Human In The Loop logo
Human In The Loop · Weekly

A human-first AI podcast.

Real talk. Unpopular opinions. No hype. Two builders cut through the AI hype cycle every week — and call it like it is.

Watch on YouTubeListen on SpotifyListen on Apple Podcasts

Hosted by Oscar Gallo & Matt Wozniak

Now playing · Latest episode

Sam Altman Thinks Your PC Is a Waste of RAM

EP 30 · November 3, 2026 · 97 min

Watch on YouTubeListen on SpotifyListen on Apple
About

We’re the humans in the loop.

In machine learning, “human in the loop” means a human who provides oversight and feedback in an automated system. That’s the lens of this show: AI is powerful, but humans aren’t leaving the loop. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

This isn’t another “AI is going to change everything” podcast. It’s for builders, operators, and the AI-curious who are tired of breathless hype, doomerism, and surface-level news recaps with no original thought.

What’s in each episode

Every week: one fixed, one rotating.

FIXED

Signal or Noise

We run through the week's AI headlines and make the call: is this actual signal worth paying attention to, or just noise clogging the timeline?

ROTATING

Ship It or Skip It

A real use case or product idea lands on the table. We debate whether it's worth building now or if the tech isn't there yet.

ROTATING

Explain It to My Client

Take a complex AI concept and explain it the way you'd actually explain it to a non-technical stakeholder. No jargon allowed.

ROTATING

Stack Check

One tool, library, or workflow change we actually adopted this week. No sponsorship energy. Just what's in the trenches.

Hosts
Oscar Gallo

Oscar Gallo

AI Engineer & Entrepreneur

AI Engineer and entrepreneur. He lives in the intersection of engineering and businesses.

Matt Wozniak

Matt Wozniak

Serial Builder & Relentless Executor

Serial Builder and relentless executor. He comes from the lens of what works and what doesn't.

EP 15Jul 21, 2026 · 69 minDear Human in the Loop

Your CEO says, “We need AI.” Before you hire an AI engineer or buy another tool, find one painful process worth fixing.

Episode 15 is our first Dear Human in the Loop, an advice episode for founders, engineering leaders, developers, and decision-makers trying to make practical AI calls.

Dear Human in the Loop

This week’s questions from the inbox.

  1. Q1. My CEO said, “We need AI.” Where do I start?

    Start with problems, not prompts.

  2. Q2. Should an AI engineer be my startup's first technical hire?

    Hire for your biggest business problem, not the trendiest job title.

  3. Q3. My developers do not trust AI. Should I push them to use it?

    Show developers real value and give them time to learn. Trust beats mandates.

  4. Q4. Which skills will still matter five years from now?

    Learn engineering fundamentals, system design, product thinking, communication, and critical thinking. Model quirks will expire.

Sources referenced
    EP 14Jul 14, 2026 · 92 minNo Jargon Required

    Apple says OpenAI built its hardware program with stolen trade secrets. OpenAI denies any interest in Apple's secrets. We make the Signal or Noise call.

    Signal or Noise

    The week’s AI headlines, filtered.

    1. SIGNALApple sues OpenAI over alleged trade-secret theft

    2. SIGNALMeta releases Muse Spark 1.1 and opens the Meta Model API to developers

    3. SIGNALOpenAI releases GPT-5.6 across ChatGPT, Codex, and the API

    4. SIGNALSpaceXAI releases Grok 4.5 for coding and agentic work

    5. SIGNALAnthropic and OpenAI trade usage resets during the GPT-5.6 launch

    No Jargon Required

    we explain two terms a decision-maker needs this week.

    Multi-agent orchestration: when several AI workers help and when they multiply failure

    Model routing: how a product switches among fast, cheap, and capable models

    Hot takes

    Two opinions, no disclaimers.

    Oscar

    “The Apple lawsuit is a warning for every AI company hiring from a competitor. Talent does not arrive empty-handed. If your onboarding process does not separate experience from confidential material, your product roadmap can become evidence.”

    Matt

    “I don't care if your model is as good as Fable. If it's close, and it's faster, and it's cheaper — it wins. The whole industry is selling you a god-tier model like it's the finish line, but with orchestration and model routing, you don't need one genius doing everything. You need a smart conductor and a cheap, fast bench. The frontier model is becoming the part you use least — and the teams still paying premium tokens for every keystroke are going to feel really dumb in a year.”

    EP 13Jul 7, 2026 · 73 minShip It or Skip It

    Meta spent so much on AI that it may have backed into becoming a cloud company. Smart move, or capex panic? We make the call.

    Welcome to Human In the Loop, a weekly podcast where two builders talk about what matters in AI. No hype. No doomerism. No recaps for the sake of recaps.

    Signal or Noise

    The week’s AI headlines, filtered.

    1. SIGNALMeta building a cloud business for excess AI compute

    2. SIGNALOpenAI reportedly proposing to give 5% equity to a U.S. sovereign wealth fund

    3. SIGNALClaude Sonnet 5 shipping across Claude, Claude Code, and the Claude Platform, which we call noise until it changes builder behavior

    4. SIGNALTogether AI raising $800M for open-source AI infrastructure

    5. SIGNALClaude Science launching as a research workbench

    Ship It or Skip It

    we debate two AI business ideas.

    Meta Compute broker for AI teams

    Back-office agent for small law and accounting firms

    Hot takes

    Two opinions, no disclaimers.

    Oscar

    “The model race is becoming an infrastructure race again.”

    Matt

    “Most AI workbench products are selling relief from tool chaos.”

    EP 12Jun 30, 2026 · 106 minNo Jargon Required

    OpenAI just shipped its most powerful model to twenty companies the government picked. Not the best twenty. The approved twenty. A week after the US switched off Anthropic's best model, the frontier has a guest list, and you are not on it. We figure out what that does to anyone trying to build on the newest model.

    Welcome to Human In the Loop, a weekly podcast where two builders cut through the AI hype cycle. No breathless hype. No doomerism. No surface-level recaps.

    Signal or Noise

    The week’s AI headlines, filtered.

    1. SIGNALGPT-5.6 ships under US government restrictions

      OpenAI began a limited preview of GPT-5.6 — Sol, Terra, and Luna — to roughly twenty pre-approved organizations at the US government's request, the first major model to ship under the June 2 executive order. Last week Anthropic went dark by force. This week OpenAI went gated by choice. Two labs, two weeks, same direction.

    2. SIGNALAnthropic accuses Alibaba's Qwen of the largest distillation attack on record

      Anthropic's complaint to Senators Warren and Scott alleges Alibaba's Qwen lab ran about 25,000 fraudulent accounts and 28.8 million exchanges against Claude between April 22 and June 5, aimed at software engineering and agentic reasoning. That is roughly 1.7x the combined total it attributed to DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax in February, and the first time it has named a major Chinese conglomerate.

    3. SIGNALOpenAI and Broadcom unveil Jalapeño, OpenAI's first inference chip

      OpenAI's first custom chip, built with Broadcom for inference, went from first design to tape-out in nine months with help from OpenAI's own models — the companies call it the fastest ASIC cycle ever. Early claims cite performance-per-watt well above the current state of the art, with first deployment targeted for the end of 2026.

    4. SIGNALAgentjacking: the prompt-injection hole in every coding agent

      A new attack class hijacks coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex by hiding instructions inside data they already trust, such as a Sentry error report pulled in over MCP. There is no universal patch — the fix is to treat incoming data as untrusted and keep a human review step before the agent acts. OWASP says prompt injection is up 340% year over year.

    5. NOISEChatGPT slips below 50% as Gemini and Claude surge

      Reports put ChatGPT at 46.4% of the assistant market, its first time below 50% since launch, with Gemini at 27.7% and Claude at 10.3%. Mostly a distribution story — Gemini's climb is Android OS-level placement. Noise for builders, except the one real line: Claude roughly quadrupled its monthly users in five months on the back of agentic coding.

    No Jargon Required

    Two AI words an exec heard this week and couldn't define on the spot, in plain English.

    Distillation

    Teaching a small, cheap model by having it copy a big, expensive one's answers. The word at the center of the Alibaba–Claude fight, and why some cheap models punch far above their price. The real question is provenance, not the technique.

    Prompt injection

    A model reads instructions and data as one stream of words, so commands hidden in the data get obeyed like orders. Researchers say it may not be patchable — the defense is design: read-only by default, a human in front of anything you can't undo.

    Hot takes

    Two opinions, no disclaimers.

    Oscar

    “The frontier is being quietly nationalized, and most builders are cheering it as safety. Build on the model you can actually keep.”

    Matt

    “Everyone panicking about distillation forgot the lesson. The frontier has no moat. Stop betting your company on a six-week lead anyone can clone.”

    Sources referenced
    EP 11Jun 23, 2026 · 104 minShip It or Skip It

    Last week the US government gave Anthropic's best model a 72-hour public life, then switched it off for every foreign national on earth. This week, three Chinese labs shipped models that beat almost everything in the open, handed over the weights, and charged a tenth of the price. We figure out which of those two plays ends with the whole world building on your stack.

    Welcome to Human In the Loop, a weekly podcast where two builders cut through the AI hype cycle. No breathless hype. No doomerism. No surface-level recaps.

    Signal or Noise

    The week’s AI headlines, filtered.

    1. SIGNALFIFA is running the 2026 World Cup on AI, the biggest live deployment on earth

      An Intelligent Command Center in Miami tied to digital twins of all 16 stadiums, Football AI Pro built with Lenovo on FIFA's own Football Language Model and handed to all 48 teams, 1,248 player avatars from one-second scans, and Gemini drawing up tactics for Argentina, Brazil, and France. Multi-vendor, multi-model, real-time, under a five-second latency budget — the reference architecture nobody asked for.

    2. SIGNALChina's open-weight wave: GLM-5.2 and Kimi K2.7 Code land

      Z.ai's GLM-5.2 tops the open-weight leaderboard with a 1M-token window and MIT weights; Moonshot's Kimi K2.7 Code ships open and tuned for agentic coding. Chinese labs now hold four of the top five open-weight spots at a fraction of Western pricing. The model you self-host is the only one Commerce can't switch off.

    3. SIGNALAnthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are still dark a week after the export ban

      A full week after the June 12 Commerce directive, both models stay suspended for foreign nationals with no end date. Anthropic published its defense on June 16, arguing a recall over a narrow jailbreak would halt every frontier deployment. This was the closed-frontier fire drill, and most teams failed it.

    4. SIGNALNoam Shazeer leaves Google for OpenAI

      The co-author of "Attention Is All You Need" is gone again, two years after Google paid a reported $2.7B to bring him back into DeepMind. When models converge, talent is the only moat left — and the gravity just pulled toward OpenAI.

    5. NOISEThe International AI Safety Report 2026 drops

      A government-commissioned synthesis meant to set a shared baseline regulators reference, landing the same month the EU AI Act becomes fully applicable. It doesn't regulate anything — it's the document the regulations will point at. Noise for builders, for now.

    Ship It or Skip It

    Two real ideas from this year's agent discourse, steelman versus pushback.

    AI governance layer for the agents your employees already run

    The referee between an employee's agent and the action — block the refund agent pushing $40k against a $500 policy before it fires. Own the rules engine, not the dashboard.

    Vertical AI harnesses, one trade at a time

    Stop selling a chat box, sell the opinionated rig for one trade like marketing or video. Brief in, on-brand output out. Win the domain by being the tool people open every morning, not the model underneath.

    Hot takes

    Two opinions, no disclaimers.

    Oscar

    “The most important AI lab of 2026 might not be American, and most US builders are too proud to notice.”

    Matt

    “A free model is only free if you own the GPUs, the ops team, and the eval harness to babysit it.”

    New episodes every week. Reply with the story you want us on next.

    Subscribe

    Pick your platform.

    YouTubeWatch weeklySpotifyListen on the goApple PodcastsSubscribe on Apple