22 Apr 2026a16z’s MTS Launch, Tim Cooked, Lovable Hacked, GRITCULT Joins, Chinese Robot Marathon
Yang Li (Cosine AI): Sovereign AI & Niche Coding Models
Cosine AI co-founder Yang Li explains the lab's focus on state-of-the-art generalist coding plus niche languages like COBOL, Fortran and Ada, with fully air-gapped deployment for defense and financial-services customers. He recounts the founding story from a pub pre-ChatGPT, pushing OpenAI's fine-tuning limits and meeting Sam Altman, the UK Sovereign AI award of 500,000 GPU hours as the 'last unlock,' and the recent launch of one coding agent across every surface with swarm mode running 30-50 concurrent agents and reduced code slop.
Yoshi Yokokawa (Alpaca): Brokerage Infrastructure, UK Expansion & AI Agents
Yoshi Yokokawa, CEO and co-founder of Alpaca, describes the company as a US-headquartered clearing broker-dealer infrastructure serving hundreds of financial institutions like Kraken, covering stocks, options, fixed income, crypto and tokenization. He shares the founding story (started 2017, YC W19, driven by frustration that financial access in Japan lagged the US) and explains the Wealth Kernel acquisition anchoring the UK/EU expansion, arguing UK and European regulation is more structured and less politically volatile than in the US. Looking ahead, he sees two big trends shaping the roadmap: AI agents interacting with financial services through APIs rather than human UIs, and the slow migration of the $350 trillion custody market on-chain, with European market access launching on Alpaca's API.