Best FirstMark Podcasts (2025)

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DeepMind Gemini 3 Lead: What Comes After "Infinite Data" 54:56

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7d ago54:56

54:56

Gemini 3 was a landmark frontier model launch in AI this year — but the story behind its performance isn’t just about adding more compute. In this episode, I sit down with Sebastian Bourgeaud, a pre-training lead for Gemini 3 at Google DeepMind and co-author of the seminal RETRO paper. In his first-ever podcast interview, Sebastian takes us inside …

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Mitchell Jones on Building Lava: Helping SaaS Companies Price for the Future 1:18:55

13d ago1:18:55

1:18:55

This week my guest is Mitchell Jones, Co-Founder and CEO of Lava, a company building developer infrastructure to reimagine how enterprise software is created and deployed. Mitchell shares his journey from growing up in Dayton, Ohio to studying at Yale, working at Facebook and Dropbox, and ultimately founding his own companies. We explore his philos…

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The Competitive Advantage of Caring: Ben Markowitz's Customer-First Approach at Clerq 1:02:05

24d ago1:02:05

1:02:05

This week my guest is Ben Markowitz, Co-Founder and CEO of Clerq, a payments platform serving auto dealerships. Ben shares his journey from JP Morgan to Citadel and eventually founding Clerq, offering raw insights into the realities of building in fintech venture investors territory. We explore why technology alone can't solve financial services pr…

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What’s Next for AI? OpenAI’s Łukasz Kaiser (Transformer Co-Author) 1:05:25

1M ago1:05:25

1:05:25

We’re told that AI progress is slowing down, that pre-training has hit a wall, that scaling laws are running out of road. Yet we’re releasing this episode in the middle of a wild couple of weeks that saw GPT-5.1, GPT-5.1 Codex Max, fresh reasoning modes and long-running agents ship from OpenAI — on top of a flood of new frontier models elsewhere. T…

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Open Source AI Strikes Back — Inside Ai2’s OLMo 3 ‘Thinking" 1:28:10

1M ago1:28:10

1:28:10

In this special release episode, Matt sits down with Nathan Lambert and Luca Soldaini from Ai2 (the Allen Institute for AI) to break down one of the biggest open-source AI drops of the year: OLMo 3. At a moment when most labs are offering “open weights” and calling it a day, AI2 is doing the opposite — publishing the models, the data, the recipes, …

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Intelligence Isn’t Enough: Why Energy & Compute Decide the AGI Race – Eiso Kant 1:06:28

2M ago1:06:28

1:06:28

Frontier AI is colliding with real-world infrastructure. Eiso Kant (Co-CEO & Co-Founder, Poolside) joins the MAD Podcast to unpack Project Horizon— a multi-gigawatt West Texas build—and why frontier labs must own energy, compute, and intelligence to compete. We map token economics, cloud-style margins, and the staged 250 MW rollout using 2.5 MW mod…

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AI Agents for Private Equity with Rohan Parikh, Co-Founder of Keye 41:30

2M ago41:30

41:30

This week my guest is Rohan Parikh, founder and CEO of Keye, an AI-powered platform revolutionizing due diligence for private equity professionals. Rohan brings a fascinating perspective shaped by growing up in a family of entrepreneurs in Mumbai and spending five years climbing from analyst to director at a French investment bank in New York. We d…

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State of AI 2025 with Nathan Benaich: Power Deals, Reasoning Breakthroughs, Real Revenue 1:03:15

2M ago1:03:15

1:03:15

Power is the new bottleneck, reasoning got real, and the business finally caught up. In this wide-ranging conversation, I sit down with Nathan Benaich, Founder and General Partner at Air Street Capital, to discuss the newly published 2025 State of AI report—what’s actually working, what’s hype, and where the next edge will come from. We start at th…

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Are We Misreading the AI Exponential? Julian Schrittwieser on Move 37 & Scaling RL (Anthropic) 1:09:56

2M ago1:09:56

1:09:56

Are we failing to understand the exponential, again? My guest is Julian Schrittwieser (top AI researcher at Anthropic; previously Google DeepMind on AlphaGo Zero & MuZero). We unpack his viral post (“Failing to Understand the Exponential, again”) and what it looks like when task length doubles every 3–4 months—pointing to AI agents that can work a …

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How GPT-5 Thinks — OpenAI VP of Research Jerry Tworek 1:16:04

2M ago1:16:04

1:16:04

What does it really mean when GPT-5 “thinks”? In this conversation, OpenAI’s VP of Research Jerry Tworek explains how modern reasoning models work in practice—why pretraining and reinforcement learning (RL/RLHF) are both essential, what that on-screen “thinking” actually does, and when extra test-time compute helps (or doesn’t). We trace the evolut…

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The Future of Private Markets with Ryan Eisenman, Co-Founder of Arch 39:09

3M ago39:09

39:09

This week my guest is Ryan Eisenman, Co-Founder and CEO of Arch, the platform automating private market investment management. Ryan shares the fascinating origin story of how a dinner conversation in New York City led to building what he calls "one-click alt" - the Schwab for private markets. We explore how Arch has grown from a scrappy three-perso…

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Ed Brandman on Building ToltIQ: How AI is Revolutionizing Private Markets Diligence 1:11:31

3M ago1:11:31

1:11:31

Former KKR CIO Ed Brandman joins Dez Fleming to discuss his transition from retirement to founding ToltIQ, an AI-powered platform revolutionizing due diligence for early-stage venture capital and private markets firms. Brandman shares insights from his decade at KKR, where he scaled technology operations from 5 to 145 people as AUM grew from $30-40…

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Sonnet 4.5 & the AI Plateau Myth — Sholto Douglas (Anthropic) 1:10:03

3M ago1:10:03

1:10:03

Sholto Douglas, a top AI researcher at Anthropic, discusses the breakthroughs behind Claude Sonnet 4.5—the world's leading coding model—and why we might be just 2-3 years from AI matching human-level performance on most computer-facing tasks. You'll discover why RL on language models suddenly started working in 2024, how agents maintain coherency a…

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Goodbye Excel? AI Agents for Self-Driving Finance – Pigment CEO 1:05:46

4M ago1:05:46

1:05:46

The most successful enterprises are about to become autonomous — and Eléonore Crespo, Co-CEO of Pigment, is building the nervous system that makes it possible. In this conversation, Eléonore reveals how her $400 million AI platform is already running supply chains for Coca-Cola, powering finance for the hottest newly public companies like Figma and…

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AI Video’s Wild Year – Runway CEO on What’s Next 1:04:57

4M ago1:04:57

1:04:57

2025 has been a breakthrough year for AI video. In this episode of the MAD Podcast, Matt Turck sits down with Cristóbal Valenzuela, CEO & Co-Founder of Runway, to explore how AI is reshaping the future of filmmaking, advertising, and storytelling - faster, cheaper, and in ways that were unimaginable even a year ago. Cris and Matt discuss: * How AI …

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How to Build a Beloved AI Product - Granola CEO Chris Pedregal 1:08:28

4M ago1:08:28

1:08:28

Granola is the rare AI startup that slipped into one of tech’s most crowded niches — meeting notes — and still managed to become the product founders and VCs rave about. In this episode, MAD Podcast host Matt Turck sits down with Granola co-founder & CEO Chris Pedregal to unpack how a two-person team in London turned a simple “second brain” idea in…

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Cyrus Shirazi on Building a Unified Financial Operating System with Haven 51:02

5M ago51:02

51:02

Cyrus Shirazi, founder of Haven, joins Dez Fleming to discuss his journey from watching his father leave private equity to becoming an entrepreneur himself. After experiencing both the highs and pitfalls at companies like Mainstreet and Meow, Cyrus launched Haven - a unified financial operating system for startups and small businesses. He shares ta…

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Building Dexari, Crypto's Next $100bn Opportunity 42:08

5M ago42:08

42:08

Chuck Bradford, founder and CEO of Dexari, shares his journey from engineering student at UPenn to crypto entrepreneur. After experiencing the inner workings of centralized exchanges at Binance US, Bradford identified a massive opportunity to combine the user experience of traditional fintech with the benefits of decentralization. Dexari is buildin…

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Anthropic's Surprise Hit: How Claude Code Became an AI Coding Powerhouse 1:00:16

5M ago1:00:16

1:00:16

What happens when an internal hack turns into a $400 million AI rocket ship? In this episode, Matt Turck sits down with Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, to unpack the wild story behind the fastest-growing AI coding tool on the planet. Boris reveals how Claude Code started as a personal productivity tool, only to become Anthrop…

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Ex‑DeepMind Researcher Misha Laskin on Enterprise Super‑Intelligence | Reflection AI 1:06:29

5M ago1:06:29

1:06:29

What if your company had a digital brain that never forgot, always knew the answer, and could instantly tap the knowledge of your best engineers, even after they left? Superintelligence can feel like a hand‑wavy pipe‑dream— yet, as Misha Laskin argues, it becomes a tractable engineering problem once you scope it to the enterprise level. Former Deep…

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The Rise of Agentic Commerce — Emily Glassberg Sands (Stripe) 1:15:14

6M ago1:15:14

1:15:14

Agentic commerce is no longer science fiction — it’s arriving in your browser, your development IDE, and soon, your bank statement. In this episode of The MAD Podcast, Matt Turck sits down with Emily Glassberg Sands, Stripe’s Head of Information, to explore how autonomous “buying bots” and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) are reshaping the very mec…

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Why "Saving is a Scam" and How Basic Capital Unlocks Asset Ownership with Adbul Al-Assad of Basic Capital 1:17:03

6M ago1:17:03

1:17:03

This week on The Longest View, Desmond Fleming sits down with Abdul Al-Assad, founder and CEO of Basic Capital, shares his remarkable journey from growing up in Damascus during the Syrian civil war to building a revolutionary fintech company in New York. As a Palestinian entrepreneur who arrived in America with $140 and no connections, Abdul built …

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How Understory is Revolutionizing Private Market Data for Investors 48:42

6M ago48:42

48:42

Eric Shapiro and David Fine, co-founders of Understory, join Dez Fleming to discuss their journey from Columbia philosophy classmates to building a company that transforms how financial analysts work with private company data. Eric shares his transition from Elliott Management to entrepreneurship, while David brings his experience from Dynamic Yiel…

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How Fintech is Transforming Banking Operations with Jeremy Tsui, CEO and Co-Founder of Finely 50:44

6M ago50:44

50:44

Jeremy Tsui, Founder and CEO of Finley Technologies, joins Dez Fleming on The Longest View podcast to discuss his transition from Goldman Sachs private credit investor to fintech venture investors-backed entrepreneur. Tsui shares insights on building enterprise software VC solutions for the evolving capital markets landscape, where traditional bank…

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AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark 49:53

6M ago49:53

49:53

Welcome to a special FirstMark Deep Dive edition of the MAD Podcast. In this episode, Matt Turck and David Waltcher unpack the explosive impact of generative AI on engineering — hands-down the biggest shift the field has seen in decades. You’ll get a front-row seat to the real numbers and stories behind the AI code revolution, including how compani…

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Guillermo Rauch: Why Software Development Will Never Be the Same 1:45:40

6M ago1:45:40

1:45:40

In this episode, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch goes deep on how V0, their text-to-app platform, has already generated over 100 million applications and doubled Vercel’s user base in under a year. Guillermo reveals how a tiny SWAT team inside Vercel built V0 from scratch, why “vibe coding” is making software creation accessible to everyone (not just en…

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Inside Canva’s $3B ARR AI Design Rocketship — CTO Brendan Humphreys on Magic Studio & Canva Code 56:38

6M ago56:38

56:38

Canva just announced $3 billion in ARR, 230 million monthly active users, and 24 million paying subscribers—including 95% of the Fortune 500. Even more impressive? They’ve been profitable for seven years while growing at 40–50% per year. In this episode, Canva’s Head of Engineering, Brendan Humphreys, reveals how he went from employee #12 to leadin…

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GitHub CEO: The AI Coding Gold Rush, Vibe Coding & Cursor 1:04:46

7M ago1:04:46

1:04:46

AI coding is in full-blown gold-rush mode, and GitHub sits at the epicenter. In this episode, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke tells Matt Turck how a $7.5 B acquisition in 2018 became a $2 B ARR rocket ship, and reveals how Copilot was born from a secret AI strategy years before anyone else saw the opportunity. We dig into the dizzying pace of AI innovatio…

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Revolutionizing Bond Markets with Jonathan Birnbaum, Founder of OpenYield 50:44

7M ago50:44

50:44

Desmond Fleming welcomes Jonathan Birnbaum, founder of OpenYield. On the first episode of The Longest View, Jonathan shares his journey from Morgan Stanley trading floors to building a modern bond marketplace. Drawing from his experience in fixed income trading and fintech venture investors backing, he discusses how OpenYield is democratizing acces…

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Inside the Paper That Changed AI Forever - Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez on 2025 Agents 1:02:24

7M ago1:02:24

1:02:24

What really happened inside Google Brain when the “Attention is All You Need” paper was born? In this episode, Aidan Gomez — one of the eight co-authors of the Transformers paper and now CEO of Cohere — reveals the behind-the-scenes story of how a cold email and a lucky administrative mistake landed him at the center of the AI revolution. Aidan sha…

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AI That Ends Busy Work — Hebbia CEO on “Agent Employees” 48:24

7M ago48:24

48:24

What if the smartest people in finance and law never had to do “stupid tasks” again? In this episode, we sit down with George Sivulka, founder of Hebbia, the AI company quietly powering 50% of the world’s largest asset managers and some of the fastest-growing law firms. George reveals how Hebbia’s Matrix platform is automating the equivalent of 50,…

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AI Eats the World: Benedict Evans on What Really Matters Now 1:15:09

7M ago1:15:09

1:15:09

What if the “AI revolution” is actually… stuck in the messy middle? In this episode, Benedict Evans returns to tackle the big question we left hanging a year ago: Is AI a true paradigm shift, or just another tech platform shift like mobile or cloud? One year later, the answer is more complicated — and more revealing — than anyone expected. Benedict…

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Jeremy Howard on Building 5,000 AI Products with 14 People (Answer AI Deep-Dive) 55:02

8M ago55:02

55:02

What happens when you try to build the “General Electric of AI” with just 14 people? In this episode, Jeremy Howard reveals the radical inside story of Answer AI — a new kind of AI R&D lab that’s not chasing AGI, but instead aims to ship thousands of real-world products, all while staying tiny, open, and mission-driven. Jeremy shares how open-sourc…

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Why Influx Rebuilt Its Database for the IoT and Robotics Explosion 35:35

8M ago35:35

35:35

InfluxDB just dropped its biggest update ever — InfluxDB 3.0 — and in this episode, we go deep with the team behind the world’s most popular open-source time series database. You’ll hear the inside story of how InfluxDB grew from 3,000 users in 2015 to over 1.3 million today, and why the company decided to rewrite its entire architecture from scrat…

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Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data 41:32

8M ago41:32

41:32

Sigma Computing recently hit $100M in ARR — planning on doubling revenue again this year— and in this episode, CEO Mike Palmer reveals exactly how they did it by throwing out the old BI playbook. We open with the provocative claim that “the world did not need another BI tool,” and dig into why the last 20 years of business intelligence have been “b…

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Glean’s Breakthrough: CEO Arvind Jain on Scaling AI Agents & Search 52:11

8M ago52:11

52:11

A week after OpenAI’s o3/o4-mini volleyed with Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash, I sat down with Arvind Jain— ex-Google search luminary, Rubrik co-founder, and now CEO of Glean —just as his company released its agentic reasoning platform and swirled with rumors of a new round at a $7 billion valuation. We open on that whirlwind: why the model race is acce…

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Box’s Big AI Leap: Aaron Levie on Agents & the Future of Work 1:15:46

8M ago1:15:46

1:15:46

In this episode, we sit down with Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box, for a wide-ranging conversation that’s equal parts insightful, technical, and fun. We kick things off with a candid discussion about what it’s like to be a public company CEO during times of volatility, and then rewind to the early days of Box — from dorm room experiments to …

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Snowflake CEO on Winning the AI Arms Race 1:23:41

9M ago1:23:41

1:23:41

In this episode, we sit down with Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake, for an in-depth conversation about the company’s transformation from a cloud analytics platform into a comprehensive AI data cloud. Sridhar shares insights on Snowflake’s shift toward open formats like Apache Iceberg and why monetizing storage was, in his view, a strategic misst…

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Chasing Real AGI: Inside ARC Prize 2025 with Chollet & Knoop 1:00:45

9M ago1:00:45

1:00:45

In this fascinating episode, we dive deep into the race towards true AI intelligence, AGI benchmarks, test-time adaptation, and program synthesis with star AI researcher (and philosopher) Francois Chollet, creator of Keras and the ARC AGI benchmark, and Mike Knoop, co-founder of Zapier and now co-founder with Francois of both the ARC Prize and the …

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Why This Ex-Meta Leader is Rethinking AI Infrastructure | Lin Qiao, CEO, Fireworks AI 59:14

9M ago59:14

59:14

In 2022, Lin Qiao decided to leave Meta, where she was managing several hundred engineers, to start Fireworks AI. In this episode, we sit down with Lin for a deep dive on her work, starting with her leadership on PyTorch, now one of the most influential machine learning frameworks in the industry, powering research and production at scale across th…

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Top AI Researcher on GPT 4.5, DeepSeek and Agentic RAG | Douwe Kiela, CEO, Contextual AI 50:44

10M ago50:44

50:44

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a dominant architecture in modern AI deployments, and in this episode, we sit down with Douwe Kiela, who co-authored the original RAG paper in 2020. Douwe is now the founder and CEO of Contextual AI, a startup focusing on helping enterprises deploy RAG as an agentic system. We start the conversation w…

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Empowering Millions of Creators with AI Video Editing | Gaurav Misra, CEO, Captions 1:13:14

10M ago1:13:14

1:13:14

In this episode, we dive into how AI is transforming video editing with Gaurav Misra, the CEO of Captions. Launched in New York in 2021, Captions already empowers over 10 million creators worldwide, leveraging AI to make video production as simple as clicking a button. Discover the strategic framework that led to the inception of Captions, and lear…

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Farewell, Chatbots: AI Agents Are Taking Over Customer Service | Mike Murchison, CEO, Ada 1:11:27

11M ago1:11:27

1:11:27

AI customer service agents are quickly replacing the often clunky AI chatbots of years past, and revolutionizing how we all interact with customer service. In this episode, we dive into this rapid transformation with Mike Murchison, CEO of Ada, a fast-growing leader in the space. Mike shares how harnessing the power of several Generative AI models …

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The AI Coding Agent Revolution, The Future of Software, Techno-Optimism | Amjad Masad, CEO, Replit 1:29:39

11M ago1:29:39

1:29:39

Replit is one of the most visible and exciting companies reshaping how we approach software and application development in the Generative AI era. In this episode, we sit down with its CEO, Amjad Masad, for an in-depth discussion on all things AI, agents, and software. Amjad shares the journey of building Replit, from its humble beginnings as a stud…

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Trino, Iceberg and the Battle for the Lakehouse | Justin Borgman, CEO, Starburst 1:06:24

11M ago1:06:24

1:06:24

In this episode, we explore the cutting-edge world of data infrastructure with Justin Borgman, CEO of Starburst — a company transforming data analytics through its open-source project, Trino, and empowering industry giants like Netflix, Airbnb, and LinkedIn. Justin takes us through Starburst’s journey from a Yale University spin-out to a leading fo…

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Understanding Data Engineering in 2025 | Ben Rogojan, Seattle Data Guy 1:02:24

11M ago1:02:24

1:02:24

As AI takes over the world, data is more than ever “the new oil”, and data engineering is the discipline that makes data usable behind the scenes. In this episode, we dive deep into the present and future of data engineering with Ben Rogojan, also known as the Seattle Data Guy. A seasoned data engineering consultant, Ben has built a big brand and r…

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What You MUST Know About AI Engineering in 2025 | Chip Huyen, Author of “AI Engineering” 1:12:35

12M ago1:12:35

1:12:35

In this episode, we dive deep into the world of AI engineering with Chip Huyen, author of the excellent, newly released book "AI Engineering: Building Applications with Foundation Models". We explore the nuances of AI engineering, distinguishing it from traditional machine learning, discuss how foundational models make it possible for anyone to bui…

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Dataiku's Secret to Scaling AI in Global Enterprises | Florian Douetteau, CEO, Dataiku 53:06

1y ago53:06

53:06

In this episode, we sit down with Florian Douetteau, co-founder and CEO of Dataiku, a global category leader in enterprise AI and a fixture on the Forbes Cloud 100 list and in the Gartner Leader Quadrant. Florian shares his journey from a Parisian student fascinated by functional programming to leading a global enterprise software company. We discu…

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Building the Easy Button for Generative AI | May Habib, CEO, Writer 35:52

1y ago35:52

35:52

In this episode, we dive into the world of generative AI with May Habib, co-founder of Writer, a platform transforming enterprise AI use. May shares her journey from Qordoba to Writer, emphasizing the impact of transformers in AI. We explore Writer's graph-based RAG approach, and their AI Studio for building custom applications. We also discuss Wri…

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State of AI 2024: Frontier Models, AI Geopolitics and The Robotics Renaissance | Nathan Benaich, Founder, Air Street Capital 51:39

1y ago51:39

51:39

Nathan Benaich, founder and GP at VC firm Air Street Capital, publishes every year "State of AI", one of the most widely-read and comprehensive reports on all things AI across research, industry, and policy. In this episode, we sit down with Nathan to discuss some of the highlights of the 2024 edition of the report, including the "vibes" shift in t…