AI:AM GUEST

Zach Bratun-Glennon

General Partner, Gradient

Zach Bratun-Glennon is a general partner at Gradient, the pre-seed and seed AI fund launched inside Alphabet in 2017 that spun out as an independent firm in October 2025 and closed a $220M fifth fund in March 2026. He has been with the firm since its launch, has made 35+ investments and holds 25+ board seats, including at Lambda and CentML, which NVIDIA acquired. He was previously in Google corporate development and an investment banking analyst at Deutsche Bank, and he argues the interesting positions in AI sit below the model layer, where the customer is the agent, or above it in end-to-end enterprise workflows.

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APPEARANCES

One AI:AM appearance.

EPISODE 2026-08-31 · AUG 31, 2026

AI:AM LIVE — August 31, 2026 — Why the OpenFace Investigation Wasn't Enough, Gradient's Zach Bratun-Glennon on Betting on the Ecosystem, and Cerebras's Angela Yeung on the Moat That Stopped Holding

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan open on the OpenFace post-mortem, with Nathan arguing the independent investigators were given access too narrow — six days on site, about a thousand transcripts from a single seven-day window — for the public to treat the story as settled, and Prakash countering that scope and deadline are the price of getting a report at all. Gradient general partner Zach Bratun-Glennon explains why he now invests below the model layer, where the agent is the customer, or above it in end-to-end enterprise workflows, and why he'd bet on the ecosystem over any single leader. Cerebras SVP of Product Angela Yeung details wafer-scale inference, the microbatch of one, and a CUDA moat she says has eroded sharply now that AI can write the kernels — before a forty-five-minute close on frontier models as capable cyber attackers, RLVR and model deception, and an AI-generated song.

GUESTS · Zach Bratun-Glennon, Angela Yeung