Discussion on the challenges and strategies of managing research and product development in an AI computing business, emphasizing the importance of balancing research and commercialization. Highlights include the evolution of publishing in AI research, collaboration between industry and academia, mitigating supply-demand imbalances, and strategic decision-making for serving research labs versus enterprises.
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