Sublime Founder Shows How AI Can Amplify Human Taste

Sublime founder Sari Azout is flipping the script on AI anxiety. Instead of viewing artificial intelligence as a threat to human creativity, she’s built a platform where AI amplifies taste and curation. Her approach offers a blueprint for startups looking to integrate AI without losing their humanity.

Sublime isn’t your typical AI startup story. While most founders either worship at the altar of artificial intelligence or fear its creative destruction, Sari Azout has found something rarer – balance. Her curation platform proves that AI and human taste don’t just coexist, they can actually make each other better. Speaking on The Vergecast, Azout laid out a vision that cuts through the usual AI hype cycle. “It’s easy to think about AI as a sort of existential battle between human and machine,” she explained. “But there are lots of people trying to figure out how to use AI not as a replacement for human creativity and thinking but as a tool meant to augment those things.” That philosophy drives everything at Sublime, a platform built around the idea that great curation requires human taste, even when powered by machine intelligence. The company’s approach feels refreshing in an industry obsessed with replacing human workers with AI agents. Azout’s background gives her unique insight into this balance. Before founding Sublime, she spent years in venture capital, where pattern recognition and taste-making are essential skills. She saw firsthand how the best investors combine data analysis with intuitive judgment calls. Now she’s applying that same hybrid approach to content curation. The platform works by letting users save and organize content they find meaningful, then using AI to surface connections and recommendations that might otherwise stay hidden. It’s bookmarking meets discovery, with machine learning handling the heavy lifting behind the scenes. But the crucial insight is that the AI isn’t making taste decisions – it’s making the data connections that help humans exercise their taste more effectively. “Sublime is all about taste, which makes it slightly surprising that there’s a huge amount of AI powering the way it works,” Azout noted during the interview. “But to me, it all makes sense.” The startup recently launched Podcast Magic, which Azout describes as “AI models all the way down.” The tool helps users discover podcasts based on their existing interests and consumption patterns. It represents exactly the kind of AI application that enhances human choice rather than replacing it. This human-AI collaboration model is gaining traction across the startup ecosystem. Companies like