No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups - Conviction

Latest Episodes:

Transforming Customer Service through Company Agents, with Sierra’s Bret Taylor Sep 19, 2024

Show notes

Bret Taylor, Cofounder of Sierra, Chairman of the board at OpenAI, and former co-CEO of Salesforce and CTO of Facebook, joins Sarah and Elad in this week’s episode of No Priors. Bret discusses building company-branded AI agents with unique personalities, goals, and guardrails at Sierra, and their potential to revolutionize customer engagement while cutting costs. The conversation explores the next sectors for enterprise AI adoption, building resilient AI products, and the parallels between today’s AI market and the evolution of the cloud industry. Bret also shares his unique insights on future business models and upcoming technology shifts.

Show Notes:

(0:00) Intro

(0:42) Defining agentic systems and types of agents

(3:55) Customer-facing company agents

(5:43) Sierra AI

(8:11) Transforming customer service and reducing costs

(9:57) Challenges in implementing LLMs for company agents

(14:45) Drawing parallels between AI and the cloud market’s evolution

(17:50) Future of the AI landscape

(19:15) Building durable AI products

(24:39) Outcome-based business models and tangible ROI in AI solutions

(29:22) Next wave of AI sectors for enterprise adoption

(31:15) Customizing goals and guardrails with customers

(35:55) Creating distinct personalities for Sierra's agents

(41:05) Bret’s insights on upcoming technology and hardware shifts

(46:50) How AI software could enhance human agency

Future of LLM Markets, Consolidation, and Small Models with Sarah and Elad Sep 12, 2024

Show notes

In this episode of No Priors, Sarah and Elad go deep into what's on everyone’s mind. They break down new partnerships and consolidation in the LLM market, specialization of AI models, and AMD’s strategic moves. Plus, Elad is looking for a humanoid robot.

Show Notes:

(0:00) Introduction

(0:24) LLM market consolidation

(2:18) Competition and decreasing API costs

(3:58) Innovation in LLM productization

(8:20) Comparing the LLM and social network market

(11:40) Increasing competition in image generation

(13:21) Trend in smaller models with higher performance

(14:43) Areas of innovation

(17:33) Legacy of AirBnB and Uber pushing boundaries

(24:19) AMD Acquires ZT

(25:49) Elad’s looking for a Robot

The Road to Autonomous Intelligence with Andrej Karpathy Sep 05, 2024

Show notes

Andrej Karpathy joins Sarah and Elad in this week of No Priors. Andrej, who was a founding team member of OpenAI and former Senior Director of AI at Tesla, needs no introduction. In this episode, Andrej discusses the evolution of self-driving cars, comparing Tesla and Waymo’s approaches, and the technical challenges ahead. They also cover Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot, the bottlenecks of AI development today, and how AI capabilities could be further integrated with human cognition. Andrej shares more about his new company Eureka Labs and his insights into AI-driven education, peer networks, and what young people should study to prepare for the reality ahead.

Show Notes:

(0:00) Introduction

(0:33) Evolution of self-driving cars

(2:23) The Tesla vs. Waymo approach to self-driving

(6:32) Training Optimus with automotive models

(10:26) Reasoning behind the humanoid form factor

(13:22) Existing challenges in robotics

(16:12) Bottlenecks of AI progress

(20:27) Parallels between human cognition and AI models

(22:12) Merging human cognition with AI capabilities

(27:10) Building high performance small models

(30:33) Andrej’s current work in AI-enabled education

(36:17) How AI-driven education reshapes knowledge networks and status

(41:26) Eureka Labs

(42:25) What young people study to prepare for the future

Building toward a bright post-AGI future with Eric Steinberger from Magic.dev Aug 30, 2024

Show notes

Today on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil are joined by Eric Steinberger, the co-founder and CEO of Magic.dev. His team is developing a software engineer co-pilot that will act more like a colleague than a tool. They discussed what makes Magic stand out from the crowd of AI co-pilots, the evaluation bar for a truly great AI assistant, and their predictions on what a post-AGI world could look like if the transition is managed with care.

Show Notes:

(0:00) Introduction

(0:45) Eric’s journey to founding Magic.dev

(4:01) Long context windows for more accurate outcomes

(10:53) Building a path toward AGI

(15:18) Defining what is enough compute for AGI

(17:34) Achieving Magic’s final UX

(20:03) What makes a good AI assistant

(22:09) Hiring at Magic

(27:10) Impact of AGI

(32:44) Eric’s north star for Magic

(36:09) How Magic will interact in other tools

Cloud Strategy in the AI Era with Matt Garman, CEO of AWS Aug 29, 2024

Show notes

In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah and Elad are joined by Matt Garman, the CEO of Amazon Web Services. They talk about the evolution of Amazon Web Services (AWS) from its inception to its current position as a major player in cloud computing and AI infrastructure. In this episode they touch on AI commuting hardware, partnerships with AI startups, and the challenges of scaling for AI workloads.

Show Notes:

(00:00) Introduction

(00:23) Matt’s early days at Amazon

(02:53) Early conception of AWS

(06:36) Understanding the full opportunity of cloud compute

(12:21) Blockers to cloud migration

(14:19) AWS reaction to Gen AI

(18:04) First-party models at hyperscalers

(20:18) AWS point of view on open source

(22:46) Grounding and knowledge bases

(26:07) Semiconductors and data center capacity for AI workloads

(31:15) Infrastructure investment for AI startups

(33:18) Value creation in the AI ecosystem

(36:22) Enterprise adoption

(38:48) Near-future predictions for AWS usage

(41:25) AWS’s role for startups

The marketplace for AI compute with Jared Quincy Davis from Foundry Aug 22, 2024

Show notes

In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah and Elad are joined by Jared Quincy Davis, former DeepMind researcher and the Founder and CEO of Foundry, a new AI cloud computing service provider. They discuss the research problems that led him to starting Foundry, the current state of GPU cloud utilization, and Foundry's approach to improving cloud economics for AI workloads. Jared also touches on his predictions for the GPU market and the thinking behind his recent paper on designing compound AI systems.

Show Notes:

(00:00) Introduction

(02:42) Foundry background

(03:57) GPU utilization for large models

(07:29) Systems to run a large model

(09:54) Historical value proposition of the cloud

(14:45) Sharing cloud compute to increase efficiency

(19:17) Foundry’s new releases

(23:54) The current state of GPU capacity

(29:50) GPU market dynamics

(36:28) Compound systems design

(40:27) Improving open-ended tasks

How AI can help build smarter systems for every team with Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh of Ramp Aug 15, 2024

Show notes

In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah and Elad are joined by Ramp co-founders Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh of Ramp. The pair has been working to build one of the fastest growing fintechs since they were teenagers. This conversation focuses on how Ramp engineers have been building new systems to help every team from sales and marketing to product. They’re building best-in-class SaaS solutions just for internal use to make sure their company remains competitive. They also get into how AI will augment marketing and creative fields, the challenges of selling productivity, and how they’re using LLMs to create internal podcasts using sales calls to share what customers are saying with the whole team.

Show Notes:

(0:00) Introduction to Ramp

(3:17) Working with startups

(8:13) Ramp’s implementation of AI

(14:10) Resourcing and staffing

(17:20) Deciding when to build vs buy

(21:20) Selling productivity

(25:01) Risk mitigation when using AI

(28:48) What the AI stack is missing

(30:50) Marketing with AI

(37:26) Designing a modern marketing team

(40:00) Giving creative freedom to marketing teams

(42:12) Augmenting bookkeeping

(47:00) AI-generated podcasts

Innovating Spend Management through AI with Pedro Franceschi from Brex Aug 08, 2024

Show notes

Hunting down receipts and manually filling out invoices kills productivity. This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Pedro Franceschi, co-founder and CEO of Brex. Pedro discusses how Brex is harnessing AI to optimize spend management and automate tedious accounting and compliance tasks for teams. The conversation covers the reliability challenges in AI today, Pedro’s insights on the future of fintech in an AI-driven world, and the major transitions Brex has navigated in recent years.

Show Notes:

(0:00) Introduction

(0:32) Brex’s business and transitioning to solo CEO

(3:04) Building AI into Brex

(7:09) Solving for risk and reliability in AI-enabled financial products

(11:41) Allocating resources toward AI investment

(14:00) Innovating data use in marketing

(20:00) Building durable businesses in the face of AI

(25:36) AI’s impact on finance

(29:15) Brex’s decision to focus on startups and enterprises

Google DeepMind's Vision for AI, Search and Gemini with Oriol Vinyals from Google DeepMind Aug 01, 2024

Show notes

In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah and Elad are joined by Oriol Vinyals, VP of Research, Deep Learning Team Lead, at Google DeepMind and Technical Co-lead of the Gemini project. Oriol shares insights from his career in machine learning, including leading the AlphaStar team and building competitive StarCraft agents. We talk about Google DeepMind, forming the Gemini project, and integrating AI technology throughout Google products. Oriol also discusses the advancements and challenges in long context LLMs, reasoning capabilities of models, and the future direction of AI research and applications. The episode concludes with a reflection on AGI timelines, the importance of specialized research, and advice for future generations in navigating the evolving landscape of AI.

Show Notes:

(00:00) Introduction to Oriol Vinyals

(00:55) The Gemini Project and Its Impact

(02:04) AI in Google Search and Chat Models

(08:29) Infinite Context Length and Its Applications

(14:42) Scaling AI and Reward Functions

(31:55) The Future of General Models and Specialization

(38:14) Reflections on AGI and Personal Insights

(43:09) Will the Next Generation Study Computer Science?

(45:37) Closing thoughts

Low-Code in the Age of AI and Going Enterprise, with Howie Liu from Airtable Jul 25, 2024

Show notes

This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil are joined by Howie Liu, the co-founder and CEO of Airtable. Howie discusses their Cobuilder launch, the evolution of Airtable from a simple productivity tool to an enterprise app platform with integrated AI capabilities. They talk about why the conventional wisdom of “app not platform” can be wrong, why there’s a future for low-code in the age of AI and code generation, and where enterprises need help adopting AI.

Show Notes:

(00:00) Introduction

(00:29) The Origin and Evolution of Airtable

(02:31) Challenges and Successes in Building Airtable

(06:09) Airtable's Transition to Enterprise Solutions

(09:44) Insights on Product Management

(16:23) Integrating AI into Airtable

(21:55) The Future of No Code and AI

(30:30) Workshops and Training for AI Adoption

(36:28) The Role of Code Generation in No Code Platforms