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

509. Josh Jackson