Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron

Ep 58: Google Researchers Noam Shazeer and Jack Rae on Scaling Test-time Compute, Reactions to Ilya & AGI

Ep 57: Former CTO of Meta Mike Schroepfer on the Path to Powering the AI Revolution

Ep 56: Distinguished Engineer at Waymo Vincent Vanhoucke Unpacks the Breakthroughs and Bottlenecks of Self-Driving

This podcast interviews Vincent Vanhoucke, a distinguished engineer at Waymo, about the impact of LLMs on autonomous vehicles and robotics. The conversation covers how LLMs enhance Waymo's self-driving technology by providing "world knowledge" and improving model training, while also discussing limitations and the nee...

Ep 55: Head of Amazon AGI Lab David Luan on DeepSeek’s Significance, What’s Next for Agents & Lessons from OpenAI

This episode of Unsupervised Learning interviews David Luan, head of the AGI SF Lab at Amazon, about the implications of DeepSeek, the current state of AI agents, and the future of AGI. The conversation covers the initial market reaction to DeepSeek, Luan's perspective on combining LLMs with reinforcement learning to...

Ep 54: Princeton Researcher Arvind Narayanan on the Limitations of Agent Evals, AI’s Societal Impact & Important Lessons from History

This interview podcast features Jacob interviewing Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton computer science professor, about the current state and future of AI, particularly focusing on reasoning models and agentic AI. The conversation explores the limitations of current AI benchmarks, the challenges of evaluating agentic AI's ...

Ep 53: SemiAnalysis Founder Dylan Patel on New AI Regulations, Future of Chinese AI & xAI’s Scrappy Surge to Hyperscale

This podcast interviews Dylan Patel, a hardware and AI expert, about the implications of new AI diffusion rules. The discussion begins with an overview of the rules and Patel's assessment of their effectiveness in maintaining US AI dominance over China, highlighting loopholes such as data center construction in Malays...

Ep 52: Marc Benioff Responds to Satya and Unpacks the Agentic Era

This interview podcast features Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff discussing the company's foray into AI-powered digital labor. The conversation begins with an overview of Salesforce's existing AI capabilities (predictive, generative, and now agentic) and their massive total addressable market (TAM). Benioff highlights the...

Ep 51: Former Chief Research Officer of OpenAI Bob McGrew - What Comes Next for AI?

In this podcast, Bob McGrew, the former chief research officer at OpenAI, shares insights on the current landscape and future of AI. He challenges the idea that we’ve hit a wall in AI capabilities, pointing out that while progress may be slower, it continues due to the high computational power needed for breakthroughs....

Ep 50: Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao on Why There Won’t be a Single Model, Will Hyperscalers Win Inference & AI Use-cases with PMF

In this podcast, Lin Qiao, the co-founder and CEO of Fireworks, discusses the company's innovative generative AI inference platform and the future of AI infrastructure. Fireworks aims to enhance the speed and efficiency of inference for composite AI systems, tackling the challenges associated with relying on single-mod...

Ep 49: OpenAI Researcher Noam Brown Unpacks the Full Release of o1 and the Path to AGI

In this podcast, Noam Brown, a research scientist at OpenAI, explores the future of Large Language Models (LLMs). He points out that while the costs of scaling pre-training are becoming increasingly high, there’s a wealth of untapped potential in enhancing test-time compute. Brown believes that focusing on this area, a...

Ep 48: Co-Founder/CEO of LiveKit Russ d'Sa on the Best ChatGPT Voice Use-Cases, New UX Paradigms in AI, and When Voice Makes Sense

Ep 47: Chief AI Scientist of Databricks Jonathan Frankle on Why New Model Architectures are Unlikely, When to Pre-Train or Fine Tune, and Hopes for Future AI Policy

In this podcast, Jonathan Frankle, Chief AI Scientist at Databricks, dives into enterprise AI strategies, covering topics like model selection—whether to use prompt engineering, fine-tuning, or training—and the significance of thorough evaluations. He advocates for an iterative approach, suggesting that businesses star...

Ep 46: CEO of DeepL Jarek Kutylowski on Specialized vs. General Models, Beating Google and a Future with Synchronous Translation

In this podcast, Jarek Kutylowski, the CEO and founder of DeepL, shares insights about his successful AI translation company. He discusses DeepL's unique approach to AI translation, highlighting their use of specialized models, in-house data labeling, and the development of their own data centers. Kutylowski explains h...

Ep 45: Founder & CEO of HeyGen Josh Xu on TikTok’s GenAI Dilemma, Trust and Safety and the Path to Interactive Avatars

Ep 44: Co-Founder of Together.AI Percy Liang on What’s Next in Research, Reaction to o1 and How AI will Change Simulation

Ep 43: CEO/Co-Founder of Contextual AI Douwe Kiela Reaction to o1, What’s Next in Reasoning and Innovations in Post-Training

Ep 42: CEO of Grammarly Rahul Roy-Chowdhury on the Future of Communication, Impact of LLMs and How Grammarly Does Eval

Bonus Episode: Trunk Tools CEO Sarah Buchner is Building Trunk Tools to Simplify the $13T Construction Industry

Ep 41: Head of AI at Snowflake Baris Gultekin on Why They Built Their Own LLM, Governance as a Moat, and the Most Common Enterprise Use-Cases

Ep 40: CEO of Speak.com Connor Zwick on How AI Will Change the Way we Learn