The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica

A series of informal conversations with thought leaders, researchers, practitioners, and writers on a wide range of topics in technology, science, and of course big data, data science, artificial intelligence, and related applications. Anchored by Ben Lorica (@BigData), the Data Exchange also features a roundup of the most important stories from the worlds of data, machine learning and AI. Detailed show notes for each episode can be found on https://thedataexchange.media/ The Data Exchange podcast is a production of Gradient Flow [https://gradientflow.com/].

How to Build and Optimize AI Research Agents

Jakub Zavrel, CEO of Zeta Alpha, joins the podcast to discuss the practical evolution from traditional enterprise search to powerful “deep research” systems. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

09-25
38:41

Why Digital Work is the Perfect Training Ground for AI Agents

Andrew Rabinovich, CTO and Head of AI at Upwork, discusses how digital work marketplaces serve as ideal testing grounds for AI agents, exploring their custom reinforcement learning approach called RLEF (Reinforcement Learning from Experience). Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes - with links to many references - ca...

09-18
42:16

Beyond the Chatbot: What Actually Works in Enterprise AI

Jay Alammar is Director and Engineering Fellow at Cohere and co-author of the O’Reilly book “Hands-on Large Language Models.” Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

09-11
38:24

Why China's Engineering Culture Gives Them an AI Advantage

Ben Lorica and Evangelos Simoudis discuss three critical topics for AI practitioners: the complexities of AI regulation, with debates over foundation model oversight versus domain-specific regulations and concerns about IP protection in AI training data. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes - with links to many refe...

09-06
52:45

Predictability Beats Accuracy in Enterprise AI

In this episode, Anant Bhardwaj, CEO of Instabase, provides a pragmatic guide for AI practitioners building enterprise solutions. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

09-04
44:11

2025 AI Governance Survey

Ben Lorica and David Talby present findings from the 2025 AI Governance Survey of 350+ respondents, revealing that while 30% have AI models in production, there are significant gaps in risk management practices. 🚨 This episode is based on an online presentation, see the YouTube version for a visual presentation. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ...

08-28
39:23

The Fenic Approach to Production-Ready Data Processing

Kostas Paralis, co-founder of Typedef , discusses Fenic, an open-source data frame framework designed specifically for AI applications that treats inference as a first-class operation within the query engine. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web...

08-21
46:45

When AI Eats the Bottom Rung of the Career Ladder

Ben Lorica and Evangelos Simoudis discuss three critical trends shaping the AI industry: the “Great Hollowing Out” where AI automation is eliminating entry-level positions and disrupting talent pipelines, the financial implications of rapid AI hardware depreciation versus traditional accounting practices, and OpenAI’s shift to router-based model selection as foundation model providers search for sustainable business models. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflo...

08-16
27:57

From NotebookLM to Audio Companions: Why Google’s AI Team Went Startup

Raiza Martin, co-founder of Huxe and former leader of Google’s NotebookLM team, discusses leaving Google at the height of NotebookLM’s success to build an audio-first personal AI companion. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

08-14
32:33

The AI-Native Notebook That Thinks Like a Spreadsheet

The discussion with CEO Akshay Agrawal covers how Marimo’s AI integration provides runtime context to LLMs for superior code generation, its adoption across industries from cybersecurity to DevOps, and the technical innovations that make notebooks viable for production environments. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes - ...

08-07
42:26

How Agentic AI is Transforming Wall Street

Josh Pantony, CEO of Boosted AI, discusses Alfa, an agentic AI platform that creates persistent AI workers for finance professionals, moving beyond traditional prompt-response AI to proactive, autonomous systems. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange...

07-31
40:09

The Quantum Advantage Is Real—But Where's the Infrastructure?

Jennifer Prendki explains that while universal quantum computers are a decade away, specialized quantum accelerators are already tackling AI problems in finance and pharma. She argues the biggest hurdle isn’t the hardware but the profound software and infrastructure gap, as fundamental principles like the “no-cloning theorem” break traditional MLOps. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · Ante...

07-24
45:53

From Human-Readable to Machine-Usable: The New API Stack

Sagar Batchu, CEO of Speakeasy, joins the podcast to discuss the critical shift in API development as AI agents become primary consumers. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

07-17
38:23

Why Voice Security Is Your Next Big Problem

In this episode, Yishay Carmiel and Roy Zanbel of Apollo Defend discuss the rapidly evolving landscape of voice AI and its emerging security threats. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

07-10
41:37

Unlocking Unstructured Data with LLMs

Shreya Shankar is a PhD student at UC Berkeley in the EECS department. This episode explores how Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing the processing of unstructured enterprise data like text documents and PDFs. It introduces DocETL, a framework using a MapReduce approach with LLMs for semantic extraction, thematic analysis, and summarization at scale. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · ...

07-03
27:46

Building Production-Grade RAG at Scale

Douwe Kiela, Founder and CEO of Contextual AI, discusses why RAG isn’t obsolete despite massive context windows, explaining how RAG 2.0 represents a fundamental shift to treating retrieval-augmented generation as an end-to-end trainable system. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes - with links to many references - c...

06-26
31:24

Unlocking AI Superpowers in Your Terminal

Zach Lloyd, Founder/CEO of Warp, joins the podcast to discuss how Warp is revolutionizing the command-line terminal by integrating AI. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

06-19
44:59

From Vibe Coding to Autonomous Agents

Jackie Brosamer and Brad Axen from Block discuss codename goose (Goose), their open-source AI agent designed to automate complex engineering and knowledge work. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

06-12
51:16

How a Public-Benefit Startup Plans to Make Open Source the Default for Serious AI

Oumi Labs CEO Manos Koukoumidis lays out a vision for “unconditionally open” foundation models—where data, code, weights, and recipes are all transparent and reproducible—arguing this is the only path to production-grade, trustworthy AI. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be f...

06-05
48:45

The Highly Uncertain Future of OpenAI’s Dominance

Dan Schwarz (CEO & Co-Founder, Futuresearch) explains why his firm finds OpenAI’s $125 billion revenue projection highly implausible, citing fierce competition, pressure on ChatGPT/API revenue, and fleeting technical advantages. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The...

05-29
54:07

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