Making Data Simple From 9× Safer Cars to Hallucination-Free LLMs: Inside Sama with Duncan Curtis SVP for GenAI & AI Product + Technology
From Elephant Butts to Ethical AI — Duncan Curtis on De-Risking GenAI at Sama
Episode intro
Duncan Curtis, SVP for GenAI & AI Product + Technology at Sama, has shipped everything from autonomous-vehicle platforms at Zoox to game-changing data products at Google. Today he leads a 160-person team that’s reinventing how training data is curated, labeled, and audited so enterprises can ship production-ready GenAI—without the lurking model risk. Sama’s newest release, Sama Automate, is already cutting annotation time by 40 percent while keeping quality above SLAs, and Duncan says they’re “aiming for a 10× improvement by 2025.” (aiuserconference.com, sama.com)
If you want the inside track on AI ROI, ethical guardrails, and why A’s hire A’s (but B’s hire C’s!), lean in—this one’s for you. (And yes, we do get to elephant butts.)
Timestamped roadmap
- 00:46 Meet Duncan Curtis
- 03:51 The Duncan Brand
- 05:52 Making Time for Yourself
- 08:47 Autonomous Cars — 9× Safer
- 12:21 Favorite Jobs
- 13:24 Inside Sama
- 14:39 Data & LLM Training
- 16:04 De-Risking Models
- 19:08 Ethical AI
- 22:43 Stopping Hallucinations
- 27:18 Data Labeling Deep-Dive
- 31:56 Production-Ready GenAI
- 33:44 AGI Horizons
- 35:34 What Makes Sama Different
- 36:31 Calculating AI ROI
- 38:50 State of the LLMs
- 44:48 Elephant Butts & Closing Thoughts
Quick links
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/duncan-curtis/
- Sama: https://www.sama.com/
- Latest blog: “Sama Introduces New Data Automation Platform” (sama.com)
- Hear more: Duncan on “Human Guardrails in Generative AI” (DataCamp podcast) (datacamp.com)
Hashtags
#MakingDataSimple #AIProduct #GenAI #DataLabeling #EthicalAI #AIROI #AutonomousVehicles #Podcast
Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at almartintalksdata@gmail.com and tell us why you should be next. The Making Data Simple Podcast is hosted by Al Martin, WW VP Technical Sales, IBM, where we explore trending technologies, business innovation, and leadership ... while keeping it simple & fun.