that to a variety of different things.
But I think just sticking to the question at hand, one thing that really motivated us was this idea that in a creative world-
Mm-hmm
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