Adept: A Vertically Integrated Company

Today, we have a bonus double episode of the Newcomer podcast for you — two conversations from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit last week.

Part 1: Replit CEO Amjad Masad and Hugging Face Clément Delangue

Together, they’re a charismatic open-source alliance.

We talked about the threat posed by OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft, the questions around Replit and Hugging Face’s business models, and where they would like to see more development in artificial intelligence.

Charles Hudson, at Precursor, wrote up a smart reflection on the Cerebral Valley event and one of his main takeaways was about open-source companies like Replit and Hugging Face. Hudson wrote:

Open-source applications will play a big role in this early phase of experimentation. One of the more refreshing and interesting things for me to hear was the different approaches that open-source companies were taking relative to their more commercially-minded peers. It wasn’t simply about business models or go to market approaches — it felt way more fundamental and philosophical about how they wanted to see AI deployed and governed. I didn’t have a full appreciation for that difference before the event, but it was one of the things that I was most struck by at the event.

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Part 2: Adept CEO David Luan and Greylock partner Saam Motamedi

On stage with Luan and Motamedi, a major investor in Adept, I wanted to know how Adept planned to compete with foundation models like OpenAI and Anthropic — especially now that OpenAI has introduced plugins that allow third-parties to easily connect to ChatGPT.

Adept is building an AI model that mirrors humans input into computers. It’s a different approach than the language models that are getting built by other foundation model companies.

I also asked Luan about his time at OpenAI and at Google. I particularly wanted to know if he trusted his old team at OpenAI to spearhead the AI revolution.

Find the Podcast

We’re also posting all the on-stage conversations on our YouTube channel over the next few days.

Right now, you can watch:

* Stability CEO Emad Mostaque one-on-one with me (the first half of my last podcast).

* Shane Orlick (President at Jasper) and Cristóbal Valenzuela (CEO of Runway) with Coatue’s Caryn Marooney.

* Benchmark’s Miles Grimshaw’s conversation with Quora CEO and OpenAI board member Adam D’Angelo and with LangChain founder Harrison Chase.

* A panel of investors (Leigh Marie Braswell at Founders Fund, Bucky Moore at Kleiner Perkins, and Amber Yang at Bloomberg Beta) moderated by me.

* Volley CEO Max Child’s talk with Lisha Li (Rosebud), Caroline Zhang (Knowtex), Chun Jiang (Monterey AI), and Medha Basu (Defog).

* General Catalyst’s Deep Nishar with me (also featured in Tuesday’s podcast episode) .

* Volley CTO James Wilsterman’s talk with Yasmin Dunsky (Wild Moose), Emily Dorsey (Pyq), and Lydia Ding (Code Complete).