Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth

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Luis von Ahn built Duolingo into a company with 100M+ monthly active users and $1B in the bank — and he's never done a single layoff. While every other CEO is blaming AI for firing people, he's hiring more.
In this episode, Luis breaks down exactly how his team used AI to build a chess course from scratch in 6 months — two people, no engineering background, no chess knowledge. It now has 7 million daily users. That's the real story of what AI can do for your career, if you know how to use it.
We also get into: why "AI is taking your job" is mostly a lie companies tell to cover over-hiring, what happened when Duolingo's stock dropped 82% and why Luis has zero regrets, the one mindset shift that lets him not check the stock price every day, and his honest takes on which jobs are actually going away — translator, teacher, social media manager, strategist, project manager — gone in 5 years, gone in 10, or not going anywhere.
If you're trying to figure out what to do with your career or business right now, this conversation will reset your thinking.
Keywords: AI jobs future, career and AI, Duolingo CEO, Luis von Ahn, AI replacing jobs, future of work, AI startup, vibe coding, education AI, Silicon Valley Girl podcast

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What happens after AI? John Martinis — Nobel Prize-winning physicist and the scientist behind Google's quantum computing breakthrough — says most people are focused on the wrong threat.
He's the only scientist on Trump's new tech advisory council, alongside Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, and Jensen Huang. And he has a very different read on where this is all going.
In this episode: why quantum computers could crack Bitcoin encryption, which assets are already at risk, why the entire internet needs to switch encryption protocols in the next decade — and why investing in quantum hardware right now mirrors the Nvidia GPU bet before anyone knew what GPUs were for.
If you're thinking about your career, your savings, or your business in an AI world — this one changes the frame.
Topics: quantum computing, AI future, Bitcoin encryption, cybersecurity, career in tech, future of work, tech investing, Nobel Prize, Silicon Valley

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Allie K. Miller is the #1 most-followed voice in AI business on LinkedIn with 2M followers. She launched IBM's first multimodal AI team, then became global head of machine learning for startups at AWS. Now her advisory firm, Open Machine, works with Novartis, ServiceNow, Warner Bros. Discovery — and she's advised Reid Hoffman and Melinda French Gates's Pivotal Ventures. In 2025 Allie was named TIME100 AI.In this episode, she shows us her exact setup — 36 proactive workflows, around 100 agents running while she sleeps — and walks us through how to build it yourself without writing a single line of code. We covered the 3 context documents everyone should create first, why most people are using AI at 20% of its potential, and what separates the people winning with AI from the ones falling behind.This is the most practical AI episode I've recorded. Watch it once and you'll spend the rest of the day inside Claude.
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Mo Gawdat spent 12 years at Google, wrote Scary Smart, and now predicts 12–15 years of disruption before things get better. In this episode, he breaks down the 7 forces already reshaping jobs and power, why 23–30% of new grad hiring has collapsed, and how he built an AI startup in 6 weeks instead of 4 years. Mo Gawdat is former Chief Business Officer at Google X and one of the few tech insiders saying out loud what most are only thinking.
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Yossi Matias has been inside Google Research for 20 years. He built Autocomplete, Google Trends, and Google Duplex before most people knew what a large language model was. His argument isn't that AI is coming. It's that we already passed the inflection point and most of us didn't notice because we adapted. In this conversation: 6 things changing how we work right now, why one person can now do the work of three, which skills Google actually hires for in 2026, and what the flood prediction system covering 2 billion people tells us about what's possible next.

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