No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups - Conviction

Latest Episodes:

The Intersection of AI and Blockchain, with Transformers author and NEAR founder Illia Polosukhin Sep 15, 2023

Show notes

More than 25 million users are using NEAR-powered applications. Co-founder of NEAR protocol and Transformers author Illia Polosukhin joins hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss the intersections of crypto and AI technology, what we should expect from AI agents, decentralized data labeling, why AI’s alignment problem is really a human problem, and more.

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Show Notes:

(0:00:00) - Blockchain, AI, and Web3 Intersection

(0:06:39) - How We Might Combine Blockchain and AI for Cancer Research

(0:23:35) - Inference and Decentralized Data Labeling

(0:30:13) - AI SaaS Strategic Challenges

(0:38:18) - The Future of Hardware Accelerators

The World’s Largest AI Processor with Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman Sep 07, 2023

Show notes

The GPU supply crunch is causing desperation amongst AI teams large and small. Cerebras Systems has an answer, and it’s a chip the size of a dinner plate. Andrew Feldman, CEO and Co-founder of Cerebras and previously SeaMicro, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors. They discuss why there might be an alternative to Nvidia, localized models and predictions for the accelerator market.

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Show Notes:

(0:00:00) - Cerebra Systems CEO Discusses AI Supercomputers

(0:07:03) - AI Advancement in Architecture and Training

(0:16:58) - Future of AI Accelerators and Chip Specialization

(0:26:38) - Scaling Open Source Models and Fine-Tuning

AI Superpowers for Frontend Developers, with Vercel Founder/CEO Guillermo Rauch Aug 31, 2023

Show notes

Everything digital is increasingly intermediated through web user experiences, and now AI development can be frontend-first, too. Just ask Guillermo Rauch, the founder and CEO of Vercel, the company behind Next.js. In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil speak to Guillermo about their AI SDK and AI templates, and why Vercel is focused on making it easy for every frontend engineer to build with AI. They also discuss what applications Guillermo's most excited about, how to prepare for the world of bots, whether the winds are changing in web architectures, and why he believes in the AI-fueled 100X engineer.

Prior to Vercel, Guillermo co-founded several startups and created the JavaScript library, Socket.io, which allows for real-time bi-directional communication between web clients and servers.

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Show Notes:

(0:00:00) - Vercel's AI Strategy and Future Plans

(0:10:36) - AI Frameworks, Observability, and Bot Mitigation

(0:17:24) - Crawling the Web and Architecture Changes

(0:27:54) - AI's Impact on Web Personalization

AI-Powered Biological Software with Jakob Uszkoreit, CEO of Inceptive Aug 24, 2023

Show notes

"Biological Software" is the future of medicine. Jakob Uszkoreit, CEO and Co-founder of Inceptive, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors, to discuss how deep learning is expanding the horizons of RNA and mRNA therapeutics.

Jakob co-authored the revolutionary paper Attention is All You Need while at Google, and led early Google Translate and Google Assistant teams. Now at Inceptive, he's applying these same architectures and ideas to biological design, optimizing vaccine production, and magnitude-more efficient drug discovery. We also discuss Jakob's perspective on promising research directions, and his point of view that model architectures will actually get simpler from here, and be driven by hardware.

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Show Notes:

(0:00:00) - Creating Biological Software

(0:06:54) - The Hardware Drivers of Large-Scale Transformers

(0:14:32) - Challenges in Optimizing Compute Allocation

(0:23:25) - Deep Learning in Biology and RNA

(0:32:49) - The Future of Drug Discovery

(0:41:41) - Collaboration and Innovation at Inceptive

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan Aug 17, 2023

Show notes

The future of education is right at your children’s fingertips. Sal Khan, CEO and Founder of Khan Academy, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors. For over a decade, Sal Khan has been trying to reform education, beginning with tutoring his cousins in math.

He's the father of the YouTube "chalk talk" format, and has now served tens of millions of students through Khan Academy.

He guides us through how Khan Academy is using AI to personalize a student's educational experience, transporting students into immersive learning experiences that allow them to debate historical figures, to assisting teachers with lesson plans that address the learning gaps keeping students from reaching their full potential, to a Khanmigo, a tutor for every child.

Prior to founding Khan Academy, Sal worked as a hedge fund analyst. He holds an MS in business from Harvard University, as well as an MS in Engineering and a BS in Computer Science from MIT.

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Show Notes:

[0:00:06] - Sal Khan's Journey

[0:08:41] - Mastery Learning and AI in Education

[0:19:53] - Future of AI Tutors in Education

[0:23:10] - Education's Future With Generative AI

[0:29:35] - Connecting Learning Through Tutoring and Collaboration

[0:33:22] - Implications of GPT 4 on Education

[0:40:42] - Future of Education and Job Skills

[0:46:47] - Importance of Traditional Skills in Education

Listener Q&A: 2024 Tech Market Predictions, Long Term Implications of Today’s GPU Crunch, and Will AI Agents Bring Us Happiness? Aug 10, 2023

Show notes

This week on the podcast, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil answer listener questions on the state of technology and artificial intelligence. Sarah and Elad also talk about the 2024 tech market, what type of companies may reach their highest valuation ever and the (former) unicorns that may go bust. Plus, how do Sarah and Elad define happiness? Hint: it’s a use case for a specialized AI agent.

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Show Notes:

[0:00:37] - Impact of GPU Bottleneck in the near and long term

[0:10:30] - Timeline for existing incumbent enterprises to use AI in products

[0:11:50] - Vertical versus broad applications for AI Agents

[0:19:33] - 2024 tech market predictions & how founders should think about valuations

Eradicating Machine Learning Pain Points with Weights & Biases CEO Lukas Biewald Aug 03, 2023

Show notes

How are ML developer tools helping to advance our capabilities? Lukas Biewald, CEO of Weights & Biases, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors. Lukas explores the impact of ML in various industries like gaming, AgTech, and fintech through his insightful perspective. He discusses the impact of LLMs, puts them in context of the evolution of ML engineering over the past decade and a half, and tells the backstory of Weights & Biases' success. He gives advice for aspiring AI company founders, placing emphasis on customer feedback and using insecurity as a vehicle for better customer discovery.

Prior to founding Weights & Biases, Lukas attacked the problem of data collection for model training as the Founder of Figure Eight, which he sold in 2019. He holds an MS in Computer Science and a BS in Mathematics from Stanford University.

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Show Notes:

[0:00:00] - Lucas Wald's Journey in AI

[0:08:16] - Startup Evolution and Machine Learning

[0:18:54] - Open Source Models Implications and Adoption

[0:29:54] - ML Impact in Various Industries

[0:40:27] - Advice for AI Company Founders

How Palantir’s AI Bet is Revolutionizing Defense and Beyond, with CTO Shyam Sankar Jul 27, 2023

Show notes

Can frontiers as high-stakes as next-generation, AI-enabled defense depend on something as mundane as data integration? Can "large language models" work in such mission critical applications? In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil are joined by Shyam Sankar, the Chief Technical Officer of Palantir Technologies and inventor of their famous Forward Deployed Engineering force.

Early employee and longtime leader Shyam explains the evolution of technology at Palantir, from ontology and data integration to process visualization and now AI. He describes how a company of Palantir's scale has adopted foundation models and shares customer stories. They discuss the case for open source AI models fine-tuned on private, domain-specific data, and the challenges of anchoring AI models in reality.

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Show Notes:

[0:00:00] - Palantir's CTO Discusses Company's Background

[0:10:17] - Apollo and AIP

[0:20:25] - Future of UI and Application Integration

[0:28:29] - Investment in Co-Pilot Models and Education

[0:31:22] - Exploring AI Implementation in Various Industries

[0:38:19] - Operational and Analytical Workflows in Context

The Timeline for Realistic 4-D: Devi Parikh from Meta on Research Hurdles for Generative AI in Video and Multimodality Jul 20, 2023

Show notes

Video dominates modern media consumption, but video creation is still expensive and difficult. AI-generated and edited video is a holy grail of democratized creative expression. This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Devi Parikh. She is a Research Director in Generative AI at Meta and an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Her work focuses on multimodality and AI for images, audio and video. Recently, she worked on Make a Video 3D, also called MAV3D, which creates animations from text prompts. She is also a talented AI-generated and analog artist herself.

Elad, Sarah and Devi talk about what’s exciting in computer vision, what’s blocking researchers from fully immersive Generative 4-D, and AI controllability.

No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode.

Show Links:

Devi Parikh - Google Scholar
Text-To-4D Dynamic Scene Generation named MAV3D (Make-A-Video3D)
Full Research Paper
Website with examples of image to 4 D generation
Devi’s Substack

Show Notes:

(0:00:06) - Democratizing Creative Expression With AI-Generated Video

(0:08:31) - Challenges in Video Generation Research

(0:15:57) - Challenges and Implications of Video Processing

(0:20:43) - Control and Multi-Modal Inputs in Video

(0:25:50) - Audio's Role in Visual Content

(0:39:00) - Don't Self-Select & Devi’s tips for young researchers

Bringing AI to the Data Cloud, with Snowflake's CEO Frank Slootman Jun 29, 2023

Show notes

Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake Computing, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors. Before scaling Snowflake to its blockbuster IPO and beyond, Frank was also the CEO from early to scale for landmark enterprise companies ServiceNow and Data Domain. Frank grew up in the Netherlands and is also the author of three books: Amp It Up, Rise of the Data Cloud, and Tape Sucks.

In this episode, our hosts talk with Frank about the opportunity for generative AI in the enterprise, why Snowflake isn't really a data warehousing company, their acquisitions of Neeva and Streamlit, apps within Snowflake, and how AI relates to traditional analytics and BI. He also talks about his personal journey, why it's always a good time to do performance management, and why most leaders struggle to raise the bar for performance.

** No Priors is taking a summer break! The podcast will be back with new episodes in three weeks. Join us on July 20th for a conversation with Devi Parikh, Research Director in Generative AI at Meta. **

No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode.

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