No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups - Conviction

Latest Episodes:

What's for Dinner? AI-Driven Commerce with Instacart CEO Fidji Simo Jun 22, 2023

Show notes

Fidji Simo, the CEO of Instacart and co-founder of Metrodora Institute, a medical center and research institute for neuroimmune axis disorders, shares her personal journey from growing up in France, to leading the Facebook app, to becoming a wartime CEO. Fidji talks about the future of Instacart, their AI strategy, how the current era of AI is different from prior ML waves, and the impact of LLMs in commerce, robotics and healthcare. She also shares how she earns followership from her teams.

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

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Show Links:

May 31, 2023: Instacart users can now plan meals using AI - Fast Company Profile
May 13, 2023: Instacart CEO Fidji Simo makes groceries personal. Now she’s doing the same for women’s health
December 2, 2021: Rapid Response: Re-founding Instacart, w/ first-time CEO Fidji Simo | Podcast: Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman
Metrodora Institute
Fidji Simo’s LinkedIn

Show Notes:

[00:01] - Leading With Impact and Authenticity

[11:48] - Implementing AI

[17:28] - Future of Grocery Shopping With AI

[25:38] - AI in Advertising and Commerce

[32:54] - Metrodora: AI in Biotech and Healthcare

[34:18] - The positive impact of AI, mitigating harm & role of regulations

What happens to Observability If Code is AI-Generated? The Potential for AI in DevOps, with Datadog Co-founder/CEO Olivier Pomel Jun 15, 2023

Show notes

Olivier Pomel, co-founder and CEO of Datadog, the leading observability company, discusses the company’s founding story, early product sequencing, platform strategy, and acquisitions. Olivier also shares his thoughts on their more recent expansion into security, and why he’s bullish on the potential for AI in DevOps.

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Show Notes:

[00:10] - DevOps and AI Potential

[06:54] - Datadog and Generative AI

[20:40] - Datadog's Acquisition and Expansion Strategy

[31:46] - LLMs in Automation and Precision

[42:35] - Datadog's Customer Value and Growth

Listener Q&A: AI Misconceptions, The Reality of Regulation, Infinite Context, Incumbent AI Execution and Startup Ideas Jun 08, 2023

Show notes

This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad do another hangout to answer listener questions. Topics include debunking common misconceptions about AI and its implications on the world, the analogy to nuclear power and nuclear safety, the impact of larger context windows, developer productivity, incumbent announcements of AI products, and some requests for (fat) startups.

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

Show Notes:

[00:21] - What Are People Getting Wrong About AI Right Now? / New Capabilities of NLP

[04:35] - Nuclear Power and Safety Concerns

[11:12] - Emerging AI Companies and Research

[15:54] - China's Hardware Sanctions and Funding Ramp

[20:34] - Innovation in Heterogeneous Compute Infrastructure

[28:08] - Enterprise Stack and Decision Making

[33:44] - Data's Impact on the World

AI & Defense Technology with Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf Jun 01, 2023

Show notes

Today on No Priors, we discuss defense technology, AI, drones, and autonomous vehicles (think giant submarine drones!) with Brian Schimpf, the co-founder and CEO of Anduril, a next-generation defense technology company. From his early days of coding at age 12 to working on self-driving cars, and finally founding Anduril, Brian's incredible journey led him to create innovative solutions for pressing defense problems.

This episode covers the impact of AI, intelligent software, and other technologies to defense. We discuss the challenges of deploying and selling technology in the government spaceBrian shared his perspective on building general-purpose defense technology, the importance of a software-first approach, and how Anduril is working to solve urgent defense problems with speed and efficiency.

As we wrapped up our conversation, we touched on the recent shift in the low cost of space launch, which has changed the way the US thinks about defense. We examined the proliferation of satellites, drones, and hypersonic missiles, and how these technologies can be applied, scaled, and built in a way that can fundamentally shift America's approach to defense. Don't miss this fascinating episode with Brian Schimpf as we uncover the cutting edge of defense technology and its implications for the future.

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Show Links:

May 16, 2023: AI in Military Operations and How We Can Prevent It From Outsized Effects
May 9, 2023: CNBC Disruptor 50 - Anduril Industries
Anduril Website
Anduril Newsroom

Show Notes:

[0:00:01] - Exploring AI in Defense Tech

[0:05:15] - Lower Cost Defense With Intelligent Software

[0:15:10] - Building General Purpose Defense Technology

[0:20:41] - Autonomy in Defense Challenges

[0:25:05] - Machine Learning in Defense & Intelligence

[0:29:06] - Scaling a Defense Tech Company

[0:37:08] - The Future of Defense Technology

[0:46:53] - Allied Forces and Washington Engagement

[0:51:47] - Discussion on Leadership Popularity

Going Full Send on AI, and the (Positive) Impact of AI on Jobs, with Kevin Scott, CTO of Microsoft May 24, 2023

Show notes

In this episode, Sarah and Elad speak with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott about his unlikely journey from rural Virginia to becoming the driving force behind Microsoft's AI strategy.

Sarah and Elad discuss the partnership that Kevin helped forge between Microsoft and OpenAI and explore the vision both companies have for the future of AI. They also discuss yesterday’s announcement of “copilots” across the Microsoft product suite, Microsoft’s GPU computing budget, the potential impact of open source AI models in the tech industry, the future of AI in relation to jobs, why Kevin is bullish on creative and physical work, and predictions for progress in AI this year.

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Show Links:

May 23, 2023: The Verge - Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott Thinks Sydney Might Make a Comeback
May 23, 2023: Microsoft Outlines Framework For Building AI Apps and Copilots
January 10, 2023: A Conversation with Kevin Scott: What’s Next In AI

Show Notes:

[00:00] - Kevin Scott's Journey to Microsoft CTO

[12:44] - Microsoft and Open AI Partnership

[21:18] - The Future of Open Source AI

[32:12] - AI for Everyone

[45:29] - AI and the Future of Jobs

[51:44] - The Future of AI and Regulation

[58:10] - Taking a Global Perspective

The AI Will See You Now: Exploring Biomedical AI and Google’s Med-PaLM2 With Karan Singhal May 18, 2023

Show notes

What if AI could revolutionize healthcare with advanced language learning models? Sarah and Elad welcome Karan Singhal, Staff Software Engineer at Google Research, who specializes in medical AI and the development of MedPaLM2. On this episode, Karan emphasizes the importance of safety in medical AI applications and how language models like MedPaLM2 have the potential to augment scientific workflows and transform the standard of care.

Other topics include the best workflows for AI integration, the potential impact of AI on drug discoveries, how AI can serve as a physician's assistant, and how privacy-preserving machine learning and federated learning can protect patient data, while pushing the boundaries of medical innovation.

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

Show Links:

May 10, 2023: PaLM 2 Announcement
April 13, 2023: A Responsible Path to Generative AI in Healthcare
March 31, 2023: Scientific American article on Med-PaLM
February 28, 2023: The Economist article on Med-PaLM
KaranSinghal.com

Show Notes:

[00:22] - Google's Medical AI Development

[08:57] - Medical Language Model and MedPaLM 2 Improvements

[18:18] - Safety, cost/benefit decisions, drug discovery, health information, AI applications, and AI as a physician's assistant.

[24:51] - Privacy Concerns - HIPAA's implications, privacy-preserving machine learning, and advances in GPT-4 and MedPOM2.

[37:43] - Large Language Models in Healthcare and short/long term use.

Will Everyone Have a Personal AI? With Mustafa Suleyman, Founder of DeepMind and Inflection May 11, 2023

Show notes

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and now co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI, joins Sarah and Elad to discuss how his interests in counseling, conflict resolution, and intelligence led him to start an AI lab that pioneered deep reinforcement learning, lead applied AI and policy efforts at Google, and more recently found Inflection and launch Pi.

Mustafa offers insights on the changing structure of the web, the pressure Google faces in the age of AI personalization, predictions for model architectures, how to measure emotional intelligence in AIs, and the thinking behind Pi: the AI companion that knows you, is aligned to your interests, and provides companionship.

Sarah and Elad also discuss Mustafa’s upcoming book, The Coming Wave (release September 12, 2023), which examines the political ramifications of AI and digital biology revolutions.

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

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Show Notes:

[00:06] - From Conflict Resolution to AI Pioneering

[10:36] - Defining Intelligence

[15:32] - DeepMind's Journey and Breakthroughs

[24:45] - The Future of Personal AI Companionship

[33:22] - AI and the Future of Personalized Content

[41:49] - The Launch of Pi

[51:12] - Mustafa’s New Book The Coming Wave

Personalizing AI Models with Kelvin Guu, Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google Brain May 04, 2023

Show notes

How do you personalize AI models? A popular school of thought in AI is to just dump all the data you need into pre-training or fine tuning. But that may be less efficient and less controllable than alternatives — using AI models as a reasoning engine against external data sources.

Kelvin Guu, Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google, joins Sarah and Elad this week to talk about retrieval, memory, training data attribution and model orchestration. At Google, he led some of the first efforts to leverage pre-trained LMs and neural retrievers, with >30 launches across multiple products. He has done some of the earliest work on retrieval-augmented language models (REALM) and training LLMs to follow instructions (FLAN).

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Show Notes:

[1:44] - Kelvin’s background in math, statistics and natural language processing at Stanford

[3:24] - The questions driving the REALM Paper

[7:08] - Frameworks around retrieval augmentation & expert models

[10:16] - Why is modularity important

[11:36] - FLAN Paper and instruction following

[13:28] - Updating model weights in real time and other continuous learning methods

[15:08] - Simfluence Paper & explainability with large language models

[18:11] - ROME paper, “Model Surgery” exciting research areas

[19:51] - Personal opinions and thoughts on AI agents & research

[24:59] - How the human brain compares to AGI regarding memory and emotions

[28:08] - How models become more contextually available

[30:45] - Accessibility of models

[33:47] - Advice to future researchers

Listener Q&A: AI Investment Hype, Foundation Models, Regulation, Opportunity Areas, and More Apr 27, 2023

Show notes

This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad answer listener questions about tech and AI. Topics covered include the evolution of open-source models, Elon AI, regulating AI, areas of opportunity, and AI hype in the investing environment. Sarah and Elad also delve into the impact of AI on drug development and healthcare, and the balance between regulation and innovation.

Show Notes:

[0:00:06] - The March of Progress for Open Source Foundation Models

[0:06:00] - Should AI Be Regulated?

[0:13:49] - Investing in AI and Exploring the AI Opportunity Landscape

[0:23:28] - The Impact of Regulation on Innovation

[0:31:55] - AI in Healthcare and Biotech

The Computing Platform Underlying AI, with Jensen Huang, Founder & CEO of NVIDIA Apr 20, 2023

Show notes

So much of the AI conversation today revolves around models and new applications. But this AI revolution would not be possible without one thing – GPUs, Nvidia GPUs.

The Nvidia A100 is the workhorse of today’s AI ecosystem. This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of NVIDIA, at their Santa Clara headquarters. Jensen co-founded the company in 1993 with a goal to create chips that accelerated graphics. Over the past thirty years, NVIDIA has gone far behind gaming and become a $674B behemoth. Jensen talks about the meaning of this broader platform shift for developers, making very long term bets in areas such as climate and biopharma, their next-gen Hopper chip, why and how NVIDIA chooses problems that are unsolvable today, and the source of his iconic leather jackets.

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

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Show Notes:

[1:26] - The early days when Jensen Co-founded NVIDIA

[4:58] - Why NVIDIA started to expand its aperture to artificial intelligence use cases

[10:42] - The moment in 2012 Jensen realized AI was going to be huge

[13:52] - How we’re in a broader platform shift in computer science

[17:48] - His vision for NVIDIA’s future lines of business

[18:09] - How NVIDIA has two motions: Shipping reliable chips and solving new use cases

[25:41] - Why no one should assume they’re right for the job of CEO and why not every company needs to be architected as the US military

[31:39] - What’s next for NVIDIA’s Hopper

[32:57] - Durability of Transformers

[35:08] - What Jensen is excited about in the future of AI & his advice for founders

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