Best Berkeley Engineering Podcasts (2025)

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From lawless spaces to true liberty: rethinking AI's role in society 1:38:37

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5d ago1:38:37

1:38:37

Welcome back to Generally Intelligent! We’re excited to relaunch our podcast—still featuring thoughtful conversations on building AI, but now with an expanded lens on its economic, societal, political, and human impacts. Matt Boulos leads policy and safety at Imbue, where he shapes the responsible development of AI coding tools that make software c…

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Exploring Engineering Ep. 10: Nuclear Engineering 11:05

1M ago11:05

11:05

In this episode of Exploring Engineering at UC Berkeley, we dive into the powerful and often misunderstood world of Nuclear Engineering. Undergraduate students Conrad Buck and Isaac Duarte Valdez share how curiosity—and a little serendipity—led them into a field full of untapped potential. Then, hear from Professor Ellie Tubman, a fusion researcher…

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Exploring Engineering Ep. 09: Mechanical Engineering 13:29

1M ago13:29

13:29

What does a robot-fetching chicken, baking, and diagnosing breast cancer have in common? Mechanical engineering! In this episode of Exploring Engineering at UC Berkeley, host Laura Vogt talks with Aashray Manchanda, a recent graduate of the M.E.T. program, Michael McNabb, an alum with a passion for invention, and Professor Lydia Sohn, who bridges p…

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Exploring Engineering Ep. 08: Materials Science and Engineering 17:22

1M ago17:22

17:22

In this episode of Exploring Engineering, we dive into the dynamic and often overlooked world of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE). Faculty member Mary Scott reveals the wide range of career paths in the field—from biomaterials to aerospace and electronics—while undergraduate Ava Daniels shares how a high school summer camp led her to discove…

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Exploring Engineering Ep. 07: Industrial Engineering and Operations Research 14:44

1M ago14:44

14:44

Welcome to Exploring Engineering at UC Berkeley! In this episode, we dive into the fascinating world of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research — better known as IEOR. Join host Laura Vogt as she talks with UC Berkeley faculty member Rhonda Righter, current student Kenny Wongchamcharoen, and alum Nanavati Low. Discover how IEOR blends math, …

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Exploring Engineering Ep. 06: Engineering science program 8:28

1M ago8:28

8:28

What do contact lenses, Newton rings, and computer science all have in common? For Jacqueline Thibault, a fourth-year Engineering Mathematics and Statistics major at UC Berkeley, they all came together in her first internship. In this episode of Exploring Engineering, host Laura Vogt sits down with Jackie to talk about what it means to be part of t…

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Exploring Engineering Ep. 05: Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences 20:14

1M ago20:14

20:14

What do robotics, video game mods, and chip design have in common? They’re all part of the incredibly broad and exciting world of EECS at UC Berkeley. In this episode, you’ll hear from faculty member Claire Tomlin, a MacArthur “Genius” and former chair of the EECS department, as well as undergraduates Robert Nochez, Julian Rickenbach, and Evan Sand…

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Exploring Engineering Ep. 04: Civil and Environmental Engineering 21:10

1M ago21:10

21:10

In this episode of Exploring Engineering, host Laura Vogt guides us through the many layers of civil engineering. You’ll hear from faculty, recent grads, and alumni who’ve carved out careers in transportation, public service, and cutting-edge construction. Parson Galicia (City of Oakland), Kimberly Leung (San Francisco MTA), and Nelson Jurado (stud…

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Exploring Engineering Ep. 03: Bioengineering 15:10

1M ago15:10

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What does it mean to merge engineering with biology? In this episode of Exploring Engineering at UC Berkeley, we dive into the world of bioengineering—a field that’s as interdisciplinary as it is impactful. You'll hear from Na’im Pierce, a recent graduate with a passion for genetic engineering and neurosurgery; Professor Kevin Healy, who shares his…

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Exploring Engineering Ep. 02: Aerospace Engineering 16:26

1M ago16:26

16:26

Ever wonder what it’s really like to study rocket science? In this episode, we dive into UC Berkeley’s newest engineering major: Aerospace Engineering. Hear from current students Evan Smart and Maxwell Stolarz, who share what inspired them to pursue aerospace and how broad and exciting the field really is. You'll also get insights from Professor Pa…

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Exploring Engineering Ep. 01: What’s Engineering? 10:34

1M ago10:34

10:34

Welcome to Exploring Engineering at UC Berkeley—a new podcast series where we uncover what it means to be an engineer and dive into the paths that lead there. Hosted by Laura Vogt, director of student communications for Berkeley Engineering, this first episode features an inspiring conversation with Tsu-Jae King Liu, former dean of Berkeley Enginee…

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Exploring Engineering at UC Berkeley trailer 1:03

2M ago1:03

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Debuting Tuesday, July 8, Exploring Engineering at UC Berkeley is your introduction into each of the academic departments and programs that are part of UC Berkeley Engineering. For a transcript, please visit the episode page on the ESS podcast hubBy Berkeley Engineering

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Solving the CRISPR delivery problem using a proprietary peptide-based platform 1:05:53

3M ago1:05:53

1:05:53

Dana Foss and Ross Wilson are the cofounders of Editpep, a biotech startup focused on developing CRISPR-based therapeutics. They are using a proprietary peptide-based delivery platform that enables targeted delivery to specific cell types, particularly for hard-to-reach areas like the brain. While Dana Foss is the CEO, Ross Wilson is also an Assist…

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Altitude Lab Fund- Supporting healthcare founders in challenging times 51:41

5M ago51:41

51:41

Chandana Haque is the Executive Director of Altitude Lab, a healthcare startup accelerator building a community of diverse entrepreneurs in Utah. Altitude Lab was cofounded in 2020 by Chandana and Chris Gibson, the co-founder & CEO of Recursion in Salt Lake City. They recently announced the launch of a pre-seed venture fund aimed at supporting earl…

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Partnering to accelerate therapeutics: A primer on forming alliances and their management 50:40

8M ago50:40

50:40

Monica Rosoff, the founder and CEO of LBBAL™ Alianza. Prior to launching Alianza, Monica was a partnering executive with roles of increasing seniority at Genentech, Gilead, Kite and Exelixis. Over the course of over two decades, she had the opportunity to lead and participate in a wide diversity of deals, negotiations, diligence exercises, alliance…

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Rylan Schaeffer, Stanford: Investigating emergent abilities and challenging dominant research ideas 1:02:51

11M ago1:02:51

1:02:51

Rylan Schaeffer is a PhD student at Stanford studying the engineering, science, and mathematics of intelligence. He authored the paper “Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?”, as well as other interesting refutations in the field that we’ll talk about today. He previously interned at Meta on the Llama team, and at Google DeepMin…

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From Pitches to Stories: Transforming Complex Ideas into Engaging Narratives 54:11

11M ago54:11

54:11

Zack Shildhorn is an investing Partner at venture firm Lux Capital. He played multiple key roles that helped the firm scale from less than $100M to more than $4B in assets under management. After witnessing thousands of pitches, he saw that even the most disruptive startups often struggled to develop effective narratives. Having worked closely with…

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ESS 812: Resources in the CAEE 22:17

12M ago22:17

22:17

In our final podcast of the summer, we speak with Luis Castillo, associate director of student development in ESS, and returning engineering students Andrea Limon, Gabriel Sianez and Rosalind Martinez. They will introduce us to the Center for Access to Engineering Excellence (CAEE), a program in ESS that includes academic support, a computer loan p…

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ESS 811: Engineering Transfer Center & Transfer Ambassadors 27:20

1y ago27:20

27:20

Students transferring to the College of Engineering face many changes. Among them, they must learn to navigate an entirely new college environment. To support these students, we asked Heidi Maqueos, program manager for transfer success initiatives in ESS, to tell us about two resources that are for transfer students, by transfer students: the Engin…

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ESS 810: Discover entrepreneurship in engineering 15:48

1y ago15:48

15:48

Are you interested in someday making the leap from student to entrepreneur? This week, we are learning about the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology and its Student Innovation Fellows program. Engineering students Rachel Eizner and Claire Holland will give us pointers on signing up to be a fellow and ways you can engage with this pr…

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ESS 809: Career Library 25:05

1y ago25:05

25:05

We don’t expect students to always know their post-graduation plans.You will spend the next two to four years learning about the many opportunities that await you after graduation. This week, we are delighted to have Kate Zuby, from Berkeley’s counseling & psychological services, here to introduce the Career Library — a resource that will help you …

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Turning great science into impactful medicine: Lessons from Corey Goodman, Pioneer in Science and Venture Capital 1:21:13

1y ago1:21:13

1:21:13

Corey Goodman, Ph.D., is the managing partner of venBio, a venture capital firm he cofounded in 2011. venBio already has 7 FDA approved drugs on the market, saving and improving lives. Corey spent 25 years as Professor of Biology at Stanford University and Evan Rauch Chair of Neurobiology at U.C. Berkeley, where he was a HHMI Investigator, Head of …

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Ari Morcos, DatologyAI: Leveraging data to democratize model training 1:34:19

1y ago1:34:19

1:34:19

Ari Morcos is the CEO of DatologyAI, which makes training deep learning models more performant and efficient by intervening on training data. He was at FAIR and DeepMind before that, where he worked on a variety of topics, including how training data leads to useful representations, lottery ticket hypothesis, and self-supervised learning. His work …

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Pushing Boundaries: Abhishek Tripathi’s Experience with NASA, SpaceX, UC Berkeley and Startups 1:01:24

1y ago1:01:24

1:01:24

Abhishek Tripathi, is the Director of Mission operations of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Abhi is also the Chair of the Air and Space track startups at Skydeck, which is UC Berkeley's startup accelerator program. For over two decades, Abhi has been at the forefront of human and robotic space exploration. A…

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Percy Liang, Stanford: The paradigm shift and societal effects of foundation models 1:01:55

1+ y ago1:01:55

1:01:55

Percy Liang is an associate professor of computer science and statistics at Stanford. These days, he’s interested in understanding how foundation models work, how to make them more efficient, modular, and robust, and how they shift the way people interact with AI—although he’s been working on language models for long before foundation models appear…

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Lessons from Evolution of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Ecosystem at UC Berkeley 58:06

1+ y ago58:06

58:06

Richard Lyons, Ph.D., is the Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Innovation & Entrepreneurship Officer, at the University of California, Berkeley. Rich is an economist and the former dean of the business school. Rich will become the next chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. We talk about a wide variety of topics around the Evolutio…

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Civilization Ventures: Lessons learned from founding, exiting and applying them to support founders as an investor 54:45

1+ y ago54:45

54:45

Shahram Seyedin-Noor is the founder and managing partner at Civilization Ventures. Shahram received a JD from Harvard and worked at Wilson Solsinis and Cooley before going into investment banking at firms like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. He then entered the startup world co-founding several startups. He eventually ended up Angel investing an…

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Seth Lazar, Australian National University: Legitimate power, moral nuance, and the political philosophy of AI 1:55:45

1+ y ago1:55:45

1:55:45

Seth Lazar is a professor of philosophy at the Australian National University, where he leads the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory (MINT) Lab. His unique perspective bridges moral and political philosophy with AI, introducing much-needed rigor to the question of what will make for a good and just AI future. Generally Intelligent is a podca…

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Humba Ventures: Investing in Deep Tech Startups with Engineering Focus 53:11

1+ y ago53:11

53:11

Leo Polovets is the Co-founder and General Partner at Susa Ventures. Leo focuses on enterprise software and technical products at Susa. About two years ago, He also started Humba Ventures, a fund that invests in deep tech and critical national sectors like energy and defense at Humba. Leo led Susa's investments in Mashgin, People Data Labs, Scalyr,…

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Berkeley Skydeck- Catalyzing the growth of deep tech startups at the world’s number one ranked public university. 52:08

1+ y ago52:08

52:08

Caroline Winnett is the Executive Director of Berkeley Skydeck, a startup accelerator at the University of California, Berkeley. Skydeck started as a mentoring space in 2012 and soon translated into one of the leading startup accelerators in the world. SkyDeck was Formed as a partnership between UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, the College of…

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Medtech Innovator and Biotools Innovator: accelerator for medical device, digital health and diagnostic companies 1:12:25

1+ y ago1:12:25

1:12:25

Paul Grand is the founder and CEO; Ayelet Marom is the Program Director for BioTools Innovator, which focuses specifically on biotools; and Jim West is the Associate Director, BioTools Innovator, who was previously the Co-Founder and CEO of, Clara Biotech, which was founded in 2018 and was acquired by Innovaprep in the summer of 2023. Jim was the f…

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Metcela - Treating chronic organ diseases using a novel fibroblast-based technology 58:06

1+ y ago58:06

58:06

Kenichi Nogami is the co-founder and CEO of Metcela, a clinical-stage biotechnology startup pioneering the research and development of fibroblast and stem cell-based therapy for chronic heart diseases that currently have limited therapeutic options. We talk about the current treatments for heart failure and how the fibroblast technology could help …

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Lessons learned from a scientist entrepreneur turned investor 1:16:45

1+ y ago1:16:45

1:16:45

Caleb Bell III, Ph.D., is a venture partner at Corundum Systems Biology and also the President of Corundum convergence institute. We talk about the founding story of Bell biosystems; how they were able to work at various labs around the country with very little money; building teams, culture; raising money, interacting with investors, leadership tr…

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NAMUH - Attempt at closing the gap between infant formula and human breast milk 1:05:44

2y ago1:05:44

1:05:44

Chaeyoung Shin was the Co-founder and CEO of NAMUH, a startup focused on developing yeast fermentation technologies to produce human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs). HMOs are crucial, fiber-equivalent macronutrients that are currently lacking in most formulas. Integrating them in sufficient amounts could significantly close the nutritional disparity b…

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Tri Dao, Stanford: FlashAttention and sparsity, quantization, and efficient inference 1:20:29

2y ago1:20:29

1:20:29

Tri Dao is a PhD student at Stanford, co-advised by Stefano Ermon and Chris Re. He’ll be joining Princeton as an assistant professor next year. He works at the intersection of machine learning and systems, currently focused on efficient training and long-range context. About Generally Intelligent We started Generally Intelligent because we believe …

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NASA fueling innovation through SBIR/STTR, Awards & Prizes 48:32

2y ago48:32

48:32

Jenn Gustetic is the Director of Early Stage Innovations and Partnerships at NASA. In this episode of Lab to startup, we will learn about various funding mechanisms that NASA provides to support innovation, primarily to support NASA space missions. We talk about the funding process through contracts; differences between grants and contracts; NASA’s…

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Independent directors for startups 49:31

2y ago49:31

49:31

Ryan Caldbeck, is the COO of Dune, a powerful analytics platform for blockchain research. It can be used to query, extract, and visualize vast amounts of data on the Ethereum blockchain. Ryan was previously the founder, and CEO of CircleUp, a technology platform focused on finding and evaluating private companies. He is also an angel investor in se…

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Jamie Simon, UC Berkeley: Theoretical principles for how neural networks learn and generalize 1:01:54

2y ago1:01:54

1:01:54

Jamie Simon is a 4th year Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley advised by Mike DeWeese, and also a Research Fellow with us at Generally Intelligent. He uses tools from theoretical physics to build fundamental understanding of deep neural networks so they can be designed from first-principles. In this episode, we discuss reverse engineering kernels, the con…

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Feeding our astronauts - Reflections of a NASA food scientist 1:08:25

2y ago1:08:25

1:08:25

Vickie Kloeris is a food scientist with an out of this world career. She worked at NASA in space food systems for 34 years. She served as the NASA manager of the Shuttle first and then the International Space Station food systems. She and her teams worked through the complex challenges of creating tasty, nutritious, long-lasting, easy-to-prepare me…

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Developing foundational tools for engineering metabolism inside cells to solve important societal problems. 57:28

2y ago57:28

57:28

Jay Keasling, the CEO of the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). He is also a Professor in the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering and also the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley.. He’s also a Senior Faculty Scientist @ Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and also holds other prestigious positions a…

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PCDworks: Hardtech Basecamp Incubator for building hardware products 1:00:15

2+ y ago1:00:15

1:00:15

Donna Rainone and Mike Rainone are the founders of PCDworks. PCDworks is a technology development company that helped develop hardware for over 50 big companies in the oil and gas, transportation, healthcare and several other industries; and now helping startups with a new incubator model. We first talk about lessons learned from building innovativ…

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VeriSIM Life: Using AI to build translational indices to push better drug moieties into clinicals 1:09:22

2+ y ago1:09:22

1:09:22

Jo Varshney, Ph.D., is the founder and CEO of VeriSIM Life, a startup developing disease-specific simulation software designed to replace animal drug testing by using artificial intelligence. We talk about translational gap in drug discovery, the technology VeriSIM is developing, especially their virtual mouse models; some of the mathematical model…

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Bill Thompson, UC Berkeley: How cultural evolution shapes knowledge acquisition 1:15:24

2+ y ago1:15:24

1:15:24

Bill Thompson is a cognitive scientist and an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. He runs an experimental cognition laboratory where he and his students conduct research on human language and cognition using large-scale behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and machine learning. In this episode, we explore the impact of cultural evolution…

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Ben Eysenbach, CMU: Designing simpler and more principled RL algorithms 1:45:56

2+ y ago1:45:56

1:45:56

Ben Eysenbach is a PhD student from CMU and a student researcher at Google Brain. He is co-advised by Sergey Levine and Ruslan Salakhutdinov and his research focuses on developing RL algorithms that get state-of-the-art performance while being more simple, scalable, and robust. Recent problems he’s tackled include long horizon reasoning, exploratio…

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Osage University Partners- Funding university spinouts 55:43

2+ y ago55:43

55:43

Manny Stockman is a Partner at Osage University Partners. OUP exclusively invests in startups spun out of university research. We talk about the investment thesis of Osage University Partners; technology readiness challenges; lessons learned from investing in early stage technologies at universities; challenges with the current market research used…

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Jim Fan, NVIDIA: Foundation models for embodied agents, scaling data, and why prompt engineering will become irrelevant 1:26:45

2+ y ago1:26:45

1:26:45

Jim Fan is a research scientist at NVIDIA and got his PhD at Stanford under Fei-Fei Li. Jim is interested in building generally capable autonomous agents, and he recently published MineDojo, a massively multiscale benchmarking suite built on Minecraft, which was an Outstanding Paper at NeurIPS. In this episode, we discuss the foundation models for …

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Lucira Health 2:07:29

2+ y ago2:07:29

2:07:29

Debkishora Mitra and John Waldeisen are the co-founders of Lucira Health. Lucira Health, which was originally founded as Diassess, is the first company to get an FDA approval for at-home PCR based test for COVID. We talk about the story of Lucira from its founding stage to raising; the technological and market based pivots; raising over $250M (incl…

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Sergey Levine, UC Berkeley: The bottlenecks to generalization in reinforcement learning, why simulation is doomed to succeed, and how to pick good research problems 1:34:49

2+ y ago1:34:49

1:34:49

Sergey Levine, an assistant professor of EECS at UC Berkeley, is one of the pioneers of modern deep reinforcement learning. His research focuses on developing general-purpose algorithms for autonomous agents to learn how to solve any task. In this episode, we talk about the bottlenecks to generalization in reinforcement learning, why simulation is …

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Legal 101 for deeptech founders; Understanding the basics; dilution, and safeguarding employee equity 1:18:13

2+ y ago1:18:13

1:18:13

Nick Dorsey and Amanda Gold are partners at Cravath, Swaine and Moore, LLP. Cravath has been known as one of the premier law firms in the US for more than two centuries. We talk about a wide variety of topics involving legal aspects for startups from incorporation to exit- incorporation, picking a law firm, equity split, vesting, hiring first emplo…

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Noam Brown, FAIR: Achieving human-level performance in poker and Diplomacy, and the power of spending compute at inference time 1:44:54

2+ y ago1:44:54

1:44:54

Noam Brown is a research scientist at FAIR. During his Ph.D. at CMU, he made the first AI to defeat top humans in No Limit Texas Hold 'Em poker. More recently, he was part of the team that built CICERO which achieved human-level performance in Diplomacy. In this episode, we extensively discuss ideas underlying both projects, the power of spending c…