Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron

Latest Episodes:

Ep 22: Notion AI Engineer Linus Lee: Behind the Scenes of Notion AI Nov 16, 2023

Show notes

Linus Lee is an AI engineer at Notion, one of the earliest and most effective adopters of AI. In the episode, Linus shares how Notion developed its AI products, including Writer, Autofill, and Q&A, which just launched on Tuesday. It was fascinating to learn how Notion structures its AI team and dogfoods its development process. Linus also explores the hardest to anticipate when going to market with new AI features, and how Notion thinks of its LLM partnerships. Overall, a wide-ranging conversation about the behind-the-scenes stories of one of the most widely used AI tools today.

(0:00) intro

(0:37) T-Swift

(2:07) Notion AI

(9:08) approach to staffing

(16:51) educating users and user behavior

(22:32) challenges in developing Notion Q&A

(30:42) working with Anthropic and Open AI

(35:50) avoiding hallucinations

(36:23) switching AI models

(39:32) iterating on interfaces

(42:03) over-hyped/under-hyped

(48:03) Midjourney

(51:07) Pat and Jacob debrief

With your co-hosts:

@ericabrescia

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)

@patrickachase

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn

@jacobeffron

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

@jordan_segall

- Partner at Redpoint

Jacob is an AI investor at Redpoint Ventures. He's led Redpoint's investments in companies like Abridge, Physical Intelligence & Legora. Follow Jacob on Twitter (@jacobeffron).
On Unsupervised Learning we probe the sharpest minds in AI in search for the truth about what's real today, what will be real in the future and what it all means for businesses and the world. If you're a builder, researcher or investor navigating the AI world, this podcast will help you deconstruct and understand the most important breakthroughs and see a clearer picture of reality. Subscribe to this show to stay up to date on our latest episodes.

Ep 21: Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson on Bringing Development to the Cloud, the GPU Market, and GenAI Music Oct 31, 2023

Show notes

Jacob and Pat sit down with Erik Bernhardsson, the founder of Modal Labs, a data infrastructure company providing GPU compute to data teams. On this episode we discussed Erik’s thoughts on the AI chip market, the most popular GenAI use cases on Modal, and even Oracle Cloud’s resurgence in the AI start-up market.

0:00 intro

0:45 motivation for founding Modal

6:35 advantages that Modal gives developers

9:21 early applications built with Modal

11:58 challenges for AI developers

16:31 GPU access today

20:09 Vector DB companies

24:55 why is cloud adoption so slow?

31:30 Oracle Cloud

39:22 AI music generation

42:05 over-hyped/under-hyped

43:26 what Erik wishes he knew when starting Modal

45:53 episode debrief

With your co-hosts:

@ericabrescia

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)

@patrickachase

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn

@jacobeffron

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

@jordan_segall

- Partner at Redpoint

Ep 20: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on the Future of AGI, Leading Anthropic, and AI Doom Chances Oct 16, 2023

Show notes

Special Crossover Episode: We're excited to share this conversation from "The Logan Bartlett Show," another Redpoint podcast that focuses on untold stories from tech's inner circle. In the episode, Logan Bartlett interviews Dario Amodei (CEO, Anthropic) on the future of AI.

In the episode, Dario gives detailed predictions on the AI industry for 2024, 2025, and beyond. He discusses his days at OpenAI, leaving to start Anthropic, why he doesn’t like the term AGI, what AI developments he’s most excited about right now, and much more. Sharing here because we believe our AI enthusiasts will find this episode particularly enlightening. Enjoy!

(0:00) Intro

(0:40) Joining OpenAI

(13:51) Are scaling and AI safety intertwined?

(19:51) Anthropic Early Days

(23:24) Amazon's Investment in Anthropic

(23:39) FTX investment in Anthropic

(25:10) Anthropic's Business Today

(30:11) Dario's Advice For Builders

(33:14) Should we pause AI progress?

(35:47) Future of AI

(37:15) Dario's Biggest AI Safety Concerns

(44:17) How Anthropic Deals With AI Bias

(48:49) Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy

(55:56) Testifying in front of Congress

(58:45) Will AI destroy humanity?

(59:20) GPT3 vs GPT4

(1:01:46) The memification of a CEO

(1:08:50) What are you most surprised by with AI?

(1:16:23) Why don't you like the term AGI?

(1:21:10) 2024 AI Predictions

(1:33:05) Dario's opinion on open-source models

(1:37:23) Probability of AI Catastrophe

(1:40:12) Misuse of AI

(1:44:04) Looking ahead: Dario's optimistic outlook on AI

With your co-hosts:

@ericabrescia

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)

@patrickachase

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn

@jacobeffron

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

@jordan_segall

- Partner at Redpoint

Ep 19: Tome CEO Keith Peiris on Disrupting Powerpoint and Scaling To Millions of Users Sep 28, 2023

Show notes

Jacob and Pat sit down with Tome Co-Founder and CEO Keith Peiris to discuss Tome’s go-to market strategy, deciphering through the “AI tourists” to identify their ideal customer profile (ICP), and the different hardware cost considerations when reaching enterprise scale.

0:00 intro

1:35 founding Tome

5:05 designing Tome

10:30 how users want to interact with AI

12:26 teaching users how to use Tome

20:13 partnering with model providers vs. building your own

28:43 model evaluation

31:23 building an enterprise product

37:48 thinking about pricing

43:43 Keith’s favorite Tome projects

44:26 over-hyped/under-hyped

With your co-hosts:

@ericabrescia

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)

@patrickachase

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn

@jacobeffron

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

@jordan_segall

- Partner at Redpoint

Ep 18: LlamaIndex CEO Jerry Liu on Trends in LLM Applications Sep 19, 2023

Show notes

Jacob and Pat sit down with LlamaIndex CEO Jerry Liu to discuss his motivations for building LlamaIndex, thoughts on building enterprise-ready LLM applications and agents, and when fine-tuning makes sense.

0:00 intro

1:02 the evolution of LlamaIndex

3:48 apps being built with LlamaIndex

6:39 making agents more effective

12:58 retrieval augmented generation

16:49 what’s the right level of abstraction for LlamaIndex?

19:42 balancing reasoning and knowledge

30:46 storage for embeddings

36:03 underutilized features of LlamaIndex

40:38 over-hyped/under-hyped

With your co-hosts:

@ericabrescia

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)

@patrickachase

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn

@jacobeffron

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

@jordan_segall

- Partner at Redpoint

Ep 17: Nomic AI Co-Founder Andriy Mulyar on "GPT-4-All", LLMs in Video Games, and Apple's AI Strategy Sep 12, 2023

Show notes

Jordan and Erica sit down with Andriy Mulyar, Founder & CTO of Nomic AI, and discuss his motivation for creating GPT4ALL, the importance of data-centric AI, the use of LLMs in video games, and which technology companies are well positioned to “win” in the GenAI market long term.

0:00 intro

0:59 getting into AI and meeting Brandon

2:27 starting Nomic

7:43 how people are using Atlas

10:31 hallucinations in LLMs

13:05 gpt4all

17:25 building LLMs into video games

26:31 where does Nomic go from here?

37:39 Apple’s role in the LLM space

38:57 Andriy’s thoughts on AGI

40:41 over-hyped/under-hyped

42:13 AI regulation going forward

With your co-hosts:

@jacobeffron

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

@patrickachase

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn

@ericabrescia

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)

@jordan_segall

- Partner at Redpoint

Ep 16: VP of Generative AI at Adobe Alexandru Costin on The Future of Content Creation Aug 29, 2023

Show notes

Patrick and Jacob sit down with Alexandru Costin, the VP of Generative AI and Sensei at Adobe, and discuss how Adobe’s early projects with generative AI in 2019 helped them move quickly upon the release of LLMs and diffusion models. Before leading Adobe’s generative AI efforts he founded InterAKT, a web development company, and led Adobe Romania for 10 years.

00:00 intro

01:44 Adobe Romania and background

02:26 AI projects at Adobe

10:03 incorporating AI into existing products

16:34 educating Adobe’s user base

25:13 avoiding copyright issues with Ai-generated content

32:12 using customer feedback

40:30 what is the right way to structure an AI team?

45:11 pricing AI products

48:00 the future of Adobe

With your co-hosts:

@jasoncwarner

- Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical

@ericabrescia

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)

@patrickachase

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn

@jacobeffron

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

@jordan_segall

- Partner at Redpoint

Ep 15: Snorkel AI CEO Alex Ratner on What's Needed for Wider-Spread Enterprise AI Adoption Aug 18, 2023

Show notes

Jacob sits down with Alex to discuss how Snorkel grew from an open-source project in a Stanford AI lab to a $1B company. Alex shares his thoughts on why data development is at the heart of AI development, why enterprises are slow to deploy LLM applications, and the importance of academia in the future of AI development.

00:00 intro

01:03 moving from academia to Snorkel

05:08 the evolution of Snorkel

18:33 improving pre-training

21:37 avoiding hallucinations and other errors

33:00 barriers to enterprises deploying AI

36:59 the Snorkel footprint of the future

39:37 the role of academia in AI development

42:57 over-hyped/under-hyped

44:50 how should AI regulation change going forward?

With your co-hosts:

@jasoncwarner

- Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical

@ericabrescia

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)

@patrickachase

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn

@jacobeffron

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

@jordan_segall

- Partner at Redpoint

Ep 14: Chroma CEO Jeff Huber on Vector Databases, Multimodal Embeddings & Building an AI Startup Aug 01, 2023

Show notes

On today’s episode we talk with Jeff Huber, the CEO and Co-founder of Chroma. We talk about what sets Chroma apart from its competitors, new developments in AI technology, and advice for listeners who want to get started in AI.

0:00 intro

1:02 starting chroma

6:08 vector databases

10:03 interesting use cases for vector databases

13:14 what sets chroma apart?

23:00 unresolved questions in LLMs

32:45 multiple agents vs. one agent to rule them all

34:50 chroma’s future

38:00 embedding models

43:00 over-hyped/under-hyped

44:30 AI regulation

48:42 is it too late to get into AI?

With your co-hosts:

@jasoncwarner

- Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical

@ericabrescia

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)

@patrickachase

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn

@jacobeffron

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health

@jordan_segall

- Partner at Redpoint

Ep 13: PathAI CEO Dr. Andy Beck on the Future of AI in Medical Diagnosis Jul 25, 2023

Show notes

Jacob sits down with PathAI Ceo Dr. Andy Beck to discuss the state of AI adoption in diagnosis, why Path acquired their own lab, pathologists' jobs in the future and nailing GTM to reach a ~$1B valuation.

00:00 intro

01:01 pathology and AI

13:30 nailing go-to-market strategy

19:47 how pathology labs can go digital

25:36 regulatory frameworks and roadblocks

33:05 do improvements in foundation models impact PathAI?

36:26 standardizing diagnosis

40:05 how will the job of a pathologist change going forward?

42:35 NASH

47:30 working in Daphne Koller’s lab

With your co-hosts:

@jasoncwarner - Former CTO GitHub, VP Eng Heroku & Canonical