Martin Källström
knowledge / projects

Co-creating with AI

Co-creating with AI is Martin's podcast, produced through Multiply and co-hosted with co-founder Rasmus Adler Wahlberg, running weekly from January 2023 through late 2024 across roughly 60 episodes. It premiered under the working title "CoCast" (▶ 0:01) before being renamed specifically to foreground its organizing idea — human–AI partnership — from the show's inception (▶ 0:00). Martin has said the whole project grew out of one core belief: that co-creation with AI, not command-and-response prompting, should become the default mode of working with these systems (▶ 21:24) — and the show became a running, dated commentary on that belief as the industry (and Multiply itself) lurched through GPT-4 Turbo, the rise of agents, and the first wave of AI coding tools.

Premise: a podcast co-created, not broadcast

The founding episode is a small meta-exercise: Martin and Rasmus set out to make a show about co-creation by co-creating the show's own format live on air, deliberately uncertain of the outcome. Their explicit framing question was whether a podcast could be genuinely participatory — listeners contributing, not just consuming — rather than one-way broadcast (▶ 1:32). Martin's stated approach was to "plan without planning" — enough intention and preparation to show up prepared, but with real room left for emergence (▶ 15:08), so that the unexpected could surprise hosts and listeners in equal measure (▶ 15:33). Rasmus's version of the same ambition was structural: episodes should feed listener perspectives directly into their creation rather than arrive pre-packaged, moving podcasting away from a mainstream-media broadcast model toward something closer to participatory media (▶ 16:52; ▶ 17:17). In the first episode Martin also thanks Rasmus specifically for the initiative and energy that turned the idea into an actual recording — itself a small demonstration of the co-creative dynamic the show would spend two years examining (▶ 19:02).

A podcast about co-creation, made through co-creation. That founding episode frames Martin's creative philosophy in miniature: the show enacts the principle it discusses, treating co-creation as a lived practice rather than an abstract theme — professional, domestic, and creative all at once (▶ 0:07).

The core thesis: co-creation as the lens on the AI revolution

Martin repeatedly returns to a single claim across the run: that "co-creation" is the concept for understanding what AI is doing to society, not just a feature of one product (▶ 3:12). Two distinctions recur as its practical unpacking:

Practically, real co-creation requires AI-native interfaces where both human and AI have equal access to the same tools (▶ 2:49) — because prompting in natural language alone is too imprecise, Martin notes that working prompts increasingly contain pseudocode for its semantic density (▶ 14:53) — while the design goal is the opposite: users shouldn't have to become prompt engineers just to co-create (▶ 15:19). The idealized end state is an agent that asks permission to explore a risky creative direction rather than waiting passively for instructions (▶ 4:28), with trust between human and AI evolving gradually to determine who handles what autonomously (▶ 13:07). This philosophy is developed further in AI co-creation and AI-native interfaces & products, both drawn substantially from this show.

The February 2023 vision dump: agentic AI, ubiquitous computing, and its dark side

One early episode (ep5, "As AI Enters Our Lives") is an unusually dense, freewheeling brainstorm — Martin and Rasmus running through implications of agentic AI months before "agents" became an industry buzzword. Worth reading as a single arc rather than isolated bullets:

Startups, no-code, and the shape of AI-era work

A later episode with guest Rasmus [Oller] — a Klarna product manager of eight years, initially skeptical of AI hype until ChatGPT's November 2022 release (▶ 1:33) — turns into an extended, opinionated discussion of how AI changes company-building:

Industry moments the show tracked in real time

Because it ran weekly across two turbulent years, the podcast doubles as a dated log of the AI industry's inflection points, several covered live:

Guests

Most episodes are Martin and Rasmus alone, but recurring guest slots brought in outside expertise: Malcolm Sparks, founder/CTO of Juxt and creator of XTDB — the database underlying Multiply — on data flexibility and graph relationships (ep17); Oskar Beijbom on practical AI deployment (ep38); Johan Salo on AI, design and strategy (ep35); and a Klarna product manager also named Rasmus (surname Oller) on startups and no-code, distinct from co-host Rasmus Adler Wahlberg (ep30).

Notable episode narratives

OpenAI Dev Day aftermath: the industry awakening. Recorded the morning after OpenAI's first Dev Day, Rasmus is visibly hyper about the announcements while he and Martin work through what changed: GPT-4 Turbo's 128K context window, a two-thirds price cut, and new capabilities — vision, function calling, code interpreter, the Assistants API. The conversation lands on a real pivot point: the entire industry being reset overnight, forcing every company to choose between seeing opportunity or existential threat. "This is a big divisor of the entire world — either you're 'holy fuck, I'm going to do so much more now,' or you're 'holy fuck, my business is in ruins.'" (▶ 1:12)

From API Constraints to Self-Hosted Models. Years into using commercial AI APIs — fast, production-ready, his default path — Martin hits a wall building a conversational AI system: he needs millisecond-level control over conversation flow, and chaining six or seven API calls together makes cost prohibitive. That pushes him to rent GPUs and self-host models, discovering along the way that flexibility, not cost, is the real driver: APIs cap how granularly you can shape data in and out, in ways self-hosting doesn't. "It was the flexibility, because you run into limitations with the API where you actually can't influence how they receive data or send data to the granularity that I need." (▶ 6:36)

The Marketing Agency's AI Celebrity Search. A marketing agency's celebrity brand ambassador drops out days before a campaign, and they need a fast, nuanced replacement — similar appeal, not A-list budget, an existing online following, matching audience overlap. Multiply's research agent returns ten candidates from just a couple of prompts, three of them genuinely strong — a task that would normally demand significant expertise and time, compressed to minutes. "They got, basically, out of like 10 suggestions just from the first couple of prompts — there was like 3 really good ones." (▶ 20:27)

The Community Manager's Growing Autonomy. Rasmus describes onboarding a new community manager at Multiply, starting from strict process documentation for the podcast workflow and weekly product updates. Rather than staying scripted, the manager's autonomy and initiative grew through natural iteration — his questions decreased not because he'd become a robot, but because shared understanding deepened; he began taking on work unprompted, the way a trusted colleague does, and collaboration increased rather than shrank. It becomes the template Martin and Rasmus use to imagine AI agency itself: specify role and context, iterate on feedback, let autonomy and partnership co-evolve. "I can already feel his autonomy increasing... it doesn't necessarily mean we collaborate less. It's like working with another person." (▶ 13:56)

A podcast about co-creation, made through co-creation. See Premise above — the founding episode's meta-structure is itself one of the show's clearest stories. (▶ 0:07)

Worth remembering

Related: Multiply · AI co-creation · AI-native interfaces & products