Fireside Chat by Aparna Ramani and Ion Stoica

Aparna Ramani interviews Ion Stoica, founder of Databricks, about his prolific career and current projects. Stoica emphasizes the importance of identifying and solving impactful problems, staying ahead of technological trends, and empowering students. He discusses the role of academia in driving innovation, particularly in AI, and shares his excitement about the AI stack, code assistance for system optimizations, and building reliable AI applications. Stoica also explores the potential of reinforcement learning (RL) and its integration into existing workflows, highlighting its ability to learn new solutions. The conversation touches on how enterprises can prepare for a future increasingly shaped by AI, the importance of data, and the critical role of human preferences in AI evaluations. Finally, Stoica envisions a future where reliable AI assistants are commonplace, bridging the gap between impressive demos and practical production use cases.