The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck

0:46 - What is Nomic AI & how it got started

5:57 - Building GPT4ALL

7:23 - Running LLMs on a personal computer

16:00 - Nomic Atlas

21:33 - Launching Nomic Embed

28:10 The Importance of Data in AI

31:10 - Benchmarking LLMs

32:56 - The Future of Nomic AI

36: 22 - Building an AI Startup in New York

39:10 - Nomic AI is hiring

Poolside: AI for Software Development with CTO Eiso Kant Dec 20, 2023

Today, we’re thrilled to be joined by Eiso Kant, CTO + Co-Founder of Poolside, the buzzy new AI tool for software development. Eiso and Matt talk about Poolside’s foundational model, the critical role of data quality in AI, the importance of controlling all levels of the stack and the merits of building a global AI company out of Europe, and more.

Thank you to everyone who has joined us for Season 1 of the MAD Podcast. We will be taking a short break for the winter holidays and will be back with an exciting new lineup of great speakers for Season 2 on Wednesdays in January. If you like this show, you can find the video recording of this episode -- along with many more -- on the Data Driven NYC channel on YouTube. Important links are in the show notes below.

twitter.com/eisokant

poolside.ai

Show Notes:

[00:38:00] Introducing Eiso Kant, Co-founder and CTO of the AI startup, Poolside;

[00:39:16] Eiso's Background; his journey, from starting as a young programmer to founding several companies, including Source{d}, a pioneer in applying deep learning to software source code;

[00:40:33] Formation of Poolside; the collaboration between Eiso and his co-founder, Jason Warner, who was previously the CTO of GitHub and VC with Redpoint Ventures;

[00:42:14] Poolside's Vision and potential to improve software development;

[00:47:17] Narrowing Vision to Product Development; the importance of sequence in a company's growth, focusing on AI pair programming assistants as a start, moving towards a more autonomous future;

[00:50:32] Initial Product Focus, user base, and approach to providing a vertically integrated AI stack for developers;

[00:53:05] Reinforcement Learning from Code Execution Feedback;

[01:02:29] Data Handling and Synthetic Data Generation; the importance of data quality and Poolside's strategy for generating and refining training data;

[01:12:05] Engineering Behind Poolside's AI; the challenges and strategies Poolside is adopting, including building a team of strong engineers and creating a scalable architecture from scratch;

[01:16:52] Choosing Europe as a Base for Poolside;

[01:20:22] Poolside's Future Plans; the roadmap for Poolside, including launching products and APIs, exploring enterprise solutions, and creating a sustainable revenue-generating business;

ASAPP: Generative AI for Contact Centers with CEO Gustavo Sapoznik Dec 13, 2023

Today, we’re joined by Gustavo Sapoznik, Founder and CEO of ASAPP, the generative AI platform transforming contact centers. Matt + Gustavo discuss the magnitude of challenges to overcome in this market, how their AI tech is designed to help humans, the reason smart people should choose working at a startup over Big Tech, and more.

This session was recorded live at a recent Data Driven NYC, our in-person, monthly event series. If you are ever in New York, you can find us on Eventbrite by searching for "FirstMark Capital". Events run monthly and are free and open to everyone. And as always, if you enjoy the MAD podcast, please subscribe and feel free to leave us a comment or rating.

asapp.com

twitter.com/asapp

Show Notes:

[00:00:45] Introducing Gustavo Sapoznik, Founder & CEO of ASAPP, a unicorn AI startup based in New York;

[00:01:00] How ASAPP started with a mission to “end bad customer service” after a frustrating phone call Mr. Sapoznik had with his cable provider;

[00:02:44] ASAPP’s product philosophy and how the customer service is a three-legged stool with companies, customers, and agents;

[00:05:11] How ASAPP automates what they can and augments the rest to make agents more productive;

[00:07:12] The evolution of ASAPP’s offerings including how ASAPP technology makes agents more productive;

[00:9:16] How ASAPP’s technology reduces response times and improves quality for agents by including transcription, auto complete, and real-time scoring of interactions for quality assurance;

[00:13:49] How ASAPP has evolved since 2014; their research-first approach, building in-house AI capabilities, training their own models, and their recent exploration of using open-source checkpoints;

[00:15:05] How Mr. Sapoznik hired the guy who ran all NLP research at Google;

[00:16:04] How cost, latency, and accuracy in their AI models differentiate ASAPP from common AI APIs available today;

[00:18:49] Agent models v. Language models and how ASAPP AI is modularized for large teams with established tech stacks;

[00:20:09] Mr. Sapoznik shares insights on selling to large enterprises and why he believes building a sales machine is equally, if not more important, than the product itself;

[00:23:08] How to recruit and retain top AI talent;

[00:27:42] Lessons learned from working with notable board members, including the three key dimensions of support from a good board: being a sounding board, providing tactical advice and connections, and instilling a sense of accountability and motivation;

Scott Belsky: AI & Creativity Dec 06, 2023

Today, we’re excited to chat with Scott Belsky - author, entrepreneur, investor and Chief Strategy Officer at Adobe. Matt + Scott discuss the impact of AI on creative work, how Adobe is incorporating AI across their products, and what the future creative tools landscape might look like.

This session was recorded live at a recent Data Driven NYC, our in-person, monthly event series. If you are ever in New York, you can find us on Eventbrite by searching for "FirstMark Capital". Events run monthly and are free and open to everyone. And as always, if you enjoy the MAD podcast, please subscribe and leave us a comment.

Implications, by Scott Belsky

twitter.com/scottbelsky

Show Notes:

[00:53] How Adobe uses AI to enhance user experience, streamline onboarding and automate tasks across their product suite;

[01:30] How AI impacts Adobe's business, making creative processes accessible with features like the context bar in Photoshop;

[02:13] Firefly's journey: internal decisions, training challenges, and a commitment to using licensed material for ethical AI;

[03:58] Moral considerations in Firefly's development: the decision to use licensed material, commercial viability, and addressing user comparisons;

[05:52] Adobe's homegrown approach to generative AI models: in-house development and partnerships for specific capabilities like LLM;

[06:08] Adobe Sensei's 10-year evolution: developing AI technologies, the non-profit Content Authenticity Initiative, and content credentials establishing asset provenance;

[09:17] Adobe's new AI advancements: Firefly Image Model 2, Generative Match, and the vector model for illustration;

[11:16] Firefly Editor's revolutionary image editing: dynamically generating pixels, real-time object manipulation, and Adobe's commitment to pushing technological boundaries;

[12:41] Rapid integration of AI features: Firefly models and playground, surfacing on a website for user testing, and collaboration within Adobe's design organization;

[14:32] How Adobe's AI and data teams are structured and leveraging in-house development for competitive advantage;

[15:47] Future of work and creativity: AI's impact on raising the bar for digital experiences, accelerating creative processes, and the evolving landscape of personalized social content;

[19:11] Leveraging technology to reduce friction, streamline processes, and unlock creative flow;

[20:09] Impact of AI on business models: questioning time-based pricing, anticipating a shift to value-based models, and reconsidering compensation for creative professionals;

[21:10] Parallels with historical Internet Service Providers, the rapid evolution of ideas, and reflections on sustainable business models;

[24:53] Scott’s criteria for evaluating AI investments: valuing skeptical entrepreneurs, acknowledging temporary uniqueness, and emphasizing empathy with customers;

[26:40] Navigating challenges in 2023: Tough decisions for entrepreneurs, evaluating conviction, and the importance of sticking together through the "messy middle”;

Glean AI: The ML-Powered Accounting Solution with CEO Howard Katzenberg Nov 29, 2023

Today, we’re joined by Howard Katzenberg, CEO of Glean AI, a machine learning powered accounts payable platform. Matt + Howard discuss Glean’s founding story, how Glean helps CFOs make insight driven choices, and more.

This session was recorded live at a recent Data Driven NYC, our in-person, monthly event series. If you are ever in New York, you can find us on Eventbrite by searching for "FirstMark Capital". Events run monthly and are free and open to everyone. And as always, if you enjoy the MAD podcast, please subscribe and leave us a comment.

Shownotes:

[00:00:35] Howard's background;

[00:01:15] Challenges with manual FP&A;

[00:02:54] Approval Process gap realization and opportunity for Glean AI;

[00:04:40] How Glean AI is like “bill.com with a brain”;

[00:05:06] Enhanced functionalities beyond basic AP automation;

[00:06:32] Glean AI’s Inception and AI Models;

[00:07:54] Why Glean AI is unique;

[00:08:25] The evolution of Glean AI’s ML stack;

[00:10:44] Defensibility and how Glean AI offers vendor pricing insights to its network;

[00:12:23] Success stories and customer value;

[00:14:47] Future plans for Glean AI;

[00:16:39] Navigating industry and technical expertise;

[00:18:41] Audience Q&A

Humanloop: LLM Collaboration and Optimization with CEO Raza Habib Nov 22, 2023

Today, we have the pleasure of chatting with Raza Habib, CEO of Humanloop, the platform for LLM collaboration and evaluation. Matt and Raza cover how to understand and optimize model performance, lessons learned about model evaluation and feedback, and explore the future of model fine-tuning.

twitter.com/RazRazcle

humanloop.com

In Conversation with Florian Douetteau Blog Post

Shownotes:

[00:00:47] How Humanloop helps product and engineering teams build reliable applications on top of large language models by providing tools to find, manage, and version prompts;

[00:03:05] Where Humanloop fits into the MAD landscape as LM / LLM Ops;

[00:02:40] The challenges of evaluating and monitoring LLM;

[00:03:40] Why evaluating LLMs and generative AI is subjective given its stochastic attributes;

[00:04:40] Why evaluation is important during development and production stages of LLMs to make informed design decisions, and how that challenge evolves In production to monitoring system behavior;

[00:05:40] The need for regression testing with LLMs;

[00:06:10] How Humanloop makes it easy for users to capture feedback including Implicit signals of user satisfaction, such as post-interaction actions and edits to generated content;

[00:07:40] Why and how Humanloop uses guardrails in the app to ensure effective LLM use and implementation;

[00:08:38] Why using an LLM as part of the evaluation process can introduce additional uncertainty and noise; with turtles all the way down;

[00:09:40] How evaluators on Humanloop are restricted to binary yes-or-no style questions or numerical scores to maintain reliability with LLMs in production.

[00:10:40] Why a new set of tools were needed to monitor and observe LLM performance;

[00:11:40] How Humanloop’s interactive environment allows users to find and fix bugs in a prompt, including logs to support issue identification, and then run what-if style analysis by changing the prompt or information retrieval system — allowing for quick interventions and turnaround times within minutes to hours instead of days/weeks;

[00:12:40] Why having evaluation and observability closely connected to prompt engineering tools is critical for speed;

[00:13:40] How prompt engineering is like writing software specifications for the model, enabling domain experts to have a more direct impact on product development, and democratizing access and reducing reliance on engineers to implement the desired features;

[00:15:40] The key differences between popular LLMs on the market today;

[00:18:40] How the quality of open-source models has been rapidly improving, and how LLMs use tools or function calling to access APIs to go beyond simple text-based interactions;

[00:21:22] How Humanloop empowers non-technical experts;

[00:22:40] Where Humanloop fits within the AI ecosystem as an collaborative tool for enterprises building language models where collaboration and robust evaluation are crucial;

[00:25:40] How Humanloop customers are often problem-aware, and how the go-to-market motion is mainly inbound, but sales-led

[00:27:48] How Humanloop serves as a central place for storing prompts and sharing learnings across teams;

[00:28:24] Raza’s thoughts on Open Source v. Closed Source models in the AI community;

[00:30:40] The potential consequences of restricting access to models and Raza’s case for regulating end use cases and punishing malicious use rather than banning the technology altogether;

[00:33:40] Next steps for Humanloop;

DeepScribe: The AI-Powered Medical Scribe with CEO Akilesh Bapu Nov 15, 2023

Today we're joined by Akilesh Bapu, CEO and Founder of DeepScribe, the platform using AI and Natural Language Processing to doctor/ patient transcripts. Matt and Akilesh go into DeepScribe's clinical use cases, supervised vs. unsupervised learning, and how critical it still is to have a human in the loop in a medical setting.

Lamini: Fine-Tuning LLMs for The Enterprise with CEO Sharon Zhou Nov 08, 2023

Today we have the pleasure of chatting with Sharon Zhou, CEO of Lamini, an LLM platform for the enterprise. Matt and Sharon go over the battle between prompting and fine-tuning, how the Lamini platform enables fine-tuning to be done "one billion times faster", and their recently-announced "LLM Super-station" in partnership with AMD.

Perplexity AI: The AI-Powered Answer Engine with CEO Aravind Srinivas Nov 01, 2023

Today we're joined by Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, a chatbot-style AI conversational engine that directly answers users' questions with sources and citations. Matt & Aravind discuss Perplexity's founding story, the platform itself, and more.

This session was recorded live at a recent Data Driven NYC, our in-person, monthly event series. If you are ever in New York, you can find us on Eventbrite by searching for "FirstMark Capital". Events run monthly and are free and open to everyone. And as always, if you enjoy the MAD podcast, please subscribe and feel free to leave us a comment or rating.

Diffblue: AI For Code Testing with CEO Mathew Lodge Oct 25, 2023

Today we're joined by Mathew Lodge, CEO of Diffblue, an AI platform that uses reinforcement learning to autonomously test software. We chat about the "AI for code" landscape, the Diffblue platform, and why prompt engineering is not a thing.

Moonhub AI: The On-Demand AI Recruiter with Founder & CEO Nancy Xu Oct 18, 2023

Today we're joined by Nancy Xu, AI Investor and CEO and Founder of Moonhub AI, the AI recruiting platform helping companies shorten and speed up the recruiting process while also helping employers reach a more diverse pool of candidates. We dive into how the Moonhub platform operates, Nancy's thoughts on opportunities for AI startups, her journey as an investor, and interesting projects she has her eye on.

Dust: Secure AI Assistants for The Enterprise with Co-Founder Stanislas Polu Oct 11, 2023

Today we're joined by Stanislas Polu, Co-Founder of Dust, a startup building Secure AI assistants for the enterprise. We dive into Stanislas's journey to founding Dust including his experience at Open AI, the path to generative AI adoption in the enterprise, and the rise of the French AI ecosystem.

Imbue: AI Agents That Can Reason with CEO Kanjun Qiu Oct 04, 2023

Today we're joined by Kanjun Qiu, CEO of Imbue, an independent research company developing AI agents with general intelligence, fresh off the announcement of their $200M Series B round of financing. We talk about Kanjun's journey, Imbue's vision and the future of AI agents.

Guardrails AI: Deploying Generative AI Safely with CEO Shreya Rajpal Sep 27, 2023

Today we're joined by Shreya Rajpal, Co-founder & CEO of Guardrails AI for a conversation on the Guardrails platform, mitigating AI hallucinations and the role fine tuning and retrieval augmented generation play in that.

AI21 Labs: Bringing Reliable AI to the Enterprise with Co-Founder Ori Goshen Sep 20, 2023

Today we are joined by Ori Goshen, Co-founder and Co-CEO of AI21 Labs, for a conversation about AI 21's origin story, their differentiated approach to AI, and their ambitious platform and applications.

AI, Gaming, and Building a Data Science Brand - A Conversation with Carly Taylor, Founder of Rebel Data Science Sep 13, 2023

Today we are excited to welcome Carly Taylor for a broad discussion covering the numerous ways she's ingrained in the AI & data world including AI at Activision’s Call of Duty franchise, consulting at Rebel Data Science and being a prominent voice for data science on social media.

Deepset AI: NLP For The Enterprise with CEO Milos Rusic Sep 06, 2023

We're joined by Milos Rusic, CEO & Co-founder of deepset AI for a conversation on deepset's origin story as a bootstrapped company, a deep dive into the Haystack open source project and deepset's Cloud platform, and emerging applications for NLP and LLMs in the enterprise.

BigID: Data Visibility & Control with CEO Dimitri Sirota Aug 30, 2023

Dimitri Sirota, Co-Founder and CEO of BigID, which has raised $280+ to date, joins us for a chat about the importance and complexities around knowing and controlling your enterprise data.

Hippocratic AI: A Safety-First LLM for Healthcare with CEO Munjal Shah Aug 23, 2023

Today we are diving into the world of generative AI in Healthcare with CEO and Co-founder of Hippocratic AI, Munjal Shah. In this episode Matt and Munjal discuss the vision for Hippocratic AI, and the unique challenges and opportunities of deploying generative AI in the world of healthcare.

You.com: An AI Chatbot to Search The Web with CEO Richard Socher Aug 16, 2023

This week’s guest is top AI researcher, entrepreneur and investor Richard Socher, CEO of AI search engine You.com. In this conversation, we go behind the scenes and discuss some core design principles and building blocks of the You.com platform, as well as its market positioning. We close the discussion with Richard’s investment thesis and approach in the fast moving AI market

Weights & Biases: The Developer-First MLOps Platform with CEO Lukas Biewald Aug 09, 2023

Today we have the pleasure of talking to Lukas Biewald, CEO of Weights and Biases for a conversation about Lukas' entrepreneurial journey building two companies in the MLOps space, the current capabilities of the Weights & Biases platform, lessons learned on the Go to Market front, and more!

Cockroach Labs: A Cloud SQL Database Built for Survival with CEO Spencer Kimball Aug 02, 2023

Relational databases, data cloud's effect on infrastructure, serverless databases, and GTM strategies: Matt Turck and CockroachDB's Spencer Kimball cover it all in today's episode.

Ada: AI-First Customer Service with CEO Mike Murchison Jul 26, 2023

Today we're joined by Mike Murchison, Co-Founder & CEO of AI-native customer service platform Ada, for a talk about about the Ada platform, reinventing customer service in the age of Generative AI, and how AI should be onboarded and trained like an employee.

Synthesia: Creating Video with Generative AI with CEO Victor Riparbelli Jul 19, 2023

Today we're joined by Victor Riparbelli, CEO of the generative AI video platform Synthesia that just last month hit a $1B valuation after raising their Series C funding round. Matt and Victor go into the Synthesia platform, what it takes to build a successful AI company, and dive into the ethics of generative AI videos.

LlamaIndex: Unleashing LLMs on Your Data with CEO Jerry Liu Jul 12, 2023

This week we're joined by Jerry Liu, Co-Founder & CEO of LlamaIndex, a startup that offers a data framework for connecting custom data sources to large language models, for a conversation about the emerging Generative AI infrastructure stack, how startup founders navigate a field as new and fast paced as Generative AI, and more.

Dataiku: The Single Platform for Everyday AI with CEO Florian Douetteau Jul 05, 2023

Today we're joined by Florian Douetteau, CEO and Co-Founder of Dataiku, for a conversation about the Dataiku platform, emerging use cases for Generative AI in the enterprise and some leadership lessons learned along the way.

You can find Florian's essay, The Children of AI, here: https://children-of-ai.florian-douetteau.com

twitter.com/fdouetteau

dataiku.com