No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

Today on No Priors, Elad is joined by Ankur Goyal, founder and CEO of Braintrust. Braintrust enables companies like Notion, Airtable, Instacart, Zapier, and Vercel to deploy AI solutions at scale by efficiently evaluating and managing complex, non-deterministic AI applications. Ankur shares his insights into emerging trends in the use of AI tooling and coding languages, the rise of open-source, and the future of data infrastructure. Ankur also reflects on building resilient AI products, his philosophy on coding as a CEO, and the importance of a startup’s initial customer base.  Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Ankrgyl Show Notes:  (0:00) Introduction (0:38) Ankur’s path to Braintrust (3:05) Braintrust’s solution (5:46) AI tooling trends  (7:58) Instruction tuning vs. fine-tuning (8:57) Open-source AI adoption  (10:42) Future of data infrastructure and synthetic data (14:45) Designing technical interviews (18:04) Rethinking agent-based approaches (19:34) Building out an AI team (23:35) Typescript as the language of AI (25:12) The shift away from using frameworks (26:02) Vendor consolidation among enterprises  (27:16) Coding as a CEO  (30:16) Collaborating with customers (33:00) Future of Braintrust and evals

Lina Khan’s FTC has been the most active in decades, notably challenging tech giants and adopting a more hands-on approach to regulating the digital age. On today’s episode of No Priors, Lina Khan joins Elad and Sarah to discuss her regulatory philosophy for tech markets and what the industry can expect for future M&A deals. She shares her approach to overseeing emerging technology sectors, including AI at the model layer, and her work to ban non-competes on a federal level. Khan also offers insights into the realities of leading a government agency, the scarcity of young leaders in power, and how she measures the FTC’s impact. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @LinaKhanFTC Show Notes:  (0:00) Introduction (0:56) Lina Khan’s background and path to the FTC (2:35) Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox (4:20) Frameworks for regulating M&A in young markets (8:50) Khan’s perspective on AI acquisitions (12:18) What founders can expect from Khan’s M&A environment  (14:55) Promoting competition at the large model layer (17:01) Creating fair AI regulation (18:40) FTC’s work to ban non-competes (20:31) Why so few young people hold power in government today (22:18) The realities of running a government agency (24:20) Measuring the impact of FTC

In this episode of No Priors, Sarah and Elad sit down with Matt MacInnis, COO of Rippling, to discuss the company’s unique product strategy and the advantages of being a compound startup. Matt introduces Talent Signal, Rippling’s AI-powered employee performance tool, and explains how early adopters are using it to gain a competitive edge. They explore Rippling’s approach to choosing which AI products to build and how they plan to leverage their rich data sources. The conversation also delves into how AI shapes real-world decision-making and how to realistically integrate these tools into organizational workflows. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Stanine Show Notes:  0:00 Introduction 0:32 Rippling’s mission and product offerings 2:13 Compound startups 3:53 Evaluating human performance with Talent Signal  13:19 Incorporating AI evaluations into decision-making at Rippling 14:56 Leveraging work outputs as inputs for models 18:23 How Rippling chose which AI product to build first 20:53 Building out bundled products 23:26 Merging and scaling diverse data sources 25:16 Early adopters and integrating AI into decision-making processes

Bret Taylor, Cofounder of Sierra, Chairman of the board at OpenAI, and former co-CEO of Salesforce and CTO of Facebook, joins Sarah and Elad in this week’s episode of No Priors. Bret discusses building company-branded AI agents with unique personalities, goals, and guardrails at Sierra, and their potential to revolutionize customer engagement while cutting costs. The conversation explores the next sectors for enterprise AI adoption, building resilient AI products, and the parallels between today’s AI market and the evolution of the cloud industry. Bret also shares his unique insights on future business models and upcoming technology shifts. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Btaylor Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (0:42) Defining agentic systems and types of agents (3:55) Customer-facing company agents (5:43) Sierra AI (8:11) Transforming customer service and reducing costs (9:57) Challenges in implementing LLMs for company agents (14:45) Drawing parallels between AI and the cloud market’s evolution (17:50) Future of the AI landscape (19:15) Building durable AI products (24:39) Outcome-based business models and tangible ROI in AI solutions (29:22) Next wave of AI sectors for enterprise adoption (31:15) Customizing goals and guardrails with customers (35:55) Creating distinct personalities for Sierra's agents (41:05) Bret’s insights on upcoming technology and hardware shifts (46:50) How AI software could enhance human agency

In this episode of No Priors, Sarah and Elad go deep into what's on everyone’s mind. They break down new partnerships and consolidation in the LLM market, specialization of AI models, and AMD’s strategic moves. Plus, Elad is looking for a humanoid robot.  Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil  Show Notes: (0:00) Introduction (0:24) LLM market consolidation  (2:18) Competition and decreasing API costs (3:58) Innovation in LLM productization  (8:20) Comparing  the LLM and social network market (11:40) Increasing competition in image generation (13:21) Trend in smaller models with higher performance (14:43) Areas of innovation (17:33) Legacy of AirBnB and Uber pushing boundaries (24:19) AMD Acquires ZT  (25:49) Elad’s looking for a Robot

Andrej Karpathy joins Sarah and Elad in this week of No Priors. Andrej, who was a founding team member of OpenAI and former Senior Director of AI at Tesla, needs no introduction. In this episode, Andrej discusses the evolution of self-driving cars, comparing Tesla and Waymo’s approaches, and the technical challenges ahead. They also cover Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot, the bottlenecks of AI development today, and  how AI capabilities could be further integrated with human cognition.  Andrej shares more about his new company Eureka Labs and his insights into AI-driven education, peer networks, and what young people should study to prepare for the reality ahead. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Karpathy Show Notes:  (0:00) Introduction (0:33) Evolution of self-driving cars (2:23) The Tesla  vs. Waymo approach to self-driving  (6:32) Training Optimus  with automotive models (10:26) Reasoning behind the humanoid form factor (13:22) Existing challenges in robotics (16:12) Bottlenecks of AI progress  (20:27) Parallels between human cognition and AI models (22:12) Merging human cognition with AI capabilities (27:10) Building high performance small models (30:33) Andrej’s current work in AI-enabled education (36:17) How AI-driven education reshapes knowledge networks and status (41:26) Eureka Labs (42:25) What young people study to prepare for the future

Today on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil are joined by Eric Steinberger, the co-founder and CEO of Magic.dev. His team is developing a software engineer co-pilot that will act more like a colleague than a tool. They discussed what makes Magic stand out from the crowd of AI co-pilots, the evaluation bar for a truly great AI assistant, and their predictions on what a post-AGI world could look like if the transition is managed with care.  Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @EricSteinb Show Notes:  (0:00) Introduction (0:45) Eric’s journey to founding Magic.dev (4:01) Long context windows for more accurate outcomes (10:53) Building a path toward AGI (15:18) Defining what is enough compute for AGI (17:34) Achieving Magic’s final UX (20:03) What makes a good AI assistant (22:09) Hiring at Magic (27:10) Impact of AGI (32:44) Eric’s north star for Magic (36:09) How Magic will interact in other tools

In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah and Elad are joined by Matt Garman, the CEO of Amazon Web Services. They talk about the evolution of Amazon Web Services (AWS) from its inception to its current position as a major player in cloud computing and AI infrastructure. In this episode they touch on AI commuting hardware,  partnerships with AI startups, and the challenges of scaling for AI workloads. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil  Show Notes:  (00:00) Introduction  (00:23) Matt’s early days at Amazon (02:53) Early conception of AWS (06:36) Understanding the full opportunity of cloud compute (12:21) Blockers to cloud migration (14:19) AWS reaction to Gen AI (18:04) First-party models at hyperscalers (20:18) AWS point of view on open source (22:46) Grounding and knowledge bases (26:07) Semiconductors and data center capacity for AI workloads (31:15) Infrastructure investment for AI startups (33:18) Value creation in the AI ecosystem (36:22) Enterprise adoption  (38:48) Near-future predictions for AWS usage (41:25) AWS’s role for startups

In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah and Elad are joined by Jared Quincy Davis, former DeepMind researcher and the Founder and CEO of Foundry, a new AI cloud computing service provider. They discuss the research problems that led him to starting Foundry, the current state of GPU cloud utilization, and Foundry's approach to improving cloud economics for AI workloads. Jared also touches on his predictions for the GPU market and the thinking behind his recent paper on designing compound AI systems. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @jaredq_ Show Notes:  (00:00) Introduction  (02:42) Foundry background (03:57) GPU utilization for large models (07:29) Systems to run a large model (09:54) Historical value proposition of the cloud (14:45) Sharing cloud compute to increase efficiency  (19:17) Foundry’s new releases (23:54) The current state of GPU capacity (29:50) GPU market dynamics (36:28) Compound systems design (40:27) Improving open-ended tasks

In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah and Elad are joined by Ramp co-founders Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh of Ramp. The pair has been working to build one of the fastest growing fintechs since they were teenagers. This conversation focuses on how Ramp engineers have been building new systems to help every team from sales and marketing to product. They’re building best-in-class SaaS solutions just for internal use to make sure their company remains competitive. They also get into how AI will augment marketing and creative fields, the challenges of selling productivity, and how they’re using LLMs to create internal podcasts using sales calls to share what customers are saying with the whole team.  Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @eglyman l @karimatiyeh Show Notes:  (0:00) Introduction to Ramp (3:17) Working with startups (8:13) Ramp’s implementation of AI (14:10) Resourcing and staffing (17:20) Deciding when to build vs buy (21:20) Selling productivity (25:01) Risk mitigation when using AI (28:48) What the AI stack is missing (30:50) Marketing with AI (37:26) Designing a modern marketing team (40:00) Giving creative freedom to marketing teams (42:12) Augmenting bookkeeping (47:00) AI-generated podcasts

Hunting down receipts and manually filling out invoices kills productivity. This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Pedro Franceschi, co-founder and CEO of Brex. Pedro discusses how Brex is harnessing AI to optimize spend management and automate tedious accounting and compliance tasks for teams. The conversation covers the reliability challenges in AI today, Pedro’s insights on the future of fintech in an AI-driven world, and the major transitions Brex has navigated in recent years. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Pedroh96 Show Notes:  (0:00) Introduction (0:32) Brex’s business and transitioning to solo CEO (3:04) Building AI into Brex  (7:09) Solving for risk and reliability in AI-enabled financial products (11:41) Allocating resources toward AI investment (14:00) Innovating data use in marketing  (20:00) Building durable businesses in the face of AI (25:36) AI’s impact on finance (29:15) Brex’s decision to focus on startups and enterprises

In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah and Elad are joined by Oriol Vinyals, VP of Research, Deep Learning Team Lead, at Google DeepMind and Technical Co-lead of the Gemini project. Oriol shares insights from his career in machine learning, including leading the AlphaStar team and building competitive StarCraft agents. We talk about Google DeepMind, forming the Gemini project, and integrating AI technology throughout Google products. Oriol also discusses the advancements and challenges in long context LLMs, reasoning capabilities of models, and the future direction of AI research and applications. The episode concludes with a reflection on AGI timelines, the importance of specialized research, and advice for future generations in navigating the evolving landscape of AI. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @oriolvinyalsml Show Notes:  (00:00) Introduction to Oriol Vinyals (00:55) The Gemini Project and Its Impact (02:04) AI in Google Search and Chat Models (08:29) Infinite Context Length and Its Applications (14:42) Scaling AI and Reward Functions (31:55) The Future of General Models and Specialization (38:14) Reflections on AGI and Personal Insights (43:09) Will the Next Generation Study Computer Science? (45:37) Closing thoughts

This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil are joined by Howie Liu, the co-founder and CEO of Airtable. Howie discusses their Cobuilder launch, the evolution of Airtable from a simple productivity tool to an enterprise app platform with integrated AI capabilities. They talk about why the conventional wisdom of “app not platform” can be wrong,  why there’s a future for low-code in the age of AI and code generation, and where enterprises need help adopting AI. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Howietl Show Notes:  (00:00) Introduction (00:29) The Origin and Evolution of Airtable (02:31) Challenges and Successes in Building Airtable (06:09) Airtable's Transition to Enterprise Solutions (09:44) Insights on Product Management (16:23) Integrating AI into Airtable (21:55) The Future of No Code and AI (30:30) Workshops and Training for AI Adoption (36:28) The Role of Code Generation in No Code Platforms

This week on No Priors, we have a host-only episode. Sarah and Elad catch up to discuss how tech history may be repeating itself. Much like in the early days of the internet, every company is clamoring to incorporate AI into their products or operations while some legacy players are skeptical that investment in AI will pay off. They also get into new opportunities and capabilities that AI is opening up, whether or not incubators are actually effective, and what companies are poised to stand the test of time in the changing tech landscape. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil Show Notes:  (0:00) Introduction (0:16) Old school operators AI misunderstandings (5:10) Tech history is repeating itself with slow AI adoption (6:09) New AI Markets (8:48) AI-backed buyouts (13:03) AI incubation (17:18) Exciting incubating applications (18:26) AI and the public markets (22:20) Staffing AI companies  (25:14) Competition and shrinking head count

Believe or not, we’re almost halfway through 2024. Sarah and Elad have spent the first of this year talking with some of the most innovative minds in the AI industry, so we’re taking a look at some of our favorite No Priors conversations so far featuring Dylan Field (Figma); Emily Glassberg-Sands (Stripe); Brett Adcock (Figure AI); Aditya Ramesh, Tim Brooks and Bill Peebles (OpenAI’s Sora Team); Scott Wu (Cognition); and Alexandr Wang (Scale). Watch or listen to the full episodes here: Build AI products at on-AI companies with Emily Glassberg Sands from Stripe Designing the Future: Dylan Field on AI, Collaboration, and Independence The argument for humanoid robots with Brett Adcock from Figure OpenAI’s Sora team thinks we’ve only seen the "GPT-1 of video models" Cognition’s Scott Wu on how Devin, the AI software engineer, will work for you The Data Foundry for AI with Alexandr Wang from Scale Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil  Show Notes:  (0:00) Introduction (0:46) Emily Glassberg Sands on the Future of AI and Fintech (4:23 Dylan Field on AI and Human Creative Potential (9:03) Brett Adcock on Running Figure AI’s Hardware and Software Processes (12:43) OpenAI’s Sora Team on Artists’ Creative Experiences with their Model (17:43) Scott Wu Gives Advice for Human Engineers Co-Working with AI (21:06) Alexandr Wang on How Quality Data Builds Confidence in AI Systems

This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Karan Goel and Albert Gu from Cartesia. Karan and Albert first met as Stanford AI Lab PhDs, where their lab invented Space Models or SSMs, a fundamental new primitive for training large-scale foundation models. In 2023, they Founded Cartesia to build real-time intelligence for every device. One year later, Cartesia released Sonic which generates high quality and lifelike speech with a model latency of 135ms—the fastest for a model of this class. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @krandiash | @_albertgu Show Notes:  (0:00) Introduction (0:28) Use Cases for Cartesia and Sonic  (1:32) Karan Goel & Albert Gu’s professional backgrounds (5:06) State Space Models (SSMs) versus Transformer Based Architectures  (11:51) Domain Applications for Hybrid Approaches  (13:10) Text to Speech and Voice (17:29) Data, Size of Models and Efficiency  (20:34) Recent Launch of Text to Speech Product (25:01) Multimodality & Building Blocks (25:54) What’s Next at Cartesia?  (28:28) Latency in Text to Speech (29:30) Choosing Research Problems Based on Aesthetic  (31:23) Product Demo (32:48) Cartesia Team & Hiring

AI video generation models still have a long way to go when it comes to making compelling and complex videos but the HeyGen team are well on their way to streamlining the video creation process by using a combination of language, video, and voice models to create videos featuring personalized avatars, b-roll, and dialogue. This week on No Priors, Joshua Xu the co-founder and CEO of HeyGen,  joins Sarah and Elad to discuss how the HeyGen team broke down the elements of a video and built or found models to use for each one, the commercial applications for these AI videos, and how they’re safeguarding against deep fakes.  Links from episode: HeyGen McDonald’s commercial Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil |  @joshua_xu_ Show Notes:  (0:00) Introduction (3:08) Applications of AI content creation (5:49) Best use cases for Hey Gen (7:34) Building for quality in AI video generation (11:17) The models powering HeyGen (14:49) Research approach (16:39) Safeguarding against deep fakes (18:31) How AI video generation will change video creation (24:02) Challenges in building the model (26:29) HeyGen team and company

The first step in achieving AGI is nailing down a concise definition and Mike Knoop, the co-founder and Head of AI at Zapier, believes François Chollet got it right when he defined general intelligence as a system that can efficiently acquire new skills. This week on No Priors, Miked joins Elad to discuss ARC Prize which is a multi-million dollar non-profit public challenge that is looking for someone to beat the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) evaluation. In this episode, they also get into why Mike thinks LLMs will not get us to AGI, how Zapier is incorporating AI into their products and the power of agents, and why it’s dangerous to regulate AGI before discovering its full potential.  Show Links: About the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus Zapier Central ARC Prize Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @mikeknoop Show Notes:  (0:00) Introduction (1:10) Redefining AGI (2:16) Introducing ARC Prize (3:08) Definition of AGI (5:14) LLMs and AGI (8:20) Promising techniques to developing AGI (11:0) Sentience and intelligence (13:51) Prize model vs investing (16:28) Zapier AI innovations (19:08) Economic value of agents (21:48) Open source to achieve AGI (24:20) Regulating AI and AGI

After Tengyu Ma spent years at Stanford researching AI optimization, embedding models, and transformers, he took a break from academia to start Voyage AI which allows enterprise customers to have the most accurate retrieval possible through the most useful foundational data. Tengyu joins Sarah on this week’s episode of No priors to discuss why RAG systems are winning as the dominant architecture in enterprise and the evolution of foundational data that has allowed RAG to flourish. And while fine-tuning is still in the conversation, Tengyu argues that RAG will continue to evolve as the cheapest, quickest, and most accurate system for data retrieval.  They also discuss methods for growing context windows and managing latency budgets, how Tengyu’s research has informed his work at Voyage, and the role academia should play as AI grows as an industry.  Show Links: Voyage AI Stanford Assistant Professor of Computer Science Tengyu Ma Key Research Papers: Sophia: A Scalable Stochastic Second-order Optimizer for Language Model Pre-training Non-convex optimization for machine learning: design, analysis, and understanding Provable Guarantees for Self-Supervised Deep Learning with Spectral Contrastive Loss Larger language models do in-context learning differently, 2023 Why Do Pretrained Language Models Help in Downstream Tasks? An Analysis of Head and Prompt Tuning On the Optimization Landscape of Tensor Decompositions Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @tengyuma Show Notes:  (0:00) Introduction (1:59) Key points of Tengyu’s research (4:28) Academia compared to industry (6:46) Voyage AI overview (9:44) Enterprise RAG use cases (15:23) LLM long-term memory and token limitations (18:03) Agent chaining and data management (22:01) Improving enterprise RAG  (25:44) Latency budgets (27:48) Advice for building RAG systems (31:06) Learnings as an AI founder (32:55) The role of academia in AI

Garry Tan is a notorious founder-turned-investor who is now running one of the most prestigious accelerators in the world, Y Combinator. As the president and CEO of YC, Garry has been credited with reinvigorating the program. On this week’s episode of No Priors, Sarah, Elad, and Garry discuss the shifting demographics of YC founders and how AI is encouraging younger founders to launch companies, predicting which early stage startups will have longevity, and making YC a beacon for innovation in AI companies. They also discussed the importance of building companies in person and if San Francisco is, in fact, back.  Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @garrytan Show Notes:  (0:00) Introduction (0:53) Transitioning from founder to investing (5:10) Early social media startups (7:50) Trend predicting at YC (10:03) Selecting YC founders (12:06) AI trends emerging in YC batch (18:34) Motivating culture at YC (20:39) Choosing the startups with longevity (24:01) Shifting YC found demographics (29:24) Building in San Francisco  (31:01) Making YC a beacon for creators (33:17) Garry Tan is bringing San Francisco back