Unsupervised Learning (by Redpoint Ventures)

Patrick and Jacob sit down with Mike Conover, Staff Software Engineer at Databricks and Co-Creator of Databricks Dolly, the world’s first truly open instruction-tuned LLM, to discuss the magic behind Dolly, Alpaca and other instruction-tuned LLMs, the unreasonable effectiveness of fine-tuning, how they got all Databricks employees to help them curate the Dolly dataset (hint: google forms), and more.

(0:00) - Intro

(5:54) - The birth of Dolly

(12:03) - Data curation at Databricks

(15:34) - Advice for building LLMs

(24:10) - The future of instruction-tuning datasets

(30:43) - UI innovation

(38:16) - The future of machine learning infrastructure

(42:05) - How SkipFlag would be different with the tools we have today

(47:01) - What Mike has learned since Dolly

With your co-hosts:

@jasoncwarner

- Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical

@ericabrescia

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)

@patrickachase

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn

@jacobeffron

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

Jonathan Frankle is the Chief AI Scientist at Databricks ($43B), which he joined through the acquisition of MosaicML in July 2023. Databricks has over 12,000 customers on the cutting edge of AI; Jonathan works to anticipate their needs and offer solutions even as the tech is rapidly evolving.

[0:00] Intro

[0:52] Incentives and Team Motivation at Databricks

[2:40] The Evolution of AI Models: Transformers vs. LSTMs

[5:27] Mosaic and Databricks: A Strategic Merger

[7:31] Guidance on AI Model Training and Fine-Tuning

[11:11] Building Effective AI Evaluations

[16:02] Domain-Specific AI Models and Their Importance

[19:37] The Future of AI: Challenges and Opportunities

[25:07] Ethical Considerations and Human-AI Interaction

[29:13] Customer Collaboration and AI Implementation

[30:45] Navigating AI Tools and Techniques

[35:41] The Role of Open Source Models

[36:46] AI Infrastructure and Partnerships

[48:27] Academia's Role in AI Research

[52:09] Ethics and Policy in AI

[57:47] Quickfire

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Perplexity is a next-gen search tool going after Google, with 1M Android app installs and 1M iOS installs within only 8 months of product launch. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with the CEO and Co-Founder of Perplexity AI, Aravind Srinivas. Aravind shared with us the behind-the-scenes stories of how Perplexity AI was born (37:19), how he thinks about Perplexity being viewed as a "wrapper" (24:01), where search will be in 10 years (23:08), and where Perplexity is headed.

(0:00) intro

(0:48) the simplicity of Perplexity

(5:16) how Perplexity allocates resources

(7:09) don’t waste your time building your own models

(11:39) being a “wrapper” for OpenAI

(14:37) the future of Quora and Wikipedia

(19:38) what does it take to compete with Google

(23:08) what does search look like in 10 years

(24:01) showing users that Perplexity is more than a “wrapper”

(27:28) RAG solutions and solving hallucinations

(30:13) guiding users’ questions

(32:44) discover tab

(35:48) attracting new users vs. pleasing “power users”

(37:19) how Perplexity landed on search

(53:01) should AI be regulated?

(54:56) what other company would Aravind work at

(56:56) OpenAI

(58:42) Jacob and Pat debrief

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

At Redpoint’s annual meeting with investors, Redpoint partners Scott Raney, Alex Bard, Patrick Chase and Jacob Effron shared unfiltered thoughts on some of the most topical questions in AI today, where value will accrue, which industries are best positioned for defensibility at the application layer, and more.

(0:00) Intro
(0:39) AI Investment Landscape
(1:30) Market Projections
(3:25) Strategic Imperatives in AI
(6:04) AI Model Layer Insights
(10:06) Infrastructure Layer
(11:46) Application Layer
(15:04) Vertical AI SaaS Opportunities
(21:45) Evaluating Early-Stage Founders
(23:39) First Mover Advantage and Competitive Dynamics
(25:28) Domain Expertise vs. AI Expertise
(26:58) Why AI Startups Fail
(29:41) Startups vs. Incumbents
(35:15) Navigating High AI Valuations

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

On today’s Unsupervised Learning, Mike Schroepfer (ex-CTO of Meta and founder of Gigascale Capital) reveals why energy is a key bottleneck holding AI progress back. Mike discusses how we can scale energy production to democratize AI globally and explores AI’s role in climate change. He also reflects on a decade as Meta’s CTO and how AI coding is transforming the CTO role. Finally, he offers predictions on the future of AI developer tools, VR, and open-source models.

(0:00) Intro
(0:43) AI's Role in Energy and Climate Change
(4:32) Innovative Energy Solutions
(14:50) Open Source and AI Development
(22:35) Challenges in Chip Design
(24:04) Balancing Data Center Capacity
(25:55) The Future of VR and AI Integration
(29:41) AI's Role in Climate Solutions
(31:41) AI in Material Science and Beyond
(34:31) Personal AI Assistants and Their Impact
(38:47) Reflections on AI and Future Predictions
(41:23) Quickfire

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Jacob sits down with Insitro CEO Daphne Koller to discuss founding Coursera, where and how ML can drive the most impact in drug development, and if foundation models can transform core drug discovery work and edtech. 

(00:00) - intro 

(00:54) - Daphne’s journey 

(09:18) - AI and biology discovery 

(10:59) - insitro vs. traditional pharma 

(20:04) - phenotyping patients 

(26:01) - early mistakes 

(29:51) - the future of data 

(35:33) - partnering with larger pharma companies 

(38:17) - impact of LLMs on biopharma 

(44:04) - over-hyped/under-hyped 

With your co-hosts: 

@jasoncwarner - Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical 

@ericabrescia - Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@patrickachase - Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@jacobeffron - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

In this episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sit down with Dylan Patel, Chief Analyst at SemiAnalysis, to break down what these sweeping changes really mean. From how they consolidate power among Big Tech to China's narrowing options for AI dominance, we unpacked the impact of this regulatory shift.

Follow SemiAnalysis: https://semianalysis.com/

[0:00] Intro
[1:07] Grading the AI Diffusion Rule
[3:48] What Will Happen to the Malaysian Data Centers?
[7:23] How do the Regulations Favor Giant Tech Companies?
[9:07] Pre-Regulation AI Landscape
[13:00] Where Does Chinese AI Go From Here?
[22:00] The Goldie Locks Approach to Regulation
[24:16] Size of Cluster Buildouts Today
[37:47] How Big Will Cluster Buildouts Get?
[43:00] Are Open-Source Models Falling Behind?
[47:51] Questions Dylan Wants the Answer To
[51:30] Hardware Startups
[1:01:05] The Future of Enterprise AI
[1:05:10] What Made CoreWeave So Successful?
[1:19:28] Quickfire

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Arvind Narayanan is one of the leading voices in AI when it comes to cutting through the hype. As a Princeton professor and co-author of AI Snake Oil, he’s one of the most thoughtful voices cautioning against both unfounded fears and overblown promises in AI. In this episode, Arvind dissects the future of AI in education, its parallels to past tech revolutions, and how our jobs are already shifting toward managing these powerful tools. Some of our favorite take-aways:

[0:00] Intro
[0:46] Reasoning Models and Their Uneven Progress
[2:46] Challenges in AI Benchmarks and Real-World Applications
[5:03] Inference Scaling and Verifier Imperfections
[7:33] Agentic AI: Tools vs. Autonomous Actions
[12:07] Future of AI in Everyday Life
[15:34] Evaluating AI Agents and Collaboration
[24:49] Regulatory and Policy Implications of AI
[27:49] Analyzing Generative AI Adoption Rates
[29:17] Educational Policies and Generative AI
[30:09] Flaws in Predictive AI Models
[31:31] Regulation and Safety in AI
[33:47] Academia's Role in AI Development
[36:13] AI in Scientific Research
[38:22] AI and Human Minds
[46:04] Economic Impacts of AI
[49:42] Quickfire

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Jacob and Erica sit down with You.com CEO and former Salesforce Chief Scientist Richard Socher to discuss building a new search engine and the future of search, his predictions on when open source models will catch up to GPT-4, AGI and more.

(1:29) - Richard's career moves and what motivated them

(6:44) - More about You.com and the ethos behind the company

(9:47) - How You.com integrates 3rd-party apps

(13:30) - Richard's thoughts on the future of AI

(23:19) - The role of academia in the world of AI going forward

(27:30) - Things in AI that Richard is excited about

(31:53) - Quickfire Round

With your co-hosts:

@jasoncwarner

- Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical

@ericabrescia

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)

@patrickachase

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn

@jacobeffron

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

In this cross-over episode, Sam Altman sat down with Logan on the day of the ChatGPT-4o announcement to share behind-the-scenes details of the launch and offer his predictions for the future of AI. Altman delves into OpenAI’s vision, discusses the timeline for achieving AGI, and explores the societal impact of humanoid robots. He also expresses his excitement and concerns about AI personal assistants, highlights the biggest opportunities and risks in the AI landscape today, and much more.

(0:00) Intro
(00:41) The Personal Impact of Leading OpenAI
(01:35) Unveiling Multimodal AI: A Leap in Technology
(02:38) The Surprising Use Cases and Benefits of Multimodal AI
(03:14) Behind the Scenes: Making Multimodal AI Possible
(08:27) Envisioning the Future of AI in Communication and Creativity
(10:12) The Business of AI: Monetization, Open Source, and Future Directions
(16:33) AI's Role in Shaping Future Jobs and Experiences
(20:20) Debunking AGI: A Continuous Journey Towards Advanced AI
(23:55) Exploring the Pace of Scientific and Technological Progress
(24:09) The Importance of Interpretability in AI
(25:02) Navigating AI Ethics and Regulation
(27:17) The Safety Paradigm in AI and Beyond
(28:46) Personal Reflections and the Impact of AI on Society
(29:02) The Future of AI: Fast Takeoff Scenarios and Societal Changes
(30:50) Navigating Personal and Professional Challenges
(40:12) The Role of AI in Creative and Personal Identity
(43:00) Educational System Adaptations for the AI Era
(44:21) Contemplating the Future with Advanced AI
(45:21) Jacob and Pat Debrief

With your co-hosts:

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq'd by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Jacob and Pat sit down with LlamaIndex CEO Jerry Liu to discuss his motivations for building LlamaIndex, thoughts on building enterprise-ready LLM applications and agents, and when fine-tuning makes sense.

0:00 intro

1:02 the evolution of LlamaIndex

3:48 apps being built with LlamaIndex

6:39 making agents more effective

12:58 retrieval augmented generation

16:49 what’s the right level of abstraction for LlamaIndex?

19:42 balancing reasoning and knowledge

30:46 storage for embeddings

36:03 underutilized features of LlamaIndex

40:38 over-hyped/under-hyped

With your co-hosts:

@ericabrescia

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)

@patrickachase

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn

@jacobeffron

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

@jordan_segall

- Partner at Redpoint

It was very special to have Github CEO Thomas Dhomke on the pod for many reasons, not the least of which is that my partner Erica Brescia was COO at Gitlab just before joining Redpoint! Thomas has been at Github for almost 6 years, and has been CEO for almost 3 of those years. He has a pulse on what engineers around the world are looking for from the world’s leading developer platform, and incredible vision and empathy in making Github delivers it.

[0:00] Intro

[1:08] The Magic of GitHub Copilot 

[2:07] AI's Impact on Software Development 

[2:49] Global Adoption and Democratization of AI 

[4:20] Keeping Developers in the Creative Flow 

[6:59] Future of Software Development with AI 

[9:54] Challenges and Opportunities in AI-Powered Coding 

[11:31] The Role of Agents in Copilot's Strategy 

[17:03] AI's Influence on Open Source Ecosystem 

[24:08] Fine-Tuning and Customization of Copilot 

[28:22] The Rapid Evolution of Copilot 

[30:26] Future Innovations and Accelerating Pace of AI 

[33:09] The Future of AI in Software Development 

[33:44] AI's Impact on Different Tech Stacks 

[34:21] The Evolution of Media Consumption 

[35:15] The Competitive Landscape of AI Models 

[37:02] The Infinite Game of Business 

[38:17] The Role of Multiple AI Models in Enterprises 

[43:01] Advice for Founders Competing with Incumbents 

[45:06] The Importance of Focus in Startups 

[45:50] Expanding the GitHub Ecosystem with Extensions 

[47:20] The Next Wave of Copilot 

[50:57] Quick Fire Questions 

[54:35] Erica and Jordan Debrief

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Replit raised nearly $100M at $1.2B valuation last April and powers over 20M developers. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with Replit Founder and CEO Amjad Masad to talk about the future of software development, how Replit is empowering young users, how Replit developed its own models, and the data advantage Replit has. Amjad also shared his takes on why he’s bullish on agents, where the value in AI will most likely accrue and why open-source models might not be truly open today.

(0:00) intro

(0:45) advice for new coders

(6:20) how Replit uses AI

(10:36) AI’s coding capabilities

(15:49) what makes the best data

(20:52) educating new Replit AI users

(23:46) structuring AI teams

(27:02) building an in-house model

(36:54) “the world is gonna get way weirder”

(38:10) Kim and Taylor teaching calculus

(44:19) usage based pricing is going to get more prevalent

(51:05) will Microsoft win it all?

(55:00) Llama and vibe-checking AI models

(57:35) chatbots are overhyped

(58:18) latency matters

(59:50) why Sam Altman is the GOAT

(1:01:16) over 10 years we’ll see companies really shrink in size

(1:03:51) Jacob and Pat debrief

(1:05:27) training coding models on random data 

(1:06:36) Amjad’s take on agents

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Special Crossover Episode: We're excited to share this conversation from "The Logan Bartlett Show," another Redpoint podcast that focuses on untold stories from tech's inner circle. In the episode, Logan Bartlett interviews Dario Amodei (CEO, Anthropic) on the future of AI.

In the episode, Dario gives detailed predictions on the AI industry for 2024, 2025, and beyond. He discusses his days at OpenAI, leaving to start Anthropic, why he doesn’t like the term AGI, what AI developments he’s most excited about right now, and much more. Sharing here because we believe our AI enthusiasts will find this episode particularly enlightening. Enjoy!

(0:00) Intro 

(0:40) Joining OpenAI 

(13:51) Are scaling and AI safety intertwined? 

(19:51) Anthropic Early Days 

(23:24) Amazon's Investment in Anthropic 

(23:39) FTX investment in Anthropic 

(25:10) Anthropic's Business Today 

(30:11) Dario's Advice For Builders 

(33:14) Should we pause AI progress? 

(35:47) Future of AI 

(37:15) Dario's Biggest AI Safety Concerns 

(44:17) How Anthropic Deals With AI Bias 

(48:49) Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy 

(55:56) Testifying in front of Congress 

(58:45) Will AI destroy humanity? 

(59:20) GPT3 vs GPT4 

(1:01:46) The memification of a CEO 

(1:08:50) What are you most surprised by with AI? 

(1:16:23) Why don't you like the term AGI? 

(1:21:10) 2024 AI Predictions 

(1:33:05) Dario's opinion on open-source models 

(1:37:23) Probability of AI Catastrophe 

(1:40:12) Misuse of AI 

(1:44:04) Looking ahead: Dario's optimistic outlook on AI

With your co-hosts: 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. The company operates a 24/7 public ride-hail service and provides over 150,000 trips each week across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin, making mobility more accessible, sustainable, and safer for everyone.

In this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we dive deep into the frontier where AI meets hardware — and there’s no better guide than Vincent Vanhoucke, Distinguished Engineer at Waymo and former Head of Robotics at DeepMind.

[0:00] Intro

[0:50] Waymo's Technological Evolution

[2:40] The Role of LLMs in Autonomous Driving

[6:02] Vincent's Journey to Waymo

[9:17] Challenges in Autonomous Driving

[11:58] Simulation and World Models

[27:44] Future Milestones and Expansion

[30:10] Broader Robotics and AI

[36:12] Future of General Robotics Models

[38:14] Hardware vs. Software Approaches in Robotics

[40:19] Challenges in Robotic Data Acquisition

[40:38] Simulation vs. Real-World Data in Robotics

[43:02] Human-Robot Interaction for Data Collection

[45:03] Advancements in Multimodal Models

[47:08] Unanswered Questions in Robotics

[52:02] Reasoning Capabilities in AI

[54:57] Future of Robotics and AI

[1:00:51] Quickfire

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

We’re excited to bring you Connor Zwick, CEO and cofounder of Speak, on the podcast this week! Speak helps people learning a language have conversations with an AI speaking partner, which is critical to gaining fluency. It’s backed by OpenAI and most recently raised at a $500M valuation. Since launching in its inaugural market of South Korea in 2019, Speak has grown to over 10 million users and now has customers in more than 40 countries. 

We learned so much about how language works and how Connor has built this startup. Some of our favorite bits:

[0:00] Intro 

[0:38] Connor's Entrepreneurial Journey 

[3:40] Diving into AI and Language Learning 

[6:07] The Evolution of Speak 

[9:30] Building Specialized Models and Overcoming Challenges 

[18:17] User Experience and Interface Design 

[24:18] Future of AI in Language Learning 

[35:38] Comparing Duolingo and Speak 

[38:00] Challenges in Translation and Human Connection 

[41:18] Specialized AI Models and Their Impact 

[47:41] Opportunities in Professional and Personal Learning 

[53:38] The Evolution of Education with AI 

[59:31] Final Thoughts and Reflections

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

If you don’t know Grammarly, it’s a personalized AI assistant for writing that has over 30 Million Daily Active Users. Grammarly has been building AI productivity tooling long before the most recent GenAI wave and has raised over $400M, with a current valuation of $13B. Rahul believes AI will enable everyone to focus on more meaningful, creative interactions by automating the "drudgery" of daily tasks. It was interesting to hear him talk about how he thinks about competition and his longer-term perspective on how AI will be adopted by the enterprise.

[0:00] Intro
[1:03] The Future of AI in Human Communication
[3:47] Grammarly's Evolution and Product Overview
[8:21] Limitations of LLMs
[15:31] The Impact of ChatGPT and Future Prospects
[23:52] Fine-Tuning AI for User Needs
[30:16] Competitive Landscape and Differentiators
[39:14] AI in Education
[46:25] Over-hyped/Under-hyped
[49:57] Most Exciting AI Startups

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Noam Brown, renowned AI researcher and key figure at OpenAI, joins us for a deep dive into the o1 release. Recorded just one day before o1’s full public debut, this episode explores the groundbreaking advancements and challenges behind this innovative test-time compute model.

We discuss the technical breakthroughs that set o1 apart, its unique capabilities compared to previous models, and how it disrupts traditional paradigms in AI development. Noam also shares insights into OpenAI’s approach to innovation, the economic realities of scaling AI, and what the future holds for the field.

[0:00] Intro

[0:50] Scaling Model Capabilities and Economic Constraints

[2:48] Excitement Around Test Time Compute

[4:50] Challenges and Future Directions in AI Research

[8:11] Noam Brown's Journey and OpenAI's Research Focus

[16:08] The Role of Specialized Models and Tools

[21:18] Unexpected Use Cases and Future Milestones

[23:44] Proof of Concept: o1's Capabilities

[24:48] The Bitter Lesson: Insights from Richard Sutton

[25:59] Scaffolding Techniques and Their Future

[27:56] Challenges in Academia and AI Research

[30:30] Evaluating AI Models: Metrics and Trends

[34:47] The Role of AI in Social Sciences

[39:39] AI Agents and Emergent Communication

[40:17] Future of AI Robotics

[41:13] Advancing Scientific Research with AI

[43:30] Quickfire

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Lin Qiao, the co-founder of Fireworks.ai, sits down for a deep dive into the future of AI. Lin ran the PyTorch team at Meta, which developed some of the most fundamental open-source AI software in use today. She’s got a riveting perspective on the AI landscape that is a must-listen.

[0:00] Intro

[1:06] Fireworks: Revolutionizing AI Inference

[2:12] Challenges in AI Model Development

[4:05] The Future of AI: Compound Systems

[4:32] Designing Effective AI Tools

[10:26] Customization and Fine-Tuning in AI

[14:06] Human-in-the-Loop Automation

[16:38] Evaluating AI Models

[19:18] Building Complex AI Systems

[21:18] Function Calling and AI Orchestration

[26:52] AI Infrastructure and Hardware

[31:08] Small Expert Models

[31:27] Hyperscalers and Resource Management

[32:14] Inference Systems and Scalability

[33:08] Running Models Locally: Cost and Privacy

[35:20] Open Source Models and Meta's Role

[36:41] The Evolution of AI Training and Inference

[38:04] Fireworks' Vision and Market Strategy

[40:46] The Impact of Generative AI

[45:18] AI Research and Future Trends

[46:58] Building for a Rapidly Changing AI Landscape

[49:36] Quickfire

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Last week, Suno announced $125M in funding, marking a significant milestone in their journey to reshape the music creation landscape. On this week's episode of Unsupervised Learning, we caught up with Suno's founder, Mikey Shulman, to dive into their approach to multiplayer music collaboration, how they got Suno to be so fast and the future of digital concerts (and workshopped new intro music for the pod 👀).

(0:00) intro
(0:31) Mikey’s favorite Suno songs
(5:17) who uses Suno?
(7:50) teaching people how to use Suno
(9:57) new ways to prompt models
(13:24) the social aspect of Suno
(17:45) how does Suno approach pricing?
(19:37) model eval
(23:27) how models can improve
(24:58) how is Suno so fast?
(26:50) handling usage spikes
(34:28) raising $125 million
(41:00) IP partnerships
(45:55) over-hyped/under-hyped
(46:56) biggest surprises in building Suno
(50:53) generating an Unsupervised Learning theme song
(53:26) Jacob and Rashad debrief

With your co-hosts:  

@jacobeffron  

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health  

@patrickachase  

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn  

@ericabrescia  

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)  

@jordan_segall  

- Partner at Redpoint

On the latest episode of Unsupervised Learning, Jacob is joined by two of the most influential minds in AI today. 

🔹 Noam Shazeer, co-inventor of the Transformer

🔹 Jack Rae, Research Director at DeepMind and one of the leads behind Gemini’s Flash Thinking

We got to ask them all of the top-of-mind questions in AI today about where we are, where we’re headed and what it means for businesses and the world. Some key take-aways:

(0:00) Intro
(1:30) Exploring Gemini 2.0
(4:04) Challenges with Evals and Benchmarks
(6:14) Reinforcement Loops and AI Productivity
(8:15) Agentic Coding and AI in Development
(13:02) Multimodal Capabilities and Applications
(15:21) Future of AI: Complexity and Reliability
(19:02) Test Time Compute and Data Efficiency
(31:20) AI Research Culture and Breakthroughs
(38:59) Reflecting on Large Language Models
(39:37) The Rise of Vision-Based Models
(41:01) Native Image Generation and General Purpose Models
(41:35) AI in Healthcare and Specialized Models
(43:32) Shifting Timelines and Rapid Adoption
(46:48) Open Source Models and Competitive Edge
(49:30) AI's Impact on Education and Personal Lives
(55:10) AGI Risks and Safety Considerations
(57:33) Future of AI Companions
(1:02:17) Quickfire

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

To unpack some of the most topical questions in AI, I’m joined by two fellow AI podcasters: Swyx and Alessio Fanelli, co-hosts of the Latent Space podcast. We’ve been wanting to do a cross-over episode for a while and finally made it happen.

Swyx brings deep experience from his time at AWS, Temporal, and Airbyte, and is now focused on AI agents and dev tools. Alessio is an investor at Decibel, where he’s been backing early technical teams pushing the boundaries of infrastructure and applied AI. Together they run Latent Space, a technical newsletter and podcast by and for AI engineers.

To subscribe or learn more about Latent Space, click here: https://www.latent.space/

(0:00) Intro
(1:08) Reflecting on AI Surprises of the Past Year
(2:24) Open Source Models and Their Adoption
(6:48) The Rise of GPT Wrappers
(7:49) Challenges in AI Model Training
(10:33) Over-hyped and Under-hyped AI Trends
(24:00) The Future of AI Product Market Fit
(30:27) Google's Momentum and Customer Support Insights
(33:16) Emerging AI Applications and Market Trends
(35:13) Challenges and Opportunities in AI Development
(39:02) Defensibility in AI Applications
(42:42) Infrastructure and Security in AI
(50:04) Future of AI and Unanswered Questions
(55:34) Quickfire

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

In light of one of the biggest news stories in AI, we’ve put together a special episode to discuss the ramifications of Sam Altmans’ firing from OpenAI. Regardless of what happens between now and when you’re listening to this, the implications of the events that happened over the past few days are certainly worth unpacking. 

About our guests: 

• Alex Konrad, a journalist at Forbes covering Venture Capital and Tech 
• Jason Warner, former CTO at GitHub, partner at Redpoint, and now Founder of AGI start-up Poolside (https://www.poolside.ai/)

We go over what the implications are for AI Startups, who came away as the biggest winners, what’s going on behind the scenes and more. Hopefully you enjoy this episode. 

With your co-hosts: 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Jacob and Jason sit down with NEAR CEO and Transformer paper author Illia Polosukhin. They discuss Illia’s fascinating journey from Ukraine to Google and AI to crypto, the origin story behind the “Attention Is All You Need” paper and the overlap between AI and crypto. Illia also shared his thoughts on AGI and the problems that excite him most in AI right now. You can find Illia on Twitter (@ilblackdrago) and learn more about NEAR (@nearprotocol)

(00:39) - Welcoming Illia; how he became interested in AI, transitioning into Crypto and explaining NEAR 

(02:40)  - Walking through Illia's story more in depth

(07:46) - How the Transformer Paper came to be

(11:24) - Understanding the Transformer Papers' impact

(18:28) - The overlap of Crypto and AI and how Illia sees the future of how they develop together

(26:47) - Illia's views on AGI

(30:46) - Optimism vs pessimism of the future of machine learning as a tool

(41:32) - What problems Illia sees in AI right now

(45:03) - Rapid fire questions

(47:36) - Where to learn more about NEAR and Illia

With your co-hosts:

@jasoncwarner

- Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical

@ericabrescia

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)

@patrickachase

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn

@jacobeffron

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

In our new world of AI, few minds shine as brightly as Bob McGrew's. Until November Bob was the Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, and before that led Palantir’s engineering and product management for the first decade of its existence. He’s seen it all and we were fortunate to get his insights and vision for the future in one of my favorite episodes of Unsupervised Learning to date:

[0:00] Intro
[0:44] Debating AI Model Capabilities
[0:57] Inside vs Outside Perspectives on AI Progress
[1:39] Challenges in AI Pre-Training
[3:02] Reinforcement Learning and Future Models
[3:48] AI Progress in 2025
[5:58] New Form Factors for AI Models
[8:56] Reliability and Enterprise Integration
[18:14] Multimodal AI and Video Models
[24:05] The Future of Robotics
[32:46] The Complexity of Automating Jobs with AI
[34:08] AI in Startups: Tackling Boring Problems
[35:33] AI's Impact on Productivity and Consultants
[36:43] Traits of Top AI Researchers
[40:52] The Evolution of OpenAI's Mission
[46:57] The Challenges of Scaling AI
[49:16] The Future of AI and Human Agency
[54:47] AI in Social Sciences and Academia
[1:01:15] Reflections and Future Plans
[1:02:57] Quickfire

With your co-hosts:  

@jacobeffron  

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health  

@patrickachase  

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn  

@ericabrescia  

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)  

@jordan_segall  

- Partner at Redpoint

Joshua Xu is co-founder and CEO of HeyGen -- the fast-growing AI video creation and translation platform. You can upload a video, or create a new one from a script using an AI avatar as your star, and HeyGen will translate it into 175 languages. HeyGen now serves over 40,000 customers and is generating $35+ million in revenue.

[0:00] Intro  

[0:37] HeyGen's Viral Moments  

[1:23] Creating Magic with AI  

[3:30] The Future of AI in Video Production  

[9:29] HeyGen's Use Cases and Customer Base  

[13:15] AI Avatars  

[25:46] The Future of Content  

[26:43] Competing with Industry Giants  

[27:16] Innovating for New Markets  

[31:24] Enterprise Push: Lessons and Surprises  

[33:07] Trust and Safety in AI  

[37:03] Fundraising and Financial Strategies for AI Startups  

[41:22] Quickfire

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

There’s an ongoing debate about where the most value will accrue in AI between incumbents and startups. Of the incumbents, few have shipped product faster than SalesforceAI. Today on Unsupervised Learning we had on Clara Shih, CEO of SalesforceAI and one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI. 

(0:00) intro

(0:50) work practices that will become irrelevant

(1:37) revolutionizing reply recommendations and case summaries

(4:57) newest Salesforce products

(5:53) structuring teams

(7:22) engineering trust into AI products

(11:58) combining in-house models with ChatGBT

(13:33) Gucci’s AI adoption

(16:01) how does Salesforce choose who to share their data with?

(20:29) AI costs

(26:29 creating unique voices for brands

(27:45) AI incumbents vs. startups

(29:54) what Clara would build if she had the time

(32:28) the future of Slack

(35:55) what percent of customer support questions can be answered by AI?

(38:37) over-hyped/under-hyped

(39:32) working with Mark Benioff

(40:46) Jacob and Pat debrief

(44:42) Slack is the perfect interface for generative AI

(46:10) Abridge investment

(48:15) Ideogram investment

With your co-hosts:  

@jacobeffron  

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health  

@patrickachase  

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn  

@ericabrescia  

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)  

@jordan_segall  

- Partner at Redpoint

In this cross-over episode with The Logan Bartltett Show, Marc Benioff (CEO, Salesforce) responds to Satya Nadella’s recent predictions and shares his thoughts on the current reality of Agi. He dives into the rise of digital labor, the multi-trillion-dollar potential of agentic technology, and what the future split between software and agentic revenue might look like. Marc also discusses why CEOs need to stay grounded in delivering actionable solutions, and he emphasizes the moral obligation businesses have to retrain employees and invest in communities as AI continues to evolve.

(00:00) Intro

(01:45) Salesforce's AI Impact on Business

(03:03) The Future of Digital Labor

(05:28) Agentic AI and Customer Success

(07:42) Salesforce's Competitive Edge

(11:48) Marc Benioff's Response to Satya Nadella

(14:16) The Role of AI in Enterprise Software

(20:14) The Balance of AI and Human Labor

(28:34) Salesforce's Philanthropic Efforts

(36:24) The Future of AI and Regulation

(40:24) Conclusion and Farewell

Patrick and Jacob sit down with Alexandru Costin, the VP of Generative AI and Sensei at Adobe, and discuss how Adobe’s early projects with generative AI in 2019 helped them move quickly upon the release of LLMs and diffusion models. Before leading Adobe’s generative AI efforts he founded InterAKT, a web development company, and led Adobe Romania for 10 years.

00:00 intro

01:44 Adobe Romania and background

02:26 AI projects at Adobe

10:03 incorporating AI into existing products

16:34 educating Adobe’s user base

25:13 avoiding copyright issues with Ai-generated content

32:12 using customer feedback

40:30 what is the right way to structure an AI team?

45:11 pricing AI products

48:00 the future of Adobe

With your co-hosts: 

@jasoncwarner 

- Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Scott Belsky is the founder of Behance, a creative platform sold to Adobe in 2012. He’s since gone on to take on the role of Chief Product Officer at Adobe leading design for all products across Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and the Digital Experience business. This week on Unsupervised Learning Scott shares his thoughts on the future of creative tools with AI, a future where hyper-personalization wins and what humans will do when content is commoditized.

(0:00) intro

(2:27) Adobe’s new AI tools

(4:40) best uses of Adobe’s AI features

(7:22) educating users

(9:28) will the future have one model or thousands?

(11:01) Adobe building their own models

(15:12) goals for video generation

(19:40) hyper-personalized media

(22:11) AI music

(26:30) pricing for AI features

(28:02) biggest surprises in building AI features for Adobe

(30:58) most exciting AI startups (KoBold AI)

(32:13) where else would Scott build in the AI world

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Sarah Buchner is the Founder and CEO of Trunk Tools (https://trunktools.com/). She is a one-of-a-kind founder, having spent her young life as a carpenter in Austria and then working her way up the ranks of the construction industry. She’s also earned several graduate degrees including an MS in Civil Eng, a PHD in Data Science and an MBA from Stanford.

Trunk Tools is an AI Tool for the $13T construction industry aimed at enhancing project management and addressing the skilled Labor shortage.

We wanted to have Sarah on to share her experience in building a vertical AI tool - specifically: where AI will have the biggest impact on construction and behind the scenes of how they’ve built tools like TrunkText and TrunkScheduler to massively reduce the amount of rework in construction.

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

On this week’s Unsupervised Learning, Pat and I sat down with CTO and Co-Founder of Sourcegraph, Beyang Liu. Sourcegraph is a leader in the AI coding space, and recently launched AI coding assistant, Cody. Beyang shared with us his view on the current landscape of AI coding and the future of coding and software development. He also shared how Sourcegraph has tried to make RAG better, and their model eval approaches.

(0:00) intro
(0:47) advice for young coders
(3:34) AI products at Sourcegraph
(6:17) the current state of AI coding
(12:33) what happens when a new GPT model comes out?
(20:16) what types of developers benefit from these AI tools?
(30:45) how important is inference cost?
(35:31) how does Sourcegraph structure AI teams?
(41:27) what metrics does Sourcegraph use to evaluate their products?
(50:02) customizing RAG
(56:55) getting ahead of the agentic future
(1:05:05) will there be more or less engineers in the future?
(1:13:50) over-hyped/under-hyped
(1:16:56) surprises during the Sourcegraph journey
(1:18:26) cognition buzz and Devin
(1:26:48) Jacob and Pat debrief

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

OpenAI's inaugural DevDay sparked excitement in the AI community, with several product releases and ChatGPT hitting the milestone of reaching 100M weekly active users. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with the Head of Developer Relations at OpenAI, Logan Kilpatrick. Logan shared with us how OpenAI prioritizes product builds internally, the interesting use cases he's seen for several OpenAI products, where OpenAI is headed, and what the Gemini release means for the ecosystem.

(0:00) intro

(0:33) how Logan uses ChatGBT

(1:36) underrated OpenAI products

(6:08) when is using GPT-4 necessary?

(7:22) custom GPT models

(9:05) are we at peak need for custom models in 2024?

(11:45) how does OpenAI prioritize products

(13:31) OpenAI’s text-to-speech model

(14:31) benefits of using open-source models

(21:00) what kind of company would Logan start if he left OpenAI?

(23:40) Google Gemini

(24:41) assistants API

(30:00) the need for a text-first AI-assistant experience

(35:18) putting limitations on agents

(42:18) the future of DALL-E and art generation

(48:00) over-hyped/under-hyped

(48:30) rare disappointments for OpenAI

(49:25) surprise successes for OpenAI

(50:03) how has OpenAI’s team developed?

(58:22) debrief with Pat

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

On today’s episode we talk with Jeff Huber, the CEO and Co-founder of Chroma. We talk about what sets Chroma apart from its competitors, new developments in AI technology, and advice for listeners who want to get started in AI.

0:00 intro 

1:02 starting chroma 

6:08 vector databases 

10:03 interesting use cases for vector databases 

13:14 what sets chroma apart? 

23:00 unresolved questions in LLMs 

32:45 multiple agents vs. one agent to rule them all 

34:50 chroma’s future 

38:00 embedding models 

43:00 over-hyped/under-hyped 

44:30 AI regulation 

48:42 is it too late to get into AI? 

With your co-hosts: 

@jasoncwarner 

- Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Last week LangChain announced a $20M Series A led by Sequoia and released the paid version of LangSmith, which has already been used by 1K+ teams and driven 80K signups. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with LangChain Co-Founder and CEO Harrison Chase to talk about the current state of LLM evaluation, observability, and the agent landscape.

(0:00) intro 

(1:07) applications of AI in the sports world 

(3:26) what does LangChain do? 

(7:51) building with LangSmith 

(10:00) best AI eval practices 

(16:51) to what extent is eval generalizable? 

(21:11) the current agent landscape 

(29:35) balancing present and future at LangChain 

(36:27) using LangServe to deploy LangChain applications 

(41:37) more complex chatbots are coming 

(45:51) current AI practices that will become obsolete 

(48:55) over-hyped/under-hyped 

(49:25) bigger surprise in building LangChain 

(51:50) how ubiquitous will open-source models be in the future? 

(52:43) most exciting AI startups 

(56:07) being an AI “celebrity” 

(58:09) Jacob and Jordan debrief 

With your co-hosts:  

@jacobeffron  

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health  

@patrickachase  

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn  

@ericabrescia  

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)  

@jordan_segall  

- Partner at Redpoint

Jordan and Erica sit down with Andriy Mulyar, Founder & CTO of Nomic AI, and discuss his motivation for creating GPT4ALL, the importance of data-centric AI, the use of LLMs in video games, and which technology companies are well positioned to “win” in the GenAI market long term.

0:00 intro

0:59 getting into AI and meeting Brandon

2:27 starting Nomic

7:43 how people are using Atlas

10:31 hallucinations in LLMs

13:05 gpt4all

17:25 building LLMs into video games

26:31 where does Nomic go from here?

37:39 Apple’s role in the LLM space

38:57 Andriy’s thoughts on AGI

40:41 over-hyped/under-hyped

42:13 AI regulation going forward

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Percy Liang is a Stanford professor and co-founder of Together AI, driving some of the most critical advances in AI research. 

Percy is also a trained classical pianist, which clearly influences the way he thinks about technology. We explored the evolution of AI from simple token prediction to autonomous agents capable of long-term problem-solving, the problem of interpretability, and the future of AI safety in complex, real-world systems.

[0:00] Intro

[0:46] Discussing OpenAI's O1 Model  

[2:21] The Evolution of AI Agents  

[3:27] Challenges and Benchmarks in AI  

[4:38] Compatibility and Integration Issues  

[6:17] The Future of AI Scaffolding  

[10:05] Academia's Role in AI Research  

[15:17] AI Safety and Holistic Approaches  

[18:32] Regulation and Transparency in AI  

[21:42] Generative Agents and Social Simulations  

[29:14] The State of AI Evaluations  

[32:07] Exploring Evaluation in Language Models  

[35:13] The Challenge of Interpretability  

[39:31] Innovations in Model Architectures  

[43:18] The Future of Inference and Customization  

[46:46] Milestones in AI Research and Reasoning  

[49:43] Robotics and AI: The Road Ahead  

[52:24] AI in Music: A Harmonious Future  

[55:52] AI's Role in Education and Beyond  

[56:30] Quickfire

[59:16] Jacob and Pat Debrief

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Oscar Health is a $4B public healthcare company, providing healthcare insurance to nearly 1 million members. Oscar is at the forefront of AI adoption, continuously developing new AI use cases in healthcare. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with Oscar Health Co-Founder, former CEO, and now President of Technology Mario Schlosser to talk about where AI will have the biggest impact in healthcare, top AI use cases at Oscar today, AI adoption challenges Oscar is facing, and limitations of GPT-4 in healthcare. Mario also shared his takes on open-source vs. off-the-shelf vs. healthcare-specific LLMs, and why can't we have robot doctors today.

(0:00) intro

(1:26) how will AI change healthcare in the next decade

(9:29) how Oscar uses AI

(19:00) how to build around healthcare requirements

(26:06) when would GPT-4 fail "miserably" and fundamental limitations of LLMs

(36:48) we shouldn’t piss off our smartest robots

(38:35) sharing AI knowledge between companies

(42:10) developing healthcare-specific models

(44:55) hackathons and karaoke nights at Oscar

(49:27) the need for a safety layer in LLMs

(51:53) best commercial opportunities in healthcare

(55:39) will their be AI doctors this decade?

(59:38) over-hyped/under-hyped

With your co-hosts:  

@jacobeffron  

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health  

@patrickachase  

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn  

@ericabrescia  

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)  

@jordan_segall  

- Partner at Redpoint

Jacob and Pat sit down with Tome Co-Founder and CEO Keith Peiris to discuss Tome’s go-to market strategy, deciphering through the “AI tourists” to identify their ideal customer profile (ICP), and the different hardware cost considerations when reaching enterprise scale.

0:00 intro

1:35 founding Tome

5:05 designing Tome

10:30 how users want to interact with AI

12:26 teaching users how to use Tome

20:13 partnering with model providers vs. building your own

28:43 model evaluation

31:23 building an enterprise product

37:48 thinking about pricing

43:43 Keith’s favorite Tome projects

44:26 over-hyped/under-hyped

With your co-hosts: 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Jacob and Jordan sit down with EleutherAI's Aran Komatsuzaki to discuss the future of open-source models, thought cloning, his work on GPT-J and more.

0:00 intro

01:06 Aran’s background

02:58 starting work on gpt-j

05:49 gathering data for Lion and gpt-j

08:51 history of EleutherAI

11:16 open vs. closed-source models

19:06 how will open-source models be used going forward

21:33 thought cloning

25:51 building AI models that understand video

29:35 one model to rule them all

31:58 influence of academia in the LLM space

34:33 over-hyped/under-hyped

38:01 Aran’s thoughts on AGI

With your co-hosts: 

@jasoncwarner 

- Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Aidan joined this week’s Unsupervised Learning for a wide-ranging conversation on model architectures, enterprise adoption, and what’s breaking in the foundation model stack. 

If you’re building or investing in AI infrastructure, Aidan is worth listening to. He co-authored the original Transformer paper, leads one of the most advanced model labs outside of the hyperscalers, and is now building for real-world enterprise deployment with Cohere’s agent platform, North. Cohere serves thousands of customers across sectors like finance, telco, and healthcare — and they’ve made a name for themselves by staying model-agnostic, privacy-forward, and deeply international (with major bets in Japan and Korea)

(0:00) Intro
(0:32) Enterprise AI
(3:23) Custom Integrations and Future of AI Agents
(4:33) Enterprise Use Cases for Gen AI
(7:02) The Importance of Reasoning in AI Models
(10:38) Custom Models and Synthetic Data
(17:48) Cohere's Approach to AI Applications
(23:24) Future Use Cases and Market Fit
(27:11) Building a Unified Automation Platform
(27:34) Strategic Decisions in the AI Journey
(29:19) International Partnerships and Language Models
(31:05) Future of Foundation Models
(32:27) AI in Specialized Domains
(34:40) Challenges in Data Integration
(35:06) Emerging Foundation Model Companies
(35:31) Technological Frontiers and Architectures
(37:29) Scaling Hypothesis and Model Capabilities
(42:26) AI Research Culture and Team Building
(44:39) Future of AI and Societal Impact
(48:31) Addressing AI Risks

With your co-hosts:  

@jacobeffron  

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health  

@patrickachase  

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn  

@ericabrescia  

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)  

@jordan_segall  

- Partner at Redpoint

Jacob sits down with PathAI Ceo Dr. Andy Beck to discuss the state of AI adoption in diagnosis, why Path acquired their own lab, pathologists' jobs in the future and nailing GTM to reach a ~$1B valuation. 

00:00 intro 

01:01 pathology and AI 

13:30 nailing go-to-market strategy 

19:47 how pathology labs can go digital 

25:36 regulatory frameworks and roadblocks 

33:05 do improvements in foundation models impact PathAI? 

36:26 standardizing diagnosis 

40:05 how will the job of a pathologist change going forward? 

42:35 NASH 

47:30 working in Daphne Koller’s lab

With your co-hosts: 

@jasoncwarner - Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical 

@ericabrescia - Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@patrickachase - Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@jacobeffron - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@jordan_segall - Partner at Redpoint

Linus Lee is an AI engineer at Notion, one of the earliest and most effective adopters of AI. In the episode, Linus shares how Notion developed its AI products, including Writer, Autofill, and Q&A, which just launched on Tuesday. It was fascinating to learn how Notion structures its AI team and dogfoods its development process. Linus also explores the hardest to anticipate when going to market with new AI features, and how Notion thinks of its LLM partnerships. Overall, a wide-ranging conversation about the behind-the-scenes stories of one of the most widely used AI tools today.

(0:00) intro

(0:37) T-Swift

(2:07) Notion AI

(9:08) approach to staffing

(16:51) educating users and user behavior

(22:32) challenges in developing Notion Q&A

(30:42) working with Anthropic and Open AI

(35:50) avoiding hallucinations

(36:23) switching AI models

(39:32) iterating on interfaces

(42:03) over-hyped/under-hyped

(48:03) Midjourney

(51:07) Pat and Jacob debrief

With your co-hosts: 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Snowflake sits in a unique position in the AI landscape: They enable fast, secure, and scalable proprietary data access for thousands of customers, many of whom are building AI tools. They also maintain their own suite of AI products, increasing the utility of their platform and empowering customers who may not have the resources to build their own.

That’s why it was so fascinating to speak with Baris Gultekin, Snowflake’s Head of AI, on our latest Unsupervised Learning. Baris has helped Snowflake launch several key products, including Cortex, AI Data Cloud, and even Snowflake’s own LLM, called Arctic. Baris was a founder himself — he joined Snowflake through an acquisition of his blockchain API startup, nxyz. He has a unique window into the future of AI via his role building key infrastructure. It was really fun to dive deep into this side of the AI ecosystem with Baris.

[0:00] Intro

[0:33] Snowflake's AI Product Portfolio

[0:52] Building Arctic LLM: Challenges and Innovations

[2:57] Use Cases and Applications of Arctic LLM

[3:10] Cortex: Snowflake's Managed Service for LLMs

[4:26] Tackling BI Challenges with Cortex Analyst

[8:46] Data Extraction and Analysis with AI

[10:15] Snowflake's AI Strategy and Future Directions

[13:12] Governance and Security in AI Deployments

[22:25] Supporting and Integrating New AI Models

[24:02] Discussing the 405B AI Model

[25:02] Enterprise Use Cases and Cost Considerations

[26:09] Future of Arctic LM and Security Concerns

[26:59] Open Source Models and Guardrails

[30:21] Internal Use of LLMs at Snowflake

[31:32] Comparing Snowflake and Databricks AI Strategies

[33:24] Opportunities for AI Startups

[34:14] Exciting AI Developments and Future Prospects

[40:34] Over-hyped/Under-hyped

[45:58] Closing Thoughts and Resources

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Jacob and Jason sit down with Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue and discuss trends in who’s using Hugging Face, the future of closed source vs open source in machine learning, why Clem compares large closed foundation models to Formula One Cars, how enterprise AI teams will evolve and AI safety.

(0:00) - Introduction

(1:37) - Welcome Clem

(1:57) - Starting Hugging Face

(5:42) - Influence of ChatGPT

(15:47) - Use cases of large vs. small platforms

(18:44) -  Should large language models be open?

(30:20) - What’s next for Hugging Face?

(43:06) - Rapid fire

(47:02) - Learn more about Hugging Face

With your co-hosts:

@jasoncwarner

- Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical

@ericabrescia

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)

@patrickachase

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn

@jacobeffron

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

Cris is the co-founder and CEO of Runway, which builds breathtakingly real video AI tools, including the incredible Gen-3 Alpha foundation model. Cris sits right at the intersection of technology and creativity, and in 2023 was named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI. Runway is reported to be in talks to raise capital at a $4 Billion valuation.

(0:00) intro
(0:37) how early are we in the AI for creative tools space
(3:01) how Cris tests new models
(8:21) who uses Runway?
(10:37) how Runway teaches new users
(14:08) does UI matter?
(29:09) what are the next frontiers for video models?
(32:32) allocating resources for the research time
(39:15) how Cris thinks about pricing
(42:10) one video model to rule them all?
(44:24) incorporating IP
(52:45) over-hyped/under-hyped
(53:30) biggest surprises while building Runway
(55:12) advice for art students

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Intercom is one of the earliest adopters of AI - its AI product Fin has generated over two million answers and been used by thousands of users since it was launched last March. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with Intercom Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Des Traynor to talk about how AI is incorporated into Intercom, structuring its AI team, using RAG vs. fine-tuning techniques, where we are in the AI adoption curve, and his advice for startups building on top of AI. 

(0:00) intro 

(0:31) Intercom reaction to ChatGBT 

(3:18) how AI is incorporated into Intercom products 

(6:33) guardrails preventing hallucinations 9:49 exploration versus optimizing cost 

(19:00) structuring AI teams 

(31:17) fine-tuning for customers vs RAG 

(37:03) solving the 'actions' problem 

(38:38) lessons learned from transitioning into AI 

(44:28) over-hyped/under-hyped 

(45:53) companies that have implemented AI well/poorly 

(48:27) Jacob and Jordan debrief

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

According to Ramp’s (ramp.com) quarterly spend report, Fireflies was the 4th highest AI platform by spend. With over 300,000 customers worldwide and 16M users, Fireflies.ai is operating at some of the largest scale amongst AI companies today. 

This week on Unsupervised Learning we had Krish Ramineni, Co-founder & CEO of Fireflies on to talk about how he sees AI changing the way we work and conduct meetings, and share his biggest learnings around AI in building Fireflies.

(0:00) intro

(1:01) how will AI change meetings going forward

(4:03) Fireflies’ capabilities

(8:18) how new models change Fireflies

(11:19) shortcomings of current models

(16:36) Krish’s lack of belief in fine-tuning

(26:19) dealing with high inference costs

(34:00) taking on incumbents

(40:50) what metrics matter most to Fireflies

(46:37) how is Fireflies so fast?

(54:28) over-hyped/under-hyped

(55:11) biggest surprises in building Fireflies

(1:01:15) Jacob and Rashad debrief

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Mistral AI is often seen as the startup challenging OpenAI and incumbents developing LLMs. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with CEO and Co-Founder at Mistral AI, Arthur Mensch. Arthur shared with us his view on why open-source will prevail, how Mistral gets LLMs into the hands of enterprises, the build vs. partnership decisions, the competitive landscape and future of LLMs, and how he’d regulate AI safety. 

(0:00) intro

(0:46) origins of the name “Mistral”

(2:20) logo origins

(3:06) closed-source vs open-source models

(6:31) “training models is what we do best”

(7:50) Mistral’s partnership strategy

(10:12) the next frontiers for LLMs

(11:47) Meta’s GPU announcement

(13:03) when will Mistral catch up to ChatGPT?

(16:00) NVIDIA chips

(16:55) AI regulation and EU AI Act

(20:07) who should handle AI safety?

(20:51) policy changes that Arthur would make

(22:52) foundation models around the world

(25:50) starting Mistral

(26:54) releasing Le Chat

(30:19) over-hyped/under-hyped

(30:32) surprises while building Mistral

(31:55) AI startups Arthur is excited about

(32:19) what application would Arthur build

(33:46) Jacob and Jordan debrief

With your co-hosts:  

@jacobeffron  

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health  

@patrickachase  

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn  

@ericabrescia  

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)  

@jordan_segall  

- Partner at Redpoint

Patrick and Jacob sit down with Matei Zaharia, Co-Founder and CTO at Databricks and Professor at Stanford. They discuss how companies are training and serving models in production with Databricks, where LLMs fall short for search and how to improve them, the state of the art AI research at Stanford, and how the size and cost of models is likely to change with technological advances in the coming years.

(0:00) - Introduction

(2:04) - Founding story of Databricks

(6:03) - PhD classmates using early version of spark for Netflix competition

(6:55) - Building applications with MLFlow

(9:55) - LLMs and ChatGPT

(12:05) - Working with and fine-tuning foundation models

(13:00) - Prompt engineering here to stay or temporary?

(15:12) - Matei’s research at Stanford. The Demonstrate-Search-Predict framework (DSP)

(17:42) - How LLMs will be combined with classic information retrieval systems for world-class search

(19:38) - LLMs writing programs to orchestrate LLMs

(20:36) - Using LLMs in Databricks cloud product

(24:21) - Scaling LLM training and serving

(27:29) - How much will cost to train LLMs go down in coming years?

(29:22) - How many parameters is too many?

(31:14) - Open source vs closed source?

(35:19) - Stanford AI research - Snorkel, ColBERT, and More

(38:58) - Matei getting a $50 amazon gift card for weeks of work

(43:23) - Quick-fire round

With your co-hosts:

@jasoncwarner

- Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical

@ericabrescia

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)

@patrickachase

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn

@jacobeffron

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

Jacob sits down with ex-DeepMind / White House operator Teddy Collins to discuss Sam Altman’s Congressional testimony, how AI can enable direct democracy, state-driven economic planning and better orgs, US-China competition and more.

(00:00) - intro

(01:15) - how Teddy came to the AI world

(06:26) - working in government

(12:27) - AI regulation and Sam Altman testimony

(19:19) - the end of humanity

(34:34) - nearer term issues with AI

(41:10) - how the government can use AI

(47:13) - lessons from DeepMind

(54:54) - over-hyped/under-hyped

With your co-hosts:

@jasoncwarner

- Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical

@ericabrescia

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)

@patrickachase

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn

@jacobeffron

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

I sat down with DeepL cofounder Jarek Kutylowski. DeepL is a comprehensive Language AI platform that enables organizations to communicate effectively across languages, cultures, and markets. Jarek shared a treasure trove of insights on the past, present, and future of AI translation. Here were some standout moments:

[0:00] Intro
[0:38] The Rise of AI and DeepL's Journey
[1:41] DeepL's Competitive Edge and Market Impact
[2:41] Innovations in AI Translation
[4:39] DeepL's Product and Use Cases
[7:35] Challenges and Strategies in AI Translation
[14:29] Human Translators and Data Labeling
[24:39] Building and Scaling AI Infrastructure
[32:52] Evaluating AI Models: Objective vs Subjective
[34:05] Translation Quality Metrics
[35:35] The Debate on AI Moats and Specialized Models
[40:16] The Impact of Real-Time Translation on Business
[45:05] Challenges in Developing Synchronous Speaking Models
[46:49] Adjacent AI Technologies and Their Potential
[48:33] Quickfire

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Jacob and Pat sit down with Erik Bernhardsson, the founder of Modal Labs, a data infrastructure company providing GPU compute to data teams. On this episode we discussed Erik’s thoughts on the AI chip market, the most popular GenAI use cases on Modal, and even Oracle Cloud’s resurgence in the AI start-up market.

0:00 intro

0:45 motivation for founding Modal

6:35 advantages that Modal gives developers

9:21 early applications built with Modal

11:58 challenges for AI developers

16:31 GPU access today

20:09 Vector DB companies

24:55 why is cloud adoption so slow?

31:30 Oracle Cloud

39:22 AI music generation

42:05 over-hyped/under-hyped

43:26 what Erik wishes he knew when starting Modal

45:53 episode debrief

With your co-hosts: 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Two weeks ago, OpenAI released its set of tools to help developers build agentic systems. Today on Unsupervised Learning, Nikunj Handa (Product Lead) and Steve Coffey (Eng Lead) answer some of the biggest questions around how developers should be thinking about building in the agentic paradigm in 2025.

(0:00) Intro
(0:53) OpenAI’s Vision for Consumer Interaction
(4:51) Building Multi-Agent Systems for Business Solutions
(6:53) Challenges and Innovations in AI Fine-Tuning
(13:20) Exploring Computer Use Cases and Applications
(17:20) Advanced Use Cases and Developer Insights
(25:29) Challenges with Context Storage and Chat Completions
(26:09) Introducing the Responses API and MCP
(27:16) AI Infrastructure Companies and Their Role
(29:35) Building the Tools Ecosystem
(30:17) Exploring Computer Use Models
(31:47) The Future of AI and Developer Tools
(38:36) Quickfire

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Jacob and Erica sit down with Jasper CEO Dave Rogenmoser to discuss the future of writing with AI and what it means for marketers and the internet, Jasper post ChatGPT, hosting a massive Gen AI conference, going upmarket and more.

(00:56) - How Jasper works and how people are using it

(02:00) - Dave's journey leading up to Jasper

(04:30) - The moment Dave knew he was onto something with Jasper

(07:30) - Where Jasper works well for business applications

(10:55) - How the content of the internet might change going forward with the use of AI for content creation

(13:00) - What a writer's workflow in the future looks like with AI

(14:50) - How the introduction of ChatGPT impacted Jasper

(17:46) - Looking at the long term opportunity for differentiation for Jasper

(23:16) - Tuning a 'brand voice' through Jasper's AI

(26:15) - Jasper's role in bringing community together, ie with their recent Gen AI Conference

(30:00) - How Dave thinks about the future of work for his kids

(32:20) - The productivity boost clients see through using Jasper

(37:00) - Quick fire round

With your co-hosts:

@jasoncwarner

- Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical

@ericabrescia

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)

@patrickachase

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn

@jacobeffron

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

Pinecone has raised over $130 million and was most recently valued at $750 million. On this week’s Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with CEO and Founder of Pinecone, Edo Liberty. Pinecone is arguably one of the most important elements in today's modern datastack. Edo shared with us the most common use cases of Pinecone, the evolving landscape of vector databases, challenges in building vector databases, the "painful" launch of serverless model, and what people get wrong the most about Pinecone.

(0:00) intro

(0:33) what was it like when ChatGBT came out?

(6:29) Edo’s favorite applications built on Pinecone

(10:34) will we see more image and video applications in 2024?

(14:58) best ways to deal with hallucinations

(18:12) the evolving landscape of vector databases

(20:27) if Edo had to build a product, what would his stack look like?

(31:45) helping clients versus letting them figure things out

(36:38) moving to a serverless model

(40:33) what areas of AI should new startups target?

(45:18) Amazon SageMaker

(50:38) over-hyped/under-hyped

(51:30) biggest surprises while building Pinecone

(56:13) Jacob and Pat debrief

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Jordan and Erica chat with Fixie.ai co-founder and former Harvard CS professor on the journey from researcher to Google eng leader and then to startup life prior to founding Fixie, a new platform for building LLM-based apps (a Redpoint portfolio company). We also talk about having Mark Zuckerberg in his CS class, ChatGPT Plugins and the AI ecosystem, and what the future might look like for our kids with AGI. You can find Matt on Twitter (@mdwelsh) and learn more about Fixie at https://www.fixie.ai/

(1:06) - Matt talks about his early days at Berklee and Harvard

(6:45) - Making the jump to the start-up world

(8:15) - Matt explains what Fixie does

(11:30) - How Matt thinks about use cases for Fixie

(14:20) - How work might change with AI's integration

(17:04) - The future of LLM's

(20:30) - Matt's take on the race to AGI 

(25:20) - How Matt thinks about the future of the world for his kids and how they might use AI

(29:24) - Quick fire round

With your co-hosts:

@jasoncwarner

- Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical

@ericabrescia

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)

@patrickachase

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn

@jacobeffron

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

David is an OG in AI who has been at the forefront of many of the major breakthroughs of the past decade. His resume: VP of Engineering at OpenAI, a key contributor to Google Brain, co-founder of Adept, and now leading Amazon’s SF AGI Lab. In this episode we focused on how far test-time compute gets us, the real implications of DeepSeek, what agents milestones he’s looking for and more.

[0:00] Intro
[1:14] DeepSeek Reactions and Market Implications
[2:44] AI Models and Efficiency
[4:11] Challenges in Building AGI
[7:58] Research Problems in AI Development
[11:17] The Future of AI Agents
[15:12] Engineering Challenges and Innovations
[19:45] The Path to Reliable AI Agents
[21:48] Defining AGI and Its Impact
[22:47] Challenges and Gating Factors
[24:05] Future Human-Computer Interaction
[25:00] Specialized Models and Policy
[25:58] Technical Challenges and Model Evaluation
[28:36] Amazon's Role in AGI Development
[30:33] Data Labeling and Team Building
[36:37] Reflections on OpenAI
[42:12] Quickfire

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Patrick and Jacob sit down with Tatsu Hashimoto, Professor of AI at Stanford, to discuss the incredible open source projects from his research group like Alpaca and AlpacaFarm, whether data, algorithms, fine-tuning or RLHF is most important for performance, if AI is liberal or conservative, and much more!

(0:00) - intro

(1:05) - journey to Stanford

(2:50) - origins of Alpaca

(6:08) - capabilities of the Alpaca model

(16:39) - the future of AI

(20:07) - AlpacaFarm

(21:37) - how to improve language models

(29:15) - do language models form opinions?

(32:15) - how to solve bias in ai

(34:18) - how does academia fit into the world of AI

(42:01) - over-hyped/under-hyped

(46:35) - questions Tatsu doesn’t have time for

With your co-hosts: 

@jasoncwarner - Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical 

@ericabrescia - Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@patrickachase - Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn @jacobeffron - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

@jacobeffron - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

In this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we delve into the forefront of AI innovation with Eric Ries and Jeremy Howard. Eric Ries, renowned for pioneering the Lean Startup movement, has consistently influenced modern entrepreneurial strategies with his emphasis on agile, sustainable growth through innovation. Jeremy Howard is known for his contributions to deep learning and data science, co-founding the fast.ai educational initiative that democratizes access to cutting-edge AI learning.

Eric's new podcast and newsletter:

https://www.ericriesshow.com/

https://ericries.carrd.co/

(0:00) intro 

(0:33) The Lean Startup 

4:34) thinking about defensibility 

(9:10) best way to get caught up on AI 

(11:34) starting Answer.ai 

(23:48) efficient fine-tuning of Llama 3 

(38:21) AI regulations 

(48:27) over-hyped/under-hyped 

(48:53) most exciting AI startups 

(55:37) Jacob and Jordan debrief

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Douwe’s contributions to AI are truly a part of its bedrock foundations. He wrote the first paper on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and has raised over $100 million to help enterprises build contextual language models that fit their use cases. Before Contextual he was the head of research at Hugging Face, worked on the Facebook AI research team (i.e. Llama) and remains a professor at Stanford. Douwe was incredibly open about his take on AI’s recent history and where he thinks it’s going.

[0:00] Intro
[0:51] Exploring the Impact of Systems Thinking in AI
[1:49] Latency Constraints and AI Deployments
[2:05] Benchmarks and Real-World Applications
[3:27] Transition to Contextual and Company Vision
[5:12] Challenges and Innovations in Enterprise AI
[8:51] The Evolution and Future of RAG
[15:26] Alignment and Reinforcement Learning in AI
[23:52] Collaborations and the Role of Academia
[29:15] The Evolving Role of AI Developers
[30:19] Changing Perspectives in AI Research
[30:44] Synthetic Data and Agentic Workflows
[33:47] The Future of Multimodal Data
[35:31] Reasoning Capabilities in AI Models
[42:56] The Rise of Multi-Agent Systems
[45:24] Hugging Face and the AI Ecosystem
[46:59] Building Contextual and AI Startups
[49:51] The Future of AI and Personalized Entertainment
[50:41] Quickfire Round: Overhyped and Underhyped AI
[56:25] Final Thoughts and Parting Words

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

For this episode of Unsupervised Learning we spoke with Russ d'Sa, co-founder of LiveKit, a company at the forefront of voice AI technology. Russ thinks of LiveKit as a “nervous system,” powering the sensory interfaces humans use to interact with AI – including the Advanced Voice feature in ChatGPT as well as applications like Character.ai, Spotify and many more. 

Russ talked about when voice makes sense as an interface, the exciting new UX paradigms on the horizon, the intersection of voice and robotics and Anthropic's Computer Use API.

[0:00] Intro

[0:24] Using ChatGPT Voice in Daily Life

[2:26] How LiveKit Works with ChatGPT Voice

[5:16] LiveKit as the Nervous System for AI

[8:11] Future of Work and AI Interfaces

[18:31] Emerging Use Cases for Voice AI

[22:29] AI Models in Customer Support

[23:10] Latency Improvements in AI

[24:37] Challenges in System Integration

[26:01] Multimodal AI and Browser Integration

[29:40] Telephony and AI in Healthcare

[32:11] Humanoid Robotics and On-Device AI

[33:50] Cloud vs. On-Device Inference

[36:50] Quickfire

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Jacob sits down with Alex to discuss how Snorkel grew from an open-source project in a Stanford AI lab to a $1B company. Alex shares his thoughts on why data development is at the heart of AI development, why enterprises are slow to deploy LLM applications, and the importance of academia in the future of AI development. 

00:00 intro 

01:03 moving from academia to Snorkel 

05:08 the evolution of Snorkel 

18:33 improving pre-training 

21:37 avoiding hallucinations and other errors 

33:00 barriers to enterprises deploying AI 

36:59 the Snorkel footprint of the future 

39:37 the role of academia in AI development 

42:57 over-hyped/under-hyped 

44:50 how should AI regulation change going forward? 

With your co-hosts: 

@jasoncwarner 

- Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Superhuman recently launched AI-powered Summarize and Instant Reply features, and has since processed 4 billion emails. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with CEO and Founder at Superhuman, Rahul Vohra. Rahul shared with us what email will look like in the future, the internal product design decisions in building Summarize and Instant Reply, why he’s bullish on the agentic future, and why and how startups should go after incumbents.

(0:00) intro 

(1:20) why email will never die

(10:46) how ChatGBT changed Superhuman 

(17:01) making design decisions 

(24:34) how Superhuman personalizes email voices 

(28:35) choosing which models to use 

(31:00) how does cost play into decision-making 

(34:10) teaching users how to use AI 

(46:27) competing with incumbents 

(56:57) how work has evolved 

(59:02) how Rahul would redesign Slack / Slack Agent 

(1:04:54) Jacob and Pat debrief

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Jacob sits down with OpenAI VP of Product & Partnerships Peter Welinder and guest host Rob Toews (Radical VC Partner) to discuss OpenAI’s strategy, how they think about what they will/won’t build, the future of open source models and when we’ll reach AGI. 

(00:00) - intro

(00:42) - where is the value in AI?

(07:51) - how OpenAI prioritizes projects

(14:15) - open-source AI

(25:49) - gaps in AI

(29:36) - risks and downsides

(34:02) - when will we reach super-intellegence?

(40:40) - super-intellegence safety

(43:37) - how OpenAI uses ChatGPT

With your co-hosts: 

@jasoncwarner - Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical 

@ericabrescia - Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@patrickachase - Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn @jacobeffron - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

@jacobeffron - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health