Mythos, Sonnet 5, GLM-5.2 Dominate the News Cycle | Episode 20

About this episode

This Week In Startups is made possible by:

PAYPAL

Today’s show:

The US government won’t let you use the most powerful releases from US AI labs… but a Chinese lab is giving away their latest frontier model for free.

This week, we’ve got three AI CEOs building in image generation (Victor Perez of Krea), mobile agents (Div Garg of The AGI Company), and enterprise governance (Andrew Berman of Runlayer). Together, they’re breaking down what’s really happening underneath all this chaos, and why the industry’s more focused on “minimum viable intelligence” over breaking benchmarks.

Guests

Victor Perez on X: https://x.com/viccpoes

Krea AI: https://www.krea.ai/

Krea 2 Raw and Turbo on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/krea/Krea-2-Raw

Div Garg on X: https://x.com/divgarg

The AGI Company: https://theagi.company/

Andrew Berman on X: https://x.com/berman66

Runlayer: https://www.runlayer.com/

Relevant Links

Anthropic: “Introducing Claude Sonnet 5”: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-5

Z.ai: GLM-5.2: https://docs.z.ai/guides/llm/glm-5.2

Yuchen Jin X post: “GLM-5.2 is the open source Claude moment”: https://x.com/Yuchenj_UW/status/2071278256817574297

TechCrunch: GPT-5.6 restricted rollout coverage: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/26/openai-limits-gpt-5-6-rollout-after-government-request-says-restrictions-shouldnt-be-the-norm/

AndroidWorld benchmark on GitHub: https://github.com/google-research/android_world

The Information Higgsfield valuation article: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-video-startup-talks-quadruple-valuation-5-billion

Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF): https://aaif.io/

Tomasz Tunguz: “When AI Costs More Than The Engineer”: https://tomtunguz.com/ai-spend-breakeven-2029/

Fortune Runlayer raise coverage: https://fortune.com/2026/06/24/exclusive-vinod-khosla-felicis-runlayer-nanit-30-million-enterprise-ai/

Gusto: https://gusto.com/

Timestamps:

0:00 Making sense of US AI policy

5:09 Tiny Action Models vs. LLMs

7:02 Runlayer, AGI Inc, and computer-use agents

10:05 What does "trusted access" really mean?

12:37 Why Krea open sourced its image model

22:21 BREAKING: Claude Sonnet 5 is here

26:00 GLM-5.2 is the open source Claude moment

31:58 Personalization and corporate ontology

41:25 Can we trust Higgsfield's numbers?

50:39 Distillation: The threat is real

58:01 Agentic personhood and corporate rights

1:03:19 Everyone's AGI timeline and p(doom) score

Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com

Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com

Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp

Follow Lon:

X: https://x.com/lons

Follow Alex:

X: https://x.com/alex

LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm

Follow Jason:

X: https://twitter.com/Jason

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis

Thank you to our partners:

Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/

Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland

Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis

Follow TWiST:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups

Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com