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. Follow this show and consider enabling notifications to stay up to date on our latest episodes.
Unsupervised Learning is a podcast by Redpoint Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund that has invested in companies like Snowflake, Stripe, and Mistral.
Hosted by Redpoint investor Jacob Effron alongside Patrick Chase, Jordan Segall and Erica Brescia.
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Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere, delves into the evolving landscape of enterprise AI, highlighting successful use cases in healthcare, customer support, and research, and the critical role of reasoning and custom models using synthetic data. He explains Cohere's North platform, designed to simplify application development and foster vertical integration, alongside the company's international strategy and efforts in multilingual model development. Gomez also shares insights on the future of foundation models, the shifting scaling hypothesis, and an optimistic view on AI's societal impact and manageable risks.
At Redpoint’s annual meeting with investors, Redpoint partners Scott Raney, Alex Bard, Patrick Chase and Jacob Effron shared unfiltered thoughts on some of the most topical questions in AI today, where value will accrue, which industries are best positioned for defensibility at the application layer, and more. (0:00) Intro (0:39) AI Investment Landscape (1:30) Market Projections (3:25) Strategic Imperatives in AI (6:04) AI Model Layer Insights (10:06) Infrastructure Layer (11:46) Application Lay...
To unpack some of the most topical questions in AI, I’m joined by two fellow AI podcasters: Swyx and Alessio Fanelli, co-hosts of the Latent Space podcast. We’ve been wanting to do a cross-over episode for a while and finally made it happen. Swyx brings deep experience from his time at AWS, Temporal, and Airbyte, and is now focused on AI agents and dev tools. Alessio is an investor at Decibel, where he’s been backing early technical teams pushing the boundaries of infrastructure and applied AI. ...
Two weeks ago, OpenAI released its set of tools to help developers build agentic systems. Today on Unsupervised Learning, Nikunj Handa (Product Lead) and Steve Coffey (Eng Lead) answer some of the biggest questions around how developers should be thinking about building in the agentic paradigm in 2025. (0:00) Intro (0:53) OpenAI’s Vision for Consumer Interaction (4:51) Building Multi-Agent Systems for Business Solutions (6:53) Challenges and Innovations in AI Fine-Tuning (13:20) Exploring Comput...
On the latest episode of Unsupervised Learning, Jacob is joined by two of the most influential minds in AI today. 🔹 Noam Shazeer, co-inventor of the Transformer 🔹 Jack Rae, Research Director at DeepMind and one of the leads behind Gemini’s Flash Thinking We got to ask them all of the top-of-mind questions in AI today about where we are, where we’re headed and what it means for businesses and the world. Some key take-aways: (0:00) Intro (1:30) Exploring Gemini 2.0 (4:04) Challenges with Evals a...
On today’s Unsupervised Learning, Mike Schroepfer (ex-CTO of Meta and founder of Gigascale Capital ) reveals why energy is a key bottleneck holding AI progress back. Mike discusses how we can scale energy production to democratize AI globally and explores AI’s role in climate change. He also reflects on a decade as Meta’s CTO and how AI coding is transforming the CTO role. Finally, he offers predictions on the future of AI developer tools, VR, and open-source models. (0:00) Intro (0:43) AI's Rol...
Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. The company operates a 24/7 public ride-hail service and provides over 150,000 trips each week across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin, making mobility more accessible, sustainable, and safer for everyone. In this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we dive deep into the frontier where AI meets hardware — and there’s no better guide than Vincent Vanhoucke, Distinguished E...
David is an OG in AI who has been at the forefront of many of the major breakthroughs of the past decade. His resume: VP of Engineering at OpenAI, a key contributor to Google Brain, co-founder of Adept, and now leading Amazon’s SF AGI Lab. In this episode we focused on how far test-time compute gets us, the real implications of DeepSeek, what agents milestones he’s looking for and more. [0:00] Intro [1:14] DeepSeek Reactions and Market Implications [2:44] AI Models and Efficiency [4:11] Challeng...
Arvind Narayanan is one of the leading voices in AI when it comes to cutting through the hype. As a Princeton professor and co-author of AI Snake Oil, he’s one of the most thoughtful voices cautioning against both unfounded fears and overblown promises in AI. In this episode, Arvind dissects the future of AI in education, its parallels to past tech revolutions, and how our jobs are already shifting toward managing these powerful tools. Some of our favorite take-aways: [0:00] Intro [0:46] Reasoni...
In this episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sit down with Dylan Patel, Chief Analyst at SemiAnalysis, to break down what these sweeping changes really mean. From how they consolidate power among Big Tech to China's narrowing options for AI dominance, we unpacked the impact of this regulatory shift. Follow SemiAnalysis: https://semianalysis.com/ [0:00] Intro [1:07] Grading the AI Diffusion Rule [3:48] What Will Happen to the Malaysian Data Centers? [7:23] How do the Regulations Favor Giant Tech ...
In this cross-over episode with The Logan Bartltett Show, Marc Benioff (CEO, Salesforce) responds to Satya Nadella’s recent predictions and shares his thoughts on the current reality of Agi. He dives into the rise of digital labor, the multi-trillion-dollar potential of agentic technology, and what the future split between software and agentic revenue might look like. Marc also discusses why CEOs need to stay grounded in delivering actionable solutions, and he emphasizes the moral obligation bus...
In our new world of AI, few minds shine as brightly as Bob McGrew's. Until November Bob was the Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, and before that led Palantir’s engineering and product management for the first decade of its existence. He’s seen it all and we were fortunate to get his insights and vision for the future in one of my favorite episodes of Unsupervised Learning to date: [0:00] Intro [0:44] Debating AI Model Capabilities [0:57] Inside vs Outside Perspectives on AI Progress [1:39] Chal...
Lin Qiao, the co-founder of Fireworks.ai, sits down for a deep dive into the future of AI. Lin ran the PyTorch team at Meta, which developed some of the most fundamental open-source AI software in use today. She’s got a riveting perspective on the AI landscape that is a must-listen. [0:00] Intro [1:06] Fireworks: Revolutionizing AI Inference [2:12] Challenges in AI Model Development [4:05] The Future of AI: Compound Systems [4:32] Designing Effective AI Tools [10:26] Customization and Fine-Tunin...
Noam Brown, renowned AI researcher and key figure at OpenAI, joins us for a deep dive into the o1 release. Recorded just one day before o1’s full public debut, this episode explores the groundbreaking advancements and challenges behind this innovative test-time compute model. We discuss the technical breakthroughs that set o1 apart, its unique capabilities compared to previous models, and how it disrupts traditional paradigms in AI development. Noam also shares insights into OpenAI’s approach to...
For this episode of Unsupervised Learning we spoke with Russ d'Sa, co-founder of LiveKit, a company at the forefront of voice AI technology. Russ thinks of LiveKit as a “nervous system,” powering the sensory interfaces humans use to interact with AI – including the Advanced Voice feature in ChatGPT as well as applications like Character.ai, Spotify and many more. Russ talked about when voice makes sense as an interface, the exciting new UX paradigms on the horizon, the intersection of voice and ...
Jonathan Frankle is the Chief AI Scientist at Databricks ($43B), which he joined through the acquisition of MosaicML in July 2023. Databricks has over 12,000 customers on the cutting edge of AI; Jonathan works to anticipate their needs and offer solutions even as the tech is rapidly evolving. [0:00] Intro [0:52] Incentives and Team Motivation at Databricks [2:40] The Evolution of AI Models: Transformers vs. LSTMs [5:27] Mosaic and Databricks: A Strategic Merger [7:31] Guidance on AI Model Traini...
I sat down with DeepL cofounder Jarek Kutylowski. DeepL is a comprehensive Language AI platform that enables organizations to communicate effectively across languages, cultures, and markets. Jarek shared a treasure trove of insights on the past, present, and future of AI translation. Here were some standout moments: [0:00] Intro [0:38] The Rise of AI and DeepL's Journey [1:41] DeepL's Competitive Edge and Market Impact [2:41] Innovations in AI Translation [4:39] DeepL's Product and Use Cases [7:...
Joshua Xu is co-founder and CEO of HeyGen -- the fast-growing AI video creation and translation platform. You can upload a video, or create a new one from a script using an AI avatar as your star, and HeyGen will translate it into 175 languages. HeyGen now serves over 40,000 customers and is generating $35+ million in revenue. [0:00] Intro [0:37] HeyGen's Viral Moments [1:23] Creating Magic with AI [3:30] The Future of AI in Video Production [9:29] HeyGen's Use Cases and Customer Base [13:15] AI...
Percy Liang is a Stanford professor and co-founder of Together AI, driving some of the most critical advances in AI research. Percy is also a trained classical pianist, which clearly influences the way he thinks about technology. We explored the evolution of AI from simple token prediction to autonomous agents capable of long-term problem-solving, the problem of interpretability, and the future of AI safety in complex, real-world systems. [0:00] Intro [0:46] Discussing OpenAI's O1 Model [2:21] T...
Douwe’s contributions to AI are truly a part of its bedrock foundations. He wrote the first paper on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and has raised over $100 million to help enterprises build contextual language models that fit their use cases. Before Contextual he was the head of research at Hugging Face, worked on the Facebook AI research team (i.e. Llama) and remains a professor at Stanford. Douwe was incredibly open about his take on AI’s recent history and where he thinks it’s going. [...
If you don’t know Grammarly, it’s a personalized AI assistant for writing that has over 30 Million Daily Active Users. Grammarly has been building AI productivity tooling long before the most recent GenAI wave and has raised over $400M, with a current valuation of $13B. Rahul believes AI will enable everyone to focus on more meaningful, creative interactions by automating the "drudgery" of daily tasks. It was interesting to hear him talk about how he thinks about competition and his longer-term ...
Sarah Buchner is the Founder and CEO of Trunk Tools (https://trunktools.com/). She is a one-of-a-kind founder, having spent her young life as a carpenter in Austria and then working her way up the ranks of the construction industry. She’s also earned several graduate degrees including an MS in Civil Eng, a PHD in Data Science and an MBA from Stanford. Trunk Tools is an AI Tool for the $13T construction industry aimed at enhancing project management and addressing the skilled Labor shortage. We w...
Snowflake sits in a unique position in the AI landscape: They enable fast, secure, and scalable proprietary data access for thousands of customers, many of whom are building AI tools. They also maintain their own suite of AI products, increasing the utility of their platform and empowering customers who may not have the resources to build their own. That’s why it was so fascinating to speak with Baris Gultekin, Snowflake’s Head of AI, on our latest Unsupervised Learning. Baris has helped Snowfla...
We’re excited to bring you Connor Zwick, CEO and cofounder of Speak, on the podcast this week! Speak helps people learning a language have conversations with an AI speaking partner, which is critical to gaining fluency. It’s backed by OpenAI and most recently raised at a $500M valuation. Since launching in its inaugural market of South Korea in 2019, Speak has grown to over 10 million users and now has customers in more than 40 countries. We learned so much about how language works and how Conno...
It was very special to have Github CEO Thomas Dhomke on the pod for many reasons, not the least of which is that my partner Erica Brescia was COO at Gitlab just before joining Redpoint! Thomas has been at Github for almost 6 years, and has been CEO for almost 3 of those years. He has a pulse on what engineers around the world are looking for from the world’s leading developer platform, and incredible vision and empathy in making Github delivers it. [0:00] Intro [1:08] The Magic of GitHub Copilot...
Cris is the co-founder and CEO of Runway, which builds breathtakingly real video AI tools, including the incredible Gen-3 Alpha foundation model. Cris sits right at the intersection of technology and creativity, and in 2023 was named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI. Runway is reported to be in talks to raise capital at a $4 Billion valuation. (0:00) intro (0:37) how early are we in the AI for creative tools space (3:01) how Cris tests new models (8:21) who uses Runway? (10:37) how Ru...
According to Ramp’s (ramp.com) quarterly spend report, Fireflies was the 4th highest AI platform by spend. With over 300,000 customers worldwide and 16M users, Fireflies.ai is operating at some of the largest scale amongst AI companies today. This week on Unsupervised Learning we had Krish Ramineni, Co-founder & CEO of Fireflies on to talk about how he sees AI changing the way we work and conduct meetings, and share his biggest learnings around AI in building Fireflies. (0:00) intro (1:01) h...
Scott Belsky is the founder of Behance, a creative platform sold to Adobe in 2012. He’s since gone on to take on the role of Chief Product Officer at Adobe leading design for all products across Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and the Digital Experience business. This week on Unsupervised Learning Scott shares his thoughts on the future of creative tools with AI, a future where hyper-personalization wins and what humans will do when content is commoditized. (0:00) intro (2:27) Adobe’s new AI tool...
Last week, Suno announced $125M in funding, marking a significant milestone in their journey to reshape the music creation landscape. On this week's episode of Unsupervised Learning, we caught up with Suno's founder, Mikey Shulman, to dive into their approach to multiplayer music collaboration, how they got Suno to be so fast and the future of digital concerts (and workshopped new intro music for the pod 👀). (0:00) intro (0:31) Mikey’s favorite Suno songs (5:17) who uses Suno? (7:50) teaching p...
In this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we delve into the forefront of AI innovation with Eric Ries and Jeremy Howard. Eric Ries, renowned for pioneering the Lean Startup movement, has consistently influenced modern entrepreneurial strategies with his emphasis on agile, sustainable growth through innovation. Jeremy Howard is known for his contributions to deep learning and data science, co-founding the fast.ai educational initiative that democratizes access to cutting-edge AI learning. ...
