Hunting down receipts and manually filling out invoices kills productivity. This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Pedro Franceschi, co-founder and CEO of Brex. Pedro discusses how Brex is harnessing AI to optimize spend management and automate tedious accounting and compliance tasks for teams. The conversation covers the reliability challenges in AI today, Pedro’s insights on the future of fintech in an AI-driven world, and the major transitions Brex has navigated in recen...
Aug 08, 2024•34 min•Ep 75•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah and Elad are joined by Oriol Vinyals, VP of Research, Deep Learning Team Lead, at Google DeepMind and Technical Co-lead of the Gemini project. Oriol shares insights from his career in machine learning, including leading the AlphaStar team and building competitive StarCraft agents. We talk about Google DeepMind, forming the Gemini project, and integrating AI technology throughout Google products. Oriol also discusses the advancements and challenges in lon...
Aug 01, 2024•46 min•Ep 72•Transcript available on Metacast This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil are joined by Howie Liu, the co-founder and CEO of Airtable. Howie discusses their Cobuilder launch, the evolution of Airtable from a simple productivity tool to an enterprise app platform with integrated AI capabilities. They talk about why the conventional wisdom of “app not platform” can be wrong, why there’s a future for low-code in the age of AI and code generation, and where enterprises need help adopting AI. Sign up for new podcasts every wee...
Jul 25, 2024•41 min•Ep 73•Transcript available on Metacast This week on No Priors, we have a host-only episode. Sarah and Elad catch up to discuss how tech history may be repeating itself. Much like in the early days of the internet, every company is clamoring to incorporate AI into their products or operations while some legacy players are skeptical that investment in AI will pay off. They also get into new opportunities and capabilities that AI is opening up, whether or not incubators are actually effective, and what companies are poised to stand the ...
Jul 18, 2024•29 min•Ep 72•Transcript available on Metacast Believe or not, we’re almost halfway through 2024. Sarah and Elad have spent the first of this year talking with some of the most innovative minds in the AI industry, so we’re taking a look at some of our favorite No Priors conversations so far featuring Dylan Field (Figma); Emily Glassberg-Sands (Stripe); Brett Adcock (Figure AI); Aditya Ramesh, Tim Brooks and Bill Peebles (OpenAI’s Sora Team); Scott Wu (Cognition); and Alexandr Wang (Scale). Watch or listen to the full episodes here: Build AI ...
Jul 11, 2024•26 min•Ep 71•Transcript available on Metacast This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Karan Goel and Albert Gu from Cartesia. Karan and Albert first met as Stanford AI Lab PhDs, where their lab invented Space Models or SSMs, a fundamental new primitive for training large-scale foundation models. In 2023, they Founded Cartesia to build real-time intelligence for every device. One year later, Cartesia released Sonic which generates high quality and lifelike speech with a model latency of 135ms—the fastest for a model of t...
Jun 27, 2024•34 min•Ep 70•Transcript available on Metacast AI video generation models still have a long way to go when it comes to making compelling and complex videos but the HeyGen team are well on their way to streamlining the video creation process by using a combination of language, video, and voice models to create videos featuring personalized avatars, b-roll, and dialogue. This week on No Priors, Joshua Xu the co-founder and CEO of HeyGen, joins Sarah and Elad to discuss how the HeyGen team broke down the elements of a video and built or found m...
Jun 20, 2024•27 min•Ep 72•Transcript available on Metacast The first step in achieving AGI is nailing down a concise definition and Mike Knoop, the co-founder and Head of AI at Zapier, believes François Chollet got it right when he defined general intelligence as a system that can efficiently acquire new skills. This week on No Priors, Miked joins Elad to discuss ARC Prize which is a multi-million dollar non-profit public challenge that is looking for someone to beat the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) evaluation. In this episode, they also get i...
Jun 11, 2024•26 min•Ep 68•Transcript available on Metacast After Tengyu Ma spent years at Stanford researching AI optimization, embedding models, and transformers, he took a break from academia to start Voyage AI which allows enterprise customers to have the most accurate retrieval possible through the most useful foundational data. Tengyu joins Sarah on this week’s episode of No priors to discuss why RAG systems are winning as the dominant architecture in enterprise and the evolution of foundational data that has allowed RAG to flourish. And while fine...
Jun 06, 2024•36 min•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast Garry Tan is a notorious founder-turned-investor who is now running one of the most prestigious accelerators in the world, Y Combinator. As the president and CEO of YC, Garry has been credited with reinvigorating the program. On this week’s episode of No Priors, Sarah, Elad, and Garry discuss the shifting demographics of YC founders and how AI is encouraging younger founders to launch companies, predicting which early stage startups will have longevity, and making YC a beacon for innovation in A...
May 23, 2024•40 min•Ep 66•Transcript available on Metacast Alexandr Wang was 19 when he realized that gathering data will be crucial as AI becomes more prevalent, so he dropped out of MIT and started Scale AI. This week on No Priors, Alexandr joins Sarah and Elad to discuss how Scale is providing infrastructure and building a robust data foundry that is crucial to the future of AI. While the company started working with autonomous vehicles, they’ve expanded by partnering with research labs and even the U.S. government. In this episode, they get into the...
May 22, 2024•39 min•Ep 65•Transcript available on Metacast Mikey Shulman, the CEO and co-founder of Suno, can see a future where the Venn diagram of music creators and consumers becomes one big circle. The AI music generation tool trying to democratize music has been making waves in the AI community ever since they came out of stealth mode last year. Suno users can make a song complete with lyrics, just by entering a text prompt, for example, “koto boom bap lofi intricate beats.” You can hear it in action as Mikey, Sarah, and Elad create a song live in ...
May 16, 2024•30 min•Ep 64•Transcript available on Metacast This week on No Priors hosts, Sarah and Elad are catching up on the latest AI news. They discuss the recent developments in AI like Meta’s new AI assistant and the latest in music generation, and if you’re interested in generative AI music, stay tuned for next week’s interview! Sarah and Elad also get into device-resident models, AI hardware, and ask just how smart smaller models can really get. These hardware constraints were compared to the hurdles AI platforms are continuing to face including...
May 09, 2024•29 min•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast Scott Wu loves code. He grew up competing in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and is a world class coder, and now he's building an AI agent designed to create more, not fewer, human engineers. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad talk to Scott, the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, an AI lab focusing on reasoning. Recently, the Cognition team released a demo of Devin, an AI software engineer that can increasingly handle entire tasks end to end. In this episode, they talk about wh...
May 02, 2024•29 min•Ep 62•Transcript available on Metacast AI-generated videos are not just leveled-up image generators. But rather, they could be a big step forward on the path to AGI. This week on No Priors, the team from Sora is here to discuss OpenAI’s recently announced generative video model, which can take a text prompt and create realistic, visually coherent, high-definition clips that are up to a minute long. Sora team leads, Aditya Ramesh, Tim Brooks, and Bill Peebles join Elad and Sarah to talk about developing Sora. The generative video mode...
Apr 25, 2024•31 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast Multimodal models are making it possible to create AI art and augment creativity across artistic mediums. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad talk with Suhail Doshi, the founder of Playground AI, an image generator and editor. Playground AI has been open-sourcing foundation diffusion models, most recently releasing Playground V2.5. In this episode, Suhail talks with Sarah and Elad about how the integration of language and vision models enhances the multimodal capabilities, how the Playground ...
Apr 18, 2024•25 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast This week on a host-only episode of No Priors, Sarah and Elad discuss the AI wave as compared to the internet wave, the current state of AI investing, the foundation model landscape, voice and video AI, advances in agentic systems, prosumer applications, and the Microsoft/Inflection deal. Have a question for our next host-only episode or feedback for our team? Reach out to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (0:32) How to think...
Apr 11, 2024•26 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast Humans are always doing work that is dull or dangerous. Brett Adcock, the founder and CEO of Figure AI, wants to build a fleet of robots that can do everything from work in a factory or warehouse to folding your laundry in the home. Today on No Priors, Sarah got the chance to talk with Brett about how a company that is only 21 months old has already built humanoid robots that not only walk the walk by performing tasks like item retrieval and making a cup of coffee but they also talk the talk thr...
Apr 04, 2024•38 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast Companies are employing AI agents and co-pilots to help their teams increase efficiency and accuracy, but developing apps that are trained properly can require a skill set many enterprise teams don’t have. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Harrison Chase, the CEO and co-founder of LangChain, an open-source framework and developer toolkit that helps developers build LLM applications. In this conversation they talk about the gaps in open source app development, what it will take...
Mar 28, 2024•28 min•Ep 57•Transcript available on Metacast At a time when users are being asked to wait unthinkable seconds for AI products to generate art and answers, speed is what will win the battle heating up in AI computing. At least according to today’s guest, Tuhin Srivastava, the CEO and co-founder of Baseten which gives customers scalable AI infrastructures starting with interference. In this episode of No Priors, Sarah, Elad, and Tuhin discuss why efficient code solutions are more desirable than no code, the most surprising use cases for Base...
Mar 21, 2024•39 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast Figma has had a banner year and the formidable team isn’t slowing down—even after regulatory issues blocked the merger with Adobe. Today on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Dylan Field the CEO and founder of Figma, the design collaboration tool that is closing the gap between imagination and reality. They discuss what’s next for an independent Figma, how AI can augment design and speed up the iteration loop, and how Figma is expanding beyond design with products that help the entire produ...
Mar 14, 2024•37 min•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast Host-only episode discussing NVIDIA, Meta and Google earnings, Gemini and Mistral model launches, the open-vs-closed source debate, domain specific foundation models, if we’ll see real competition in chips, and the state of AI ROI and adoption. Don’t miss our episodes with: Mistral NVIDIA AMD Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil Show Notes: (0:00) Introduction (0:27) Model news and product launches ...
Mar 07, 2024•42 min•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast Compute is the fuel for the AI revolution, and customers want more chip vendors. AMD CTO Mark Papermaster joins Sarah and Elad on No Priors to discuss AMD’s strategy, their newest GPUs, where inference workloads will live, the chip software stack, how they are thinking about supply chain issues, and what we can expect from AMD in 2024. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil Show Notes: (0:00) Introduc...
Feb 29, 2024•39 min•Ep 53•Transcript available on Metacast Accurate, customizable search is one of the most immediate AI use cases for companies and general users. Today on No Priors, Elad and Sarah are joined by Pinecone CEO, Edo Liberty, to talk about how RAG architecture is improving syntax search and making LLMs more available. By using a RAG model Pinecone makes it possible for companies to vectorize their data and query it for the most accurate responses. In this episode, they talk about how Pinecone’s Canopy product is making search more accurate...
Feb 22, 2024•31 min•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast Notion is a productivity app that has invested heavily in AI to create products that enable workers to access information instantly without having to search through their own countless notes. Today on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Ivan Zhao, the co-founder and CEO of Notion, to talk about Notions Q&A interface and calendar applications. They also get into how using RAG models means better retrieval, longer memory, and the user can be less organized and how Notion is leading the charge ...
Feb 15, 2024•42 min•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast Many companies that are building AI products for their users are not primarily AI companies. Today on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Emily Glassberg Sands who is the Head of Information at Stripe. They talk about how Stripe prioritizes AI projects and builds these tools from the inside out. Stripe was an early adopter of utilizing LLMs to help their end user. Emily talks about how they decided it was time to meaningfully invest in AI given the trajectory of the industry and the wealth o...
Feb 08, 2024•39 min•Ep 48•Transcript available on Metacast Building an ecommerce business is hard – it requires merchants to have a wealth of skills: technical, logistics, marketing, pricing, vendor management, finance and analytics. That’s why Shopify is releasing new AI features that help merchants tackle things like product descriptions, marketing suggestions and search. Today on No Priors, Glen Coates, the VP of core product at Shopify (and former founder of b2b wholesale platform Handshake), joins Sarah and Elad. They talk about the releases from S...
Jan 31, 2024•39 min•Ep 49•Transcript available on Metacast Building adaptive AI models that can learn and complete tasks in the physical world requires precision but these AI robots could completely change manufacturing and logistics processes. Peter Chen, the co-founder and CEO of Covariant, leads the team that is building robots that will increase manufacturing efficiency, safety, and create warehouses of the future. Today on No Priors, Peter joins Sarah to talk about how the Covariant team is developing multimodal models that have precise grounding a...
Jan 25, 2024•41 min•Ep 48•Transcript available on Metacast Coding in collaboration with AI can reduce human toil in the software development process and lead to more accurate and less tedious work for coding teams. This week on No Priors, Sarah talked with Beyang Liu, the cofounder and CTO of Sourcegraph, which builds tools that help developers innovate faster. Their most recent launch was an AI coding assistant called Cody. Beyang has spent his entire career thinking about how humans can work in conjunction with AI to write better code. Sarah and Beyan...
Jan 18, 2024•47 min•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast We’re looking back on 2023 and sharing a handful of our favorite conversations. Last year was full of insightful conversations that shaped the way we think about the most innovative movements in the AI space. Want to hear more? Check out the full episodes here: What is Digital Life? with OpenAI Co-Founder & Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever How AI can help small businesses with Former Square CEO Alyssa Henry Will Everyone Have a Personal AI? With Mustafa Suleyman, Founder of DeepMind and Inflection...
Jan 11, 2024•19 min•Ep 46•Transcript available on Metacast