In the episode 001: the incredible Sharon Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Lamini. She’s a generative AI trailblazer, a Stanford-trained protégé of Andrew Ng – who, along with Andrej Karpathy and others, is also an investor in her company Lamini. From co-creating one of Coursera’s top AI courses to making MIT’s prestigious “35 under 35” list, Sharon turns complex tech into everyday magic.

She is also super fun to talk to!

We discussed:

– How to empower developers to understand and work with AI

– Lamini's technical approach to AI hallucinations (it's solvable!)

– Why benchmarks ≠ reality

– A notable industry use case and the importance of focusing on objective outputs: Subjective goals confuse it!

– And one of my favourite moments: Sharon crushes two of the hottest topics – agents and RAG. Turns out researchers don’t understand why there’s all this hype around these two.

– We also talked about open-source and its importance.

– And last but not least, Sharon (who teaches millions on Coursera) shared how to fight the lack of knowledge about AI. Her recipe: lower the barrier to entry, help people level up – plus memes!

Please give this video a watch and tell us what you think!

Likes and subscribing to the channel are hugely appreciated.

00:00 Intro & Sharon Zhou’s Early Days in GenAI

01:25 Maternal Instincts for AI Models

02:42 From Classics to Code: Language, Product, and AI

04:30 The Spark Behind Lamini

07:45 Solving Hallucinations at a Technical Level

09:20 Benchmarks That Matter to Enterprises

11:58 Staying Technical as a Founder

13:27 The Agent & RAG Hype: Industry Misconceptions

18:44 Use Cases: From Colgate to Cancer Research

20:07 The Power of Objective Use Cases

22:28 What Comes After Hallucinations?

23:21 Following AI Research (and When It’s Useful)

26:23 Open Source & Model Ownership Philosophy

28:06 Bringing AI Education to Everyone

32:36 AI Natives & Edutainment for the Next Gen

34:18 Outro

Lamini

Website - https://www.lamini.ai

Twitter - https://x.com/laminiai

Sharon Zhou

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/zhousharon/

Twitter - https://x.com/realSharonZhou/

Turing Post

Website - https://www.turingpost.com/

Twitter - https://x.com/TheTuringPost

Ksenia Se (publisher)

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ksenia-se

Twitter - https://x.com/kseniase_

2: The 7th Guest