Unsupervised Learning
Unsupervised Learning episodes converted into bullet points.
Episodes
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AI Vibe Check: Lab Wars, Why APIs Might Vanish & Future Predictions
Six months after their last roundup, Jacob sits down with Ari Morcos (Datology AI CEO, former Meta AI researcher) and Rob Toews (Radical Ventures partner, Forbes AI columnist) to take stock of an AI landscape that has shifted dramatically: coding agents crossing the long-time-horizon threshold has turned engineers into managers of agents, near-frontier open weight AI looks like it may be disappearing as Meta and the Chinese labs pull back, and Anthropic's restrictions on its newly released Fable model have its biggest supporters questioning whether safety framing is masking competitive positioning. The conversation runs through the full state of the lab wars, including Rob doubling down on his Sam Altman ouster prediction and the Bret Taylor succession theory, why Google's structural advantages remain intact despite falling behind on coding, what xAI's Cursor acquisition is really for, and Ari's claim that compute constraints could push labs to suspend their APIs entirely. The back half digs into the physical bottlenecks underneath it all, from atom and x-ray lithography startups challenging ASML to H100 prices reversing their decline, before closing with predictions: recursive self-improvement is closer than it was six months ago but slower than the takeoff narratives suggest, robotics is nearing its GPT-3 moment, and Anthropic's next chapter may be life sciences. 0:00 Intro 1:40 Coding Agents Cross a Threshold 3:29 Is Open-Weight AI in Retreat? 7:37 Cost Crunch & Scaffolding 12:13 The "Apps Are Cooked" Debate 16:37 Sam Altman Under Scrutiny 19:44 Anthropic's Fable Backlash 23:24 How Big a Step Change Is Fable? 26:50 What's Going On at Google? 33:20 Could the APIs Go Away? 34:11 Breaking the Semiconductor Bottleneck 35:42 Beyond EUV: Atom & X-Ray Lithography 37:23 Implications of a Compute Shortage 40:20 Do Alt Chips Actually Help? 43:43 SpaceX, xAI & the Cursor Acquisition 48:50 How Close Are We to RSI? 52:21 Quickfire With your host: @jacobeffron - Managing Director at Redpoint
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AI Research Legend’s Honest Assessment of Where We Are
This episode with Lukasz Kaiser, co-author of the seminal "Attention Is All You Need" transformer paper and former researcher at both Google Brain and OpenAI, is a wide-ranging conversation about the fundamental limits of current AI architectures and whether transformers will continue to dominate...
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A Conversation With Demis Hassabis' Biographer
Sebastian Mallaby spent three years and 30+ hours interviewing Demis Hassabis in the back of a British pub to write The Infinity Machine, and the conversation uses that reporting to surface the most underexplored figure in AI. Demis founded the original AI lab in 2010, won a Nobel Prize, runs mod...
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Gemini Co-Lead on World Models, RL's Next Domains & Continual Learning
Oriol Vinyals, VP of Research at Google DeepMind and co-lead of the Gemini program, joins Jacob the day after Google I/O to unpack the research underpinning Google's latest announcements and where frontier AI is heading. The conversation moves from world models (why Google has uniquely bet on the...
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Yann LeCun on What Comes After LLMs
Yann LeCun, Turing Award winner and former Chief AI Scientist at Meta, joins Jacob Effron. The conversation centers on Yann's contrarian thesis that LLMs are a dead-end on the path to human-level intelligence, despite being useful products — because they can't predict the consequences of their ac...
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AI investor + engineer discuss the current state of AI
This episode is a wide-ranging conversation between Jacob and Swyx (Shawn Wang), an AI engineer, podcaster, and now operator at Cognition, who sits at a uniquely informed intersection of builder, investor, and community organizer in the AI world. The two cover the current state of the AI engineer...
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OpenAI’s Chief Scientist on Continual Learning Hype, RL Beyond Code, & Future Alignment Directions
Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's Chief Scientist, sits down with Jacob to cover the full arc of where AI research stands today and where it's headed. The conversation spans the explosive growth of coding agents and what it signals about near-term AI capability, the use of math and physics benchmarks as p...
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Owning the System of Record, Building as Models Improve, & Why ITSM is Vulnerable
Serval is one of the fastest-growing AI-native enterprise software companies right now, and this episode is a rare inside look at the deliberate architectural, go-to-market, and talent decisions behind that growth. Jake Stauch breaks down why he made the contrarian bet to build a full system of r...
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The Most Unexpected Breakout Category in AI
Max Junestrand, CEO of Legora, joins Jacob Effron and Logan Bartlett to discuss the company's $550M Series D and share a candid account of what building an AI-native company at speed actually looks like from the inside.
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Ex-OpenAI Researcher On Why He Left, His Honest AGI Timeline, & The Limits of Scaling RL
This episode features Jerry Tworek, a key architect behind OpenAI's breakthrough reasoning models (o1, o3) and Codex, discussing the current state and future of AI. Jerry explores the real limits and promise of scaling pre-training and reinforcement learning, arguing that while these paradigms de...
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AI Vibe Check: The Actual Bottleneck In Research, SSI’s Mystique, & Spicy 2026 Predictions
Ari Morcos and Rob Toews return for their spiciest conversation yet. Fresh from NeurIPS, they debate whether models are truly plateauing or if we're just myopically focused on LLMs while breakthroughs happen in other modalities.
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Edwin Chen: Why Frontier Labs Are Diverging, RL Environments & Developing Model Taste
Ask Jacob a Question: Question Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vHBYv0bTT_EgFWTjbKnLr_sn3pZnFmcFGWYVTltKEco/edit
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OpenAI's Head of Product: How the Best Teams Build, Ship and Scale AI Products
Question Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vHBYv0bTT_EgFWTjbKnLr_sn3pZnFmcFGWYVTltKEco/edit
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China Expert: AI Race, Key Policy Decisions & Unpacking Geopolitical Chip Tension
Question Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vHBYv0bTT_EgFWTjbKnLr_sn3pZnFmcFGWYVTltKEco/edit
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Anthropic's First PM: Opus 4.5, Rethinking Model Scaffolding & Safety as a Competitive Advantage
This episode features Dianne Na Penn, a senior product leader at Anthropic, discussing the launch of Claude Opus 4.5 and the evolution of frontier AI models. The conversation explores how Anthropic approaches model development—balancing ambitious capability roadmaps with user feedback, making str...
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Inside OpenAI's Sora: Surge to #1 App, Key Product Decisions & How Video Models Learn Physics
This episode features the core team behind Sora, OpenAI's groundbreaking video generation platform that became the #1 app in the App Store. Bill Peebles (research lead), Rohan Sahai (product lead), and Thomas Dimson (engineering/product lead with Instagram background) discuss the unexpected viral...
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AI Round-up: Karpathy Reactions, OpenAI’s Dealmaking, & Bubble Reality Check
This episode features Rob Toews from Radical Ventures and Ari Morcos, Head of Research at Datology AI, reacting to Andrej Karpathy's recent statement that AGI is at least a decade away and that current AI capabilities are "slop." The discussion explores whether we're in an AI bubble, with both gu...
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AI Talent Wars, xAI’s $200B Valuation, & Google’s Comeback
This episode features a deep dive into the current state of AI model progress with Ari Morcos (CEO of Datalogy AI and former DeepMind/Meta researcher) and Rob Toews (partner at Radical Ventures). The conversation tackles whether model progress is genuinely slowing down or simply shifting into new...
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Google's Nano Banana Team: Behind the Breakthrough as Gemini Tops the Charts
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Tri Dao: The End of Nvidia's Dominance, Why Inference Costs Fell & The Next 10X in Speed
Tri Dao, Chief Scientist at Together AI and Princeton professor who created Flash Attention and Mamba, discusses how inference optimization has driven costs down 100x since ChatGPT's launch through memory optimization, sparsity advances, and hardware-software co-design. He predicts the AI hardwar...
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Scale Expert on AI Pricing Tactics, Reactions to GPT-5 & Why Voice is Underrated
In this episode, Jacob sits down with Peter Deng, General Partner at Felicis and former Product Leader at OpenAI, Facebook, and Uber. Peter shares his insider perspective on building ChatGPT Enterprise in just seven weeks and leading voice mode development at OpenAI. The conversation covers every...
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AI Bio Expert: 99% Faster Drug Discovery, BioTech’s AlphaGo Moment, Building Photoshop for Molecules
In this episode, Jacob sits down with Joshua Meier, co-founder of Chai Discovery and former Chief AI Officer at Absci, to explore the breakthrough moment happening in AI drug discovery. They discuss how the field has evolved through three distinct waves, with the current generation of companies f...
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The Infrastructure Company Powering the Top AI Apps
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2 Robotics Pioneers Unpack the Path to Generalist Robots
In this episode, Jacob sits down with Karol Hausman (Co-Founder/CEO) and Danny Driess (Research Scientist) from Physical Intelligence, two of the minds behind some of the most exciting advances in robotics. They unpack the last decade of progress in AI robotics, from early skepticism to the break...
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Databricks Co-Founder: Eval Limitations, Why China is Winning Open Source and Future of AI Infra
Ion Stoica helped define the modern data stack. Now he’s coming for AI evaluation. From co-founding Databricks and Anyscale to launching LMArena, Ion has shaped the infrastructure underlying some of the biggest shifts in computing. In this conversation, he unpacks what most people get wrong about...
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Mercor CEO: Evals Will Replace Knowledge Work, AI x Hiring Today & the Future of Data Labeling
Brendan Foody is the co-founder and CEO of Mercor, a company building the infrastructure for AI-native labor markets. Mercor’s platform is already used by top AI labs to label data, evaluate human and AI candidates, and make performance-driven hiring decisions.
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A Masterclass in Building AI Applications From Legora's CEO
Jacob and Logan sit down with Max Junestrand, founder and CEO of Legora - a rapidly growing legal AI platform (and Redpoint portfolio company). After announcing their Series B last week, Max joined the show to discuss why law is uniquely suited for AI, what it takes to scale an enterprise-ready p...
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Claude 4, Next Phase for AI Coding, and the Path to AI Coworkers
Sholto Douglas, a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, joined Unsupervised Learning to break down why coding is the clearest early signal of model progress, how AI agents are already accelerating research, and what it’ll take to unlock real-world breakthroughs in fields like biology and robotics.
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AI 2027 Co-Authors Map Out AI’s Spread of Outcomes on Humanity
The recent AI 2027 report sparked widespread discussion with its stark warnings about the near-term risks of unaligned AI.
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RFT Launch, How OpenAI Improves Its Models & the State of AI Agents Today
In this episode, I sit down with Michelle Pokrass, who leads a research team at OpenAI within post-training focused on improving models for power users: developers using OpenAI models in the API and power users in ChatGPT. We unpack how OpenAI prioritized instruction-following and long context, w...
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Khan Academy Founder: Predictions About the Future of AI Education
When Khan Academy launched Khanmigo, Salman Khan thought they might reach 100k users by 2025. Today, they’re at 1.4 million.
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Aidan Gomez: Scaling Limits Emerging, AI Use-cases with PMF & Life After Transformers
Aidan joined this week’s Unsupervised Learning for a wide-ranging conversation on model architectures, enterprise adoption, and what’s breaking in the foundation model stack.
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4 AI Investors on What Separates Enduring AI Companies from the Hype
At Redpoint’s annual meeting with investors, Redpoint partners Scott Raney, Alex Bard, Patrick Chase and Jacob Effron shared unfiltered thoughts on some of the most topical questions in AI today, where value will accrue, which industries are best positioned for defensibility at the application la...
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What has PMF Today, Google is Cooking & GPT Wrappers are Winning | With Latent Space
To unpack some of the most topical questions in AI, I’m joined by two fellow AI podcasters: Swyx and Alessio Fanelli, co-hosts of the Latent Space podcast. We’ve been wanting to do a cross-over episode for a while and finally made it happen.
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Inside OpenAI's New Agent Development Tools
Two weeks ago, OpenAI released its set of tools to help developers build agentic systems. Today on Unsupervised Learning, Nikunj Handa (Product Lead) and Steve Coffey (Eng Lead) answer some of the biggest questions around how developers should be thinking about building in the agentic paradigm in...
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Noam Shazeer and Jack Rae: Scaling Test-time Compute, Reactions to Ilya & AGI
On the latest episode of Unsupervised Learning, Jacob is joined by two of the most influential minds in AI today.
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Former Meta CTO: The Path to Powering the AI Revolution
On today’s Unsupervised Learning, Mike Schroepfer (ex-CTO of Meta and founder of Gigascale Capital) reveals why energy is a key bottleneck holding AI progress back. Mike discusses how we can scale energy production to democratize AI globally and explores AI’s role in climate change. He also refle...
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Self-Driving Expert Unpacks the Biggest Breakthroughs and Bottlenecks
Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. The company operates a 24/7 public ride-hail service and provides over 150,000 trips each week across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin, making mobility more accessible, sustain...
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David Luan: DeepSeek’s Significance, What’s Next for Agents & Lessons from OpenAI
David is an OG in AI who has been at the forefront of many of the major breakthroughs of the past decade. His resume: VP of Engineering at OpenAI, a key contributor to Google Brain, co-founder of Adept, and now leading Amazon’s SF AGI Lab.
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Unpacking AI Agent Hype vs. Reality with Arvind Narayanan
Arvind Narayanan is one of the leading voices in AI when it comes to cutting through the hype. As a Princeton professor and co-author of AI Snake Oil, he’s one of the most thoughtful voices cautioning against both unfounded fears and overblown promises in AI. In this episode, Arvind dissects the...
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SemiAnalysis Founder Dylan Patel on New AI Regulations, Chinese AI & xAI's Surge to Hyperscale
In this episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sit down with Dylan Patel, Chief Analyst at SemiAnalysis, to break down what these sweeping changes really mean. From how they consolidate power among Big Tech to China's narrowing options for AI dominance, we unpacked the impact of this regulatory shift.
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Ex-OpenAI Chief Research Officer: What Comes Next for AI?
In our new world of AI, few minds shine as brightly as Bob McGrew's. Until November Bob was the Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, and before that led Palantir’s engineering and product management for the first decade of its existence.
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Why There Won’t be One Model, Will Hyperscalers Win Inference & AI Use-cases with PMF
Lin Qiao, the co-founder of Fireworks.ai, sits down for a deep dive into the future of AI. Lin ran the PyTorch team at Meta, which developed some of the most fundamental open-source AI software in use today. She’s got a riveting perspective on the AI landscape that is a must-listen.
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OpenAI's Noam Brown Unpacks the Full Release of o1 and the Path to AGI
Noam Brown, renowned AI researcher and key figure at OpenAI, joins us for a deep dive into the o1 release. Recorded just one day before o1’s full public debut, this episode explores the groundbreaking advancements and challenges behind this innovative test-time compute model.
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A Deep Dive into the Future of Voice in AI
For this episode of Unsupervised Learning we spoke with Russ d'Sa, co-founder of LiveKit, a company at the forefront of voice AI technology. Russ thinks of LiveKit as a “nervous system,” powering the sensory interfaces humans use to interact with AI – including the Advanced Voice feature in ChatG...
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Databricks AI Head: New Model Architectures are Unlikely, When to Pre-Train/Fine Tune and AI Policy
Jonathan Frankle is the Chief AI Scientist at Databricks ($43B), which he joined through the acquisition of MosaicML in July 2023. Databricks has over 12,000 customers on the cutting edge of AI; Jonathan works to anticipate their needs and offer solutions even as the tech is rapidly evolving.
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DeepL CEO on Specialized vs. General Models, Beating Google and a Synchronous Translation Future
I sat down with DeepL cofounder Jarek Kutylowski. DeepL is a comprehensive Language AI platform that enables organizations to communicate effectively across languages, cultures, and markets. Jarek shared a treasure trove of insights on the past, present, and future of AI translation. Here were so...
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HeyGen CEO on Navigating Voice-Cloning and the Path to Interactive Avatars
Joshua Xu is co-founder and CEO of HeyGen -- the fast-growing AI video creation and translation platform. You can upload a video, or create a new one from a script using an AI avatar as your star, and HeyGen will translate it into 175 languages. HeyGen now serves over 40,000 customers and is gene...
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Stanford AI Researcher on What’s Next in Research, Reaction to o1 and How AI will Change Simulation
Percy Liang is a Stanford professor and co-founder of Together AI, driving some of the most critical advances in AI research.
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Expert AI Researcher Reacts to o1 and Shares What's Next in Reasoning and Post-Training
Douwe’s contributions to AI are truly a part of its bedrock foundations. He wrote the first paper on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and has raised over $100 million to help enterprises build contextual language models that fit their use cases. Before Contextual he was the head of research a...
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A Peek Inside Grammarly’s AI
If you don’t know Grammarly, it’s a personalized AI assistant for writing that has over 30 Million Daily Active Users. Grammarly has been building AI productivity tooling long before the most recent GenAI wave and has raised over $400M, with a current valuation of $13B.
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How Snowflake is Uniquely Positioned to Win in AI
Snowflake sits in a unique position in the AI landscape: They enable fast, secure, and scalable proprietary data access for thousands of customers, many of whom are building AI tools. They also maintain their own suite of AI products, increasing the utility of their platform and empowering custom...
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The AI English Tutor Taking the World by Storm
We’re excited to bring you Connor Zwick, CEO and cofounder of Speak, on the podcast this week! Speak helps people learning a language have conversations with an AI speaking partner, which is critical to gaining fluency. It’s backed by OpenAI and most recently raised at a $500M valuation. Since la...
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GitHub's CEO’s Boldest Predictions about the Future of Code
Thomas Dohmke has been at Github for almost 6 years, and has been CEO for almost 3 of those years. He has a pulse on what engineers around the world are looking for from the world’s leading developer platform, and incredible vision and empathy in making Github delivers it.
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The GenAI Media Platform That Keeps Getting Better
Cris is the co-founder and CEO of Runway, which builds breathtakingly real video AI tools, including the incredible Gen-3 Alpha foundation model. Cris sits right at the intersection of technology and creativity, and in 2023 was named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI. Runway is reported...
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Fireflies.ai CEO: The Surge to 16M Users
According to Ramp’s (ramp.com) Quarterly Spend report, Fireflies was the 4th highest AI platform by spend. With over 300,000 customers worldwide and 16M users, Fireflies.ai is operating at some of the largest scale amongst AI companies today.
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The Company Leading the AI Music Revolution
Last week, Suno announced $125M in funding, marking a significant milestone in their journey to reshape the music creation landscape. On this week's episode of Unsupervised Learning, we caught up with Suno's founder, Mikey Shulman, to dive into their approach to multiplayer music collaboration (1...
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CTO Unveils Lessons from Building an AI Coding Assistant
On this week’s Unsupervised Learning, Pat and I sat down with CTO and Co-Founder of Sourcegraph, Beyang Liu. Sourcegraph is a leader in the AI coding space, and recently launched AI coding assistant, Cody. Beyang shared with us his view on the current landscape of AI coding and the future of codi...
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The AI Startup That Sky Rocketed to $750M
Pinecone has raised over $130 million and was most recently valued at $750 million. On this week’s Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with CEO and Founder of Pinecone, Edo Liberty. Pinecone is arguably one of the most important elements in today's modern datastack. Edo shared with us the most com...
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The 1-Year Old AI Startup That’s Rivaling OpenAI
Mistral AI is often seen as the startup challenging OpenAI and incumbents developing LLMs. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with CEO and Co-Founder at Mistral AI, Arthur Mensch. Arthur shared with us his view on why open-source will prevail (3:09), how Mistral gets LLM...
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Superhuman CEO on Why Email Will Never Die, the Role of AI & Everything That's Wrong With Slack
Superhuman recently launched AI-powered Summarize and Instant Reply features, and has since processed 4 billion emails. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with CEO and Founder at Superhuman, Rahul Vohra. Rahul shared with us what email will look like in the future (1:23)...
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SalesforceAI CEO on Future of Slack, How Gucci Uses AI and Working with Marc Benioff
There’s an ongoing debate about where the most value will accrue in AI between incumbents and startups. Of the incumbents, few have shipped product faster than SalesforceAI. Today on Unsupervised Learning we had on Clara Shih, CEO of SalesforceAI and one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential Pe...
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The AI Developer Platform with an 80,000-Person Waitlist
Last week LangChain announced a $20M Series A led by Sequoia and released the paid version of LangSmith, which has already been used by 1K+ teams and driven 80K signups. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with LangChain Co-Founder and CEO Harrison Chase to talk about the...
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Lessons from a $4B Company Bringing AI to Healthcare and the Path to AI Doctors
Oscar Health is a $4B public healthcare company, providing healthcare insurance to nearly 1 million members. Oscar is at the forefront of AI adoption, continuously developing new AI use cases in healthcare. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with Oscar Health Co-Founder,...
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AI Will Create the Next 1 Billion Software Creators
Replit raised nearly $100M at $1.2B valuation last April and powers over 20M developers. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with Replit Founder and CEO Amjad Masad to talk about the future of software development, how Replit is empowering young users (0:45), how Replit d...
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The Product Playbook of a Billion-Dollar AI Company
Intercom is one of the earliest adopters of AI - its AI product Fin has generated over two million answers and been used by thousands of users since it was launched last March. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with Intercom Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Des Tra...
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The AI Startup Going After Google Search
Perplexity is a next-gen search tool going after Google, with 1M Android app installs and 1M iOS installs within only 8 months of product launch. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with the CEO and Co-Founder of Perplexity AI, Aravind Srinivas. Aravind shared with us the...
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A Full Deep Dive Into Notion AI
Linus Lee is an AI engineer at Notion, one of the earliest and most effective adopters of AI. In the episode, Linus shares how Notion developed its AI products, including Writer, Autofill, and Q&A, which just launched on Tuesday. It was fascinating to learn how Notion structures its AI team and d...
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Adobe’s 10 Year Vision for AI-Powered Content Creation
Patrick and Jacob sit down with Alexandru Costin, the VP of Generative AI and Sensei at Adobe, and discuss how Adobe’s early projects with generative AI in 2019 helped them move quickly upon the release of LLMs and diffusion models. Before leading Adobe’s generative AI efforts he founded InterAKT...