No Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & StartupsAI tools are helping small business owners manage their businesses, so they can stay focused on the aspects of their business they love to do. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Alyssa Henry, an executive at some of the most impactful companies from Microsoft to Amazon. Most recently she was the CEO of Square. She led Square’s team as they were very early adopters of a consumer-facing product that used GPT-2 and have continued to incorporate AI into their offerings. On today’s episode, they talk about the whitespace within e-commerce for AI and lessons from the prior generation of infrastructure.
Alyssa recently retired from being longtime CEO of Square, within Block. Before that she was a vice president of AWS running, amongst other things, the storage products, or the digital storage bucket for the world. And before AWS, she ran order management software at Amazon Retail and started her tech career at Microsoft. She remains on the boards of Intel, Confluent and was previously on the board of Unity.
0:00 Alyssa’s experience and career trajectory 2:30 Transition from engineer to manager 4:09 AI implementation at Square 7:46 Small business AI applications 12:14 Latent demand for content generation 15:04 The origin story of Square’s GPT-2 products 16:54 Consolidating ecommerce workflows 18:46 How will AI change cloud services 23:07 hyperscaler foundation models and the AI land grab 25:16 Enterprise demand for open source models 28:08 Startups in the AI semiconductor space 31:02 Scale up architectures vs scaling out 34:32 What’s next for Alyssa 36:08 What Elad and Sarah are excited about in 2024
No Priors Ep. 44 | With Former Square CEO Alyssa HenryNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2023-12-14 | AI tools are helping small business owners manage their businesses, so they can stay focused on the aspects of their business they love to do. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Alyssa Henry, an executive at some of the most impactful companies from Microsoft to Amazon. Most recently she was the CEO of Square. She led Square’s team as they were very early adopters of a consumer-facing product that used GPT-2 and have continued to incorporate AI into their offerings. On today’s episode, they talk about the whitespace within e-commerce for AI and lessons from the prior generation of infrastructure.
Alyssa recently retired from being longtime CEO of Square, within Block. Before that she was a vice president of AWS running, amongst other things, the storage products, or the digital storage bucket for the world. And before AWS, she ran order management software at Amazon Retail and started her tech career at Microsoft. She remains on the boards of Intel, Confluent and was previously on the board of Unity.
0:00 Alyssa’s experience and career trajectory 2:30 Transition from engineer to manager 4:09 AI implementation at Square 7:46 Small business AI applications 12:14 Latent demand for content generation 15:04 The origin story of Square’s GPT-2 products 16:54 Consolidating ecommerce workflows 18:46 How will AI change cloud services 23:07 hyperscaler foundation models and the AI land grab 25:16 Enterprise demand for open source models 28:08 Startups in the AI semiconductor space 31:02 Scale up architectures vs scaling out 34:32 What’s next for Alyssa 36:08 What Elad and Sarah are excited about in 2024No Priors Ep. 86 | With Sarah Guo & Elad GilNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-10-17 | In this episode of No Priors, Sarah and Elad explore how AI is transforming consumer apps and entertainment, with a focus on potential integrations in gaming and dating that could shift traditional societal incentives. They reflect on AI researchers winning Nobel Prizes in Science and Chemistry for the first time, discussing what this trend means for scientific discovery. The episode also covers recent AI releases, including their thoughts on OpenAI’s O1 model and Google’s NotebookLM, and examines which companies and job functions are most at risk—or resilient—in the face of AI advancements.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 0:47 Google releases NotebookLM 5:20 Integrating AI into consumer apps and gaming 9:11 Future of AI companionship and procreation 14:45 OpenAI o1 model improves on iterative reasoning 18:06 Sarah and Elad reflect on Nobel Prizes going to AI researchers 21:23 Jobs and businesses at risk of disruption 27:18 AI-durable companiesNo Priors Ep. 85 | CEO of Braintrust Ankur GoyalNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-10-08 | Today on No Priors, Elad is joined by Ankur Goyal, founder and CEO of Braintrust. Braintrust enables companies like Notion, Airtable, Instacart, Zapier, and Vercel to deploy AI solutions at scale by efficiently evaluating and managing complex, non-deterministic AI applications. Ankur shares his insights into emerging trends in the use of AI tooling and coding languages, the rise of open-source, and the future of data infrastructure. Ankur also reflects on building resilient AI products, his philosophy on coding as a CEO, and the importance of a startup’s initial customer base. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Ankrgyl
Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 0:38 Ankur’s path to Braintrust 3:05 Braintrust’s solution 5:46 AI tooling trends 7:58 Instruction tuning vs. fine-tuning 8:57 Open-source AI adoption 10:42 Future of data infrastructure and synthetic data 14:45 Designing technical interviews 18:04 Rethinking agent-based approaches 19:34 Building out an AI team 23:35 Typescript as the language of AI 25:12 The shift away from using frameworks 26:02 Vendor consolidation among enterprises 27:16 Coding as a CEO 30:16 Collaborating with customers 33:00 Future of Braintrust and evalsNo Priors Ep. 84 | With Chair of the Federal Trade Commission Lina KhanNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-10-03 | Lina Khan’s FTC has been the most active in decades, notably challenging tech giants and adopting a more hands-on approach to regulating the digital age. On today’s episode of No Priors, Lina Khan joins Elad and Sarah to discuss her regulatory philosophy for tech markets and what the industry can expect for future M&A deals. She shares her approach to overseeing emerging technology sectors, including AI at the model layer, and her work to ban non-competes on a federal level. Khan also offers insights into the realities of leading a government agency, the scarcity of young leaders in power, and how she measures the FTC’s impact.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 0:56 Lina Khan’s background and path to the FTC 2:35 Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox 4:20 Frameworks for regulating M&A in young markets 8:50 Khan’s perspective on AI acquisitions 12:18 What founders can expect from Khan’s M&A environment 14:55 Promoting competition at the large model layer 17:01 Creating fair AI regulation 18:40 FTC’s work to ban non-competes 20:31 Why so few young people hold power in government today 22:18 The realities of running a government agency 24:20 Measuring the impact of FTCNo Priors Ep. 83 | With Rippling COO Matt MacInnisNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-09-25 | In this episode of No Priors, Sarah and Elad sit down with Matt MacInnis, COO of Rippling, to discuss the company’s unique product strategy and the advantages of being a compound startup. Matt introduces Talent Signal, Rippling’s AI-powered employee performance tool, and explains how early adopters are using it to gain a competitive edge. They explore Rippling’s approach to choosing which AI products to build and how they plan to leverage their rich data sources. The conversation also delves into how AI shapes real-world decision-making and how to realistically integrate these tools into organizational workflows.
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0:00 Introduction 0:32 Rippling’s mission and product offerings 2:13 Compound startups 3:53 Evaluating human performance with Talent Signal 13:19 Incorporating AI evaluations into decision-making at Rippling 14:56 Leveraging work outputs as inputs for models 18:23 How Rippling chose which AI product to build first 20:53 Building out bundled products 23:26 Merging and scaling diverse data sources 25:16 Early adopters and integrating AI into decision-making processesNo Priors Ep. 82 | With CEO of Sierra Bret TaylorNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-09-19 | Bret Taylor, Cofounder of Sierra, Chairman of the board at OpenAI, and former co-CEO of Salesforce and CTO of Facebook, joins Sarah and Elad in this week’s episode of No Priors. Bret discusses building company-branded AI agents with unique personalities, goals, and guardrails at Sierra, and their potential to revolutionize customer engagement while cutting costs. The conversation explores the next sectors for enterprise AI adoption, building resilient AI products, and the parallels between today’s AI market and the evolution of the cloud industry. Bret also shares his unique insights on future business models and upcoming technology shifts.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Intro 0:42 Defining agentic systems and types of agents 3:55 Customer-facing company agents 5:43 Sierra AI 8:11 Transforming customer service and reducing costs 9:57 Challenges in implementing LLMs for company agents 14:45 Drawing parallels between AI and the cloud market’s evolution 17:50 Future of the AI landscape 19:15 Building durable AI products 24:39 Outcome-based business models and tangible ROI in AI solutions 29:22 Next wave of AI sectors for enterprise adoption 31:15 Customizing goals and guardrails with customers 35:55 Creating distinct personalities for Sierra's agents 41:05 Bret’s insights on upcoming technology and hardware shifts 46:50 How AI software could enhance human agencyNo Priors Ep. 81 | With Sarah Guo & Elad GilNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-09-12 | In this episode of No Priors, Sarah and Elad go deep into what's on everyone’s mind. They break down new partnerships and consolidation in the LLM market, specialization of AI models, and AMD’s strategic moves. Plus, Elad is looking for a humanoid robot.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 0:24 LLM market consolidation 2:18 Competition and decreasing API costs 3:58 Innovation in LLM productization 8:20 Comparing the LLM and social network market 11:40 Increasing competition in image generation 13:21 Trend in smaller models with higher performance 14:43 Areas of innovation 17:33 Legacy of AirBnB and Uber pushing boundaries 24:19 AMD Acquires ZT 25:49 Elad’s looking for a RobotNo Priors Ep. 80 | With Andrej Karpathy from OpenAI and TeslaNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-09-05 | Andrej Karpathy joins Sarah and Elad in this week of No Priors. Andrej, who was a founding team member of OpenAI and the former Tesla Autopilot leader, needs no introduction. In this episode, Andrej discusses the evolution of self-driving cars, comparing Tesla's and Waymo’s approaches, and the technical challenges ahead. They also cover Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot, the bottlenecks of AI development today, and how AI capabilities could be further integrated with human cognition. Andrej shares more about his new mission Eureka Labs and his insights into AI-driven education and what young people should study to prepare for the reality ahead.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 0:33 Evolution of self-driving cars 2:23 The Tesla vs. Waymo approach to self-driving 6:32 Training Optimus with automotive models 10:26 Reasoning behind the humanoid form factor 13:22 Existing challenges in robotics 16:12 Bottlenecks of AI progress 20:27 Parallels between human cognition and AI models 22:12 Merging human cognition with AI capabilities 27:10 Building high performance small models 30:33 Andrej’s current work in AI-enabled education 36:17 How AI-driven education reshapes knowledge networks and status 41:26 Eureka Labs 42:25 What young people study to prepare for the futureNo Priors Ep. 79 | With Magic.dev CEO and Co-Founder Eric SteinbergerNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-08-30 | Today on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil are joined by Eric Steinberger, the co-founder and CEO of Magic.dev. His team is developing a software engineer co-pilot that will act more like a colleague than a tool. They discussed what makes Magic stand out from the crowd of AI co-pilots, the evaluation bar for a truly great AI assistant, and their predictions on what a post-AGI world could look like if the transition is managed with care.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 0:45 Eric’s journey to founding Magic.dev 4:01 Long context windows for more accurate outcomes 10:53 Building a path toward AGI 15:18 Defining what is enough compute for AGI 17:34 Achieving Magic’s final UX 20:03 What makes a good AI assistant 22:09 Hiring at Magic 27:10 Impact of AGI 32:44 Eric’s north star for Magic 36:09 How Magic will interact in other toolsNo Priors Ep. 78 | With AWS CEO Matt GarmanNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-08-29 | In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah and Elad are joined by Matt Garman, the CEO of Amazon Web Services. They talk about the evolution of Amazon Web Services (AWS) from its inception to its current position as a major player in cloud computing and AI infrastructure. In this episode they touch on AI commuting hardware, partnerships with AI startups, and the challenges of scaling for AI workloads.
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Show Notes: 00:00 Introduction 00:23 Matt’s early days at Amazon 02:53 Early conception of AWS 06:36 Understanding the full opportunity of cloud compute 12:21 Blockers to cloud migration 14:19 AWS reaction to Gen AI 18:04 First-party models at hyperscalers 20:18 AWS point of view on open source 22:46 Grounding and knowledge bases 26:07 Semiconductors and data center capacity for AI workloads 31:15 Infrastructure investment for AI startups 33:18 Value creation in the AI ecosystem 36:22 Enterprise adoption 38:48 Near-future predictions for AWS usage 41:25 AWS’s role for startupsNo Priors Ep. 77 | With Foundry CEO and Founder Jared Quincy DavisNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-08-22 | In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah and Elad are joined by Jared Quincy Davis, former DeepMind researcher and the Founder and CEO of Foundry, a new AI cloud computing service provider. They discuss the research problems that led him to starting Foundry, the current state of GPU cloud utilization, and Foundry's approach to improving cloud economics for AI workloads. Jared also touches on his predictions for the GPU market and the thinking behind his recent paper on designing compound AI systems.
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Show Notes: 00:00 Introduction 02:42 Foundry background 03:57 GPU utilization for large models 07:29 Systems to run a large model 09:54 Historical value proposition of the cloud 14:45 Sharing cloud compute to increase efficiency 19:17 Foundry’s new releases 23:54 The current state of GPU capacity 29:50 GPU market dynamics 36:28 Compound systems design 40:27 Improving open-ended tasksNo Priors Ep. 76 | With Ramp Co-Founders Eric Glyman and Karim AtiyehNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-08-15 | In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah and Elad are joined by Ramp co-founders Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh of Ramp. The pair has been working to build one of the fastest growing fintechs since they were teenagers. This conversation focuses on how Ramp engineers have been building new systems to help every team from sales and marketing to product. They’re building best-in-class SaaS solutions just for internal use to make sure their company remains competitive. They also get into how AI will augment marketing and creative fields, the challenges of selling productivity, and how they’re using LLMs to create internal podcasts using sales calls to share what customers are saying with the whole team.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction to Ramp 3:17 Working with startups 8:13 Ramp’s implementation of AI 14:10 Resourcing and staffing 17:20 Deciding when to build vs buy 21:20 Selling productivity 25:01 Risk mitigation when using AI 28:48 What the AI stack is missing 30:50 Marketing with AI 37:26 Designing a modern marketing team 40:00 Giving creative freedom to marketing teams 42:12 Augmenting bookkeeping 47:00 AI-generated podcastsNo Priors Ep. 75 | With Co-Founder and CEO of Brex Pedro FranceschiNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-08-08 | Hunting down receipts and manually filling out invoices kills productivity. This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Pedro Franceschi, co-founder and CEO of Brex. Pedro discusses how Brex is harnessing AI to optimize spend management and automate tedious accounting and compliance tasks for teams. The conversation covers the reliability challenges in AI today, Pedro’s insights on the future of fintech in an AI-driven world, and the major transitions Brex has navigated in recent years.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 0:32 Brex’s business and transitioning to solo CEO 3:04 Building AI into Brex 7:09 Solving for risk and reliability in AI-enabled financial products 11:41 Allocating resources toward AI investment 14:00 Innovating data use in marketing 20:00 Building durable businesses in the face of AI 25:36 AI’s impact on finance 29:15 Brex’s decision to focus on startups and enterprisesNo Priors Ep. 74 | With Google DeepMind VP of Research Oriol VinyalsNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-08-01 | In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah and Elad are joined by Oriol Vinyals, VP of Research, Deep Learning Team Lead, at Google DeepMind and Technical Co-lead of the Gemini project. Oriol shares insights from his career in machine learning, including leading the AlphaStar team and building competitive StarCraft agents. We talk about Google DeepMind, forming the Gemini project, and integrating AI technology throughout Google products. Oriol also discusses the advancements and challenges in long context LLMs, reasoning capabilities of models, and the future direction of AI research and applications. The episode concludes with a reflection on AGI timelines, the importance of specialized research, and advice for future generations in navigating the evolving landscape of AI.
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Show Notes: 00:00 Introduction to Oriol Vinyals 00:55 The Gemini Project and Its Impact 02:04 AI in Google Search and Chat Models 08:29 Infinite Context Length and Its Applications 14:42 Scaling AI and Reward Functions 31:55 The Future of General Models and Specialization 38:14 Reflections on AGI and Personal Insights 43:09 Will the Next Generation Study Computer Science? 45:37 Closing thoughtsNo Priors Ep. 73 | With Airtable co-founder and CEO Howie LiuNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-07-25 | This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil are joined by Howie Liu, the co-founder and CEO of Airtable. Howie discusses their Cobuilder launch, the evolution of Airtable from a simple productivity tool to an enterprise app platform with integrated AI capabilities. They talk about why the conventional wisdom of “app not platform” can be wrong, why there’s a future for low-code in the age of AI and code generation, and where enterprises need help adopting AI.
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Show Notes: (00:00) Introduction (00:29) The Origin and Evolution of Airtable (02:31) Challenges and Successes in Building Airtable (06:09) Airtable's Transition to Enterprise Solutions (09:44) Insights on Product Management (16:23) Integrating AI into Airtable (21:55) The Future of No Code and AI (30:30) Workshops and Training for AI Adoption (36:28) The Role of Code Generation in No Code PlatformsNo Priors Ep. 72 | With Sarah Guo and Elad GilNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-07-18 | This week on No Priors, we have a host-only episode. Sarah and Elad catch up to discuss how tech history may be repeating itself. Much like in the early days of the internet, every company is clamoring to incorporate AI into their products or operations while some legacy players are skeptical that investment in AI will pay off. They also get into new opportunities and capabilities that AI is opening up, whether or not incubators are actually effective, and what companies are poised to stand the test of time in the changing tech landscape.
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Show Notes: (0:00) Introduction (0:16) Old school operators AI misunderstandings (5:10) Tech history is repeating itself with slow AI adoption (6:09) New AI Markets (8:48) AI-backed buyouts (13:03) AI incubation (17:18) Exciting incubating applications (18:26) AI and the public markets (22:20) Staffing AI companies (25:14) Competition and shrinking head countNo Priors Ep. 71: The Best of 2024 (so far) with Sarah Guo and Elad GilNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-07-11 | Believe or not, we’re almost halfway through 2024. Sarah and Elad have spent the first of this year talking with some of the most innovative minds in the AI industry, so we’re taking a look at some of our favorite No Priors conversations so far featuring Dylan Field (Figma); Emily Glassberg-Sands (Stripe); Brett Adcock (Figure AI); Aditya Ramesh, Tim Brooks and Bill Peebles (OpenAI’s Sora Team); Scott Wu (Cognition); and Alexandr Wang (Scale).
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Show Notes:
0:00 Introduction 0:46 Emily Glassberg Sands on the Future of AI and Fintech 4:23 Dylan Field on AI and Human Creative Potential 9:03 Brett Adcock on Running Figure AI’s Hardware and Software Processes 12:43 OpenAI’s Sora Team on Artists’ Creative Experiences with their Model 17:43 Scott Wu Gives Advice for Human Engineers Co-Working with AI 21:06 Alexandr Wang on How Quality Data Builds Confidence in AI SystemsNo Priors Ep. 70 | With Cartesia Co-Founders Karan Goel & Albert GuNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-06-27 | This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Karan Goel and Albert Gu from Cartesia. Karan and Albert first met as Stanford AI Lab PhDs, where their lab invented Space Models or SSMs, a fundamental new primitive for training large-scale foundation models. In 2023, they Founded Cartesia to build real-time intelligence for every device. One year later, Cartesia released Sonic which generates high quality and lifelike speech with a model latency of 135ms—the fastest for a model of this class.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 0:28 Use Cases for Cartesia and Sonic 1:32 Karan Goel & Albert Gu’s professional backgrounds 5:06 State Space Models (SSMs) versus Transformer Based Architectures 11:51 Domain Applications for Hybrid Approaches 13:10 Text to Speech and Voice 17:29 Data, Size of Models and Efficiency 20:34 Recent Launch of Text to Speech Product 25:01 Multi-modality & Building Blocks 25:54 What’s Next at Cartesia? 28:28 Latency in Text to Speech 29:30 Choosing Research Problems Based on Aesthetic 31:23 Product Demo 32:48 Cartesia Team & HiringNo Priors Ep. 69 | With HeyGen CEO and Co-Founder Joshua XuNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-06-20 | AI video generation models still have a long way to go when it comes to making compelling and complex videos but the HeyGen team are well on their way to streamlining the video creation process by using a combination of language, video, and voice models to create videos featuring personalized avatars, b-roll, and dialogue. This week on No Priors, Joshua Xu the co-founder and CEO of HeyGen, joins Sarah and Elad to discuss how the HeyGen team broke down the elements of a video and built or found models to use for each one, the commercial applications for these AI videos, and how they’re safeguarding against deep fakes.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 3:08 Applications of AI content creation 5:49 Best use cases for Hey Gen 7:34 Building for quality in AI video generation 11:17 The models powering HeyGen 14:49 Research approach 16:39 Safeguarding against deep fakes 18:31 How AI video generation will change video creation 24:02 Challenges in building the model 26:29 HeyGen team and companyNo Priors Ep. 68 | With Zapier Co-Founder and Head of AI Mike KnoopNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-06-11 | The first step in achieving AGI is nailing down a concise definition and Mike Knoop, the co-founder and Head of AI at Zapier, believes François Chollet got it right when he defined general intelligence as a system that can efficiently acquire new skills. This week on No Priors, Mike joins Elad to discuss Arc Prize which is a multi-million dollar non-profit public challenge that is looking for someone to beat the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) evaluation.
In this episode, they also get into why Mike thinks LLMs will not get us to AGI, how Zapier is incorporating AI into their products and the power of agents, and why it’s dangerous to regulate AGI before discovering its full potential.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 1:10 Redefining AGI 2:16 Introducing ARC Prize 3:08 Definition of AGI 5:14 LLMs and AGI 8:20 Promising techniques to developing AGI 11:0 Sentience and intelligence 13:51 Prize model vs investing 16:28 Zapier AI innovations 19:08 Economic value of agents 21:48 Open source to achieve AGI 24:20 Regulating AI and AGINo Priors Ep. 67 | With Voyage AI Co-Founder and CEONo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-06-06 | After Tengyu Ma spent years at Stanford researching AI optimization, embedding models, and transformers, he took a break from academia to start Voyage AI which allows enterprise customers to have the most accurate retrieval possible through the most useful foundational data. Tengyu joins Sarah on this week’s episode of No priors to discuss why RAG systems are winning as the dominant architecture in enterprise and the evolution of foundational data that has allowed RAG to flourish. And while fine-tuning is still in the conversation, Tengyu argues that RAG will continue to evolve as the cheapest, quickest, and most accurate system for data retrieval.
They also discuss methods for growing context windows and managing latency budgets, how Tengyu’s research has informed his work at Voyage, and the role academia should play as AI grows as an industry.
Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 1:59 Key points of Tengyu’s research 4:28 Academia compared to industry 6:46 Voyage AI overview 9:44 Enterprise RAG use cases 15:23 LLM long-term memory and token limitations 18:03 Agent chaining and data management 22:01 Improving enterprise RAG 25:44 Latency budgets 27:48 Advice for building RAG systems 31:06 Learnings as an AI founder 32:55 The role of academia in AINo Priors Ep 66 | With Y Combinator President and CEO Garry TanNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-05-23 | Garry Tan is a notorious founder-turned-investor who is now running one of the most prestigious accelerators in the world, Y Combinator. As the president and CEO of YC, Garry has been credited with reinvigorating the program. On this week’s episode of No Priors, Sarah, Elad, and Garry discuss the shifting demographics of YC founders and how AI is encouraging younger founders to launch companies, predicting which early stage startups will have longevity, and making YC a beacon for innovation in AI companies. They also discussed the importance of building companies in person and if San Francisco is, in fact, back.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 0:53 Transitioning from founder to investing 5:10 Early social media startups 7:50 Trend predicting at YC 10:03 Selecting YC founders 12:06 AI trends emerging in YC batch 18:34 Motivating culture at YC 20:39 Choosing the startups with longevity 24:01 Shifting YC found demographics 29:24 Building in San Francisco 31:01 Making YC a beacon for creators 33:17 Garry Tan is bringing San Francisco backNo Priors Ep. 65 | With Scale AI CEO Alexandr WangNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-05-22 | Alexandr Wang was 19 when he realized that gathering data will be crucial as AI becomes more prevalent, so he dropped out of MIT and started Scale AI. This week on No Priors, Alexandr joins Sarah and Elad to discuss how Scale is providing infrastructure and building a robust data foundry that is crucial to the future of AI. While the company started working with autonomous vehicles, they’ve expanded by partnering with research labs and even the U.S. government.
In this episode, they get into the importance of data quality in building trust in AI systems and a possible future where we can build better self-improvement loops, AI in the enterprise, and where human and AI intelligence will work together to produce better outcomes.
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0:00 Introduction 3:01 Data infrastructure for autonomous vehicles 5:51 Data abundance and organization 12:06 Data quality and collection 15:34 The role of human expertise 20:18 Building trust in AI systems 23:28 Evaluating AI models 29:59 AI and government contracts 32:21 Multi-modality and scaling challengesNo Priors Ep. 64 | With Suno CEO and Co-Founder Mikey ShulmanNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-05-16 | Mikey Shulman, the CEO and co-founder of Suno, can see a future where the Venn diagram of music creators and consumers becomes one big circle. The AI music generation tool trying to democratize music has been making waves in the AI community ever since they came out of stealth mode last year. Suno users can make a song complete with lyrics, just by entering a text prompt, for example, “koto boom bap lofi intricate beats.” You can hear it in action as Mikey, Sarah, and Elad create a song live in this episode.
In this episode, Elad, Sarah, And Mikey talk about how the Suno team took their experience making at transcription tool and applied it to music generation, how the Suno team evaluates aesthetics and taste because there is no standardized test you can give an AI model for music, and why Mikey doesn’t think AI-generated music will affect people’s consumption of human made music.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Mikey’s background 3:48 Bark and music generation 5:33 Architecture for music generation AI 6:57 Assessing music quality 8:20 Mikey’s music background as an asset 10:02 Challenges in generative music AI 11:30 Business model 14:38 Surprising use cases of Suno 18:43 Creating a song on Suno live 21:44 Ratio of creators to consumers 25:00 The digitization of music 27:20 Mikey’s favorite song on Suno 29:35 Suno is hiringNo Priors Ep. 63 | With Sarah Guo and Elad GilNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-05-09 | This week on No Priors hosts, Sarah and Elad are catching up on the latest AI news. They discuss the recent developments in AI like Meta’s new AI assistant and the latest in music generation, and if you’re interested in generative AI music, stay tuned for next week’s interview! Sarah and Elad also get into device-resident models, AI hardware, and ask just how smart smaller models can really get. These hardware constraints were compared to the hurdles AI platforms are continuing to face including computing constraints, energy consumption, context windows, and how to best integrate these products in apps that users are familiar with.
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Show Notes:
0:00 Intro
1:25 Music AI generation
4:02 Apple’s LLM
11:39 The role of AI-specific hardware
15:25 AI platform updates
18:01 Forward thinking in investing in AI
20:33 Unlimited context
23:03 Energy constraintsNo Priors Ep. 62 | With Cognition CEO and Co-Founder Scott WuNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-05-02 | Scott Wu loves code. He grew up competing in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and is a world class coder, and now he's building an AI agent designed to create more, not fewer, human engineers. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad talk to Scott, the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, an AI lab focusing on reasoning. Recently, the Cognition team released a demo of Devin, an AI software engineer that can increasingly handle entire tasks end to end.
In this episode, they talk about why the team built Devin with a UI that mimics looking over another engineer’s shoulder as they work and how this transparency makes for a better result. Scott discusses why he thinks Devin will make it possible for there to be more human engineers in the world and what will be important for software engineers to focus on as these roles evolve. They also get into how Scott thinks about building the Cognition team and that they’re just getting started.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 1:12 IOI training and community 6:39 Cognition’s founding team 8:20 Meet Devin 9:17 The discourse around Devin 12:14 Building Devin’s UI 14:28 Devin’s strengths and weakness 18:44 The evolution of coding agents 22:43 Tips for human engineers 26:48 Hiring at CognitionNo Priors Ep.61 | OpenAIs Sora Leaders Aditya Ramesh, Tim Brooks and Bill PeeblesNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-04-25 | AI-generated videos are not just leveled-up image generators. But rather, they could be a big step forward on the path to AGI. This week on No Priors, the team from Sora is here to discuss OpenAI’s recently announced generative video model, which can take a text prompt and create realistic, visually coherent, high-definition clips that are up to a minute long.
Sora team leads, Aditya Ramesh, Tim Brooks, and Bill Peebles join Elad and Sarah to talk about developing Sora. The generative video model isn’t yet available for public use but the examples of its work are very impressive. However, they believe we’re still in the GPT-1 era of AI video models and are focused on a slow rollout to ensure the model is in the best place possible to offer value to the user and more importantly they’ve applied all the safety measures possible to avoid deep fakes and misinformation. They also discuss what they’re learning from implementing diffusion transformers, why they believe video generation is taking us one step closer to AGI, and why entertainment may not be the main use case for this tool in the future.
Show Notes: 0:00 Sora team Introduction 1:05 Simulating the world with Sora 2:25 Building the most valuable consumer product 5:50 Alternative use cases and simulation capabilities 8:41 Diffusion transformers explanation 10:15 Scaling laws for video 13:08 Applying end-to-end deep learning to video 15:30 Tuning the visual aesthetic of Sora 17:08 The road to “desktop Pixar” for everyone 20:12 Safety for visual models 22:34 Limitations of Sora 25:04 Learning from how Sora is learning 29:32 The biggest misconceptions about video modelsNo Priors Ep. 60 | With Playground AI Founder Suhail DoshiNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-04-18 | Multimodal models are making it possible to create AI art and augment creativity across artistic mediums. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad talk with Suhail Doshi, the founder of Playground AI, an image generator and editor. Playground AI has been open-sourcing foundation diffusion models, most recently releasing Playground V2.5.
In this episode, Suhail talks with Sarah and Elad about how the integration of language and vision models enhances the multimodal capabilities, how the Playground team thought about creating a user-friendly interface to make AI-generated content more accessible, and the future of AI-powered image generation and editing.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 0:52 Focusing on image generation 3:01 Differentiating from other AI creative tools 5:58 Training a Stable Diffusion model 8:31 Long term vision for Playground AI 15:00 Evolution of AI architecture 17:21 Capabilities of multimodal models 22:30 Parallels between audio AI tools and image-generationNo Priors Ep. 59 | With Sarah Guo & Elad GilNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-04-11 | This week on a host-only episode of No Priors, Sarah and Elad discuss the AI wave as compared to the internet wave, the current state of AI investing, the foundation model landscape, voice and video AI, advances in agentic systems, prosumer applications, and the Microsoft/Inflection deal.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Intro 0:32 How to think about scaling in 2024 3:21 Microsoft/Inflection deal 5:28 Voice cloning 7:02 Investing climate 12:50 Whitespace in AI 16:36 AI video landscape 19:54 Agentic user experiences 22:21 Prosumer as the first wave of application AINo Priors Ep. 58 | The argument for humanoid robots with Brett Adcock from FigureNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-04-04 | Humans are always doing work that is dull or dangerous. Brett Adcock, the founder and CEO of Figure AI, wants to build a fleet of robots that can do everything from work in a factory or warehouse to folding your laundry in the home. Today on No Priors, Sarah got the chance to talk with Brett about how a company that is only 21 months old has already built humanoid robots that not only walk the walk by performing tasks like item retrieval and making a cup of coffee but they also talk the talk through speech to speech reasoning.
In this episode, Brett and Sarah discuss why right now is the correct time to build a fleet of AI robots and how implementation in industrial settings will be a stepping stone into AI robots coming into the home. They also get into how Brett built a team of world class engineers, commercial partnerships with BMW and OpenAI that are accelerating their growth, and the plan to achieve social acceptance for AI robots.
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Show Notes: (0:00) Brett’s background (3:09) Figure AI Thesis (5:51) The argument for humanoid robots (7:36) Figure AI public demos (12:38) Mitigating risk factors (15:20) Designing the org chart and finding the team (16:38) Deployment timeline (20:41) Build vs buy and vertical integration (23:04) Product management at Figure (28:37) Corporate partnerships (31:58) Humans at home (33:38) Social acceptance (35:41) AGI vs the robotsNo Priors Ep. 57 | With LangChain CEO and Co-Founder Harrison ChaseNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-03-28 | Companies are employing AI agents and co-pilots to help their teams increase efficiency and accuracy, but developing apps that are trained properly can require a skillset many enterprise teams don’t have. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Harrison Chase, the CEO and co-founder of LangChain, an open-source framework and developer toolkit that helps developers build LLM applications. In this conversation they talk about the gaps in open source app development, what it will take to keep up with private companies, the importance of creating prompts that can be compatible with many API models, and why memory is so undeveloped in this space.
Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction to LangChain 1:45 Managing an open source environment 4:30 Developing useful AI agents 10:03 Sophistication and limitations of AI app development 14:17 Switching between model APIs 17:10 Context windows, fine tuning and functionality 21:37 Evolution of AI open source environment 23:53 The next big breakthroughsNo Priors Ep 56 | With Baseten CEO and Co-Founder Tuhin SrivastavaNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-03-21 | At a time when users are being asked to wait unthinkable seconds for AI products to generate art and answers, speed is what will win the battle heating up in AI computing. At least according to today’s guest, Tuhin Srivastava, the CEO and co-founder of Baseten which gives customers scalable AI infrastructures starting with interference. In this episode of No Priors, Sarah, Elad, and Tuhin discuss why efficient code solutions are more desirable than no code, the most surprising use cases for Baseten, and why all of their jobs are very defensible from AI.
Show Notes: (0:00) Introduction (1:19) Capabilities of efficient code enabled development (4:11) Difference in training inference workloads (6:12) AI product acceleration (8:48) Leading on inference benchmarks at BaseTen (12:08) Optimizations for different types of models (16:11) Internal vs open source models (19:01) timeline for enterprise scale (21:53) Rethinking investment in compute spend (27:50) Defensibility in AI industries (31:30) Hardware and the chip shortage (35:47) Speed is the way to win in this industry (38:26) WrapNo Priors Ep. 55 | With Figma CEO Dylan FieldNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-03-14 | Figma has had a banner year and the formidable team isn’t slowing down—even after regulatory issues blocked the merger with Adobe. Today on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Dylan Field the CEO and founder of Figma, the design collaboration tool that is closing the gap between imagination and reality. They discuss what’s next for an independent Figma, how AI can augment design and speed up the iteration loop, and how Figma is expanding beyond design with products that help the entire product team’s workflow.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 2:01 No more Adobe acquisition 4:20 What’s next for Figma 7:16 FigJam, digital collaboration, and expanding beyond design 10:50 Figma DevMode 13:06 Incorporating AI at Figma 15:03 How AI will change design 19:19 Creativity augmentation and the iterative loop 22:44 Automating repetitive design tasks 25:35 The future of AI UI 29:44 Investing philosophy 31:28 Leadership evolutionNo Priors Ep. 54 | With Sarah Guo & Elad GilNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-03-07 | Host-only episode discussing NVIDIA, Meta and Google earnings, Gemini and Mistral model launches, the open-vs-closed source debate, domain specific foundation models, if we’ll see real competition in chips, and the state of AI ROI and adoption.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 0:27 Model news and product launches 5:01 Google enters the competitive space with Gemini 1.5 8:23 Biology and robotics using LLMs 10:22 Agent-centric companies 14:22 NVIDIA earnings 17:29 ROI in AI 20:43 Impact from AI 25:45 Building effective AI tools in house 29:09 What would it take to compete with NVIDIA 33:23 The architectural approach to compute 35:42 the roadblocks to chip production in the US 38:30 The virtuous tech cycles in AINo Priors Ep. 53 | With AMD CTO Mark PapermasterNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-02-29 | Compute is the fuel for the AI revolution, and customers want more chip vendors. AMD CTO Mark Papermaster joins Sarah and Elad on No Priors to discuss AMD’s strategy, their newest GPUs, where inference workloads will live, the chip software stack, how they are thinking about supply chain issues, and what we can expect from AMD in 2024.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction and Mark’s background 2:35 AMD background and current markets 4:40 AMD shifting to AI space 8:54 AI applications coming out of AMD 10:57 Software investment 15:15 The benefits of open-source stacks 16:58 Evolving GPU market 20:21 Constraints on GPU production 24:11 Innovations in chip technology 27:57 Chip supply chain 30:18 Future of innovative hardware products 35:42 What’s next for AMDNo Priors Ep. 52 | With Pinecone CEO Edo LibertyNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-02-22 | Accurate, customizable search is one of the most immediate AI use cases for companies and general users. Today on No Priors, Elad and Sarah are joined by Pinecone CEO, Edo Liberty, to talk about how RAG architecture is improving syntax search and making LLMs more available. By using a RAG model Pinecone makes it possible for companies to vectorize their data and query it for the most accurate responses.
In this episode, they talk about how Pinecone’s Canopy product is making search more accurate by using larger data sets in a way that is more efficient and cost effective—which was almost impossible before there were serverless options. They also get into how RAG architecture uniformly increases accuracy across the board, how these models can increase “operational sanity” in the dataset for their customers, and hybrid search models that are using keywords and embeds.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction to Edo and Pinecone 2:01 Use cases for Pinecone and RAG models 6:02 Corporate internal uses for syntax search 10:13 Removing the limits of RAG with Canopy 14:02 Hybrid search 16:51 Why keep Pinecone closed source 22:29 Infinite context 23:11 Embeddings and data leakage 25:35 Fine tuning the data set 27:33 What’s next for Pinecone 28:58 Separating reasoning and knowledge in AINo Priors Ep. 51 | With Notion CEO Ivan ZhaoNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-02-15 | Notion is a productivity app that has invested heavily in AI to create products that enable workers to access information instantly without having to search through their own countless notes. Today on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Ivan Zhao, the co-founder and CEO of Notion, to talk about Notions Q&A interface and calendar applications. They also get into how using RAG models means better retrieval, longer memory, and the user can be less organized and how Notion is leading the charge in this era of SaaS bundling products.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 2:09 AI and Computing literacy 5:39 Building the Notion AI team 8:43 Notion as an application company 12:09 Prioritizing AI investment 14:53 The rapid evolution cycle of AI development 17:46 Notion Q&A 20:00 Workflow and AI for calendars 22:43 Moving past the need for organization 24:36 History of SaaS doesn’t repeat, it rhymes 30:14 Design at Notion 34:26 Notion office design 36:52 How RAG will change the future 38:30 Building our the software in the NotionscapeNo Priors Ep. 50 | With Stripe Head of Information Emily Glassberg SandsNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-02-08 | Many companies that are building AI products for their users are not primarily AI companies. Today on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Emily Glassberg Sands who is the Head of Information at Stripe. They talk about how Stripe prioritizes AI projects and builds these tools from the inside out. Stripe was an early adopter of utilizing LLMs to help their end user. Emily talks about how they decided it was time to meaningfully invest in AI given the trajectory of the industry and the wealth of information Stripe has access to. The company’s goal with utilizing AI is to empower non-technical users to code using natural language and for technical users to be able to work much quicker and in this episode she talks about how their Radar Assistant and Sigma Assistant achieve those goals.
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Show Notes: 0:00 Background 0:38 Emily’s role at Stripe 2:31 Adopting early gen AI models 4:44 Promoting internal usage of AI 8:17 Applied ML accelerator teams 10:36 Radar fraud assistant 13:30 Sigma assistant 14:32 How will AI affect Stripe in 3 years 17:00 Knowing when it’s time to invest more fully in AI 18:28 Deciding how to proliferate models 22:04 Whitespace for fintechs employing AI 25:41 Leveraging payments data for customers 27:51 Labor economics and data 30:10 Macro economic trends for strategic decisions 32:54 How will AI impact education 35:36 Unique needs of AI startupsNo Priors Ep. 49 | With Shopify VP of Core Product Glen CoatesNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-01-31 | Building an ecommerce business is hard – it requires merchants to have a wealth of skills: technical, logistics, marketing, pricing, vendor management, finance and analytics. That’s why Shopify is releasing new AI features that help merchants tackle things like product descriptions, marketing suggestions and search.
Today on No Priors, Glen Coates, the VP of core product at Shopify (and former founder of b2b wholesale platform Handshake), joins Sarah and Elad. They talk about the releases from Shopify Editions, why they are deploying “copilot” rather than “autopilot,” AI innovation-at-scale, how to change the basement of a house while people are living in it, and building a leadership team of entrepreneurs.
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0:00 Background 2:22 Calling a “Code Red” at Shopify 4:04 Integrating acquisitions, entrepreneurial leaders 12:15 AI adoption 15:51 Deciding when to ship AI products, evaluations 17:33 Shopify’s risk orientation 18:50 Changing the core Shopify data model, enabling AI features 26:05 What’s missing from LLMs for merchants 28:47 Most interesting AI developments in the industry 33:22 What users want from LLMs and search 38:20 No Priors socialNo Priors Ep. 48 | With Covariant CEO Peter ChenNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-01-24 | Building adaptive AI models that can learn and complete tasks in the physical world requires precision but these AI robots could completely change manufacturing and logistics processes. Peter Chen, the co-founder and CEO of Covariant, leads the team that is building robots that will increase manufacturing efficiency, safety, and create warehouses of the future.
Today on No Priors, Peter joins Sarah to talk about how the Covariant team is developing multimodal models that have precise grounding and understanding so they can adapt to solve problems in the physical world. They also discuss how they plan their roadmap at Covariant, what could be next for the company, and what use case will bring us to the Chat-GPT moment for AI robots.
00:00 Peter Chen Background 00:58 How robotics AI will drive AI forward 03:00 Moving from research to a commercial company 05:46 The argument for building incrementally 08:13 Manufacturing robotics today 12:21 Put wall use case 15:45 What’s next for Covariant Brain 18:42 Covariant’s customers 19:50 Grounding concepts in Ai 25:47 How scaling laws apply to Covariant 29:21 Covariant’s driving thesis 32:54 the Chat-GPT moment for robotics 35:12 Manufacturing center of the future 37:02 Safety in AI roboticsNo Priors Ep. 47 | With Sourcegraph CTO Beyang LiuNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-01-18 | Coding in collaboration with AI can reduce human toil in the software development process and lead to more accurate and less tedious work for coding teams. This week on No Priors, Sarah talked with Beyang Liu, the cofounder and CTO of Sourcegraph, which builds tools that help developers innovate faster. Their most recent launch was an AI coding assistant called Cody. Beyang has spent his entire career thinking about how humans can work in conjunction with AI to write better code.
Sarah and Beyang talk about how Sourcegraph is thinking about augmenting the coding process in a way that ensures accuracy and efficiency starting with robust and high-quality context. They also think about what the future of software development could look like in a world where AI can generate high-quality code on its own and where that leaves humans in the coding process.
0:00 Beyang Liu’s experience 0:52 Sourcegraph premise 2:20 AI and finding flow 4:18 Developing LLMs in code 6:46 Cody explanation 7:56 Unlocking AI code generation 11:00 search architecture in LLMs 16:02 Quality-assurance in data set 18:03 Future of Cody 22:48 Constraints in AI code generation 30:28 Lessons from Beyang’s research days 33:17 Benefits of small models 35:49 Future of software development 42:14 What skills will be valued down the lineNo Priors Ep. 46 | Best of 2023 with Sarah Guo and Elad GilNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2024-01-11 | We’re looking back on 2023 and sharing a handful of our favorite conversations. Last year was full of insightful conversations that shaped the way we think about the most innovative movements in the AI space. Want to hear more? Check out the full episodes here:
What is Digital Life? with OpenAI Co-Founder & Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever youtu.be/Ft0gTO2K85A
How AI can help small businesses with Former Square CEO Alyssa Henry youtu.be/llMFYc4_vik
Will Everyone Have a Personal AI? With Mustafa Suleyman, Founder of DeepMind and Inflection youtu.be/g4VszCFonPk
How will AI bring us the future of medicine? With Daphne Koller from Insitro youtu.be/k5FvyrJdEcI
The case for AI optimism with Reid Hoffman from Inflection AI youtu.be/_Hprred2E7M
Mistral 7B and the Open Source Revolution With Arthur Mensch, CEO Mistral AI youtu.be/EMOFRDOMIiU
0:00 Introduction 0:27 Ilya Sutskever on the cap profit model 3:11 Alyssa Henry on how AI can small business owners 5:25 Mustafa Suleyman on defining intelligence 8:53 Reid Hoffman’s advice for co-working with AI 11:47 Daphne Koller on probabilistic graphical models 13:15 Noam Shazeer on the possibilities of LLMs 14:27 Arthur Mensch on keeping AI open 17:19 Jensen Huang on how Nvidia decides what to work onNo Priors Ep. 45 | With Reid HoffmanNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2023-12-21 | AI doomerism and calls to regulate the emerging technology is at a fever pitch but today’s guest, Reid Hoffman is a vocal AI optimist who views slowing down innovation as anti-humanistic. Reid needs no introduction, he’s the co-founder of PayPal, Linkedin, and most recently Inflection AI which is building empathetic AI companions. He is also a board member at Microsoft and former board member at OpenAI. On this week’s episode, Reid joins Sarah and Elad to talk about the historical case for an optimistic outlook on emerging technology like AI, advice for workers who fear AI may replace them, and why it’s impossible to regulate before you innovate. Plus, some predictions.
Aside from his storied experience in technology, Reid is an author, podcaster, and political activist. Most recently, he co-authors a book with GPT 4 called Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI.
00:00 Reid Hoffman’s birdseye view on the state of AI 03:37 AI and human collaboration in workflows 5:23 What’s causing AI doomerism 12:28 Advice for whitecollar workers 16:45 Why Reid isn’t retiring 18:25 How Inflection started 22:06 Surprising ways people are using Inflection 25:34 Western bias and AI ethics 30:58 Structural challenges in governing AI 33:15 Most exciting whitespace in AI 35:00 GPT 5 and Innovations coming in the next two years 44:00 What future should we be building?No Priors Ep. 43 | With Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AINo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2023-12-07 | AI is the new UI for enterprise customers according to Clara Shih, the CEO of Salesforce AI. Salesforce released Einstein, now called Einstein GPT, in 2016, making it an early example of how beneficial AI can be when embedded in enterprise software. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad talked with Clara about what the evolution of AI in enterprise looks like, how Salesforce is adoption AI across the organization, and the onboarding process for companies looking to integrate AI into their workflow, plus the challenges of pricing for AI services.
Clara Shih is the Chief Executive Officer of Salesforce AI where she leads the AI efforts across Salesforce including AI co-pilot and agent platform, model development, go-to-market growth, adoption, partnerships, ecosystems, and secure responsible AI. Before that was the CEO of Salesforce Service Cloud She is also the co-founder and previous CEO of Hearsay Systems. She is also on the Board of Directors at Starbucks.
0:00 Clara’s Background 0:50 From cloud services to AI 3:25 Internal Model Development vs Open Source 5:20 The Co-Pilot Approach 8:50 Enterprise AI Adoption 10:54 The future of Enterprise AI 13:23 Cross-team collaboration 14:40 AI is the new UI 19:11 Structuring the Dataset 21:25 What’s next for generative AI in Enterprise 23:18 Pricing challenges in AI 26:30 Startups and AI 28:22 Collaboration in AI IndustryNo Priors Ep. 42 | With Sarah Guo and Elad GilNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2023-11-30 | OpenAI’s leadership has taken us all on a rollercoaster so it’s great timing for another host-only episode. This week Sarah and Elad get into what has been going on at OpenAI and what the turbulent leadership changes tell us about the importance of good intent and good incentives when building these influential companies. They also talk about innovative products coming out of Pika Labs, why people are moving away from diffusion models to LLMs, and how, in AI investing, the ASP is the opportunity.
0:00 Recapping the OpenAI saga 9:56 AI video products 16:14 Moving from Diffusion Models to LLMs 19:47 The beneficial margins of AI investingNo Priors Ep. 41 | With Imbue Co-Founders Kanjun Qiu and Josh AlbrechtNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2023-11-16 | 00:00 - Introduction to Imbue 04:55 - The Spectrum of Agent Tasks 10:23 - Specialization and Generalization With Agents 14:08 - Code and Language in AI Agents 21:00 - Evaluating AI Development Tools Efficiently 26:39 - Prioritizing GPU UsageNo Priors Ep. 40 | With Arthur Mensch, CEO Mistral AINo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2023-11-09 | Open Source fuels the engine of innovation, according to Arthur Mensch, CEO and co-founder of Mistral AI. Mistral is a French AI company which recently made a splash with releasing Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size to date, and outperforming much larger models. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Arthur to discuss why open source could win the AI wars, their $100M+ seed financing, the true nature of scaling laws, why he started his company in France, and what Mistral is building next.
Arthur Mensch is Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Mistral AI. A graduate of École Polytechnique, Télécom Paris and holder of the Master Mathématiques Vision Apprentissage at Paris Saclay, he completed his thesis in machine learning for functional brain imaging at Inria (Parietal team). He spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow in the Applied Mathematics department at ENS Ulm, where he carried out work in mathematics for optimization and machine learning. In 2020, he joined DeepMind as a researcher, working on large language models, before leaving in 2023 to co-found Mistral AI with Guillaume Lample and Timothee Lacroix.
00:00 - Why he co-founded Mistral 04:22 - Chinchilla and Proportionality 06:16 - Mistral 7b 09:17 - Data and Annotations 10:33 - Open Source Ecosystem 17:36 - Proposed Compute and Scale Limits 19:58 - Threat of Bioweapons 23:08 - Guardrails and Safety 29:46 - Mistral Platform 31:31 - French and European AI StartupsNo Priors Ep. 39 | With OpenAI Co-Founder & Chief Scientist Ilya SutskeverNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2023-11-02 | Each iteration of ChatGPT has demonstrated remarkable step function capabilities. But what’s next? Ilya Sutskever, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist at OpenAI, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss the origins of OpenAI as a capped profit company, early emergent behaviors of GPT models, the token scarcity issue, next frontiers of AI research, his argument for working on AI safety now, and the premise of Superalignment. Plus, how do we define digital life?
Ilya Sutskever is Co-founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI. He leads research at OpenAI and is one of the architects behind the GPT models. He co-leads OpenAI's new "Superalignment" project, which tries to solve the alignment of superintelligences in 4 years. Prior to OpenAI, Ilya was co-inventor of AlexNet and Sequence to Sequence Learning. He earned his Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.
00:00 - Early Days of AI Research 06:49 - Origins of Open Ai & CapProfit Structure 13:54 - Emergent Behaviors of GPT Models 18:05 - Model Scale Over Time & Reliability 23:51 - Roles & Boundaries of Open Source in the AI Ecosystem 28:38 - Comparing AI Systems to Biological & Human Intelligence 32:56 - Definition of Digital Life 35:11 - Super Alignment & Creating Pro Human AI 41:20 - Accelerating & Decelerating ForcesNo Priors Ep. 38 | With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan NoonNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2023-10-26 | Cyber Security is going to change significantly in the era of AI, according to Ryan Noon, cofounder of Material Security, a security company that makes cloud-based Google and Microsoft email a safe place for sensitive data. Elad Gil and Ryan talk about how Material Security started to use LLMs, potential security threats from AI hacks, and the role of the government in securing the Internet. Ryan also shares his advice for founders.
Ryan co-founded Material Security in 2017 after seeing high profile email hacks in the 2016 Presidential election. Previously, he led various engineering teams at Dropbox after it acquired his first company, Parastructure. Prior to Parastructure, he led engineering at a data analysis company spun out of Stanford by DARPA. He holds both an MS in Computer Networks and Security and a BS in Computer Science from Stanford.
00:00 - How 2016 Election Hacking Inspired Ryan to Start Material Security 05:02 - Generative AI Use Cases in Cyber Security & Fine Tuning 11:50 - Predictions on Effective Threat Levels from AI Hacks 15:39 - Democracy, the Department of Defence, DARPA and Cyber Security 20:17 - Is there room for startups in the Cyber Security industry? 27:13 - New Challenges On Horizon After 7 Years as Cofounder 30:32 - Advice to FoundersNo Priors Ep. 37 | With Kawal GandhiNo Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups2023-10-19 | As the Lead for Generative AI in the Office of the CTO for Google Cloud, Kawal Gandhi has a unique vantage point on enterprise AI roll out. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Gandhi this week to discuss his insights on how enterprises can effectively invest and roll out AI development and tools, the best use cases for Google Colab TPU, and Google’s internal AI applications driving external customer success. Plus, when will email get more efficient?
Kawal Gandhi works in the Office of the CTO of Google Cloud, where his main focus is AI/ML. He has worked at Google for nearly a decade in search and ad roles before focusing on the development and marketing of AI tools.
00:00 - Generative AI in Google Cloud 09:05 - AI Adoption for Enterprise 13:31 - Multi-Modal AI Models 16:19 - AI Adoption, Investment Cost, Anti-patterns 24:43 - Google's TPU and NVIDIA GPU shortage 31:00 - Data Marketplace and Model Training