My guest this week is Jeremiah Lowin. Jeremiah has been on the podcast a number of times over the years. He’s one of my oldest friends who has been a sounding board for me throughout my career. Today he is the founder and CEO of Prefect, which helps companies automate and orchestrate their dataflows. In full disclosure, Positive Sum is an investor in Prefect. We didn’t plan this conversation, but when OpenAI released ChatGPT, I called Jeremiah for a primer on what’s happening under the hood and how best to contextualize this product amidst the growing AI movement. We have these conversations often, but this time I decided to record it so we can all learn from someone I consider to be a leading mind in the fields of data science and machine learning. We start off in the weeds and zoom out as the discussion unfolds. Please enjoy this conversation with my friend, Jeremiah Lowin. Listen to Founders podcast Founders Episode #136 A Success Story: Estee Lauder  Invest Like the Best with David Senra: Passion & Pain For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus streamlines the investment research process so you can get up to speed and find answers to critical questions on companies faster and more efficiently. The Tegus platform surfaces the hard-to-get qualitative insights, gives instant access to critical public financial data through BamSEC, and helps you set up customized expert calls. It’s all done on a single, modern SaaS platform that offers 360-degree insight into any public or private company. As a listener, you can take Tegus for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co/patrick. ----- Today's episode is brought to you by Brex. Brex is the integrated financial platform trusted by the world's most innovative entrepreneurs and fastest-growing companies. With Brex, you can move money fast for instant impact with high-limit corporate cards, payments, venture debt, and spend management software all in one place. Ready to accelerate your business? Learn more at brex.com/best. ----- Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.  Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes[00:03:38] - [First question] - What a pre-trained transformer is [00:06:12] - What latent representation means in the context of AI models [00:09:57] - Models using math to interpret input data and generate images accurately [00:11:43] - Whether or not understanding AI complexity in light of the results they arrive at will become a black box scenario [00:14:13] - A high level history of the companies involved in generative AI[00:17:51] - The precursory technology that makes generative AI art possible[00:21:01] - What people are doing to improve AI models in between versions [00:26:39] - Things that are literally happening during AI training[00:33:38] - Whether or not AI models might one day function as a utility like electricity[00:36:01] - Coding using GitHub Copilot and what it’s felt like to use it [00:40:30] - How he’d approach starting an AI company from scratch [00:44:40] - Developing this technology beyond general and into specific use cases[00:49:44] - The secret sauce for defensibility in the AI model space [00:53:02] - What he’s watching more closely as the story unfolds [00:56:32] - Whether or not he thinks that these toolkits will eventually learn how to use other systems like Unreal Engine on our behalf 

This is the story of Backstage -- a “platform of platforms”, built by Spotify and open to anyone as open source software. Tune in to hear insights about when to build vs buy - and when to open source - or not! Interviews with Jeremiah Lowin, CEO of Prefect.io, a company that runs on what is called an open core model, as well as from Spotify insiders like Pia Nilsson, Director of Engineering and Tyson Singer, Head of Technology and Platforms.

Jeremiah Lowin is the founder & CEO of Prefect, a dataflow automation company. Jeremiah joins Jim for his second appearance on Infinite Loops to discuss executing, storytelling, artificial intelligence and, of course, puns. Important Links: Prefect.io Disney Research Hub The story of the fake statue of Venus Show Notes: Slack, puns and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Planning, executing and the story of Prefect in 2022 Why naming things is a superpower If you can’t pivot, you’re dead Make original mistakes AI, storytelling, deep fakes and open source Books Mentioned: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; by Douglas Adams What Works on Wall Street; by Jim O'Shaughnessy The Beginning of Infinity; by David Deutsch

My guests this week are Jeremiah Lowin and Chetan Puttagunta. Jeremiah is the founder of Prefect.io, an open-source software company where my family and I are investors, and Chetan is a partner at Benchmark Capital. Both are past guests and good friends. I asked them on to help the audience understand the open source software business model. I’ve been fascinated with this model in which companies give a huge chunk of their work and value away for free to a community of developers, and then make money by building additional tools, functionality, and services on top of their free and open platform. While this may strike you as a wonky discussion on a niche software topic, I think it is valuable for everyone because the ideas can be applied to more than just code. I view much of my own activity as open-sourcing investment research and knowledge. It is also important because much of the world’s technology is built on top of open source projects. I hope you learn something new about this emerging category. Please enjoy.   This episode of Invest Like The Best is sponsored by Canalyst. Canalyst is the leading destination for public company data and analysis.  If you’re a professional equity investor and haven’t talked to Canalyst recently, you should give them a shout. Learn more and try Canalyst for yourself at canalyst.com/Patrick.     For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club and new email newsletter called “Inside the Episode” at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag   Show Notes (2:40) – (First question) – Originator business in open source software; Redhat (5:51) – Why open source is valuable in building a business (7:40) – Examples of the benefits of open source projects (10:27) – Open source business models that produce the best results (17:04) – Defensibility of open source companies (25:02) – Mentoring younger founders on using open-source (30:54) – The benefits of launching open-source (36:41) – Building a digital community (41:31) – Lessons from Open Source that can be applied to other businesses (50:04) – The opportunity sets available in the open source space (53:33) – Future of open source             (56:31) – Tobi Lutke Podcast Episode   Learn More For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club and new email newsletter called “Inside the Episode” at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag

Jeremiah Lowin, a former statistician turned founder of Prefect, discusses machine learning in investing. He addresses data workflows, friction between data scientists and engineers, deploying machine learning in investing, the importance of data and error minimization. The conversation explores applications in finance, model testing, label formation, and the significance of interpretability in machine learning.