No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups - Conviction

Latest Episodes:

Improving search with RAG architecture with Pinecone CEO Edo Liberty Feb 22, 2024

Show notes

Accurate, customizable search is one of the most immediate AI use cases for companies and general users. Today on No Priors, Elad and Sarah are joined by Pinecone CEO, Edo Liberty, to talk about how RAG architecture is improving syntax search and making LLMs more available. By using a RAG model Pinecone makes it possible for companies to vectorize their data and query it for the most accurate responses.

In this episode, they talk about how Pinecone’s Canopy product is making search more accurate by using larger data sets in a way that is more efficient and cost effective—which was almost impossible before there were serverless options. They also get into how RAG architecture uniformly increases accuracy across the board, how these models can increase “operational sanity” in the dataset for their customers, and hybrid search models that are using keywords and embeds.

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Show Notes:

(0:00) Introduction to Edo and Pinecone

(2:01) Use cases for Pinecone and RAG models

(6:02) Corporate internal uses for syntax search

(10:13) Removing the limits of RAG with Canopy

(14:02) Hybrid search

(16:51) Why keep Pinecone closed source

(22:29) Infinite context

(23:11) Embeddings and data leakage

(25:35) Fine tuning the data set

(27:33) What’s next for Pinecone

(28:58) Separating reasoning and knowledge in AI

RAG is the key for smarter productivity tools with Notion CEO Ivan Zhao Feb 15, 2024

Show notes

Notion is a productivity app that has invested heavily in AI to create products that enable workers to access information instantly without having to search through their own countless notes. Today on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Ivan Zhao, the co-founder and CEO of Notion, to talk about Notions Q&A interface and calendar applications. They also get into how using RAG models means better retrieval, longer memory, and the user can be less organized and how Notion is leading the charge in this era of SaaS bundling products.

Show Notes:

(0:00) Introduction

(2:09) AI and Computing literacy

(5:39) Building the Notion AI team

(8:43) Notion as an application company

(12:09) Prioritizing AI investment

(14:53) The rapid evolution cycle of AI development

(17:46) Notion Q&A

(20:00) Workflow and AI for calendars

(22:43) Moving past the need for organization

(24:36) History of SaaS doesn’t repeat, it rhymes

(30:14) Design at Notion

(34:26) Notion office design

(36:52) How RAG will change the future

(38:30) Building our the software in the Notionscape

Build AI products at on-AI companies with Emily Glassberg Sands from Stripe Feb 08, 2024

Show notes

Many companies that are building AI products for their users are not primarily AI companies. Today on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Emily Glassberg Sands who is the Head of Information at Stripe. They talk about how Stripe prioritizes AI projects and builds these tools from the inside out. Stripe was an early adopter of utilizing LLMs to help their end user. Emily talks about how they decided it was time to meaningfully invest in AI given the trajectory of the industry and the wealth of information Stripe has access to. The company’s goal with utilizing AI is to empower non-technical users to code using natural language and for technical users to be able to work much quicker and in this episode she talks about how their Radar Assistant and Sigma Assistant achieve those goals.

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Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @emilygsands

Show Notes:

(0:00) Background

(0:38) Emily’s role at Stripe

(2:31) Adopting early gen AI models

(4:44) Promoting internal usage of AI

(8:17) Applied ML accelerator teams

(10:36) Radar fraud assistant

(13:30) Sigma assistant

(14:32) How will AI affect Stripe in 3 years

(17:00) Knowing when it’s time to invest more fully in AI

(18:28) Deciding how to proliferate models

(22:04) Whitespace for fintechs employing AI

(25:41) Leveraging payments data for customers

(27:51) Labor economics and data

(30:10) Macro economic trends for strategic decisions

(32:54) How will AI impact education

(35:36) Unique needs of AI startups

The Copilot for Ecommerce with Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates Jan 31, 2024

Show notes

Building an ecommerce business is hard – it requires merchants to have a wealth of skills: technical, logistics, marketing, pricing, vendor management, finance and analytics. That’s why Shopify is releasing new AI features that help merchants tackle things like product descriptions, marketing suggestions and search.

Today on No Priors, Glen Coates, the VP of core product at Shopify (and former founder of b2b wholesale platform Handshake), joins Sarah and Elad. They talk about the releases from Shopify Editions, why they are deploying “copilot” rather than “autopilot,” AI innovation-at-scale, how to change the basement of a house while people are living in it, and building a leadership team of entrepreneurs.

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Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @glencoates

Shopify Editions | AI Section of Shopify Editions

Show Notes:

(0:00) Background

(2:22) Calling a “Code Red” at Shopify

(4:04) Integrating acquisitions, entrepreneurial leaders

(12:15) AI adoption

(15:51) Deciding when to ship AI products, evaluations

(17:33) Shopify’s risk orientation

(18:50) Changing the core Shopify data model, enabling AI features

(26:05) What’s missing from LLMs for merchants

(28:47) Most interesting AI developments in the industry

(33:22) What users want from LLMs and search

(38:20) No Priors social

Building the factories of the future with Covariant CEO Peter Chen Jan 25, 2024

Show notes

Building adaptive AI models that can learn and complete tasks in the physical world requires precision but these AI robots could completely change manufacturing and logistics processes. Peter Chen, the co-founder and CEO of Covariant, leads the team that is building robots that will increase manufacturing efficiency, safety, and create warehouses of the future.

Today on No Priors, Peter joins Sarah to talk about how the Covariant team is developing multimodal models that have precise grounding and understanding so they can adapt to solve problems in the physical world. They also discuss how they plan their roadmap at Covariant, what could be next for the company, and what use case will bring us to the Chat-GPT moment for AI robots.

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Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @peterxichen

Show Notes:

(0:00) Peter Chen Background

(0:58) How robotics AI will drive AI forward

(3:00) Moving from research to a commercial company

(5:46) The argument for building incrementally

(8:13) Manufacturing robotics today

(12:21) Put wall use case

(15:45) What’s next for Covariant Brain

(18:42) Covariant’s customers

(19:50) Grounding concepts in Ai

(25:47) How scaling laws apply to Covariant

(29:21) Covariant’s driving thesis

(32:54) the Chat-GPT moment for robotics

(35:12) Manufacturing center of the future

(37:02) Safety in AI robotics

Coding in Collaboration with AI with Sourcegraph CTO Beyang Liu Jan 18, 2024

Show notes

Coding in collaboration with AI can reduce human toil in the software development process and lead to more accurate and less tedious work for coding teams. This week on No Priors, Sarah talked with Beyang Liu, the cofounder and CTO of Sourcegraph, which builds tools that help developers innovate faster. Their most recent launch was an AI coding assistant called Cody. Beyang has spent his entire career thinking about how humans can work in conjunction with AI to write better code.

Sarah and Beyang talk about how Sourcegraph is thinking about augmenting the coding process in a way that ensures accuracy and efficiency starting with robust and high-quality context. They also think about what the future of software development could look like in a world where AI can generate high-quality code on its own and where that leaves humans in the coding process.

Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com

Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @beyang

Show Notes:

(0:00) Beyang Liu’s experience

(0:52) Sourcegraph premise

(2:20) AI and finding flow

(4:18) Developing LLMs in code

(6:46) Cody explanation

(7:56) Unlocking AI code generation

(11:00) search architecture in LLMs

(16:02) Quality-assurance in data set

(18:03) Future of Cody

(22:48) Constraints in AI code generation

(30:28) Lessons from Beyang’s research days

(33:17) Benefits of small models

(35:49) Future of software development

(42:14) What skills will be valued down the line

A No Priors clip show: the best of 2023 Jan 11, 2024

Show notes

We’re looking back on 2023 and sharing a handful of our favorite conversations. Last year was full of insightful conversations that shaped the way we think about the most innovative movements in the AI space. Want to hear more? Check out the full episodes here:

Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @reidhoffman l @alyssahhenry l @ilyasut l @mustafasuleyman l @DaphneKoller l @arthurmensch l @MrJensenHuang

Show Notes:

(0:00) Introduction

(0:27) Ilya Sutskever on the governance structure of OpenAI

(3:11) Alyssa Henry on how AI can small business owners

(5:25) Mustafa Suleyman on defining intelligence

(8:53) Reid Hoffman’s advice for co-working with AI

(11:47) Daphne Koller on probabilistic graphical models

(13:15) Noam Shazeer on the possibilities of LLMs

(14:27) Arthur Mensch on keeping AI open

(17:19) Jensen Huang on how Nvidia decides what to work on

The case for AI optimism Dec 21, 2023

Show notes

AI doomerism and calls to regulate the emerging technology is at a fever pitch but today’s guest, Reid Hoffman is a vocal AI optimist who views slowing down innovation as anti-humanistic. Reid needs no introduction, he’s the co-founder of PayPal, Linkedin, and most recently Inflection AI which is building empathetic AI companions. He is also a board member at Microsoft and former board member at OpenAI. On this week’s episode, Reid joins Sarah and Elad to talk about the historical case for an optimistic outlook on emerging technology like AI, advice for workers who fear AI may replace them, and why it’s impossible to regulate before you innovate. Plus, some predictions.

Aside from his storied experience in technology, Reid is an author, podcaster, and political activist. Most recently, he co-authors a book with GPT 4 called Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI.

Show Notes:

(0:00) Reid Hoffman’s birdseye view on the state of AI

(3:37) AI and human collaboration in workflows

(5:23) What’s causing AI doomerism

(12:28) Advice for whitecollar workers

(16:45) Why Reid isn’t retiring

(18:25) How Inflection started

(22:06) Surprising ways people are using Inflection

(25:34) Western bias and AI ethics

(30:58) Structural challenges in governing AI

(33:15) Most exciting whitespace in AI

(35:00) GPT 5 and Innovations coming in the next two years

(44:00) What future should we be building?

How AI can help small businesses Dec 14, 2023

Show notes

AI tools are helping small business owners manage their businesses, so they can stay focused on the aspects of their business they love to do. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Alyssa Henry, an executive at some of the most impactful companies from Microsoft to Amazon. Most recently she was the CEO of Square. She led Square’s team as they were very early adopters of a consumer-facing product that used GPT-2 and have continued to incorporate AI into their offerings. On today’s episode, they talk about the whitespace within e-commerce for AI and lessons from the prior generation of infrastructure.

Alyssa recently retired from being longtime CEO of Square, within Block. Before that she was a vice president of AWS running, amongst other things, the storage products, or the digital storage bucket for the world. And before AWS, she ran order management software at Amazon Retail and started her tech career at Microsoft. She remains on the boards of Intel, Confluent and was previously on the board of Unity.

Show Notes:

(0:00) Alyssa’s experience and career trajectory

(2:30) Transition from engineer to manager

(4:09) AI implementation at Square

(7:46) Small business AI applications

(12:14) Latent demand for content generation

(15:04) The origin story of Square’s GPT-2 products

(16:54) Consolidating ecommerce workflows

(18:46) How will AI change cloud services

(23:07) Hyperscaler foundation models and the AI land grab

(25:16) Enterprise demand for open source models

(28:08) Startups in the AI semiconductor space

(31:02) Scale up architectures vs scaling out

(34:32) What’s next for Alyssa

(36:08) What Elad and Sarah are excited about in 2024

AI is the new enterprise UI with Clara Shih, CEO Salesforce AI Dec 07, 2023

Show notes

AI is the new UI for enterprise customers, according to Clara Shih, the CEO of Salesforce AI. Salesforce released Einstein, now called Einstein GPT, in 2016, making it an early example of how beneficial AI can be when embedded in enterprise software. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad talked with Clara about what the evolution of AI in enterprise looks like, how Salesforce is adoption AI across the organization, and the onboarding process for companies looking to integrate AI into their workflow, plus the challenges of pricing for AI services.

Clara Shih is the Chief Executive Officer of Salesforce AI where she leads the AI efforts across Salesforce including AI co-pilot and agent platform, model development, go-to-market growth, adoption, partnerships, ecosystems, and secure responsible AI. Before that was the CEO of Salesforce Service Cloud She is also the co-founder and previous CEO of Hearsay Systems. She is also on the Board of Directors at Starbucks.

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