Rust, Rollouts & Reality Checks: GPT-5’s Bumpy Debut, Agentic Browsers, and 95% Pilot Flops

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Fresh From the Labs

Pioneer Square Labs

23 episodes

3 days ago

Fresh From the Labs is your front-row seat to the future of AI — straight from the builders shaping it. Hosted by the product team at Pioneer Square Labs, a Seattle-based venture studio, each episode dives into the week's most exciting AI breakthroughs, tools, and trends. No hype, just hands-on insight from the people actually prototyping, experimenting, and pushing boundaries with the latest tech. Whether you're building with AI or just trying to keep up, this podcast is your lab-tested shortcut to what matters most.

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Rust, Rollouts & Reality Checks: GPT-5’s Bumpy Debut, Agentic Browsers, and 95% Pilot Flops

Fresh From the Labs

38 minutes 34 seconds

2 months ago

Rust, Rollouts & Reality Checks: GPT-5’s Bumpy Debut, Agentic Browsers, and 95% Pilot Flops

This week on Fresh from the Labs, Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared kick things off with a conversion: Kevin has officially joined the Rust cult (beard pending). From there, we dive into three big themes shaping how builders actually ship with AI right now:

GPT-5 in the wild. A launch that felt…bumpy. We unpack autorouter misfires, sudden model deprecations, and why prompting matters more than ever with thinking/verbosity “knobs.” Kevin compares day-to-day coding performance against Anthropic’s Opus 4.1 and Claude Code—great for devs, less magical for non-technical workflows.
Agentic browsing vs. reality. Perplexity’s eyebrow-raising $35B Chrome bid sparks a broader debate: is the future in a browser or the OS? Jared’s two-week test drive of Comet delivered slick automations (cart-filling errands) but clashed with classic “just let me Google docs” moments, plus awkward multi-account gaps. We talk cryptographic request signing for agents, potential micro-payments to publishers, and why an “MCP upgrade” path could beat brittle click-automation.
Enterprise truth serum. A new MIT study claims ~95% of corporate GenAI pilots fail. We break down the why: chained-probability error rates, tool-calling flakiness, procurement drag, and shadow usage of public chatbots. The near-term win? Multiplicative copilots in the tools people already live in (think Microsoft Copilot) over moonshot agents.

Plus: glamping on Orcas Island, off-grid backpacking, and squeezing in those late-summer bike rides. Tune in for hard-earned takes on what’s hype, what’s here, and what’s next.