Mitchell Troyanovsky

AI:AM LIVE — August 20, 2026 — Basis's Mitchell Troyanovsky on Supervising Eight-Hour Accounting Agents, Lemurian Labs' Jay Dawani on Why the Kernel Era Is Ending, and What It Would Cost to Buy the Public's Consent for Data Centers

The fourth show of the relaunch week ran long on two arguments about where the next gains come from — the supervision layer above the model, and the software layer beneath the chip — bracketed by an opening and close about who actually pays for the buildout. Nathan Labenz opened on a night spent inside published chain-of-thought transcripts, ahead of an Apollo Research interview later the same day; Prakash Narayanan read out a National Republican Senatorial Committee memo warning AI companies that data centers have become an electoral liability in Ohio. Mitchell Troyanovsky, co-founder of Basis, explained why persuading accountants that AI works is no longer the problem, why token cost is a routing question rather than a price question, and how Behavior Specs supervise an eight-hour agent run by having a separate model read the finished trajectory against a written spec. Jay Dawani, co-founder and CEO of Lemurian Labs, argued that hand-written GPU kernels are the wrong abstraction now that memory and network bandwidth — not math — are the binding constraint, and that a compiler and runtime should be generating them instead. The close ran the numbers underneath all of it: the stacked gross margins that make a gigawatt data center possible, new Pew data showing under-30s have turned net-negative on AI, and what share of GPU-hour revenue an operator would have to hand back to a county to keep building.