Camilo Acosta is a GP at Perceptive VC, a pre-seed and seed stage venture firm investing in AI-first companies across the US and Latin America. He was previously a product lead at Meta. Prior to that, he was the cofounder and CEO of Pay By Group. Camilo's favorite book: The Power Law (Author: Sebastian Mallaby) (00:00) Introduction (00:29) Key Factors for AI Startup Success (01:23) Disruptive Opportunities for Startups in the AI Tech Stack (03:15) Challenges and Opportunities in AI...

Anima Anandkumar is a Bren Professor at Caltech. Her work developing novel AI algorithms enables and accelerates scientific applications of AI, including scientific simulations, weather forecasting, autonomous drone flights, and drug design. She has received best paper awards at venues such as NeurIPS and the ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for HPC-Based COVID-19 Research. She holds degrees from the IIT Madras and Cornell University. She has conducted postdoctoral research at MIT. She was...

Varun Mohan is the cofounder and CEO of Codeium, an AI code generation tool used by hundreds of thousands of developers. They recently announced their $65M Series B led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Greenoaks and General Catalyst. He was previously at Nuro. He has a bachelors and masters degree from MIT. Varun's favorite book: The Idea Factory (Author: Jon Gertner) (00:00) Introduction and State of Play (03:03) What Generative AI Can Do Well (06:10) Introduction to...

Rajat Bhageria is the founder and CEO of Chef Robotics, where they are building robots that can do the work of assembly line cooks in commercial kitchens. He's also the cofounder and managing partner of Prototype Capital, a pre-seed VC fund. He was previously the cofounder and CEO of ThirdEye, which got acquired in 2017. He has been a writer for Forbes, TechCrunch, and Huffington Post. Rajat's favorite book: Steve Jobs (Author: Walter Isaacson) (00:00) Fundamentals of Robotics and...

Jonathan Godwin  is the cofounder and CEO of Orbital Materials, where they're using Generative AI to develop a pipeline of new materials for carbon removal and energy transition. He was previously a Senior Research Engineer at Google DeepMind. Jonathan's favorite book: The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Author: Richard Rhodes) (00:07) The Process of Discovering New Materials (04:20) Building the Foundation Model (06:42) The Impact of Google's GNoME Project (08:49) Adding Materials to the...

Sergiy Nesterenko is the cofounder and CEO of Quilter, an AI platform to automate circuit board layout. He was previously at SpaceX for 5 years and he has a degree from UC Berkeley. They just announced their $10M Series A round led by Benchmark, one of Silicon Valley's most storied VC firms. (00:07) What is a PCB and its role in electronic devices (01:30) Examples of PCBs in everyday life (04:47) Manual components of the PCB design process (06:26) Introduction to Quilter and its...

Ari Morcos is the cofounder and CEO of Datology, an automated data curation platform. He was previously an AI research scientist at Meta and DeepMind. He has a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard. (00:07) Data Curation and its Importance (03:29) Assessing Data Quality (06:50) Challenges in Data Curation (13:27) Types of Data to Remove (19:33) Relationship Between Data Size and Model Size (23:22) Choosing the Optimal Subset of Data (26:23) The Future of Data Curation (31:29) Impact on Data...

Ofer Ronen is the CEO of Tomato.ai, an AI platform to soften speech accents of people as they speak. He was previously at Google where he built Contact Center AI products. Prior to this, he was the cofounder and CEO of Pulse.io and Sendori. (00:26) Accent Modification in Real Time (02:21) Training Data for AI Models (04:14) Overview of Tomato AI (05:36) Challenges in Modifying Speech Accents (07:17) Role of Phonetics and Linguistics (08:19) Handling Intonation and Subtleties in...

Itamar Arel is the CEO of Tenyx, where they are building intelligent voice AI agents. He was previously the founder of Apprente and Binatix. He was previously a visiting associate professor at Stanford. (00:22) State of Play in Voice AI (02:21) Modern Voice Agents (04:01) Building Voice AI Models (05:48) The Role of Developers (08:28) Introduction to Tenyx (09:52) Innovative Use Cases of Voice AI (15:20) Challenges in Voice AI (19:18) Scaling Voice AI Across Languages (21:45)...

Apoorv Agrawal is a partner at Altimeter, a tech-focused crossover firm with investments in iconic companies such as Snowflake, Twilio, UiPath, Uber, Okta, Roblox, HubSpot, GitLab, and more. He focuses on software and AI investments. He was previously an investor at Softbank and Steadview. Prior to this, he was building AI software at Rocket Fuel and Palantir as an engineer. He continues to code to this day and has built AltimeterGPT to augment their research efforts. He has a bachelors in...

Atif Rafiq is the cofounder and CEO of Ritual, a software app to speed up innovation and move ideas to action. He has held C-suite roles at McDonald's, Volvo, and MGM Resorts. He was previously the cofounder/CEO of Covigna, which is a content management software provider. He's the author of the book Decision Sprint, which was featured on the Wall Street Journal's bestseller list. (00:08) Defining the Future of Work (02:06) Skills for an AI-First Workplace (05:46) Evolution of Education...

Curtis Northcutt is the cofounder and CEO of Cleanlab, a data curation platform for LLMs. They have raised $30M in funding from Bain Capital Ventures, Menlo, Databricks, and TQ. He was previously the cofounder and CTO of ChipBrain. He has a PhD in Computer Science from MIT. (00:07) Data Curation in the Context of LLMs (01:14) Connection between Language Models and Computer Science (03:14) Importance of Data Curation for LLMs (04:06) Challenges in Data Curation for LLMs (06:09) Confident...

John Dulin is the founder and CEO of Modern Intelligence, where they are building AI foundation models for defense. He was previously at Numerai and Freenome. (00:00) Introduction (00:08) The State of AI in Defense (03:17) AI Impact on Tactics in Conflicts (09:24) Real-Time Threat Assessment (18:21) Naval Operations and Maritime Surveillance (22:28) Startups and Maritime Technologies (25:58) Naval Dominance and Global Power (31:20) Multi-Intelligence in Defense (35:20) The AI Arms Race and...

Talia Goldberg is a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners where she focuses on consumer internet, software, and AI. She became the youngest elected partner in firm history. Bessemer is a VC firm with a long and storied history with investments in companies like Twilio, Shopify, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Yelp, Twitch, and many more. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - Why is consumer the biggest beneficiary of AI - AI is generating massive consumer surplus - Why is RLHF...

Dan Caron is the founder and CEO of Health Universe, where they are building an open source collaboration platform for health AI. He was previously the founder and CTO of Dark Pilot. Prior to that, he was the founder and COO of RxREVU. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - State of play in Health AI - Why open source in Health AI - The founding of Health Universe - Potential risks of using open source in healthcare - Regulatory environment - Open source vs...

Jo Varshney is the founder and CEO of VeriSIM Life, an AI-driven bio-simulation platform that enables pharmaceutical companies to accelerate drug development. She has a PhD in Comparative Oncology and Genomics. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - State of play in AI-powered drug discovery - Why is it so difficult to know which drug candidates to pursue? - The founding of VeriSIM Life - Role of AI in drug formulation - Role of AI in drug repurposing - Role of AI in...

Mark Gabel is the cofounder and CEO of Laredo Labs, where they are building an AI agent for software engineers. He was previously the Chief Scientist at Viv Labs and an assistant professor at University of Texas at Dallas. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - Current state of generative AI in software development - Solver agent - Characteristics of a good AI assistant - Context awareness - Tradeoff between ease of generation and software quality - The role of...

Jae Lee is the cofounder and CEO of Twelve Labs, where they are building video understanding infrastructure to help developers build programs that can see, hear, and understand the world. He was previously the Lead Data Scientist at the Ministry of National Defense in South Korea. He has a bachelors in computer science from UC Berkeley. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - What is multimodal video understanding - State of play in multimodal video - The founding of...

Max Grigorev has been building ML products for a long time. He has worked underwater autonomy and has spent time at Google, Airbnb, and Teralytics.  In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - What is underwater autonomy - State of play in underwater robotics - Challenges of underwater operations - Differences between underwater vs land robotics - Unexplored opportunities in underwater autonomy - Regulatory hurdles - Future of underwater autonomy Max's favorite books:...

Sam Lessin is a GP at Slow Ventures, an early-stage VC firm based out of San Francisco, Boston, and New York. In the last decade, they have invested in the earliest rounds of over 500 companies including Solana, Robinhood, Venmo, Airtable, Slack, Front, Allbirds, Postmates, and more. He's the cofounder of Fin. He was VP of Product Management at Meta. He has a degree from Harvard. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - AI technology is great, but AI investing is not a good...

Tristan Zajonc is the cofounder and CEO of Continual, a developer platform for generative AI applications. He previously cofounded Sense, which was a platform for data science and machine learning. It got acquired by Cloudera in 2016. He spent 3 years at Cloudera building ML software. He has a PhD from Harvard. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - AI as an interface to the world - Tech stack of the future - The founding of Continual - AI product delivery avenues...

Martice Nicks III is the cofounder and CTO of Danti, a search engine for exploring the extensive collections of Earth observation data available today. He was previously at Orbital Insights, Maxar Technologies, and other companies working on geospatial data. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - What is Earth observation data - Where does the data come from - The founding of Danti - Use cases of Earth Observation data - How do you index this data and make it searchable...

Nicolas Tilmans is the cofounder and CEO of Anagenex, an AI-powered drug discovery platform. They have raised $37M in funding so far from investors such as Lux Capital, Khosla Ventures, Air Street, Menlo, and Catalio. He was previously the VP of Engineering at Lumiata. He has a PhD in Biochemistry from Stanford. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - What are small molecule drugs and why are they challenging to develop - The founding of Anagenex - Data generation engine...

Flo Crivello is the founder and CEO of Lindy, where they are building a personal AI assistant. He was previously the founder and CEO of Teamflow. Prior to that, he was at Uber where he led the development of Uber Works and JUMP Starter. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - Evolution of intelligence - The dawn of digital life - Artificial General Intelligence - White House's Executive Order on AI - The founding of Lindy AI - Large foundation models vs smaller...