No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups - Conviction

Latest Episodes:

Building Hard Tech in Hard Markets: Kyle Vogt on Cruise, Twitch, and The Bot Company Feb 20, 2025

Show notes

Kyle Vogt joins Sarah and Elad on this week’s episode of No Priors. A serial entrepreneur, Kyle co-founded Twitch, transforming live streaming, and later Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company acquired by GM for $1 billion. Now he’s taking on AI-powered home robotics with The Bot Company. In this episode, Kyle shares his journey building transformative tech companies, the challenges of scaling autonomous systems, and why he believes home robots are the next frontier. They also discuss the parallels between AVs and robotics, overcoming consumer skepticism, US vs. China manufacturing, and the policies needed to foster a competitive robotics industry.

Show Notes:

0:00 Introduction

0:29 Founding Cruise

3:12 Tesla vs. Waymo approach

4:44 Scaling autonomous vehicles

10:03 The Bot Company

16:35 Deploying robots in the home

17:56 Parallels between robots and AV markets

20:51 Personifying robots and overcoming consumer skepticism

25:00 Timeline on consumer robots

26:47 Chinese vs. US manufacturing

29:15 Fostering a competitive domestic robotics industry

34:00 Lessons from Cruise & personal philosophies

How Harvey AI is Changing the Legal Industry with Winston Weinberg Feb 14, 2025

Show notes

This week on No Priors, Sarah sits down with Harvey cofounder and CEO Winston Weinberg. Harvey is one of the leading application layer AI companies, building domain-specific AI for law firms, professional service providers, and the Fortune 500. They are already working with companies like Bridgewater, KKR, PWC, and O’Melveny with over $500M in funding from OpenAI, Sequoia, Kleiner, GV and Elad and Sarah. In this episode, Sarah and Winston cover AI product strategy, the future of professional services, company values, keeping up with research, and the law industry of the future.

Show Notes:

0:00 Introduction

2:39 Harvey’s founding story

3:46 Capability improvement

6:39 Building teams around AI capabilities

9:17 End to end task completion

12:37 Beginning with large industry leaders

17:21 Working with users skeptical of automation

20:40 Being a lawyer today and in the future

26:02 Adapting product for other domains

26:58 Hiring philosophy at Harvey

30:39 Lessons and mistakes as a founder

32:53 Personal drive

40:21 Advice to other founders

44:35 Prediction for next ChatGPT moment

DeepSeek, Deep Research, and 2025 Predictions with Sarah and Elad Feb 07, 2025

Show notes

This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad celebrate the 100th episode! They dive into the biggest AI stories of 2025, breaking down DeepSeek—truth vs. hype, the rapid consumer adoption, and the real cost of training the models. They debate model commoditization and the value of being a frontier model provider vs. building on existing work. Plus, they unpack OpenAI’s new Deep Research release and the latest on Stargate. Finally, they share bold predictions for 2025, covering robots, autonomous vehicles, local AI models, emerging data-generation strategies, and reasoning breakthroughs.

Show Notes:

0:00 Introduction

0:19 DeepSeek

5:38 Are models commoditizing?

8:33 DeepSeek’s consumer adoption

9:16 OpenAI’s Deep Research release

13:30 Stargate

15:04 Elad & Sarah’s Predictions for 2025

Rick Caruso on LA’s Wildfires, Policy Failures, and the Path Forward Jan 30, 2025

Show notes

This week on No Priors, Elad sits down with Rick Caruso, LA real estate developer and runner-up in the 2022 mayoral race. With experience serving under three LA mayors, as well as on the police commission and the board of water and power, Rick offers a unique perspective on the systemic failures that contributed to the devastation of the January 2025 wildfires in communities like the Palisades and Altadena. He discusses the steps he took to build more resilient infrastructure in his properties and how California can rebuild smarter to better prepare for future disasters. They also explore the state’s water management, rising crime, and how to leverage California’s vast natural resources and budget to create a better future for all residents.

Show Notes

0:00 Introduction

0:56 Caruso’s history in business and public service

3:36 Failures in fire prevention and response

5:58 How Caruso’s properties survived

8:26 Water shortages and infrastructure failures

9:47 Arson, looting, and crime in LA

15:03 Rebuilding

20:50 Allocating California’s resources effectively

26:15 Caruso’s future plans

What Can We Do About Wildfires? With Convective Capital’s Bill Clerico Jan 23, 2025

Show notes

This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad sit down with Bill Clerico, founder of Convective Capital, an early stage venture fund focused on technology-driven solutions for wildfire mitigation and climate resilience. The wildfires in Los Angeles have caused unprecedented property damage and immense hardship for countless individuals and families. This episode is devoted to diving into understanding what happened and what we can do in the future. Bill shares his insights into the increasing severity of wildfires, the role of policy, and how infrastructure issues, like outdated building codes and underfunded utilities, are contributing to the crisis. They discuss the latest innovations in fire-fighting technology, from advanced detection to drones, and how these tools can help mitigate future damage.

Show Notes:

0:00 Introduction

1:02 Why are wildfires getting worse?

5:37 Policies and regulatory decisions

10:47 Housing: building codes and permitting

13:19 Key factors in response

16:20 Improving water supply and city infrastructure

19:10 Preventing wildfires

21:26 Underinvestment in California’s utilities

26:53 Innovative fire fighting technology

29:35 Accelerating Los Angeles’ recovery

34:29 Actions homeowners, insurance companies, and governments can take

How AI Agents Are Transforming Customer Support, with Decagon’s Jesse Zhang Jan 16, 2025

Show notes

Today on No Priors, co-founder and CEO of Decagon, Jesse Zhang, joins Elad to discuss the future of agentic customer support. Decagon provides AI-powered customer interactions for companies like Rippling, Notion, Duolingo, Classpass, Substack, Vanta, Eventbrite, and more. Jesse shares the thesis behind starting Decagon, why he sees customer support as the ideal entry point for agentic technology, and what areas of AI excite him most. They also discuss voice-based interfaces, issues with latency in current capabilities, and the connection between young math olympiad communities and today’s AI startups.

Show Notes:

0:00 Introduction

0:30 Starting Decagon

3:15 Business impact of adopting agents for customer support and customer ops

8:00 AI infrastructure and models for customer success agents

12:05 Voice-based capabilities and text-to-speech engines

15:00 Combatting latency

16:25 Crossover of math and AI communities

21:12 Exciting areas of AI

25:29 Strengths and weaknesses of agents

Erik Bernhardsson on Creating Tools That Make AI Feel Effortless Jan 09, 2025

Show notes

Today on No Priors, Elad chats with Erik Bernhardsson, founder and CEO of Modal Labs, a platform simplifying ML workflows by providing a serverless infrastructure designed to streamline deployment, scaling, and development for AI engineers. Erik talks about his early work on Spotify’s ML algorithms, what Modal offers today, and his vision for building an end-to-end solution for AI engineers. They dive into GPU trends, cloud vs on-premise setups, and when to train custom models vs use off-the-shelf solutions. Erik also shares his thoughts on the evolving role of AI in fields like coding, physics, and music.

Show Notes:

0:00 Introduction

0:22 Erik's early interest in ML infra

1:22 Founding Modal Labs

4:17 State of GPU use today and what’s to come

7:14 Modal's end-to-end vision

9:00 Differentiating amongst competition

10:20 Cloud vs on-premise

12:35 Popular AI models

13:20 Gaps in AI infrastructure

14:55 Insights on vector databases

16:48 Training models vs off-the-shelf models

17:47 AI’s impact on coding and physics

22:14 AI's impact on music

The Best of 2024 with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil Dec 26, 2024

Show notes

2024 has been a year of transformative technological progress, marked by conversations that have reshaped our understanding of AI's evolution and what lies ahead. Throughout the year, Sarah and Elad have had the privilege of speaking with some of the brightest minds in the field. As we look back on the past months, we’re excited to share highlights from some of our favorite No Priors podcast episodes. Featured guests include Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Andrej Karpathy (OpenAI, Tesla), Bret Taylor (Sierra), Aditya Ramesh, Tim Brooks, and Bill Peebles (OpenAI’s Sora Team), Dmitri Dolgov (Waymo), Dylan Field (Figma), and Alexandr Wang (Scale). Want to dive deeper? Listen to the full episodes here:

NVIDIA's Jensen Huang on AI Chip Design, Scaling Data Centers, and his 10-Year Bet No Priors Ep. 89 | With NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang
The Road to Autonomous Intelligence, With Andrej Karpathy from OpenAI and Tesla No Priors Ep. 80 | With Andrej Karpathy from OpenAI and Tesla
Transforming Customer Service through Company Agents, with Sierra’s Bret Taylor No Priors Ep. 82 | With CEO of Sierra Bret Taylor
OpenAI’s Sora team thinks we’ve only seen the "GPT-1 of video models" No Priors Ep.61 | OpenAI's Sora Leaders Aditya Ramesh, Tim Brooks and Bill Peebles
Waymo’s Journey to Full Autonomy: AI Breakthroughs, Safety, and Scaling No Priors Ep. 87 | With Co-CEO of Waymo Dmitri Dolgov
Designing the Future: Dylan Field on AI, Collaboration, and Independence No Priors Ep. 55 | With Figma CEO Dylan Field
The Data Foundry for AI with Alexandr Wang from Scale No Priors Ep. 65 | With Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang

Show Notes:

0:00 Introduction

0:15 Jensen Huang on building at data-center scale

4:00 Andrej Karpathy on the AI exo-cortex, model control, and a shift to smaller models

7:14 Bret Taylor on the agentic future of business interactions

11:17 OpenAI’s Sora team on visual models and their role in AGI

15:53 Waymo’s Dmitri Dolgov on bridging the gap to full autonomy and the challenge of 100% accuracy

19:00 Figma’s Dylan Field on the future of interfaces and new modalities

23:29 Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang on the journey to AGI

26:29 Outro

Revolutionizing Customer Success with Agency’s Elias Torres Dec 19, 2024

Show notes

Today on No Priors, Sarah sits down with Elias Torres, CEO and founder of Agency, an AI agent for customer success teams. Elias shares his journey from growing up in Nicaragua to founding several companies, leading engineering at HubSpot, and selling Drift for $1B. He also discusses his work consulting with OpenAI in 2022, which deepened his understanding of the business opportunity LLMs presented and inspired him to start Agency. In this episode, Elias offers a unique perspective on the future of AI and customer success, explaining how current software has fallen short and his vision for a new generation where customers have direct relationships, spend less time on tasks, and have software working invisibly on their behalf. They also discuss the evolving landscape of hiring as teams shrink, and Elias reveals his ambitious plan to reach $1B in revenue with fewer than 100 employees.

Show notes:

0:00 Introduction

0:34 Elias’ journey to entrepreneurship

2:36 Growing HubSpot to IPO and founding Drift

6:19 Consulting with OpenAI, learning about LLMs, and diving into AI

9:35 Founding Agency to focus on customer success and AI-driven solutions

11:40 What will a customer experience look like in 5 years?

15:48 Company building in an era of AI, as a 5th time founder

18:32 Reducing headcount while raising the bar on hiring

20:35 Key challenges in building Agency and crafting a standout product

23:06 Addressing software flaws and transitioning to an era of intuitive, self-operating solutions

26:27 Timeline for the next-gen software revolution + the power of building from first principles

How Diamond Cooling Could Power the Future of AI, with Akash Systems Dec 12, 2024

Show notes

In this episode of No Priors, Sarah sits down with Felix Ejeckam and Ty Mitchell, founders of Akash Systems, a company pioneering diamond-based cooling technology for semiconductors used in space applications and large-scale AI data centers. Felix and Ty discuss how their backgrounds in materials science led them to tackle one of the most pressing challenges in tech today: thermal efficiency and heat management at scale. They explore how Akash is overcoming the limitations of traditional semiconductors and how their innovations could significantly boost AI performance. Felix and Ty also talk about their collaboration with India’s sovereign cloud provider, the importance of strengthening U.S. manufacturing in the AI chip market, and the role Akash Systems could play in advancing satellite technologies.

Show Notes:

0:00 Introduction

0:30 What is Akash Systems?

2:12 Felix’s personal path to building Akash Systems

4:45 Ty’s approach to acquiring customers

6:40 Challenges of operating in space

7:54 Live demo on diamond’s conductivity

9:50 Heat issues in data centers

15:38 Heat as a fundamental limit to technological progress

20:44 Akash’s role in the semiconductor market

22:54 Growing diamonds

25:10 Collaborating with India’s sovereign cloud provider