AI doomerism and calls to regulate the emerging technology is at a fever pitch but today’s guest, Reid Hoffman is a vocal AI optimist who views slowing down innovation as anti-humanistic. Reid needs no introduction, he’s the co-founder of PayPal, Linkedin, and most recently Inflection AI which is building empathetic AI companions. He is also a board member at Microsoft and former board member at OpenAI. On this week’s episode, Reid joins Sarah and Elad to talk about the historical case for an op...
Dec 21, 2023•47 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast AI tools are helping small business owners manage their businesses, so they can stay focused on the aspects of their business they love to do. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Alyssa Henry, an executive at some of the most impactful companies from Microsoft to Amazon. Most recently she was the CEO of Square. She led Square’s team as they were very early adopters of a consumer-facing product that used GPT-2 and have continued to incorporate AI into their offerings. On today’s ...
Dec 14, 2023•40 min•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast AI is the new UI for enterprise customers, according to Clara Shih, the CEO of Salesforce AI. Salesforce released Einstein, now called Einstein GPT, in 2016, making it an early example of how beneficial AI can be when embedded in enterprise software. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad talked with Clara about what the evolution of AI in enterprise looks like, how Salesforce is adoption AI across the organization, and the onboarding process for companies looking to integrate AI into their work...
Dec 07, 2023•27 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast OpenAI’s leadership has taken us all on a rollercoaster so it’s great timing for another host-only episode. This week Sarah and Elad get into what has been going on at OpenAI and what the turbulent leadership changes tell us about the importance of good intent and good incentives when building these influential companies. They also talk about innovative products coming out of Pika Labs, why people are moving away from diffusion models to LLMs, and how, in AI investing, the ASP is the opportunity...
Nov 30, 2023•26 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast The future of tech is 25-person companies powered by AI agents that help us accomplish our larger goals. Imbue is working on building AI agents that reason, code and generally make our lives easier. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with co-founders Kanjun Qiu (CEO) and Josh Albrecht (CTO) to discuss how they define reasoning, the spectrum of specialized and generalized agents, and the path to improved agent performance. Plus, what’s behind their $200M Series B fundraise. Kanjun Qiu is the CEO and...
Nov 16, 2023•33 min•Ep 41•Transcript available on Metacast Open Source fuels the engine of innovation, according to Arthur Mensch, CEO and co-founder of Mistral AI. Mistral is a French AI company which recently made a splash with releasing Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size to date, and outperforming much larger models. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Arthur to discuss why open source could win the AI wars, their $100M+ seed financing, the true nature of scaling laws, why he started his company in France, and what Mistral is ...
Nov 09, 2023•33 min•Ep 40•Transcript available on Metacast Each iteration of ChatGPT has demonstrated remarkable step function capabilities. But what’s next? Ilya Sutskever, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist at OpenAI, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss the origins of OpenAI as a capped profit company, early emergent behaviors of GPT models, the token scarcity issue, next frontiers of AI research, his argument for working on AI safety now, and the premise of Superalignment. Plus, how do we define digital life? Ilya Sutskever is Co-founder and Chief Scie...
Nov 02, 2023•42 min•Ep 39•Transcript available on Metacast Cyber Security is going to change significantly in the era of AI, according to Ryan Noon, cofounder of Material Security, a security company that makes cloud-based Google and Microsoft email a safe place for sensitive data. Elad Gil and Ryan talk about how Material Security started to use LLMs, potential security threats from AI hacks, and the role of the government in securing the Internet. Ryan also shares his advice for founders. Ryan co-founded Material Security in 2017 after seeing high pro...
Oct 26, 2023•36 min•Ep 36•Transcript available on Metacast As the Lead for Generative AI in the Office of the CTO for Google Cloud, Kawal Gandhi has a unique vantage point on enterprise AI rollout. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Gandhi this week to discuss his insights on how enterprises can effectively invest in AI development, the importance of TPUs, and Google’s internal AI applications. Plus, when will email get more intelligent? Kawal Gandhi has worked at Google for nearly a decade in search and ad roles before focusing on the development and...
Oct 23, 2023•33 min•Ep 37•Transcript available on Metacast Startups aren't the only companies racing to build the new world of AI. This week, Sarah Guo talks with Brian Halligan, the co-founder, longtime CEO and now executive chairperson of HubSpot, the fastest growing CRM. He talks about category creation, coining the term ‘inbound marketing,’ lessons in scaling from an app to a suite to a platform, staying innovative at scale, and how they're navigating the AI disruption. Brian also describes the life-threatening moment he decided to step back from th...
Oct 12, 2023•43 min•Ep 36•Transcript available on Metacast What Does it Take to Improve by 10x or 100x? This week is another host-only episode. Sarah and Elad talk about the path to better model quality, the potential for fine tuning to different use cases, retrieval systems (RAG), feedback systems (RLHF, RLAIF) and Meta’s sponsorship of the open source model ecosystem. Plus Sarah and Elad ask if we’re finally at the beginning of a new set of consumer applications and social networks. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors...
Oct 09, 2023•24 min•Ep 37•Transcript available on Metacast Ginkgo Bioworks is using DNA as code to digitize the cell programming revolution. Ginkgo is using AI and synthetic biology to keep the next pandemic at bay, and accelerate our production capabilities for medicine, food, and agriculture. Ginkgo’s co-founder and CEO Jason Kelly joins hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss bioengineering protein as a foundational model, specialized data learning from an evolutionary perspective, what we need to prepare for a future pandemic, and more. Jason has se...
Sep 28, 2023•37 min•Ep 34•Transcript available on Metacast Replit’s develop-to-deploy platform and new AI tool, Ghostwriter, are breaking down the barriers to entry for beginner programmers. Replit’s CEO, co-founder, and head engineer Amjad Masad joins hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss how AI can change software engineering, the infrastructure we still need, open source foundation models, and what to expect from AI agents. Before co-founding Replit, Amjad Masad worked at Facebook as a software engineer, where he worked on infrastructure tooling. H...
Sep 21, 2023•30 min•Ep 27•Transcript available on Metacast More than 25 million users are using NEAR-powered applications. Co-founder of NEAR protocol and Transformers author Illia Polosukhin joins hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss the intersections of crypto and AI technology, what we should expect from AI agents, decentralized data labeling, why AI’s alignment problem is really a human problem, and more. Show Links: Illia Polosukhin - Co-founder of NEAR | LinkedIn NEAR Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Fol...
Sep 15, 2023•42 min•Ep 132•Transcript available on Metacast The GPU supply crunch is causing desperation amongst AI teams large and small. Cerebras Systems has an answer, and it’s a chip the size of a dinner plate. Andrew Feldman, CEO and Co-founder of Cerebras and previously SeaMicro, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors. They discuss why there might be an alternative to Nvidia, localized models and predictions for the accelerator market. Show Links: Andrew Feldman - Cerebras CEO & Co-founder | LinkedIn Cerebras Sign up for new podcasts e...
Sep 07, 2023•30 min•Ep 31•Transcript available on Metacast Everything digital is increasingly intermediated through web user experiences, and now AI development can be frontend-first, too. Just ask Guillermo Rauch, the founder and CEO of Vercel, the company behind Next.js. In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil speak to Guillermo about their AI SDK and AI templates, and why Vercel is focused on making it easy for every frontend engineer to build with AI. They also discuss what applications Guillermo's most excited about, how to prepa...
Aug 31, 2023•38 min•Ep 30•Transcript available on Metacast "Biological Software" is the future of medicine. Jakob Uszkoreit, CEO and Co-founder of Inceptive, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors, to discuss how deep learning is expanding the horizons of RNA and mRNA therapeutics. Jakob co-authored the revolutionary paper Attention is All You Need while at Google, and led early Google Translate and Google Assistant teams. Now at Inceptive, he's applying these same architectures and ideas to biological design, optimizing vaccine production,...
Aug 24, 2023•35 min•Ep 29•Transcript available on Metacast The future of education is right at your children’s fingertips. Sal Khan, CEO and Founder of Khan Academy, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors. For over a decade, Sal Khan has been trying to reform education, beginning with tutoring his cousins in math. He's the father of the YouTube "chalk talk" format, and has now served tens of millions of students through Khan Academy. He guides us through how Khan Academy is using AI to personalize a student's educational experience, transpo...
Aug 17, 2023•48 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast This week on the podcast, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil answer listener questions on the state of technology and artificial intelligence. Sarah and Elad also talk about the 2024 tech market, what type of companies may reach their highest valuation ever and the (former) unicorns that may go bust. Plus, how do Sarah and Elad define happiness? Hint: it’s a use case for a specialized AI agent. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Sa...
Aug 10, 2023•24 min•Ep 27•Transcript available on Metacast How are ML developer tools helping to advance our capabilities? Lukas Biewald, CEO of Weights & Biases, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors. Lukas explores the impact of ML in various industries like gaming, AgTech, and fintech through his insightful perspective. He discusses the impact of LLMs, puts them in context of the evolution of ML engineering over the past decade and a half, and tells the backstory of Weights & Biases' success. He gives advice for aspiring AI company foun...
Aug 03, 2023•44 min•Ep 26•Transcript available on Metacast Can frontiers as high-stakes as next-generation, AI-enabled defense depend on something as mundane as data integration? Can "large language models" work in such mission critical applications? In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil are joined by Shyam Sankar, the Chief Technical Officer of Palantir Technologies and inventor of their famous Forward Deployed Engineering force. Early employee and longtime leader Shyam explains the evolution of technology at Palantir, from ontolog...
Jul 27, 2023•40 min•Ep 25•Transcript available on Metacast Video dominates modern media consumption, but video creation is still expensive and difficult. AI-generated and edited video is a holy grail of democratized creative expression. This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Devi Parikh. She is a Research Director in Generative AI at Meta and an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Her work focuses on multimodality and AI for images, audio and video. Recently, she worked on Make a Video 3D, al...
Jul 20, 2023•40 min•Ep 24•Transcript available on Metacast Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake Computing, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors. Before scaling Snowflake to its blockbuster IPO and beyond, Frank was also the CEO from early to scale for landmark enterprise companies ServiceNow and Data Domain. Frank grew up in the Netherlands and is also the author of three books: Amp It Up, Rise of the Data Cloud, and Tape Sucks. In this episode, our hosts talk with Frank about the opportunity for generative AI in the enterprise, why Snowflake...
Jun 29, 2023•52 min•Ep 23•Transcript available on Metacast 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. ** ...
Jun 22, 2023•40 min•Ep 22•Transcript available on Metacast 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. ** 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 Gene...
Jun 15, 2023•45 min•Ep 121•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email f...
Jun 08, 2023•35 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast 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 technologi...
Jun 01, 2023•51 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
May 24, 2023•55 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast 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, th...
May 18, 2023•43 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
May 11, 2023•52 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast