Guests: Vipul Ved Prakash, CEO and co-founder of Together AI; and Bucky Moore, partner at Kleiner Perkins
No one knows for sure whether the future of AI will be driven more by research labs and AI-native companies, or by enterprises applying the technology to their own data sets. But one thing is for sure, says Together AI CEO and co-founder Vipul Ved Prakash: It’s going to be a lot bigger. “If you look at the next 10 years or the next 20 years, we are doing maybe 0.1 percent of [the] AI that we’ll be doing 10 years from now.”
In this episode, Vipul, Bucky, and Joubin discuss startup table stakes, Tri Dao, tentpole features, open-source AI, non-financial investors, Meta Llama, deep learning researchers, WeWork, “Attention is All You Need,” create vs. capture, Databricks, Docker, scaling laws, Ilya Sutskever, IRC, and Jordan Ritter and Napster.
Chapters:
- (00:53) - Executive hiring
- (04:40) - How Vipul and Bucky met
- (06:54) - Six years at Apple
- (08:19) - Together and the AI landscape
- (12:47) - Apple’s deal with OpenAI
- (14:27) - Open vs. closed AI
- (17:32) - Nvidia GPUs and capital expenditures
- (22:48) - Fame and reputation
- (24:17) - Planning for an uncertain future
- (27:00) - Stress and attention
- (30:18) - AI research
- (34:58) - Challenges for AI businesses
- (39:02) - Frequent disagreements
- (43:05) - Vipul’s first startups, Cloudmark and Topsy
- (47:55) - Taking time off
- (50:09) - The crypto-AI connection
- (53:20) - Who Together AI is hiring
- (54:37) - What “grit” means to Vipul
Links:
Connect with Vipul
Connect with Bucky
Connect with Joubin
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm
