Alex Volkov

Alex Volkov is an AI evangelist at Weights & Biases, the host and curator of ThursdAI, and the founder of Targum, an AI video translation service. His public work combines discussions of new models with practical questions about building AI applications: managing conversation state, understanding costs, connecting multimodal tools, and tracing tool use.[3][4][1][6]

Volkov has run ThursdAI since 2023. It began as a weekly X Space and expanded into live panels with researchers, engineers, and founders, an edited podcast, and a weekly newsletter. In his November 2023 Latent Space appearance, he described covering open models every week and meeting Nous Research contributors through the show.[3][1]

When he announced his move to Weights & Biases, Volkov committed to continuing ThursdAI’s weekly Spaces, newsletter, and podcast. He also promised to share what he learned during onboarding and “will learn in public”. He described his aim as helping newcomers get excited about AI, learn together, and recognize how low the barrier to entry had become.[4]

In his 100-episode announcement, Volkov said he had launched observable.tools to make MCP tools traceable. He described RFC-269 as a proposal to add OpenTelemetry tracing to MCP. The same announcement credited ThursdAI co-hosts @WolframRvnwlf, @nisten, @yampeleg, and @ldjconfirmed, alongside guests Michael Lou from Agentica and Liad Yosef and Ido Salomon discussing GitMCP.[6]

At the November 2023 DevDay recap, Volkov welcomed the Assistants API’s managed conversation threads after repeatedly implementing state handling himself in TypeScript and Python. While he and swyx shared a live Space with developers, listeners asked whether submitting only a new message meant paying only for its tokens. Volkov recalled seeking clarification from OpenAI staff and reported: “You still pay for the whole context that you have inside the thread.” The convenience of managed state, in his account, still required developers to understand the context being billed.[1]

Volkov called ChatGPT’s unified tools “MMIO, Multimodal Input and Output”. He saw their value in shared context across tools, beyond removing the need to select separate modes. As an example, he described a collaborative experiment that used live weather information to guide image generation, producing a snowy scene for Denver.[1]

Responding to Simon Willison’s concerns about prompt injection in systems connected to external actions, Volkov emphasized user understanding and acknowledgment: “You have to give the user the choice to understand, like, what's going to happen.” His argument concerned giving users control before an action executes.[1]

Earlier in 2023, Volkov had demonstrated an AI application of his own: Targum’s video translation workflow. That work provides context for his later account of testing AI startup ideas with paying customers.[5][4]

In a Cloudflare Workers Launchpad demonstration originally aired on March 19, 2023, Volkov introduced himself as Targum’s founder and CEO. He demonstrated translating a video linked from Twitter from Turkish to English, then selecting Arabic as another output language. He said Targum used Cloudflare Stream to store and stream its videos.[5]

In his Weights & Biases joining announcement, Volkov said he valued Targum’s paying customers and the opportunity to test new AI startup ideas in production. He also expressed uncertainty about how long he could sustain it and considered exploring a sale through MicroAcquire.[4]