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Conviction
At this moment of inflection in technology, co-hosts Elad Gil and Sarah Guo talk to the world's leading AI engineers, researchers and founders about the biggest questions: How far away is AGI? What markets are at risk for disruption? How will commerce, culture, and society change? What’s happening in state-of-the-art in research? “No Priors” is your guide to the AI revolution. Email feedback to [email protected]. Sarah Guo is a startup investor and the founder of Conviction, an investment firm purpose-built to serve intelligent software, or "Software 3.0" companies. She spent nearly a decade incubating and investing at venture firm Greylock Partners. Elad Gil is a serial entrepreneur and a startup investor. He was co-founder of Color Health, Mixer Labs (which was acquired by Twitter). He has invested in over 40 companies now worth $1B or more each, and is also author of the High Growth Handbook.
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21/12/2023

The case for AI optimism

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. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @alyssahhenry Show Notes:  (0:00) Reid Hoffman’s birdseye view on the state of AI (3:37) 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?
47m
14/12/2023

How AI can help small businesses

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.  Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @alyssahhenry Show Notes:  (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
39m
07/12/2023

AI is the new enterprise UI with Clara Shih, CEO Salesforce AI

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.  Show Links:  Clara’s Linkedin Ask more of AI podcast Salesforce AI Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @clarashih Show Notes:  (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 Industry
27m
30/11/2023

Open AI leadership shuffle, new diffusion models, and starting the cult of Q*

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.  Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil Show Notes:  (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 investing
26m
16/11/2023

AI Agents That Reason and Code with Imbue Co-Founders Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht

The future of tech is 25-person companies powered by AI agents that help us accomplish our larger goals. Imbue is working on building AI agents that reason, code and generally make our lives easier. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with co-founders Kanjun Qiu (CEO) and Josh Albrecht (CTO) to discuss how they define reasoning, the spectrum of specialized and generalized agents, and the path to improved agent performance. Plus, what’s behind their $200M Series B fundraise.  Kanjun Qiu is the CEO and co-founder of Imbue. Kanjun is also a partner at angel fund Outset Capital, where she invests in promising pre-seed companies. Previously, Kanjun was the co-founder and CEO of Sourceress, a machine learning recruiting startup backed by YC and DFJ. She was previously Chief of Staff to Drew Houston at Dropbox, where she helped scale the company from 300 employees to 1200. Josh Albrecht is the CTO and co-founder of Imbue. He also invests in other founders via his fund, Outset Capital. He has published machine learning papers as an academic researcher; founded an AI recruiting company that went through YC and a 3D injection molding software company that was acquired; helped build Addepar as an early engineer; and served as a Thiel Fellow mentor. He started programming as a kid and began working professionally as a software engineer in high school.  Show Links:  Kanjun’s LinkedIn | Website | Google Scholar Josh’s LinkedIn | Website | Google Scholar Imbue raises $200M to build AI systems that can reason and code Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Kanjun | @JoshAlbrecht Show Notes:  (00:00) - Introduction to Imbue (04:55) - The Spectrum of Agent Tasks (08:43) - Specialization and Generalization With Agents (13:03) - Code and Language in AI Agents
32m
09/11/2023

Mistral 7B and the Open Source Revolution With Arthur Mensch, CEO Mistral AI

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. Show Links:  Arthur’s Linkedin Mistral Mistral 7b Retro: Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens Chinchilla: Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @ArthurMensch Show Notes:  (0:00) - Why he co-founded Mistral (4:22) - Chinchilla and Proportionality  (6:16) - Mistral 7b (9:17) - 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 Startups
32m
02/11/2023

What is Digital Life? with OpenAI Co-Founder & Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever

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. Show Links: Ilya Sutskever | LinkedIn Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @ilyasut Show Notes: (00:00) - Early Days of AI Research (06:51) - Origins of Open Ai & CapProfit Structure (13:46) - Emergent Behaviors of GPT Models (17:55) - Model Scale Over Time & Reliability (22:23) - Roles & Boundaries of Open-Source in the AI Ecosystem (28:22) - Comparing AI Systems to Biological & Human Intelligence (30:52) - Definition of Digital Life (32:59) - Super Alignment & Creating Pro Human AI (39:01) - Accelerating & Decelerating Forces 
41m
26/10/2023

AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon

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. Show Links:  Ryan Noon LinkedIn Material Security Website  The Market for Silver Bullets by Ian Grigg Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @InternetMeme Show Notes:  (00:00) - How 2016 Election Hacking Inspired Ryan to Start Material Security (05:00) - Generative AI Use Cases in Cyber Security & Fine Tuning (11:36) - Predictions on Effective Threat Levels from AI Hacks (14:45) - Democracy, the Department of Defence, DARPA and Cyber Security (20:14) - Is there room for startups in the Cyber Security industry? (26:40) - New Challenges On Horizon After 7 Years as Cofounder (32:30) - Advice to Founders
36m
23/10/2023

What Google Cloud Can Teach Enterprises Developing & Rolling Out AI Tools, With Kawal Gandhi

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 rollout. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Gandhi this week to discuss his insights on how enterprises can effectively invest in AI development, the importance of TPUs, and Google’s internal AI applications. Plus, when will email get more intelligent?  Kawal Gandhi has worked at Google for nearly a decade in search and ad roles before focusing on the development and marketing of AI tools. Show Links:  Kawal Gandhi | LinkedIn Google Cloud    Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @geeztweets Show Notes:  (00:00) - Generative AI in Google Cloud (09:05) - AI Adoption in the Enterprise (13:31) - Multi-Modal AI Models (16:19) - AI Adoption, return-on-investment, anti-patterns (24:43) - Google's TPU and NVIDIA GPU shortage (31:00) - Data Marketplace and Model Training
32m
12/10/2023

From App to Suite to Platform, with HubSpot's Co-Founder Brian Halligan

Startups aren't the only companies racing to build the new world of AI. This week, Sarah Guo talks with Brian Halligan, the co-founder, longtime CEO and now executive chairperson of HubSpot, the fastest growing CRM. He talks about category creation, coining the term ‘inbound marketing,’ lessons in scaling from an app to a suite to a platform, staying innovative at scale, and how they're navigating the AI disruption. Brian also describes the life-threatening moment he decided to step back from the CEO role. Plus, what he’s up to at Propeller Ventures and why he’s banking on the ocean to save us from climate change. Brian coined the term "inbound marketing" and together with Dharmesh Shah built a movement around the concept, which included organizing the industry-leading INBOUND event and co-authoring the book Inbound Marketing. Now, as the founder of Propeller Ventures, Brian directs a $100 million climate tech venture fund, specializing in ocean investments. He also serves on the boards of Navier and Aquatic Labs. Brian developed MIT’s popular Scaling Entrepreneurial Ventures class, which he’s taught for over a decade. Show Links:  Brian Halligan | LinkedIn  Propeller VC WHOI Partnership HubSpot Culture Code Read his books: Inbound Marketing and Marketing Lessons From the Grateful Dead Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil |@BHalligan Show Notes:  (0:00:00) - HubSpot's Journey from Unlikely Startup to Industry Incumbent (0:05:32) - The End of Cold Calling (and the Birth of Inbound) (0:16:40) - Building a Multi-Product Company (0:22:07) - How to Stay Innovative and Hungry after Going Public (0:29:12) - AI Workflows in CRM and the Incumbent Data Advantage (0:36:09) - Creating a Culture Code for HubSpot (0:40:24) - Propeller Venture Fund, Ours Oceans and Climate Investing
43m
09/10/2023

Model Quality, Fine Tuning & Meta Sponsoring Open Source Ecosystem

What Does it Take to Improve by 10x or 100x? This week is another host-only episode. Sarah and Elad talk about the path to better model quality, the potential for fine tuning to different use cases, retrieval systems (RAG), feedback systems (RLHF, RLAIF) and Meta’s sponsorship of the open source model ecosystem. Plus Sarah and Elad ask if we’re finally at the beginning of a new set of consumer applications and social networks. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil  Show Notes: 0:03:00 - AI Models and Open AI Advances  0:08:59 - Addressing Hallucinations in AI Models  0:13:22 - Open Source Models in Consumer Engagement 0:16:23 - New Trends in Social Content Creation 0:21:53 - Balancing Ambition With Realistic Customer Expectations
23m
28/09/2023

If DNA is Code, Can AI Help Write It? Scaling Cell Programming and Synthetic Biology, with Ginkgo Bioworks Co-founder and CEO Jason Kelly

Ginkgo Bioworks is using DNA as code to digitize the cell programming revolution. Ginkgo is using AI and synthetic biology to keep the next pandemic at bay, and accelerate our production capabilities for medicine, food, and agriculture. Ginkgo’s co-founder and CEO Jason Kelly joins hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss bioengineering protein as a foundational model, specialized data learning from an evolutionary perspective, what we need to prepare for a future pandemic, and more. Jason has served as a member of our board of directors since Ginkgo’s founding in 2008. He has also served as a director of CM Life Sciences II Inc. (Nasdaq: CMII), a special purpose acquisition company with a focus on the life sciences sector, since its initial public offering in February 2021. Jason holds a Ph.D. in Biological Engineering and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Show Links:  Jason Kelly - Co-founder & CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks | LinkedIn   Ginkgo Bioworks The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin's Dilemma Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @jrkelly Show Notes:  (0:00:00) - The Difference Between Software Engineering and Biological Engineering (0:06:51) - Abstractions and Infrastructure in Synthetic Bio (0:09:23) - The Role of AI, Foundation Models that Speak Biology (0:13:17) - AWS for Cell Engineering (0:17:52) - Where are the AI-discovered Drugs? And Data at Gingko (0:19:12) - Pandemic Response and Biosecurity in the Age of AI (0:22:47) - The Likelihood of Existential AI Risk from Lone Actors Harnessing Viruses, and The Need for Defense-in-Depth (0:31:47) - Will Progress in AI Be Biologically Inspired? And Evolution
37m
21/09/2023

How Replit’s AI Tools are Changing Software Development with Co-founder and CEO Amjad Masad

Replit’s develop-to-deploy platform and new AI tool, Ghostwriter, are breaking down the barriers to entry for beginner programmers. Replit’s CEO, co-founder, and head engineer Amjad Masad joins hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss how AI can change software engineering, the infrastructure we still need, open source foundation models, and what to expect from AI agents. Before co-founding Replit, Amjad Masad worked at Facebook as a software engineer, where he worked on infrastructure tooling. He was a founding engineer at CodeAcademy. Throughout his career, Masad has been an advocate for open-source software. Show Links:  Amjad Masad - CEO & Co-founder of Replit | LinkedIn   Replit Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @amasad Show Links:  Amjad Masad - CEO & Co-founder of Replit | LinkedIn   Replit Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @amasad Show Notes:  0:03:55 - Impact of AI on Code Generation  0:11:09 - Breaking Down Barriers to Entry in Development with Replit 0:14:35 - The Impact of Open Source Models, Meta/Llama 0:20:32 - Bounties, Agents who Make Money 0:24:26 - The Missing Data Spec-to-Code 0:32:29 - Building the Future of AI, Money as a Programmable Primitive
29m
15/09/2023

The Intersection of AI and Blockchain, with Transformers author and NEAR founder Illia Polosukhin

More than 25 million users are using NEAR-powered applications. Co-founder of NEAR protocol and Transformers author Illia Polosukhin joins hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss the intersections of crypto and AI technology, what we should expect from AI agents, decentralized data labeling, why AI’s alignment problem is really a human problem, and more.  Show Links:  Illia Polosukhin - Co-founder of NEAR | LinkedIn   NEAR Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @ilblackdragon Show Notes:  (0:00:00) - Blockchain, AI, and Web3 Intersection (0:06:39) - How We Might Combine Blockchain and AI for Cancer Research (0:23:35) - Inference and Decentralized Data Labeling (0:30:13) - AI SaaS Strategic Challenges (0:38:18) - The Future of Hardware Accelerators
42m
07/09/2023

The World’s Largest AI Processor with Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman

The GPU supply crunch is causing desperation amongst AI teams large and small. Cerebras Systems has an answer, and it’s a chip the size of a dinner plate. Andrew Feldman, CEO and Co-founder of Cerebras and previously SeaMicro, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors. They discuss why there might be an alternative to Nvidia, localized models and predictions for the accelerator market. Show Links:  Andrew Feldman - Cerebras CEO & Co-founder | LinkedIn   Cerebras Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @andrewdfeldman Show Notes:  (0:00:00) - Cerebra Systems CEO Discusses AI Supercomputers (0:07:03) - AI Advancement in Architecture and Training (0:16:58) - Future of AI Accelerators and Chip Specialization (0:26:38) - Scaling Open Source Models and Fine-Tuning
30m
31/08/2023

AI Superpowers for Frontend Developers, with Vercel Founder/CEO Guillermo Rauch

Everything digital is increasingly intermediated through web user experiences, and now AI development can be frontend-first, too. Just ask Guillermo Rauch, the founder and CEO of Vercel, the company behind Next.js. In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil speak to Guillermo about their AI SDK and AI templates, and why Vercel is focused on making it easy for every frontend engineer to build with AI. They also discuss what applications Guillermo's most excited about, how to prepare for the world of bots, whether the winds are changing in web architectures, and why he believes in the AI-fueled 100X engineer. Prior to Vercel, Guillermo co-founded several startups and created the JavaScript library, Socket.io, which allows for real-time bi-directional communication between web clients and servers. Show Links: Guillermo Rauch - CEO & Founder of Vercel | LinkedIn  Vercel Vercel AI Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @rauchg Show Notes:  (0:00:00) - Vercel's AI Strategy and Future Plans (0:10:36) - AI Frameworks, Observability, and Bot Mitigation (0:17:24) - Crawling the Web and Architecture Changes (0:27:54) - AI's Impact on Web Personalization
38m
24/08/2023

AI-Powered Biological Software with Jakob Uszkoreit, CEO of Inceptive

"Biological Software" is the future of medicine. Jakob Uszkoreit, CEO and Co-founder of Inceptive, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors, to discuss how deep learning is expanding the horizons of RNA and mRNA therapeutics. Jakob co-authored the revolutionary paper Attention is All You Need while at Google, and led early Google Translate and Google Assistant teams. Now at Inceptive, he's applying these same architectures and ideas to biological design, optimizing vaccine production, and magnitude-more efficient drug discovery. We also discuss Jakob's perspective on promising research directions, and his point of view that model architectures will actually get simpler from here, and be driven by hardware. Show Links:  Inceptive - CEO & Founder - Jakob Uszkoreit | LinkedIn   Inceptive Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @kyosu Show Notes:  (0:00:00) - Creating Biological Software (0:06:54) - The Hardware Drivers of Large-Scale Transformers (0:14:32) - Challenges in Optimizing Compute Allocation (0:23:25) - Deep Learning in Biology and RNA (0:32:49) - The Future of Drug Discovery (0:41:41) - Collaboration and Innovation at Inceptive
35m
17/08/2023

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

The future of education is right at your children’s fingertips. Sal Khan, CEO and Founder of Khan Academy, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors. For over a decade, Sal Khan has been trying to reform education, beginning with tutoring his cousins in math.  He's the father of the YouTube "chalk talk" format, and has now served tens of millions of students through Khan Academy.  He guides us through how Khan Academy is using AI to personalize a student's educational experience, transporting students into immersive learning experiences that allow them to debate historical figures, to assisting teachers with lesson plans that address the learning gaps keeping students from reaching their full potential, to a Khanmigo, a tutor for every child.  Prior to founding Khan Academy, Sal worked as a hedge fund analyst. He holds an MS in business from Harvard University, as well as an MS in Engineering and a BS in Computer Science from MIT. Show Links:  Khan Academy - CEO & Founder - Khan Academy | LinkedIn   Khan Academy Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @salkhanacademy Show Notes:  [0:00:06] - Sal Khan's Journey [0:08:41] - Mastery Learning and AI in Education [0:19:53] - Future of AI Tutors in Education [0:23:10] - Education's Future With Generative AI [0:29:35] - Connecting Learning Through Tutoring and Collaboration [0:33:22] - Implications of GPT 4 on Education [0:40:42] - Future of Education and Job Skills [0:46:47] - Importance of Traditional Skills in Education
47m
10/08/2023

Listener Q&A: 2024 Tech Market Predictions, Long Term Implications of Today’s GPU Crunch, and Will AI Agents Bring Us Happiness?

This week on the podcast, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil answer listener questions on the state of technology and artificial intelligence. Sarah and Elad also talk about the 2024 tech market, what type of companies may reach their highest valuation ever and the (former) unicorns that may go bust. Plus, how do Sarah and Elad define happiness? Hint: it’s a use case for a specialized AI agent.  Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil  Show Links: Cerebras Systems signs $100 million AI supercomputer deal with UAE's G42 | Reuters  Our World in Data  Show Notes:  [0:00:37] - Impact of GPU Bottleneck in the near and long term [0:10:30] - Timeline for existing incumbent enterprises to use AI in products  [0:11:50] - Vertical versus broad applications for AI Agents   [0:19:33] - 2024 tech market predictions & how founders should think about valuations 
24m
03/08/2023

Eradicating Machine Learning Pain Points with Weights & Biases CEO Lukas Biewald

How are ML developer tools helping to advance our capabilities? Lukas Biewald, CEO of Weights & Biases, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors. Lukas explores the impact of ML in various industries like gaming, AgTech, and fintech through his insightful perspective. He discusses the impact of LLMs, puts them in context of the evolution of ML engineering over the past decade and a half, and tells the backstory of Weights & Biases' success. He gives advice for aspiring AI company founders, placing emphasis on customer feedback and using insecurity as a vehicle for better customer discovery. Prior to founding Weights & Biases, Lukas attacked the problem of data collection for model training as the Founder of Figure Eight, which he sold in 2019. He holds an MS in Computer Science and a BS in Mathematics from Stanford University. Show Links:  Lukas Biewald - CEO & Co-founder - Weights & Biases | LinkedIn   Weights & Biases Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @l2k Show Notes:  [0:00:00] - Lucas Wald's Journey in AI [0:08:16] - Startup Evolution and Machine Learning [0:18:54] - Open Source Models Implications and Adoption [0:29:54] - ML Impact in Various Industries [0:40:27] - Advice for AI Company Founders
43m
27/07/2023

How Palantir’s AI Bet is Revolutionizing Defense and Beyond, with CTO Shyam Sankar

Can frontiers as high-stakes as next-generation, AI-enabled defense depend on something as mundane as data integration? Can "large language models" work in such mission critical applications? In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil are joined by Shyam Sankar, the Chief Technical Officer of Palantir Technologies and inventor of their famous Forward Deployed Engineering force. Early employee and longtime leader Shyam explains the evolution of technology at Palantir, from ontology and data integration to process visualization and now AI. He describes how a company of Palantir's scale has adopted foundation models and shares customer stories. They discuss the case for open source AI models fine-tuned on private, domain-specific data, and the challenges of anchoring AI models in reality. Show Links: Shyam Sankar - Chief Technical Officer - Palantir Technologies | LinkedIn   Palantir Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @ssankar Show Notes:  [0:00:00] - Palantir's CTO Discusses Company's Background [0:10:17] - Apollo and AIP [0:20:25] - Future of UI and Application Integration [0:28:29] - Investment in Co-Pilot Models and Education [0:31:22] - Exploring AI Implementation in Various Industries [0:38:19] - Operational and Analytical Workflows in Context
39m
20/07/2023

The Timeline for Realistic 4-D: Devi Parikh from Meta on Research Hurdles for Generative AI in Video and Multimodality

Video dominates modern media consumption, but video creation is still expensive and difficult. AI-generated and edited video is a holy grail of democratized creative expression. This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Devi Parikh. She is a Research Director in Generative AI at Meta and an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Her work focuses on multimodality and AI for images, audio and video. Recently, she worked on Make a Video 3D, also called MAV3D, which creates animations from text prompts. She is also a talented AI-generated and analog artist herself. Elad, Sarah and Devi talk about what’s exciting in computer vision, what’s blocking researchers from fully immersive Generative 4-D, and AI controllability. No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Show Links: Devi Parikh - Google Scholar  Text-To-4D Dynamic Scene Generation named MAV3D (Make-A-Video3D) Full Research Paper Website with examples of image to 4 D generation Devi’s Substack Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @DeviParikh Show Notes: (0:00:06) - Democratizing Creative Expression With AI-Generated Video (0:08:31) - Challenges in Video Generation Research (0:15:57) - Challenges and Implications of Video Processing (0:20:43) - Control and Multi-Modal Inputs in Video (0:25:50) - Audio's Role in Visual Content (0:39:00) - Don't Self-Select & Devi’s tips for young researchers
39m
29/06/2023

Bringing AI to the Data Cloud, with Snowflake's CEO Frank Slootman

Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake Computing, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors. Before scaling Snowflake to its blockbuster IPO and beyond, Frank was also the CEO from early to scale for landmark enterprise companies ServiceNow and Data Domain. Frank grew up in the Netherlands and is also the author of three books: Amp It Up, Rise of the Data Cloud, and Tape Sucks. In this episode, our hosts talk with Frank about the opportunity for generative AI in the enterprise, why Snowflake isn't really a data warehousing company, their acquisitions of Neeva and Streamlit, apps within Snowflake, and how AI relates to traditional analytics and BI. He also talks about his personal journey, why it's always a good time to do performance management, and why most leaders struggle to raise the bar for performance. ** No Priors is taking a summer break! The podcast will be back with new episodes in three weeks. Join us on July 20th for a conversation with Devi Parikh, Research Director in Generative AI at Meta. ** No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Show Links: Forbes: How CEO-For-Hire Frank Slootman Turned Snowflake Into Software’s Biggest-Ever IPO Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity Rise of the Data Cloud (Audible Audio Edition): Frank Slootman, Steve Hamm, Zach Hoffman, Snowflake: Books TAPE SUCKS: Inside Data Domain, A Silicon Valley Growth Story eBook : Slootman, Frank: Kindle Store Frank Slootman’s LinkedIn Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @SnowflakeDB Show Notes: [00:06] - Frank’s Insights on Career Success as a three-time CEO [12:42] - The message of his book Amp It Up [25:01] - Future of Natural Language and Data [36:29] - Data Management and Industry Transformation Future [45:13] - Managing Resources in Changing Economic Environment [50:09] - Amping Up Energy and Intensity Amid Economic Headwinds
51m
22/06/2023

What's for Dinner? AI-Driven Commerce with Instacart CEO Fidji Simo

Fidji Simo, the CEO of Instacart and co-founder of Metrodora Institute, a medical center and research institute for neuroimmune axis disorders, shares her personal journey from growing up in France, to leading the Facebook app, to becoming a wartime CEO. Fidji talks about the future of Instacart, their AI strategy, how the current era of AI is different from prior ML waves, and the impact of LLMs in commerce, robotics and healthcare. She also shares how she earns followership from her teams. ** No Priors is taking a summer break! The podcast will be back with new episodes in three weeks. Join us on July 20th for a conversation with Devi Parikh, Research Director in Generative AI at Meta. ** No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Show Links: May 31, 2023: Instacart users can now plan meals using AI - Fast Company Profile May 13, 2023: Instacart CEO Fidji Simo makes groceries personal. Now she’s doing the same for women’s health December 2, 2021: Rapid Response: Re-founding Instacart, w/ first-time CEO Fidji Simo | Podcast: Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman Metrodora Institute Fidji Simo’s LinkedIn Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Fidjissimo Show Notes: [00:01] - Leading With Impact and Authenticity [11:48] - Implementing AI [17:28] - Future of Grocery Shopping With AI [25:38] - AI in Advertising and Commerce [32:54] - Metrodora: AI in Biotech and Healthcare [34:18] - The positive impact of AI, mitigating harm & role of regulations
40m
15/06/2023

What happens to Observability If Code is AI-Generated? The Potential for AI in DevOps, with Datadog Co-founder/CEO Olivier Pomel

Olivier Pomel, co-founder and CEO of Datadog, the leading observability company, discusses the company’s founding story, early product sequencing, platform strategy, and acquisitions. Olivier also shares his thoughts on their more recent expansion into security, and why he’s bullish on the potential for AI in DevOps. ** No Priors is taking a summer break! The podcast will be back with new episodes in three weeks. Join us on July 20th for a conversation with Devi Parikh, Research Director in Generative AI at Meta. ** No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Show Links: Nov 22, 2022: Product-led Growth: Founder 1-on-1 with Datadog and Aiven - Olivier Pomel & Oskari Saarenmaa May 25, 2022: Datadog, Inc. (DDOG) CEO Olivier Pomel Presents at J.P. Morgan's 50th Annual Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference Jan 6, 2021: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook Datadog’s Official Website Olivier Pomel LinkedIn Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Oliveur Show Notes: [00:10] - DevOps and AI Potential [06:54] - Datadog and Generative AI [20:40] - Datadog's Acquisition and Expansion Strategy [31:46] - LLMs in Automation and Precision [42:35] - Datadog's Customer Value and Growth
44m
08/06/2023

Listener Q&A: AI Misconceptions, The Reality of Regulation, Infinite Context, Incumbent AI Execution and Startup Ideas

This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad do another hangout to answer listener questions. Topics include debunking common misconceptions about AI and its implications on the world, the analogy to nuclear power and nuclear safety, the impact of larger context windows, developer productivity, incumbent announcements of AI products, and some requests for (fat) startups. No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @SchimpfBrian Show Notes: [00:21] - What Are People Getting Wrong About AI Right Now? / New Capabilities of NLP [04:35] - Nuclear Power and Safety Concerns [11:12] - Emerging AI Companies and Research [15:54] - China's Hardware Sanctions and Funding Ramp [20:34] - Innovation in Heterogeneous Compute Infrastructure [28:08] - Enterprise Stack and Decision Making [33:44] - Data's Impact on the World
35m
01/06/2023

AI & Defense Technology with Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf

Today on No Priors, we discuss defense technology, AI, drones, and autonomous vehicles (think giant submarine drones!) with Brian Schimpf, the co-founder and CEO of Anduril, a next-generation defense technology company. From his early days of coding at age 12 to working on self-driving cars, and finally founding Anduril, Brian's incredible journey led him to create innovative solutions for pressing defense problems. This episode covers the impact of AI, intelligent software, and other technologies to defense. We discuss the challenges of deploying and selling technology in the government spaceBrian shared his perspective on building general-purpose defense technology, the importance of a software-first approach, and how Anduril is working to solve urgent defense problems with speed and efficiency. As we wrapped up our conversation, we touched on the recent shift in the low cost of space launch, which has changed the way the US thinks about defense. We examined the proliferation of satellites, drones, and hypersonic missiles, and how these technologies can be applied, scaled, and built in a way that can fundamentally shift America's approach to defense. Don't miss this fascinating episode with Brian Schimpf as we uncover the cutting edge of defense technology and its implications for the future. No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Show Links: May 16, 2023: AI in Military Operations and How We Can Prevent It From Outsized Effects May 9, 2023: CNBC Disruptor 50 - Anduril Industries Anduril Website Anduril Newsroom Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @SchimpfBrian Show Notes: [0:00:01] - Exploring AI in Defense Tech [0:05:15] - Lower Cost Defense With Intelligent Software [0:15:10] - Building General Purpose Defense Technology [0:20:41] - Autonomy in Defense Challenges [0:25:05] - Machine Learning in Defense & Intelligence [0:29:06] - Scaling a Defense Tech Company [0:37:08] - The Future of Defense Technology [0:46:53] - Allied Forces and Washington Engagement [0:51:47] - Discussion on Leadership Popularity
50m
24/05/2023

Going Full Send on AI, and the (Positive) Impact of AI on Jobs, with Kevin Scott, CTO of Microsoft

In this episode, Sarah and Elad speak with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott about his unlikely journey from rural Virginia to becoming the driving force behind Microsoft's AI strategy.  Sarah and Elad discuss the partnership that Kevin helped forge between Microsoft and OpenAI and explore the vision both companies have for the future of AI. They also discuss yesterday’s announcement of “copilots” across the Microsoft product suite, Microsoft’s GPU computing budget, the potential impact of open source AI models in the tech industry, the future of AI in relation to jobs, why Kevin is bullish on creative and physical work, and predictions for progress in AI this year. No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Show Links: May 23, 2023: The Verge - Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott Thinks Sydney Might Make a Comeback May 23, 2023: Microsoft Outlines Framework For Building AI Apps and Copilots January 10, 2023: A Conversation with Kevin Scott: What’s Next In AI Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @kevin_scott Show Notes: [00:00] - Kevin Scott's Journey to Microsoft CTO [12:44] - Microsoft and Open AI Partnership [21:18] - The Future of Open Source AI [32:12] - AI for Everyone [45:29] - AI and the Future of Jobs [51:44] - The Future of AI and Regulation [58:10] - Taking a Global Perspective
55m
18/05/2023

The AI Will See You Now: Exploring Biomedical AI and Google’s Med-PaLM2 With Karan Singhal

What if AI could revolutionize healthcare with advanced language learning models? Sarah and Elad welcome Karan Singhal, Staff Software Engineer at Google Research, who specializes in medical AI and the development of MedPaLM2. On this episode, Karan emphasizes the importance of safety in medical AI applications and how language models like MedPaLM2 have the potential to augment scientific workflows and transform the standard of care. Other topics include the best workflows for AI integration, the potential impact of AI on drug discoveries, how AI can serve as a physician's assistant, and how privacy-preserving machine learning and federated learning can protect patient data, while pushing the boundaries of medical innovation. No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Show Links: May 10, 2023: PaLM 2 Announcement April 13, 2023: A Responsible Path to Generative AI in Healthcare March 31, 2023: Scientific American article on Med-PaLM February 28, 2023: The Economist article on Med-PaLM KaranSinghal.com Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @thekaransinghal Show Notes: [00:22] - Google's Medical AI Development [08:57] - Medical Language Model and MedPaLM 2 Improvements [18:18] - Safety, cost/benefit decisions, drug discovery, health information, AI applications, and AI as a physician's assistant. [24:51] - Privacy Concerns - HIPAA's implications, privacy-preserving machine learning, and advances in GPT-4 and MedPOM2. [37:43] - Large Language Models in Healthcare and short/long term use.
42m
11/05/2023

Will Everyone Have a Personal AI? With Mustafa Suleyman, Founder of DeepMind and Inflection

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and now co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI, joins Sarah and Elad to discuss how his interests in counseling, conflict resolution, and intelligence led him to start an AI lab that pioneered deep reinforcement learning, lead applied AI and policy efforts at Google, and more recently found Inflection and launch Pi. Mustafa offers insights on the changing structure of the web, the pressure Google faces in the age of AI personalization, predictions for model architectures, how to measure emotional intelligence in AIs, and the thinking behind Pi: the AI companion that knows you, is aligned to your interests, and provides companionship. Sarah and Elad also discuss Mustafa’s upcoming book, The Coming Wave (release September 12, 2023), which examines the political ramifications of AI and digital biology revolutions. No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Show Links: Forbes - Startup From Reid Hoffman and Mustafa Suleyman Debuts ChatBot Inflection.ai Mustafa-Suleyman.ai Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @mustafasuleymn Show Notes: [00:06] - From Conflict Resolution to AI Pioneering [10:36] - Defining Intelligence [15:32] - DeepMind's Journey and Breakthroughs [24:45] - The Future of Personal AI Companionship [33:22] - AI and the Future of Personalized Content [41:49] - The Launch of Pi [51:12] - Mustafa’s New Book The Coming Wave
52m
04/05/2023

Personalizing AI Models with Kelvin Guu, Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google Brain

How do you personalize AI models? A popular school of thought in AI is to just dump all the data you need into pre-training or fine tuning. But that may be less efficient and less controllable than alternatives — using AI models as a reasoning engine against external data sources. Kelvin Guu, Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google, joins Sarah and Elad this week to talk about retrieval, memory, training data attribution and model orchestration. At Google, he led some of the first efforts to leverage pre-trained LMs and neural retrievers, with >30 launches across multiple products. He has done some of the earliest work on retrieval-augmented language models (REALM) and training LLMs to follow instructions (FLAN). No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Show Links: Kelvin Guu Website Google Scholar FLAN: Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners Simfluence: Modeling the Influence of Individual Training Examples by Simulating Training Runs ROME: Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT Branch-Train-Merge: Scaling Expert Language Models with Unsupervised Domain Discovery Large Language Models Struggle to Learn Long-Tail Knowledge  Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Kelvin_Guu Show Notes: [1:44] - Kelvin’s background in math, statistics and natural language processing at Stanford [3:24] - The questions driving the REALM Paper [7:08] - Frameworks around retrieval augmentation & expert models [10:16] - Why is modularity important [11:36] - FLAN Paper and instruction following [13:28] - Updating model weights in real time and other continuous learning methods [15:08] - Simfluence Paper & explainability with large language models [18:11] - ROME paper, “Model Surgery” exciting research areas [19:51] - Personal opinions and thoughts on AI agents & research [24:59] - How the human brain compares to AGI regarding memory and emotions [28:08] - How models become more contextually available [30:45] - Accessibility of models [33:47] - Advice to future researchers
40m
27/04/2023

Listener Q&A: AI Investment Hype, Foundation Models, Regulation, Opportunity Areas, and More

This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad answer listener questions about tech and AI. Topics covered include the evolution of open-source models, Elon AI, regulating AI, areas of opportunity, and AI hype in the investing environment. Sarah and Elad also delve into the impact of AI on drug development and healthcare, and the balance between regulation and innovation. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil Show Notes:  [0:00:06] - The March of Progress for Open Source Foundation Models  [0:06:00] - Should AI Be Regulated? [0:13:49] - Investing in AI and Exploring the AI Opportunity Landscape [0:23:28] - The Impact of Regulation on Innovation [0:31:55] - AI in Healthcare and Biotech
34m
20/04/2023

The Computing Platform Underlying AI, with Jensen Huang, Founder & CEO of NVIDIA

So much of the AI conversation today revolves around models and new applications. But this AI revolution would not be possible without one thing – GPUs, Nvidia GPUs. The Nvidia A100 is the workhorse of today’s AI ecosystem. This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of NVIDIA, at their Santa Clara headquarters. Jensen co-founded the company in 1993 with a goal to create chips that accelerated graphics. Over the past thirty years, NVIDIA has gone far behind gaming and become a $674B behemoth. Jensen talks about the meaning of this broader platform shift for developers, making very long term bets in areas such as climate and biopharma, their next-gen Hopper chip, why and how NVIDIA chooses problems that are unsolvable today, and the source of his iconic leather jackets. No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Show Links: Jensen Huang | NVIDIA Nvidia's A100 is the $10,000 chip powering the race for A.I. | CNBC Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: A.I. is at ‘inflection point’ | Fortune Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Nvidia Show Notes:  [1:26] - The early days when Jensen Co-founded NVIDIA [4:58] - Why NVIDIA started to expand its aperture to artificial intelligence use cases  [10:42] - The moment in 2012 Jensen realized AI was going to be huge [13:52] - How we’re in a broader platform shift in computer science [17:48] - His vision for NVIDIA’s future lines of business [18:09] - How NVIDIA has two motions: Shipping reliable chips and solving new use cases  [25:41] - Why no one should assume they’re right for the job of CEO and why not every company needs to be architected as the US military  [31:39] - What’s next for NVIDIA’s Hopper  [32:57] - Durability of Transformers  [35:08] - What Jensen is excited about in the future of AI & his advice for founders
45m
13/04/2023

Your AI Friends Have Awoken, With Noam Shazeer

Noam Shazeer played a key role in developing key foundations of modern AI - including co-inventing Transformers at Google, as well as pioneering AI chat pre-chatGPT. These are the foundations supporting today’s AI revolution. On this episode of No Priors, Noam discusses his work as an AI researcher, engineer, inventor, and now CEO.  Noam Shazeer is currently the CEO and Co-founder of Character AI, a service that allows users to design and interact with their own personal bots that take on the personalities of well-known individuals or archetypes. You could have a socratic conversation with Socrates. You could pretend you’re being interviewed by Oprah. Or you could work through a life decision with a therapist bot. Character recently raised $150M from A16Z, Elad Gil, and others. Noam talks about his early AI adventures at Google, why he started Character, and what he sees on the horizon of AI development. No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Show Links: Noam Shazeer - Google Scholar Noam Shazeer - Chief Executive Officer - Character.AI | LinkedIn  Character.AI Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Character_ai Show Notes:  [1:50] - Noam’s early AI projects at Google [7:13] - Noam’s focus on language models and AI applications [11:13] - Character’s co-founder Daniel de Freitas Adiwardana work on Google’s Lambda [13:53] - The origin story of Character.AI  [18:47] - How AI can express emotions [26:51] - What Noam looks for in new hires
30m
06/04/2023

The Future is Small Models, with Matei Zaharia, CTO of Databricks

If you have 30 dollars, a few hours, and one server, then you are ready to create a ChatGPT-like model that can do what’s known as instruction-following. Databricks’ latest launch, Dolly, foreshadows a potential move in the industry toward smaller and more accessible but extremely capable AIs. Plus, Dolly is open source, requires less computing power, and fewer data parameters than its counterparts. Matei Zaharia, Cofounder & Chief Technologist at Databricks, joins Sarah and Elad to talk about how big data sets actually need to be, why manual annotation is becoming less necessary to train some models, and how he went from a Berkeley PhD student with a little project called Spark to the founder of a company that is now critical data infrastructure that’s increasingly moving into AI. No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Show Links: Hello Dolly: Democratizing the magic of ChatGPT with open models Dolly Source Code on Github Matei Zaharia - Chief Technologist & Cofounder - Databricks | LinkedIn Matei Zaharia - Google Scholar Databricks debuts ChatGPT-like Dolly, a clone any enterprise can own | VentureBeat Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Databricks | @Matei_Zaharia Show Notes:  [01:29] - Origin of Databricks [4:30] - Work at Stanford Lab [5:29] - Dolly and Role of Open Source [12:30] - Industry focus on high parameter count, understanding reasoning at small model scale [18:42] - Enterprise applications for Dolly & chat bots [25:06] - Making bets as an academic turned CTO [36:23] - The early stages of AI and future predictions
39m
30/03/2023

What’s Beyond GitHub Copilot? With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley

Everyone talks about the future impact of AI, but there’s already an AI product that has revolutionized a profession. Alex Graveley was the principal engineer and Chief Architect behind Github Copilot, a sort of pair-programmer that auto-completes your code as you type. It has rapidly become a product that developers won’t live without, and the most leaned-upon analogy for every new AI startup – Copilot for Finance, Sales, Marketing, Support, Writing, Decision-Making. Alex is a longtime hacker and tinkerer, open source contributor, repeat founder, and creator of products that millions of people use, such as Dropbox Paper. He has a new project in stealth, Minion AI. In this episode, we talk about the uncertain process of shipping Copilot, how code improves chain of thought for LLMs, how they improved product, performance, how people are using it, AI agents that can do work for us, stress testing society's resilience to waves of new technology, and his new startup named Minion. No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Show Links: Alex Graveley - San Francisco, California, United States | Professional Profile | LinkedIn Minion AI Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @alexgraveley | @ai_minion Show Notes: [1:50] - How Alex got started in technology  [2:28] - Alex’s earlier projects with Hack Pad and Dropbox Paper [07:32] - Why Alex always wanted to make bots that did stuff for people [11:56] - How Alex started working at Github and Copilot [27:11] - What is Minion AI [30:30] - What’s possible on the horizon of AI
36m
23/03/2023

How do we go from search engines to answer engines? With Perplexity AI’s Aravind Srinivas and Denis Yarats

With advances in machine learning, the way we search for information online will never be the same. This week on the No Priors podcast, we dive into a startup that aims to be the most trustworthy place to search for information online. Perplexity.ai is a search engine that provides answers to questions in a conversational way and hints at what the future of search might look like. Aravind Srinivas is a Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity. He is a former research scientist at Open AI and completed his PhD in computer science at University of California Berkeley. Denis Yarats is a Co-Founder and Perplexity’s CTO. He has a background in machine learning, having worked as a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research and a machine learning engineer at Quora. No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Show Links: Aravind Srinivas on Google Scholar Denis Yarats on Google Scholar Perplexity AI Perplexity AI Discord AI Chatbots Are Coming to Search Engines. Can You Trust Them? - Scientific American Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @AravSrinivas | @denisyarats Show Notes:  [1:46] - How Perplexity AI iterates quickly and how the company has changed over time [5:46] - Approach to hiring and building a fast-paced team [10:43] - Why you don’t need AI pedigree to transition to work or research AI [14:01] - Challenges when transitioning from AI research to running a company as CEO & CTO [16:50] - Why Perplexity only shows answers it can cite [19:33] - How Perplexity approaches reinforcement learning [20:49] - Trustworthiness and if an answer engine needs a personality [23:05] - Why answer engines will become their own market segment [26:38] - Implications of “the era of fewer clicks” on publishers and advertisers [30:20] - Monetization strategy [33:20] - Advice for those deciding between academia or startups
38m
16/03/2023

What is the future of search? With Neeva’s Sridhar Ramaswamy

For the first time in decades web search might be at risk for disruption. Bing is allied with OpenAI to integrate LLMs. Google has committed to launching new products. New startups are emerging. Sridhar Ramaswamy co-founded the challenger AI-powered, private search platform Neeva in 2019. He is a former 16-year Google veteran who most recently led the internet’s most profitable business as SVP in charge of Google Ads, Commerce and Privacy. Sridhar, Elad and Sarah talk about the challenge of building search, how LLMs have changed the landscape, and how chatbots and "answer services" will affect web publishers. No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Show Links: LinkedIn Neeva Search Neeva Gist Poe by Quora Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @RamaswmySridhar Show Notes:  [1:32] - Why Sridhar started a private search engine after leaving Google [11:11] - Information Retrieval Problems, Mapping Search Queries and LLMs [15:25] - Google and Bing’s approach to search with LLMs [19:06] - Scale challenges when building a search engine startup [22:26] - Distribution challenges and why they release Neeva Gist [24:11] - Why Neeva is a privacy centric subscription service  [28:25] - The relationship between search and publishers/content creators [30:16] - Sridhar’s predictions on how AI will disrupt current ecosystems
36m
09/03/2023

What is the role of academia in modern AI research? With Stanford Professor Dr. Percy Liang

When AI research is evolving at warp speed and takes significant capital and compute power, what is the role of academia? Dr. Percy Liang – Stanford computer science professor and director of the Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models talks about training costs, distributed infrastructure, model evaluation, alignment, and societal impact. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil join Percy at his office to discuss the evolution of research in NLP, why AI developers should aim for superhuman levels of performance, the goals of the Center for Research on Foundation Models, and Together, a decentralized cloud for artificial intelligence. No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Show Links: See Percy’s Research on Google Scholar See Percy’s bio on Stanford’s website Percy on Stanford’s Blog: What to Expect in 2023 in AI Together, a decentralized cloud for artificial intelligence Foundation AI models GPT-3 and DALL-E need release standards - Protocol The Time Is Now to Develop Community Norms for the Release of Foundation Models - Stanford Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @PercyLiang Show Notes:  [1:44] - How Percy got into machine learning research and started the Center for Research and Foundation Models at Stanford [7:23] - The role of academia and academia’s competitive advantages [13:30] - Research on natural language processing and computational semantics [27:20] - Smaller scale architectures that are competitive with transformers [35:08] - Helm, holistic evaluation of language models, a project with the the goal is to evaluate language models [42:13] - Together, a decentralized cloud for artificial intelligence
46m
02/03/2023

How AI can make drug discovery fail less, with Daphne Koller from Insitro

Life-saving therapeutics continue to grow more costly to discover. At the same time, recent advances in using machine learning for the life sciences and medicine are extraordinary. Are we on the verge of a paradigm shift in biotech? This week on the podcast, a pioneer in AI, Daphne Koller, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil on the podcast to help us explore that question. Daphne is the CEO and founder of Insitro — a company that applies machine learning to pharma discovery and development, specifically by leveraging “induced pluripotent stem cells.” We explain Insitro’s approach, why they’re focused on generating their own data, why you can’t cure schizophrenia in mice, and how to design a culture that supports both research and engineering. Daphne was previously a computer science professor at Stanford, and co-founder and co-CEO of edutech company Coursera. Show Links:  Insitro - About  Video: AWS re:Invent 2019 – Daphne Koller of insitro Talks About Using AWS to Transform Drug Development  Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @DaphneKoller Show Notes:  [1:49] - How Daphne combined her biology and tech interests and ran a bifurcated lab at Stanford [4:34] - Why Daphne resigned an endowed chair at Stanford to build Coursera  [14:14] - How insitro approaches target identification problems and training data  [18:33] - What are pluripotent stem cells and how insitro identifies individual neurons  [24:08 ] - How insitro operates as an engine for drug discovery and partners to create the drugs themselves [26:48] - Role of regulations, clinical trials and disease progression in drug delivery  [33:19] - Building a team and workplace culture that can bridge both bio and computer sciences  [39:50] - What Daphne is paying attention to in the so-called golden age of machine learning   [43:12] - Advice for leading a startup in edtech and healthtech
46m
23/02/2023

Why the Future of Machine Learning is Open Source with Huggingface’s Clem Delangue

After starting as a talking emoji companion, Hugging Face is now an organizing force for the open source AI research ecosystem. Its models are used by companies such as Apple, Salesforce and Microsoft, and it's working to become the GitHub for ML. This week on the podcast, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil talk to Clem Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face. Clem shares how they shifted away from their original product, why every employee at Hugging Face is responsible for community-building, the modalities he's most interested in, and what role open source has in the AI race. Show Links: Hugging Face website The $2 Billion Emoji: Hugging Face Wants To Be Launchpad For A Machine Learning Revolution - Forbes Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @ClementDelangue Show Notes:  [01:53] - how Clem first became interested in ML, being shouted at by eBay sellers, and the foretelling of the end of barcode scanning [3:34] - early iterations of Hugging Face, trying to make a less boring AI tamagotchi, and switching directions towards open source tools [5:36] - advice for founders considering a change in direction, 30%+ experimentation [7:39] - 1st users, MLTwitter, approach to community [10:47] - enterprise ML maturity, days to production [12:54] - open source vs. proprietary models [15:56] - main model tasks, architectures and sizes [19:12] - decentralized infrastructure, data opt out [24:16] - Hugging Face’s business model, GitHub [28:09] - What Clem is excited about in AI
31m
20/02/2023

Founder Stories: What’s behind the largest commercial autonomous system on earth? With Zipline’s Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

This is a special bonus episode from our Founder Stories series, where entrepreneurs share the story of their startup journey. A delivery with Zipline is the closest thing we have to teleportation. It sounds like science fiction, but Zipline delivers life saving medical supplies such as blood and vaccines to hospitals, doctors and people in need around the world with the world's largest autonomous drone network. This week on the podcast, Sarah Guo talks to Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, the co-founder and CEO of Zipline, about building a full-stack business that involves software, hardware and operations, how a culture of ruthless engineering practicality enabled them to do unlikely things, the state of autopilot in aircraft, their AI acoustic detect-and-avoid system, and why founders should build for users beyond the "golden billion." Show Links: Zipline's website Video: Drone Delivery Start-Up Zipline Beats Amazon, UPS And FedEx To The Punch | CNBC Keller Rinaudo: How we're using drones to deliver blood and save lives | TED Talk Meet Romotive: An Ambitious Startup That Blew Our Minds Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @KellerRinaudo Show Notes:  [2:07] - Keller’s earlier projects and early inspiration for Zipline and transforming logistics  [7:40] - Why Zipline focused on healthcare logistics and Zipline’s early near death experiences as a company  [15:32] - How Zipline iterated on the hardware while being ruthlessly practical with getting products in the customers’ hands  [21:52] - The difference between AI and Autopilot [25:51] - How Zipline developed AI acoustic-based detect and avoid system [31:30] - Zipline’s partnership with Rwanda’s public health system  [34:25] - Challenges in the business model 
46m
16/02/2023

How can we make sure that everyone has access to AI? Can small models outperform large models? With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque

AI-generated images have been everywhere over the past year, but one company has fueled an explosive developer ecosystem around large image models: Stability AI. Stability builds open AI tools with a mission to improve humanity. Stability AI is most known for Stable Diffusion, the AI model where a user puts in a natural language prompt and the AI generates images. But they're also engaged in progressing models in natural language, voice, video, and biology. This week on the podcast, Emad Mostaque joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to talk about how this barely one-year-old, London-based company has changed the AI landscape, scaling laws, progress in different modalities, frameworks for AI safety and why the future of AI is open. Show Links: Stability.AI Stable Diffusion V2 on Hugging Face  Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @EMostaque Show Notes:  [2:00] - Emad’s background as one of the largest investors in video games and artificial intelligence [7:24] - Open-source efforts in AI [13:09] - Stability.AI as the only independent multimodal AI company in the world [15:28] - Computational biology, medical information and medical models [23:29] - Pace of Adoption [26:31] - AGI versus intelligence augmentation [31:38] - Stability.AI’s business model [37:44] - AI Safety
46m
09/02/2023

What does AI-powered content creation look like? with Runway ML’s Cristobal Valenzuela

For a long time, AI-generated images and video felt like a fun toy. Cool, but not something that would bring value to professional content creators. But now we are at the exciting moment where machine learning tools have the power to unlock more creative ideas. This week on the podcast, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil talk to Cristobal Valenzuela, a technologist, artist and software developer. He’s also the CEO and co-founder of Runway, a web-based tool that allows creatives to use machine learning to generate and edit video. You've probably already seen Runway's work in action on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert and in the feature film Everything Everywhere All at Once. Show Links: Watch Cris Valenzuela’s 2018 thesis presentation at New York University’s ITP program. Read how Runway is used on the Late Show and in Everything Everywhere All at Once on the Runway Blog. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @c_valenzuelab Show Notes:  [1:50] - Cris’s background and how he doesn’t see barriers between art and machine learning [6:46] - How Runway works as a tool [8:36] - The origins and early iterations of Runway [12:22] - Product sequencing and roadmapping in a fast growing space [15:43] - Runway as an applied research company [19:10] - Common pitfalls for founders to avoid [22:35] - How Runway structures teams for effective collaboration [24:22] - Learnings from how Runway built Greenscreen product [28:01] - Building a long-term and sustainable business [32:34] - Finding Product Market Fit [36:34] - The influence of AI tools in art as an artistic movement
46m
02/02/2023

The bot Cicero can collaborate, scheme and build trust with humans. What does this mean for the next frontier of AI? With Noam Brown, Research Scientist at Meta

AGI can beat top players in chess, poker, and, now, Diplomacy. In November 2022, a bot named Cicero demonstrated mastery in this game, which requires natural language negotiation and cooperation with humans. In short, Cicero can lie, scheme, build trust, pass as human, and ally with humans. So what does that mean for the future of AGI? This week’s guest is research scientist Noam Brown. He co-created Cicero on the Meta Fundamental AI Research Team, and is considered one of the smartest engineers and researchers working in AI today. Co-hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil talk to Noam about why all research should be high risk, high reward, the timeline until we have AGI agents negotiating with humans, why scaling isn’t the only path to breakthroughs in AI, and if the Turing Test is still relevant. Show Links: More about Noam Brown Read the research article about Cicero (diplomacy) published in Science.  Read the research article about Liberatus  (heads-up poker) published in Science.  Read the research article about Pluribus (multiplayer poker) published in Science.  Watch the AlphaGo Documentary. Read “How Smart Are the Robots Getting?” by New York Times reporter Cade Metz  Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Polynoamial Show Notes:  [01:43] - What sparked Noam’s interest in researching AI that could defeat games [6:00] - How the AlexaNET and AlphaGo changed the landscape of AI research [8:09] - Why Noam chose Diplomacy as the next game to work on after poker [9:51] - What Diplomacy is and why the game was so challenging for an AI bot [14:50] - Algorithmic breakthroughs and significance of AI bots that win in No-Limit Texas Hold'em poker [23:29] - The Nash Equilibrium and optimal play in poker [24:53] - How Cicero interacted with humans  [27:58] - The relevance and usefulness of the Turing Test [31:05] - The data set used to train Cicero [31:54] - Bottlenecks to AI researchers and challenges with scaling [40:10] - The next frontier in researching games for AI [42:55] - Domains that humans will still dominate and applications for AI bots in the real world [48:13] - Reasoning challenges with AI
58m