Naveen Rao discovered artificial intelligence through science fiction in middle school, devouring the works of Asimov while his peers in Kentucky were doing whatever kids in Kentucky normally did. Growing up in a family of doctors, he chose a less conventional path, following his early interests in programming and circuit building.

After establishing himself as an engineer, he stepped away to pursue a neuroscience PhD at Brown, finishing in record time. This combination of engineering expertise and biological understanding shaped his approach to AI hardware development at his companies Nervana (acquired by Intel) and MosaicML (acquired by Databricks).

In this conversation, the VP of AI at Databricks breaks down what's actually needed for meaningful progress in machine reasoning (hint: it's not just bigger models), and why deep tech development needs a different playbook than what we're used to.