Karan Goel
Co-founder & CEO, Cartesia. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutivescientistengineer@krandiash ↗LinkedIn ↗krandiash.github.io ↗
Karan Goel is the CEO of Cartesia, an AI model lab focused on real-time multimodal voice intelligence. During his PhD research at the Stanford AI Lab, he co-developed influential State Space Model sequence-modeling architectures, including S4 and SaShiMi.
2shows
2appearances
32statements
4resolved
4supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Karan Goel said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Goel: Multimodal AI Models Degrade in Intelligence Versus Text-Only Models
“They tend to degrade in terms of their intelligence when you try to build models that can do multimodal reasoning. Like text only models tend to be pretty smart, but when you do multimodal, they tend to get a little bit less smart.”
Goel: Open Offices Will Disappear as Workers Constantly Talk to AI
“Imagine a workplace of the future where actually the way you work is you constantly have this collaborator and you actually redesign the workplace to Help people be able to work alongside the AI collaborator. So you can't have open office spaces anymore, becau…”
Goel: AI models generating real-time data will replace traditional graphics engines
“In the future, like you will be essentially replacing, you know, graphics and rendering with essentially models that are outputting streams of data. In real time.”
Goel: Single Multimodal Models Will Dominate Low-Latency Interactive AI
“Again, it was clear that the future is going to be single, single models that are multimodal can process multiple streams of data. Can basically do reasoning over that and operate at pretty low latencies.”
Goel: Best Interactive AI Models Require New Architectures
“And we believe that to build them, you need to build them on new architectures.”
Goel: Current Voice Agents Fake Long Conversations Through Engineered Short Turns
“Today when you build a voice agent, it is actually not running a 30 minute conversation, truly. It is actually running a series of 10:02 conversations, because it is basically splitting the 30 minutes into small turns, And then every turn is treated as one thi…”
Goel: AI labs build apps out of capability excitement, not competition
“I don't think it comes from a place of trying to compete. I think a lot of times the stories around how these products got built is that people inside were amazed by what it was able to do. They built a prototype, and the prototype just happened to be somethin…”
Goel: Information Asymmetry Gives AI Labs an Unavoidable Application Head Start
“I think the thing that, that is hard is the information asymmetry that exists, which is that model developers see where the future is before the application developers do. So that asymmetry is impossible to sort of, like, actually remove.”
Goel: AI research labs and product companies are not mutually exclusive
“This is something that a lot of people think is mutually exclusive, right? People think either you can be a research lab or you're a product company. Yeah. We, I think what we did was we said, no, no, no, that's not, we don't think those two things are not pos…”
Goel: 3B parameter models are still too small and lack strong capabilities
“So the three V models are interesting, I think, but they aren't like, they're still small and not very capable.”
Goel: Always-On Synchronous AI Will Become a Primary Future Interface
“We think that AI that's always on, always running, that's able to communicate synchronously with you, is going to be one of the future interfaces for how you consume intelligence.”
Goel: Building Multimodal Models Lacks Any Established Recipe or Published Papers
“In a lot of these new areas, like multimodal models, like, there's no, Known recipe, right? Like you can't just go, go to the internet and say like, hey, this is how we're going to build the model. Here's, you know, here's the recipe we can follow. Here's a pa…”
Goel: Model Evaluation Is Undervalued; Audio AI Benchmarks Remain Inadequate
“The most undervalued part of this is evaluating your models. Because, like, I think, especially in things like audio. Yeah. There, when we started the benchmarks were pretty non-existent. Even today, I would say the benchmarks are not great.”
Goel: Building Pareto-dominant AI models requires full-stack co-design
“The only way you can build models like that is you have to go basically co-design everything. Otherwise you're going to sacrifice something for something else.”
Goel: Cartesia Built Custom Inference Engine for Real-Time Models
“So as an example, we've built our own inference engine. It's pretty important because we think that these interactive real-time models are going to need to run in a pretty different way. So having the ability to have your own engine that is not designed for LL…”
Goel: Cartesia Will Unify Listening, Thinking, and Responding Into One Model
“So ultimately our ambition is, again, how do we bring together listening, thinking, and response into a single model and just do that continuously. And that's the next phase.”
Goel: AI agents make high-touch customer experiences economically feasible
“I actually think that's the kind of thing that's super exciting, which is that it opens up the opportunity to provide an experience that was otherwise infeasible.”
Goel: Changing Voice Acoustic Profiles Drives Enormous Shifts in Business Metrics
“How do metrics shift because you changed how a voice sounds? It has enormous impact in use cases and different use cases need different experiences, right? If you're doing a nursing use case versus you're doing a banking use case versus you're actually doing a…”
Goel: Multi-Second AI Chat Delays Are a Feature to Signal Thinking
“When you're chatting to AI, if it responds too quickly, it actually feels like it hasn't done any thinking at all. So, it is actually not a, it's a feature, not a bug, that it can take a few seconds to respond to you.”
Goel: Minimizing latency without sacrificing intelligence is voice AI's biggest challenge
“A lot of what we see when people are building these systems is that they're struggling to understand how to bring latency down while keeping the overall intelligence of the system as high as possible. That is the biggest challenge a lot of these folks face.”
Goel: Cartesia's Enterprise Clients Are Approaching One Billion Audio Minutes Annually
“We're seeing customers that are starting to go towards pretty insane volumes now on our, on top of us, like anywhere To like order one billion minutes, right? Getting to that scale a year for one customer.”
Goel: Cartesia Focuses Strictly on Real-Time Voice Over Other Audio Use Cases
“For us, the mission was always about building interactive AI and closing the gap between AI and humans in terms of how smart and how interactive these models are. So we are always super focused on real time interaction. And that means also, for example, we nev…”
Goel: Current AI speech models fail to capture profession-specific vocal nuances
“And that's sort of the nuance that I don't think any models really capture well, which is like, you know, if you're a nurse, you need to talk in a different way than if you're a lawyer, or if you're a judge, or if you're a venture capitalist, you know, very di…”
Goel: Cartesia intends to train an on-device multimodal model
“Yes. But, you know, we have our own sort of set of techniques that we're developing in order to be able to do that effectively. I think that I will maybe leave for another podcast. But I think, yeah, I think that is the intention at the end of the day is build…”
The other half of the tape: Karan Goel's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Karan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 NEON SHOWLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Cartesia | 1 | 24 | 100% 2/2 | full record on the Neon Show → |
| NO PRIORSLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Cartesia | 1 | 8 | 100% 2/2 | full record on No Priors → |